It was not till later that I somehow gleaned that it was her final attempt to fulfil herself—to be a mother—that had killed her. She was over forty, not healthy—she could not pull it off. She sickened in the early months of her pregnancy, succumbed in wretched suffering to some illness incident to childbearing. I hear her murmur on her deathbed, like Charlotte Brontë: ‘Oh! I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy.’
Later there was a brief letter from Mr. Chisholm thanking my parents for condolences. Miss Mildred had loved us so much, he said; he was grateful for our sympathy. She had so sweetened his days, life was empty without her. He must live on memories now, and thank God they were all cloudless ones. He sounded dreadfully unhappy. We thought for such a handsome man to be twice a widower was too much bad luck: it seemed almost like a curse. It was clear that the suspicions of my parents were quite unfounded: it had been a marriage of true minds, and her plainness and her money had proved no obstacles whatever. I am sure now that Miss Mildred, despite her sentimentality had enough goodness and instinctive truth in her not to deceive herself about essentials.
Only the other night I re-read a volume of stories called Rhapsody by Dorothy Edwards* and came upon these words: ‘There is something very attractive about the thought of the skeletons of red-haired people’; and I thought of the white bones of Miss Mildred picked by the currents of the Indian Ocean.
We were all very sorry; but we were growing up now; the Daintreys belonged to our childhood and had grown a little dim. I think Pa died soon after: I remember another envelope inch-deep in black. Dignified with the title of beloved husband, her poor old dear went peacefully in his sleep to join Miss Mildred. Her prayers had been granted: he had been taken first, spared the last grief and loneliness. Never a harsh word in fifty years of perfect married life. Once more the dear girls were being very good.
Then Ma died. I suppose we wrote and were written to, but I do not remember anything of that. The curtain falls definitely for the last time.
What happened to the rest, I wonder?
When I count up and find that Viola must be a woman nearing fifty I feel extremely surprised; and it is a measure of the mad view which children have of adults that whether I think of her as married to an artist or a stock broker, as a business woman or a spiritualist medium, as vanished to live with the Indians in New Mexico or sharing a country cottage in Surrey with a fellow spinster, each picture seems equally possible yet utterly unfitting.
I see Rosie in uniform, red and portly, pretty high up in the Women’s Territorials. Gladys and Arthur, Norman and Esmée must be getting on. I dare say poor Dolly is shared out between them, and does little jobs about the house.
Doubtless Wendy and Peter managed somehow to expand their frames and grow up to look and behave much like other people: but not in the least like their relations of the two former generations. Product of an expanding age, the mould is broken that shaped and turned those out. Forced up too rapidly, the power in them, so lavish and imposing as it seemed, sank down as rapidly and faded out. There will be no more families in England like the Daintrey family.
*Nom de plume of poet Ruth Collie (1888–1936).
*Historian, literary critic and translator Andrew Lang (1844–1912) collected and adapted numerous fairy tales.
*Tragic character in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.
*Ham Peggotty’s cousin and fiancé, another tragic figure in David Copperfield.
*Writer and illustrator of children’s books (1846–1901).
*Welsh writer (1903–34). Rhapsody was published in 1927 to great acclaim.
When the Waters Came
Very long ago, during the first winter of the present war, it was still possible to preserve enough disbelief in the necessity for disaster to waver on with only a few minor additions and subtractions in the old way. The first quota of evacuated children had meant a tough problem for the local ladies; but most of them, including her own, had gone back to London. Nothing very disturbing was likely to happen for the present. One thought, of course, of sailors freezing in unimaginable wastes of water, perhaps to be plunged beneath them between one violent moment and the next; of soldiers numb in the black-and-white nights on sentry duty, crammed, fireless, uncomforted on the floors of empty barns and disused warehouses. In her soft bed, she thought of them with pity—masses of young men, betrayed, helpless, and so much colder, more uncomfortable than human beings should be. But they remained unreal, as objects of pity frequently remain. The war sprawled everywhere inert: like a child too big to get born it would die in the womb and be shovelled underground, disgracefully, as monsters are, and after a while, with returning health and a change of scene, we would forget that we conceived it. Lovers went on looking on the bright side, stitching cosy linings, hopeful of saving and fattening all the private promises. The persisting cold, the catastrophes of British plumbing, took precedence of the war as everybody’s topic and experience. It became the political situation. Much worse for the Germans, of course. Transport had broken down, there was no coal in Berlin. They’d crack—quite likely—morale being so low already.
