Christmas at Emmerdale

by Pamela Bell

  ‘We did it for you,’ Mick tried telling him, but Levi only turned his face away and refused to listen.

  It felt strange to hand back his uniform and put on civilian clothes again. Hoisting his bag over his shoulder he took his crutch and set off down the track for the last time, burning with resentment still. He had hated the training camp, but he hadn’t wanted to leave like this.

  Will Hutton raised his brows but showed no other sign of surprise when Levi struggled into the smithy. ‘What happened to you?’

  Levi’s leg was sore and he collapsed, panting with effort, onto an upturned barrel. He poured out the story of his brothers’ treachery to Will, who listened without comment.

  ‘They’ve made me look a fool!’ he raged.

  Will wiped his hands on a rag. ‘Mebbe,’ he said. ‘And mebbe they’ve saved your life,’ he said. ‘Mebbe I wish I’d shot Billy in t’leg before he joined up.’

  Deflated, Levi rubbed his leg. He had hoped for more understanding from the farrier. ‘They want me to go back to Ireland but I won’t do that. Can I stay here and work for you?’

  ‘I can’t afford to pay you anything,’ Will warned. ‘But Billy’s not coming back. You can have his room and board if you want to help me wi’ horses.’

  It was the best he was going to get, Levi realised.

  ‘There you go,’ said Mick when he and Nat came to see how Levi was getting on. ‘Working with horses was what you always wanted to do.’

  That was true, but Levi had no intention of letting either of his brothers think they had done him a favour.

  ‘What I wanted to do was make my own decisions,’ he retorted. ‘Everyone in the village thinks I hurt myself deliberately to get out of fighting. They call me a shirker to my face.’ His voice was bitter.

  ‘Better than calling you dead,’ said Mick flatly. ‘It’s done now, Levi. Hate us if you want, but you’ve got a chance to make something of yourself now. This farrier seems a decent man. He doesn’t think you’re a shirker, does he?’

  ‘No,’ Levi had to admit.

  ‘And has no one else been friendly to you at all?’

  Levi hesitated. ‘No, not really.’

  Although that was not quite true.

  Levi’s only consolation for what had happened had been the fact that he would be able to stay near Rose. And incredibly, she had somehow found out what had happened to him, and far from accusing him of being a shirker, she had actually come to the smithy to see how he was. She knew his name! She had asked after his leg and sympathised with how painful the shooting must have been. She had said that she was glad that he would be able to help Will.

  It had almost been worth being shot.

  Levi hadn’t asked himself how Rose knew so much about what had happened.

  But when he hobbled into the Woolpack that night, he had soon learnt that the rest of Beckindale was far less inclined to be understanding. He was met by silence and a wall of blank faces.

  ‘A pint of your best,’ he said to the landlord as confidently as he could and put some coins on the bar, but Percy Bainbridge shook his head.

  ‘We don’t serve shirkers here. Take your money elsewhere.’

  Levi’s face burned. ‘I was injured while training.’

  ‘That’s not what we heard.’ There was a murmur of agreement from the men at the bar, and Percy jerked his head in the direction of the door. ‘Go on with you.’

  Shaking with humiliation, Levi had gathered up the coins and limped out, letting the door slam closed after him.

  Worse was to come two days later. Levi was minding his own business, hoping to see Rose as he hopped on his crutch down the main street when he was accosted by the landlady at the Woolpack. According to Will Hutton, Ava Bainbridge was the chief busybody in the village.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said.

  Levi stopped in surprise. ‘For me?’

  From her basket Ava produced a white feather and made such a show of handing it to him that everyone passing stopped and stared.

  Levi went red and then white. ‘I don’t want your damned feather!’ Snatching it from her hand, he threw it onto the ground. ‘I am not a shirker!’

  ‘What else would you call somebody who’d shoot his own leg rather than go and fight with our other brave soldiers? Coward!’ Ava’s voice rose shrilly. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘Now, Ava.’ An older woman with a plump face sent Levi a half apologetic look. ‘The boy’s been injured, you can see that.’

  ‘I’ve no sympathy for him, Mary Ann, none at all! If he had been injured by a German bullet, that would be different.’ Ava looked at him with contempt. ‘We don’t want your type in Beckindale,’ she said, and she stalked off, leaving Levi in the middle of the street, burning with rage and humiliation, the white feather at his feet.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Spring was coy that year, flirting with the occasional mild day before dancing back to allow a raw wind to scour the dale once more. Maggie cursed the sleety rain that stung her face as she inspected her flock, but it fitted her mood. There might have been sunny days and mild days over the winter, but for Maggie nothing could relieve the coldness inside her. She hadn’t felt warm once since she had walked away from the church that day.

