‘Damn it all!’ he exclaimed. ‘It was your idea in the first place that I should go and help Mrs Shaw.’
‘I didn’t say you should run the whole farm for her!’
‘She certainly can’t do it herself. Not as the War Ag want her to.’
‘What about that husband of hers? He’s the one who should run the farm.’
‘He’s not there, though, as you well know. She’s got no one to turn to, only me. And he’s not much of a mucher, anyway, from what I hear.’
‘You only hear Mrs Shaw’s side of that.’
‘I’m talking about his running the farm. We know he was no good on that score. He always left the work to her.’ Charlie lifted the butter churn, on its heavy oakwood frame, and carried it to its place in the dairy. Linn followed with her milking-pail and set them down on the bench. ‘Are we quarrelling again?’ he asked.
‘I’m not quarrelling!’ Linn exclaimed.
‘Well, I’m surely not quarrelling by myself.’
‘The trouble with you is, you never think! What are people going to say when you’re up at Slipfields so much of the time with a woman whose husband’s away from home?’
‘Why, that’s just ridiculous! You know as well as I do ‒’
‘What I know is beside the point! It won’t stop people gossiping.’
‘You’re surely not jealous?’ Charlie said. He looked at her in some surprise. Jealousy, if that was the problem, was something he could understand. It might even draw them together again. His hands reached out to grasp her shoulders and he looked deeply into her face, trying to read her innermost thoughts and find his way to her innermost feelings. ‘You’re surely not jealous?’ he said again, and there was amusement in his voice. ‘Because if you are I can tell you this ‒’
‘Oh, don’t be so foolish!’ she said. ‘For heaven’s sake let’s act our age!’ She gave a quick, impatient shrug, shaking herself free from his grasp. ‘I’m a woman of forty-four and we’ve been married nearly ten years! I’m surely past being jealous by now!’
‘That’s all right, then,’ Charlie said. He turned away towards the door. ‘At least we’ve got that sorted out.’
He went out to the yard and carried the separator in. Linn also went to and fro, carrying in her pails and crocks.
‘The way I see it is this!’ he said. ‘If we’re too old to worry about being jealous, we’re surely too old to worry about a bit of gossip!’
But the thought of it worried him all the same and he mentioned it again at dinner-time.
‘If you were to go up and see her sometimes, as you’ve promised to do, it’d scotch any gossip before it begins.’
Linn merely gave him a long, hard look.
The war was going badly for the Allies. Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg had been invaded by the enemy and the British forces, driven back, had been evacuated from Dunkirk. Later in June came the fall of France. Immense German forces now occupied the West of Europe and only the Channel divided them from Great Britain.
‘Seems we’re on our own now,’ Charlie said, grimly, to Linn.
‘Do you think they’ll invade us?’
‘God only knows! There are plenty of rumours flying about!’
But it was not only a question of rumours. He knew, by the orders issued to the Home Guard, that the threat of invasion was all too real. He was on duty two nights a week, patrolling across Flaunton Heath, watching for German paratroops, and his orders were to shoot any man who failed to stop and answer his challenge.
‘How many Germans have you caught so far?’ asked Billy Graves at the Hit and Miss. ‘Or are they all invisible?’
But although no paratroops fell from the sky, and people like Billy still made jokes about the invasion, the war was coming closer these days. England itself was under fire. Dover Harbour had been heavily raided; London and Birmingham had been bombed; so had Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. Many people had been killed and many more had been made homeless. Women and children in their hundreds had been evacuated from the cities and from places along the coast ‒ Kent was under shellfire from the German guns across the Channel and there was a photograph in the paper of a small girl, aged eleven, looking at the ruins of her home, where her mother and brother had been killed by a shell.
‘And people in Scampton are grumbling because they’ve been told to plough up their cricket-pitch!’ Charlie said.
It was a dry summer that year and he was glad of the open days. When he was not busy at Stant he was busy at Slipfields: cutting the rough tussocky grass; ploughing the yellow aftermath; harrowing and rolling the soil ready for sowing in the autumn. Smoke rose from the heaps of rubbish burning on the headlands and the smell of it was everywhere.