The climax came one morning when the wind changed, the grey sky let out rain instead of snow. Then, within an hour, the wind veered round again to the north, the rain froze as it fell. When she went into the kitchen to order the day’s meals, the first of the aesthetic phenomena greeted her. The basket of vegetables had come in folded in a crust of ice. Sprouts, each crinkled knob of green brilliance cased in a clear bell, looked like tiny Victorian paperweights. The gardener scratched his head.
‘Never seen nothink like it in fifty years. Better be careful walking out, ’M. There’ll be some broken legs on the ’ill. It’s a skating rink. I slipped up a matter of five times coming along. Young Bert’s still trying to get up to the sheep at the top. He ain’t done it yet.’ He chuckled. ‘It’s a proper pantomime. The old Tabbies’ll have to mind their dignities if they steps out to-day.’
The children ran in with handfuls of things from the garden. Every natural object had become a toy: twigs, stones, blades of grass cased in tubes of ice. They broke up the mounds, and inside were the smooth grooved prints of stems and leaves: a miracle.
Later she put on nailed shoes and walked with difficulty over the snowy field path to the post office. The wind was a steel attack; sharp knobs of ice came whirling off the elms and struck her in the face. She listened by what was once a bush of dogwood, now a glittering sheaf of long ice pipes that jangled and clashed together, giving out a musical ring, hollow, like ghostly xylophones.
At the post office, the customary group of villagers was gathered, discussing the portents, their slow, toneless, deprecating voices made almost lively by shocked excitement. The sheep in the top field had been found frozen to the ground. Old Mrs. Luke had slipped up on her doorstep and broken her thigh. The ambulance sent to take her to hospital had gone backwards into the ditch and overturned. Pigeons were stuck dead by their claws on branches. The peacock at the farm had been brought in sheathed totally in ice: that was the most impressive item.
‘I wish I’d seen it!’
Stiff in its crystal case, with a gemmed crest, and all the blue iridescence gleaming through: a device for the birthday of the Empress of China.
That night was the end of the world. She heard the branches in the garden snapping and crashing down with a brittle rasp. It seemed as if the inside of the earth with all its roots and foundations had become separated from the outside by an impenetrable bed of iron; so that everything that grew above the surface must inevitably break off like matchwood, crumble and fall down.
Towards dawn the wind dropped and snow began to fall again.
The thaw came in February, not gradually but with violence, overnight. Torrents of brown snow-water poured down from the hills into the valley. By the afternoon, the village street was gone, and in its stead
a turbulent flood raced between the cottages. The farm was almost beleaguered: water ran through the back door, out the front door. The ducks were cruising under the apple trees in the orchard. Springs bubbled up in the banks and ditches, gushed out among roots and ivy. Wherever you looked, living waters spouted, trickled, leaped with intricate overlapping voices into the dance. Such sound and movement on every hand after so many weeks of silence and paralysis made you feel light-headed, dizzy; as if you, too, must be swept off and dissolved.
‘Oh, children! We shall never see the village looking like this again.’
She stood with them at the lower garden gate, by the edge of the main stream. There was nobody in sight.
‘Why not?’ said John, poking with the toe of his Wellington at the fringe of drifted rubbish. ‘We might see it next year. No reason why not if we get the same amount of snow.’
Where were all the other children? Gathered by parents indoors for fear of the water? The cottages looked dumb. ‘It’s like a village in a fairy story.’
‘Is it?’ said Jane, colouring deeply. ‘Yes, it is.’ She looked around, near and far. ‘Is it safe?’
