Seedtime and Harvest (The Apple Tree Saga Book 5)

by Mary E. Pearce

  Linn set the candle down on the chest of drawers and lifted his suitcase on to a chair. She unpacked his clothes and put them away, leaving his pyjamas on his bed. From a pocket in the lid of the suitcase she took his ration-book and identity-card. Philip stood watching her. He made no attempt to take off his clothes.

  ‘D’you want any help in getting undressed?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I can do it myself.’

  ‘Is there anything you would like?’

  ‘Well …’ He glanced towards the bed. ‘Could I have a hot-water-bottle?’

  ‘Do you really want one?’ She looked at him uncertainly. ‘It means lighting the fire, you see.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘You’ll be all right. It’s not really cold. There’s plenty of blankets to keep you warm.’ She showed him how thick the bedclothes were. ‘I’ll come back in a few minutes and tuck you up nice and snug,’ she said.

  On her way out, she showed him the chamber-pot under the bed, but he glanced away disdainfully. She left him alone and went downstairs. Charlie was out on his rounds in the yard. She busied herself for a few minutes and then returned to Philip’s bedroom. The boy lay on his back in bed, staring at Robert’s old ice-skates, which hung from a hook in the rafter above.

  ‘Whose are those?’

  ‘They belong to my son. His name is Robert and this is his room. Those are his books on the chest there. He’s away in the Army now, on active service, somewhere abroad.’

  ‘Fighting the Germans?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  She stood by the bed looking down at the boy. His face on the pillow was pale as wax and there were dark smudges under his eyes. She bent and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Goodnight, Philip. Sleep well.’ She took up the candle and moved to the door. ‘Are you getting warmer now?’

  Looking at her, he gave a nod. His shadowy eyes were half-closed with sleep. She went out, closing the door, and dimly he heard her going downstairs. He heard voices in the kitchen below and after that he heard nothing more.

  ‘He seems a nice enough little kid. Comes from a decent home, anyway. We shan’t have trouble with things in his head.’

  ‘No, he’s as clean as a pin,’ Linn said.

  ‘Seems more likely,’ Charlie said, ‘that he’ll be looking down on us.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘No electric light for a start. Did you see his face when I lit the lamp? He could hardly believe his eyes.’

  ‘No doubt he’ll soon get used to our ways.’

  ‘It’s going to seem funny,’ Charlie said, ‘having a boy in the house again.’

  ‘Yes,’ Linn said, and was suddenly still, looking up at the mantelpiece where a snapshot of Robert stood in a frame. ‘I wonder where Robert is now,’ she said. ‘It’s over three weeks since we heard from him …’

  Charlie touched her arm.

  ‘I reckon it’s time we went to bed.’

  ‘You’re not eating your bacon and egg.’

  ‘No, I’m not hungry,’ Philip said.

  ‘You ought to eat it all the same.’

  ‘Can I have a piece of toast?’

  ‘Yes, all right. You can make it yourself.’

  Charlie cut a piece of bread and Philip took it to the range. He stuck it on the prongs of the toasting-fork and held it close to the bars of the stove.

  ‘What a waste of food,’ Linn said, looking at the boy’s untouched plate.

  ‘Here, I’ll eat it,’ Charlie said. ‘Our young Philip doesn’t know what’s good.’

  Philip came back to his place at the table with his slice of bread toasted on one side.

  ‘You’ve forgotten to do both sides,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Oh, no, I didn’t forget.’ Philip reached for the butterdish. ‘This is French toast. It’s better this way.’

  ‘Is it, by golly? I never knew that. I must try it some time.’ Charlie looked at Linn and smiled.

  Philip ate with neat little bites and licked the butter from his finger-tips. ‘Where is this place?’

  ‘It’s called Stant Farm.’

  ‘Is it somewhere in Oxfordshire?’

  ‘No, this is Worcestershire,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Is it in England?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Where did you think it was? Timbuctoo?’ Charlie laughed and the boy looked away.

  ‘Eat up your toast, young fella-me-lad, and I’ll take you out to see the farm.’