‘One of those heaps burst into flames after dark last night,’ Helen said. ‘I had to go out and see to it.’
‘Damn, I never thought of that. I shall have to take more care.’ Charlie pointed towards the sky. ‘We shall have them down on us otherwise.’
German bombers were sometimes heard passing overhead at night, going to raid towns in the Midlands. Once a bomb had fallen on Baxtry, damaging a chapel there, and another had fallen in a field near Froham, killing three or four cows and a calf. So Charlie took more care after that, to see that his fires had burnt themselves out before he went home at the end of the day.
By the middle of August, he had ploughed thirty acres of ground at Slipfields, and the fields looked very brown and bare until the new growth of weeds sprang up to make them gently green again. Then, whenever he had the time, he went over and over them with the harrow, using the horses, Simon and Smutch.
‘What a lot of trouble you take,’ Helen Shaw said to him.
‘If a job’s worth doing ‒’ Charlie said.
In September he cut his own crop of oats at Stant and just as it was ready for carting, Robert came home on embarkation leave and was able to help in the harvest field. The boy looked fitter than ever before and he had a single stripe on his sleeve, which he had kept secret until now, so as to give his mother a surprise. Linn’s joy at having him home was mixed with the fear she felt for him because he would soon be going abroad.
‘Where are they sending you?’ she asked.
‘I shan’t know till I get there. But even if I did know, I’m not allowed to tell anyone.’
‘Not even your mother? How silly you are!’
‘I’ll tell you this much ‒ it’s somewhere warm. Or that was the rumour back at camp.’
He thought to satisfy her by telling her this. ‘It really is all I know!’ But all through his fourteen days’ leave, she would keep coming back to the subject, hoping to squeeze more out of him.
‘Somewhere warm … Is it Italy? Or is it British Somaliland? What about Greece, is it warm there? I wish you’d tell me where it is.’
She questioned him again and again until in the end he spoke sharply to her.
‘Mother, can we leave it alone? You’re spoiling my leave, going on like this.’
He was out in the fields by day, helping Charlie to cart the oats. He was filled with astonishment at the changes he found on the little farm. He would stand sometimes and look over the fields and shake his head in disbelief. Slipfields, too, came in for his praise. He had seen its ploughed acres, neat and trim, when looking over the boundary hedge.
‘Charlie must be driving himself, to have got through all this work,’ he said, as he walked with his mother about the fields.
‘Oh, Charlie is like a dog with two tails. It suits him down to the ground, this war.’
‘Is anything wrong?’ Robert asked.
‘No, of course not. What should be wrong?’
‘You sounded a bit sarcastic, like.’
‘Well, you know what Charlie is. You’d think, to hear him talk sometimes, he was growing food for the whole nation.’
‘He’s certainly doing his share, ent he?’
‘Yes, and more!’
‘What do you mean?’
&nb
sp; ‘Oh, never mind!’ She slipped her arm into his. ‘Let’s talk about you for a change. I want to hear how you got that stripe.’
‘I’ve already told you.’
‘Well, tell me again.’
‘I really wanted to go down to Piggotts and have a word with Mr Madge.’
‘Oh, very well. Off you go. I suppose I shall see you some of the time.’
Enemy aircraft were passing over more frequently now. Charlie and Robert sometimes went out and listened to them droning above. Air-raids had worsened on English cities and the bombing had become indiscriminate. Goering and his Luftwaffe were bent on breaking civilian morale as a first step in the conquest of Britain. Invasion was spoken of openly, even by the Prime Minister, and it was said that German troops were massed along the West of Europe ready to strike at a given signal. Mr Churchill, in a radio broadcast, had spoken of the cruel bombardment of London and had called upon the people of Britain to stand together and hold firm.
‘Will the Germans come, d’you think?’ Charlie asked Robert once, when they had been listening to the news. ‘And shall we be able to fight them back if they do?’