‘Of course it’s safe, mutt,’ said her brother, wading in. ‘Unless you want to lie down in the middle of it and get drowned.’
‘Has anything got drowned, Mummy?’
‘No. The cows and horses are all safe indoors. Only all the old dead winter sticks and leaves are going away. Look at them whirling past.’
The water ran so fast and feverish, carrying winter away. The earth off the ploughed fields made a reddish stain in it, like blood, and stalks of last year’s dead corn were mixed and tumbled in it. She remembered The Golden Bough,* the legend of Adonis, from whose blood the spring should blossom; the women carrying pots of dead wheat and barley to the water, flinging them in with his images. Sowing the spring.
The children ran along the top of the bank, following the stream, pulling sticks from the hedge and setting them to sail.
‘Let’s race them!’
But they were lost almost at once.
‘Mummy, will they go to the sea?’
‘Perhaps. In time.’
Jane missed her footing and slithered down into the ditch, clutching at John, pulling him after her.
‘It’s quite safe!’ he yelled. ‘It only comes half-way up her boots. Can’t we wade to the cross-roads and see what happens?’
‘Well, be terribly careful. It may get deep suddenly. The gravel must be washing away. Hold her hand.’
She watched them begin to wade slowly down away from her, chattering, laughing to feel the push and pull of the current at their legs.
‘It’s icy, Mummy! It’s lovely. Bend down and feel it.’
Moving farther away, they loosed hands and wandered in opposite directions, gathering up the piles of yellow foam-whip airily toppling and bouncing against every obstruction. She saw Jane rub her face in a great handful of it.
Oh, they’re beginning to look very far away, with water all round them. It can’t be dangerous, I mustn’t shout. They were tiny, and separated.
‘Stay together!’
She began to run along the bank, seeing what would happen; or causing it to happen. It did happen, a moment before she got there. Jane, rushing forward to seize a branch, went down. Perfectly silent, her astonished face framed in its scarlet bonnet fixed on her brother, her Wellingtons waterlogged, she started to sink, to sway and turn with the current and be carried away.
‘How could you … John, why didn’t you? … No, it wasn’t your fault. It was mine. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It’s all right, Jane! What a joke! Look, I’ll wrap you in my fleecy coat, like a little sheep. I’ll carry you. We’ll hurry home over the field. We’ll be in hot baths in ten minutes. I’m wet to my knees, I’ve got ice stockings—and all of Jane is wet. How much of John is wet?’
‘None of me, of course,’ said John, pale and bitter. ‘Have I got to have a bath?’
An adventure, not a disaster, she told herself unhopefully, stumbling and splashing up towards the garden over the ploughed field, weighed into the earth with the weight of the child, and of her ever more enormous clogged mud-shoes that almost would not move; and with the weight of her own guilt and Jane’s and John’s, struggling together without words in lugubrious triangular reproach and anxiety.
But by the end of the day it was all right. Disaster had vanished into the boothole with the appalling lumps of mud, into the clothes-basket with sopping bloomers and stockings, down the plug with the last of the mustard-clouded bath water. Jane lay wrapped in blankets by the nursery fire, unchilled, serene and rosy. John toasted the bread and put on his two yodelling records for a celebration. Adventure recollected in tranquillity made them all feel cheerful.
‘I thought I was done for that time,’ said Jane complacently.
‘It’ll take more than that to finish you—worse luck,’ said John, without venom. ‘We haven’t had a moment’s peace, any of us, since you were born. To-morrow I’m going to make a raft and see how far I can get.’
‘I’m afraid by to-morrow it’ll all be dry land again.’
She looked out of the window and saw that the water in the fields had almost disappeared already. After countless white weeks, the landscape lay exposed again in tender greens and browns, caressing the eye, the imagination, with a promise of mysterious blessing. The air was luminous, soft as milk, blooming in the west with pigeon’s breast colours. In the garden the last of the snow lay over flower-beds in greyish wreathes and patches. The snowman stood up at the edge of the lawn, a bit crumpled but solid still, smoking his pipe.