  Philip got up and slung his gas-mask over his shoulder. ‘You won’t need that,’ Charlie said.

  ‘We’re supposed to carry them everywhere. It’s compulsory, didn’t you know?’

  ‘Oh, all right.’

  Charlie took him to see the pigs. He scratched their backs with a little stick, then gave it to Philip to do the same.

  ‘I suppose you’ve never seen pigs before?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I have. Lots of times.’

  ‘What, in London?’ Charlie said. ‘Do they have pigs in Leicester Square?’

  ‘No, but I’ve seen them all the same.’

  Charlie had a few jobs to do. He went into the barn for a bag of meal, leaving Philip in the yard. When he came out again he stared, giving a little startled laugh. The boy was wearing his gas-mask.

  ‘You expecting an air-raid?’

  The boy shook his head. His voice came muffled through the mask.

  ‘I don’t like the smell of the pigs,’ he said.

  There was a joint of hot gammon for lunch. Philip stared at the slice on his plate and wrinkled his nose at the beads of grease that oozed out into the gravy.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Charlie asked. ‘Don’t you like the look of it?’

  ‘No, it’s all greasy,’ Philip said.

  ‘I suppose you want a slice of French toast?’

  ‘No, I don’t want anything.’

  ‘You’ve got to eat something,’ Linn said. Worried, she took his plate away and put another in its place. She helped him to potatoes and beans and dropped knobs of butter into them. ‘There, now, how’s that?’

  Philip took up his knife and fork. He looked at Charlie, eating his ham, and watched as a strand of yellow fat was sucked up into his mouth. Then he looked down at his own plate, where the knobs of butter were slowly melting, coating the steaming-hot vegetables. He ate his potatoes and left the beans.

  ‘I hope he’s not always going to be like this about his food.’

  ‘The poor chap’s feeling home-sick. He’ll be all right when he’s settled down.’

  Philip pretended not to hear. The pudding was brought. It was apple tart. He ate two helpings, with sugar and cream.

  ‘He likes his afters, anyway.’

  When lunch was over, Philip asked for paper and envelopes. He wanted to write a letter home. He sat in the wide window-recess with the pad on his knees.

  ‘This is a funny place where I am. It is a farm. They have not got a bathroom or proper lav, only a place out the back, it smells. I have to wash in the scullery. Their name is Mr and Mrs Truscott. She said I could call her Auntie Linn. I hope you are well. How are the bombs? When you come will you bring my books, Arabian Nights and Robin Hood, all my books, there is nothing to read. They send their kind regards to you.’

  Charlie took him out for a walk, and he posted his letter in Ratter’s Lane. Although it was Sunday afternoon, men were at work in the fields at Piggotts, getting the last of the harvest in, and Charlie, thinking to interest the boy, stood him up on a gate to watch.

  ‘That’s the barley they’re working on. They’re going all out to get it in. Everyone works on Sundays these days, now there’s a war on, don’t you know. See that field behind the house? They’ve got the tractors out there and they’ve made a start ploughing the stubbles …’

  Philip was not listening. His ears had caught the sound of a train and his eyes were turned to watch its smoke as it puffed along the winding valley.

  ‘Is it going to London?’


  ‘No, it’s going to Chantersfield. This is only a loop-line. The London trains don’t come this way.’

  Charlie lifted him down from the gate and they began to walk back to Stant. Overhead an aeroplane droned and they craned their necks to look at it.

  ‘It’s only one of ours,’ Philip said.

  His upturned face was empty and bleak. Charlie felt cut off from him. The boy had come from another world.

  ‘Come on, Philip, I’ve got an idea.’ He reached out and grasped the boy’s small hand. ‘I’m taking you up to Slipfields,’ he said. ‘I want you to meet a friend of mine.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  The village school at Scampton, which normally held eighty pupils, now held a hundred and twelve because of the influx of evacuees. There were not enough desks for everyone and some of the children sat on forms. Philip, on the end of a form, was constantly being edged off, so he went and sat on the floor by himself and read ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’. Nobody seemed to mind what he did.

  ‘I never went to school at home.’

  ‘You must have done,’ the headmistress said.