‘I don’t know,’ Robert said. ‘The fighting is all in the sky at the moment. The R.A.F. is doing it all. I suppose it all depends on that.’
‘I don’t understand it,’ Linn said. ‘If the Germans are going to invade, why are they sending you abroad? Surely your place is here with us?’
‘I’m leaving Charlie in charge of things here.’
‘I don’t think it’s any laughing matter.’
‘You can’t have seen him in his tin hat!’
‘What can the Home Guard do?’ she said. ‘They’re mostly old men and simpletons.’
‘And which am I?’ Charlie asked. ‘Both, I suppose?’
‘There are lots of things on the east coast to make it hot for the Germans if they do come,’ Robert said.
‘Have you seen them?’
‘Yes, in some parts.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘I can’t tell you that. But we’re better prepared than we was last time.’
‘Last time?’
‘In 1066!’
‘Ah, nobody’s tried it since then, have they? Except for the Spanish Armada, of course …’
‘Yes, and just think what we done to them!’
On the last night of Robert’s leave he and Charlie went down to the Hit and Miss for a last drink together. Linn was bitterly disappointed. She wanted Robert to stay at home. ‘Why don’t you come with us?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t care for pubs,’ she said.
‘You used to work in a pub once.’
‘Not because I wanted to.’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll stop at home.’
But the moment Robert gave in to her, Linn’s feelings went about turn. She did not like to think of herself as the sort of mother who ruled her son.
‘You go with Charlie. Have a good time. I mustn’t keep you to myself.’ She pressed ten shillings into his hand. ‘There you are. You treat yourself. You’ve earnt it, working so hard in the fields.’
Early next morning she and Charlie went with him into Mingleton and saw him off on the train.
‘You’ll be sure and write to us, won’t you? Even if it is from God knows where!’
‘Yes, I’ll write, when I’ve got time. But you mustn’t worry overmuch if letters are slow in getting through.’
‘Worry? Of course not! How absurd!’ She did her best to laugh at him. ‘The very idea!’ she exclaimed.
‘Look after yourself, young Rob,’ Charlie said.
He held Linn’s arm as the train drew out.
The house seemed empty when they got back. Charlie went out to see to the stock and when he returned to the house, later, he found Linn upstairs in Robert’s bedroom. She was standing by the chest of drawers, looking at the row of books which Robert as a boy, in his wheelchair, had read over and over again.
‘I was thinking about when he hurt his back. Was he spared from being a cripple just to be killed in this horrible war?’
Charlie took her into his arms.
The next day, while Charlie was up at Slipfields, Linn had a visit from the vicar’s wife, who came as the local billeting officer, finding homes for evacuees. She asked to be shown over the house and, seeing that there was a spare room with two single beds in it, she added the details to her list.
Charlie, when he got home from Slipfields, found Linn irritable and depressed.
‘We’ve got to have evacuees. Mrs Roper has been here.’
‘I wondered when she’d get round to us.’
‘Strangers in Robert’s room!’ she said. The thought of it was hateful to her. ‘I’ve heard about these evacuees, coming from dreadful homes in the slums, dirty and smelly, with things in their hair.’
‘Surely they’re not all like that?’
‘We don’t know what they’ll be like! We’ve got to take them, lousy or not. We’re not allowed to pick and choose.’
‘We must hope for the best, then, and keep some carbolic just in case!’
‘It’s all very well for you to laugh but I’m the one who’ll have to look after them!’
‘How many are coming, for pity’s sake?’
‘One or two, Mrs Roper says.’
‘Oh, well, that’s not too bad. I thought from the way you were carrying on we were getting half a dozen at least.’
‘Yes,’ Linn said, in a tight voice, ‘I can see it’s all a joke to you.’
‘Seeing we’ve got no choice in the matter, we may as well knuckle down to it. There is a war on, after all, and we should try to remember that.’
‘Am I likely to forget when my son is away fighting in it?’ Charlie gave an exclamation. He was suddenly out of patience with her.