What will the spring bring? Shall we be saved?
‘But you were wrong about one thing, Mummy,’ said Jane, from the sofa. ‘You know what you said about … you know.’
‘About what?’
‘Go on. Cough it up.’
‘About nothing being … you know,’ said Jane with an effort. ‘Drowned.’
‘Oh dear, was I wrong?’
‘Yes, you were wrong. I sor a chicking. At least, I think so.’
* Classic study of folklore, magic and religion, published from 1890–1915, by Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941).
A Dream of Winter
In the middle of the great frost she was in bed with influenza; and that was the time the bee man came from the next village to take the swarm that had been for years buried in the wall of her country house; deep under the leads roofing the flat platform of the balcony outside her bedroom window.
She lay staring out upon a mineral landscape: iron, ice and stone. Powdered with a wraith of spectral blue, the chalky frost-fog stood, thickened in the upper air; and behind it a glassy disc stared back, livid, drained of heat, like a gas lamp turned down, forgotten, staring down uselessly, aghast, upon the impersonal shrouded objects and dark relics in an abandoned house. The silence was so absolute that it reversed itself and became in her ears continuous reverberation. Or was it the bees, still driving their soft throbbing dynamo, as mostly they did, day in, day out, all the year round?—all winter a subdued companionship of sound, a buried murmur; fiercer, louder, daily more insistent with the coming of the warm days; materialising then into that snarling, struggling, multiple-headed organism pinned as if by centripetal force upon the outside of the wall, and seeming to strive in vain to explode away from its centre and disperse itself.
No. The bees were silent. As for the children, not one cry. They were in the garden somewhere: frost-struck perhaps like all the rest.
All at once, part of a ladder oscillated across the window space, became stationary. A pause; then a battered hat appeared, then a man’s head and shoulders. Spying her among the pillows, his face creased in a wide grin. He called cheerfully: ‘Good-morning!’
She had lost her voice, and waved and smiled, pointing to her throat.
&n
bsp; ‘Feeling a bit rough? Ah, that’s a shame. There’s a lot of nasty colds and that about. Bed’s the best place this weather, if you ask me.’
He stepped up on to the little balcony, and stood framed full-length in the long sash window—a short, broad figure in a roll-collared khaki pull-over, with a twinkling blue small peasant’s eye in a thin lined face of elliptical structure, a comedian’s face, blurred in its angles and hollows by a day’s growth of beard.
‘Come to take that there swarm. Wrong weather to take a swarm. I don’t like the job on a day like this. Bad for ’em. Needs a mild spell. Still, it don’t look like breaking and I hadn’t nothink else on and you wanted the job done.’
His speech had a curious humming drawl, not altogether following the pattern of the local dialect: brisker, more positive. She saw that, separated by the frosty pane, they were to be day-long companions. The lady of the house, on her bed of sickness, presented him with no problems in etiquette. He experienced a simple pleasure in her society: someone to chat to on a long job.
‘I’ll fetch my mate up.’
He disappeared, and below in the garden he called: ‘George!’ Then an unintelligible burr of conversation, and up he came again, followed by a young workman with a bag of tools. George felt the embarrassment of the situation, and after one constricted glance through the window, addressed himself to his task and never looked towards her again. He was very young, and had one of those nobly modelled faces of working men; jaw, brows profoundly carved out, lips shutting clearly, salient cheekbone, sunk cheek, and in the deep cavities of the eye-sockets, eyes of extreme sadness. The sorrow is fixed, impersonal, expressing nothing but itself, like the eyes of animals or of portraits. This face was abstract, belonging equally to youth or age, turning up here and there, with an engine driver’s cap on, or a soldier’s; topping mechanics’ overalls, lifting from the roadmender’s gang to gaze at her passing car. Each time she saw it, so uncorrupted, she thought vaguely, romantically, it was enough to believe in. She had had a lot of leisure in her life to look at faces. She had friends with revolutionary ideas, and belonged to the Left Book Club.
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