  ‘No, I didn’t. My school was bombed.’

  Out in the playground he read his book. A village girl came and slammed it shut, jamming his fingers between the pages.

  ‘Why don’t you cockneys go back home?’

  ‘Leave me alone or I’ll hit you,’ he said.

  Sometimes, after school, Philip loitered along the river with three other evacuees from Flag Marsh Farm. They poked among the rushes and reeds and threw pebbles at the ducks. Once they went down to the railway line and placed pennies on the rail, so that a train would run over them. Philip, when he got home to Stant, showed his smooth flat penny to Linn.

  ‘You mustn’t go down to the railway line. It’s against the law and it’s dangerous.’ She looked at him with an anxious frown. ‘I want you to promise you won’t go again.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ he said with a shrug.

  He no longer carried his gas-mask about with him everywhere. Nobody else did, not even at school. The district had never had a raid.

  ‘You people here,’ he said to Linn, ‘you don’t really know there’s a war on.’

  ‘I ought to know well enough, since my son is away fighting in it.’

  ‘You never get any air-raids, though.’

  ‘A couple of bombs fell at Froham,’ she said, ‘not so very long ago.’

  ‘A couple of bombs! I heard about them!’ Philip gave a derisive snort. ‘One of them fell in a field!’ he said.

  He leant against the dairy bench, watching her as she weighed the butter and patted the half-pounds into shape. ‘We had our windows blown in at home. There was broken glass all over the place and lumps of plaster came down on my bed. But you should see the streets all around. Some of the houses are just piles of bricks with people buried underneath. Sometimes people are blown to bits!’

  ‘Yes, it’s terrible,’ Linn said. Often she was at a loss to know how to answer this boy, who only seemed to come to life when talking about these terrible things. ‘You should be glad you’re out of it.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of the bombs myself. I’m a fatalist, like my dad.’

  ‘Are you indeed?’

  ‘Yes. I am.’

  He turned and wandered about the dairy, peering into the pans of milk. He bent over one and blew on it and the cream became wrinkled in little waves.

  ‘Where’s Uncle Charlie got to?’ he asked. ‘Up at Slipfields, I suppose.’

  ‘Don’t blow on that milk, if you please,’ Linn said. ‘It isn’t hygienic. I’ve told you before.’

  When Uncle Charlie was at home, he always found things for Philip to do, such as helping to fill the oil-lamps.

  ‘You hold the tundish steady for me and I’ll pour in the oil.’

  ‘Why do you call it a tundish? We always call it a funnel at home.’

  Lots of words were different at Stant. When there came a drizzle of rain Charlie called it a ‘duck’s frost’ and when he was hungry he said he was ‘clemmed’. Once he called across the yard, ‘Come and see this moggy here,’ and Philip expected to see a cat. But the ‘moggy’ turned out to be a calf.

  ‘You’re queer, the way you talk,’ Philip said, and sometimes he mimicked Charlie’s speech. ‘Paasture!’ he said. ‘Whatever’s that? I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  ‘It wouldn’t be you that talks queer, I suppose?’ Charlie said with a little smile.

  One of Philip’s little tasks was to look for bits of broken china lying about the garden and fields. These he hammered out on a stone until they became reduced to grit. The grit was then thrown down for the hens and they came running to peck it up.

  ‘Why do you give them grit to eat?’

  ‘It helps them digest their other food and it means their eggs’ll have good shells.’

  ‘Why does it?’

  ‘Why d’you think?’

  ‘I don’t believe it does at all.’

  ‘Seems you’re a disbelieving Jew.’

  ‘Oh no I’m not!’

  ‘What are you, then?’

  ‘I’m a gentile,’ Philip said.

  Some of the chickens were laying away. Charlie set him to find their nests, and he crept along the hedgerows, peering into the undergrowth. Once he found eleven eggs and carried them home in his cap.

  ‘Good boy! You’ve got a keen eye!’ Charlie gave him threepence to spend. ‘Get yourself some sweets,’ he said.

  Philip was good at finding the eggs. He often earned a few coppers like this. But Linn was inclined to disapprove. ‘His parents won’t thank us for spoiling him.’