‘And what is Robert fighting for? He’s fighting to keep old England safe! The cities are far from safe just now. Hundreds and thousands of families are being bombed out of their homes. Just think what the war is like for them and think of those kids in the thick of it all!’
Linn was silent, avoiding his gaze. She turned away from him, awkwardly, shamed by the truth of what he said but still chafing against the fate that would bring strangers into her house. Charlie, watching her, understood. He was able to read her thoughts.
‘We don’t know we’re born,’ he said, ‘compared with the people in the towns, and it seems to me the least we can do is to make the kids welcome when they come.’
‘Yes,’ Linn said. ‘Yes, I know.’ She drew out a chair and sat down on it. ‘We’re lucky, I know, compared with some. It’s just that I was rather upset … And Mrs Roper was so officious, poking into everything …’
‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard about her. Did she ask to see into the coal-hole?’ Charlie was laughing again now; trying to ease the atmosphere; giving Linn time to come round. ‘But I will say this about her,’ he said. ‘She’s had the vicarage full of kids ever since the war began, so she’s doing her share, we must allow that.’ He too pulled out a chair. He sat with his elbows on the table. ‘When are they coming, these kids of ours?’
‘It could be quite soon, Mrs Roper says. They’re pushing it through as fast they can because it’s so bad down there just now.’
‘They’re coming from London, then, I suppose?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘I was in London once or twice, during the last war,’ he said. ‘But I shouldn’t care to be there now … All those tall buildings shutting me in … Toppling down about my head …’ He put out a hand and gripped Linn’s arm. ‘Fancy having kids in the house! Us, at our time of life!’ he said. ‘That’ll shake us up a bit, eh? That’ll keep us on our toes?’
Linn gave a nod and tried to smile. She covered Charlie’s hand with her own.
Chapter Thirteen
The London sky at night-time was lit by the shifting crisscross beams of the searchlights probing for German bombers. Sometimes a plane
would be caught in a beam and the other beams would swivel to join it, making a glaring white patch where they crossed and chasing the plane across the sky. Then the big guns would go off and the noise of them, with the noise of the bombs, would fill the air, a double bombardment, shaking the houses again and again.
Philip was not afraid of the bombs. The air-raids at night were exciting to him. Being only nine years old he was too young, his mother said, to realize what the dangers were. But he had his fears, secretly, and what he feared most was being afraid. He hated to see his mother trembling, getting down on her hands and knees and crawling along the narrow hallway, into the cupboard under the stairs, as she did sometimes when the bombs fell close by. He wished she could be calm, as his father was.
‘Philip, come away from that window and make sure the black-out is properly closed.’
‘Just a minute. I want to see.’
There was no electric light. The power-station had been hit again.
‘Philip’s a bit of a fatalist, like me,’ his father said. But he drew the boy away from the window and made sure the curtains were closed. ‘Do as your mother tells you,’ he said.
‘Yes, that’s right, I’m a fatalist.’ Philip enjoyed collecting words. ‘If it’s got my number on it ‒’
‘Who have you heard saying that?’
‘Dinny Quinn,’ Philip said.
‘I might have guessed,’ his father said.
Mrs Quinn was their daily woman. Dinny, her son, aged seventeen, sometimes did jobs for Philip’s father. He painted the house and cleaned the car. ‘Dinny’s joining the Army soon.’
‘Thank God we’ve got a Navy, then!’
Philip’s mother rarely went out, except to the shops in the High Street, but his father liked going out and on Sunday mornings in summertime he took Philip for a good long walk. They always went the same way: down through the subway at Noresley Green, along the quiet sunny streets, and through the big gateway into the park, with its drinking-fountain and band-stand and its snapdragons smelling in the sun. They would go as far as the Green Man, up on a hill overlooking the park, and would sit on a bench in the garden there. Philip had ginger-beer to drink and a big round arrowroot biscuit to eat and his father drank a glass of stout. Then they would walk home again.
Seedtime and Harvest (The Apple Tree Saga Book 5) Page 22