  Philip was saving to buy a kite. He had seen one in the village shop. It was blue and yellow and cost three-and-six. Once, on a Friday evening, when Linn had her cashbox on the table, he looked inside.

  ‘Gosh, what a lot of money!’ he said.

  ‘Fingers out, if you please,’ Linn said.

  He watched as she took some money out and pushed it across the table to Charlie.

  ‘What does she give you money for?’

  ‘That’s my wages,’ Charlie said. ‘That’s what I get for running the farm.’ He put the money into his wallet. ‘Your Auntie Linn is my boss, you see. The farm is hers, every rod, pole and perch, and that’s why I have to keep in with her.’ Charlie screwed up his face in a wink. ‘I have to watch my “p”s and “q”s, otherwise I might get the sack.’

  Linn closed her cashbox and turned the key.

  ‘I do wish you wouldn’t talk like that. What is the boy to think of us?’

  ‘What that boy thinks,’ Charlie said, ‘would probably fill a ha’penny book.’

  Charlie had his hands full, running the two farms together, and doing guard duty two nights a week, and sometimes when Linn came down in the morning she would find him asleep in a chair by the hearth.

  ‘Why didn’t you come to bed?’

  ‘It hardly seemed worth it, just for an hour.’ Immediately after breakfast, he would be off to Slipfields again.

  ‘I wonder you bother to come home at all.’

  She often made such remarks these days. Charlie had come to expect them. Once, when he had been on guard duty, he showed her a tear in his tunic sleeve, where he had caught it on a fence. ‘Could you mend it for me?’ he asked, and Linn, in an off-hand way replied: ‘Why don’t you take it to Mrs Shaw?’ He hung the tunic up on a peg and went out without a word. Later he mended the tear himself.

  At Slipfields he was drilling wheat, as directed by the War Ag. They had sent him a tractor twenty years old and he churred and clanked about the field, with Helen Shaw behind the drill, watching over the seed in the box.

  ‘They must have got this one out of the museum!’ he said, shouting above the noise. ‘It’s the Adam and Eve of all tractors. I bet they can hear us in Mingleton!’

  ‘Never mind! It’s doing the work!’

  ‘How’s the seed?’
r />   ‘It’s getting low.’

  Charlie, on reaching the headland, drew up beside the standing cart, in which were stacked the sacks of seed. When he stopped and put on the brake he did it clumsily, with a jerk, and Helen was thrown across the drill, hitting her face on the open lid. Charlie switched off and jumped to the ground. He went to her, all concern, and saw blood starting out from two cuts, one on her forehead and one on her lip. Her knuckles, too, had been cut and grazed. He took hold of her hands and turned them over, wincing to see the torn, wrinkled skin and the blood squeezing out in glistening red beads.

  ‘We’d better go in and I’ll clean you up.’

  ‘No, it’s all right, it’s nothing,’ she said. She looked at her hands, where they lay in his; then, gently, she drew them away and plunged them into her apron-pockets, searching for her handkerchief. ‘There’s so much junk in these pockets of mine!’ She glanced at him and gave a laugh. ‘Where is that wretched handkerchief?’

  She found it at last ‒ just a piece of old rag ‒ and dabbed at the cuts on her mouth and forehead, catching a little trickle of blood just before it reached her eye.

  ‘Here, let me do it,’ Charlie said.

  ‘No, I can manage, don’t fuss,’ she said. Again she gave a little laugh and showed him the blood on her handkerchief. ‘All in the course of duty,’ she said. ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, sweat and tears!’

  ‘It was my clumsiness, jerking like that. I got in a tangle with my gears.’

  ‘You’re tired, that’s why.’ She met his gaze. ‘On guard all night and working all day. You ought to go home and get some sleep.’

  ‘Now who’s fussing?’ Charlie said.

  ‘Yes, well, shall we get on?’

  ‘You sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Right as rain.’

  Soon the seed-box had been refilled and they were able to resume work, churring noisily up and down, followed by a few foraging rooks. The day was damp, with a faint gleam of sun, and a white mist hung about the woods.