  Rose had tried to stop her, but Maggie backed away, her rigid control starting to crumble terrifyingly. The vicar had come over then. He had urged Maggie to come into the church and pray. He said it would be a comfort. But Maggie didn’t want to pray, for Ralph or for herself. How could a god who blew Ralph into a haze of pieces offer her comfort?

  ‘No, I have to go,’ she had said. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Rose called anxiously after her.

  Maggie didn’t answer. She didn’t know. She just knew that she had to get away.

  She had walked blindly that day, Fly anxious by her side. Over the bridge, up the track, past Emmerdale Farm … walking faster and faster until she was flinging herself up the hillside. Refusing to allow herself time to stop, or to think, or to feel, Maggie scrabbled over frosted tussocks, her shoes skidding sometimes on icy patches, panting in her desperation to get higher, to leave the galloping pain behind her.

  At length, exhausted, she collapsed onto a limestone outcrop. The sun was still shining, the air still crystalline. A peregrine falcon circled overhead, pitilessly marking its prey, and as Maggie watched, it folded its wings and dived.

  Another death, but life would go on. The sun would keep rising, the earth would keep turning, the hills were going nowhere, but there would always be an absence now, a gap in the space where Ralph had been.

  She would never see him again, never touch him again. He was gone, and this time he was never coming back. The hope that had kept her going the past few months was brutally snuffed out, and the future she had longed for now yawned, dark with desolation and despair.

  Maggie wanted to scream, to cry, to rain down curses on God and the Germans and the generals who were waging this cursed war, but she couldn’t. Her grief was lodged in her throat, an agonisingly tangled clump of sadness and hurt and fear and rage that could not be swallowed down or choked up.

  Sensing her distress, Fly whined and put her paw on Maggie’s knee. Maggie rested her hand on Fly’s head in return and drew a shuddering breath. Far below, the frosty roofs of Emmerdale Farm sparkled in the winter sunlight. Her heart might be broken, her last hope gone, but the cows still needed to be milked, the sheep still needed to be moved off the hills before the snow came. The oats she and Frank had sown would come up, and they would have to be harvested.

  And she would go back because what else could she do?

  Maggie felt as if her heart had shut down. Perhaps it had no alternative, when feeling was too painful to contemplate. She moved stiffly, awkwardly now, as if she had found herself in a body that didn’t belong to her.

  Winter that year was a bleak and bitter one, and not just for Maggie.

  T
he war went on. Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby were shelled by German ships and over a hundred people died, shocking news that brought the war uncomfortably close to home. The list of casualties grew ever longer. Alfred Porter was shot in the lung and died in hospital. Jack Airey lost a leg and was in hospital in France.

  One morning not long before Christmas, Maggie came out of the stable to see Rose, neat as a pin, picking her way across the farmyard in her clean boots. She held out two letters.

  ‘These came,’ she said baldly.

  Maggie wiped her hands on her trousers and took the letters very carefully, turning them over to see her name in Ralph’s familiar writing. Her throat closed painfully. Funny, she had thought she had stopped feeling, but it seemed that grief could still rake at her with savage claws.

  ‘I didn’t want to distress you,’ said Rose, her voice thin and wobbly with her own tears, ‘but I thought you’d want to have them.’

  Maggie nodded, rigid-jawed. ‘Thank you,’ she managed.

  ‘Lord and Lady Miffield have spoken to Papa about a memorial service for Ralph. There can’t be a funeral because … because …’

  ‘Because there’s no body,’ Maggie finished for her in a hard voice. ‘Because he was blown into a thousand tiny pieces and there’s nothing left to bury.’

  Rose covered her face with her hands. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she said brokenly.

  ‘You can,’ said Maggie. ‘You will. You don’t have a choice.’

  ‘Will you come to the service?’ Rose lowered her hands on a sigh. ‘Everyone will be there.’ She hesitated. ‘Papa has spoken to Lady Miffield. She has said she would make no difficulties about you going. I think she truly mourns him, as we all do.’

  Maggie looked past Rose to the fells on the other side of the valley. From where she stood, she could see High Moor, where she and Ralph had fallen in love. ‘I don’t need a service to remember him,’ she said.

  The service would remember Ralph the aristocrat; Ralph the heir to the Miffield estate; charming, handsome Ralph. It wouldn’t remember the boy he had been, running wild with her in the hills above High Moor, or the man who had laid her back in the heather and loved her.

  ‘No, I won’t go,’ she said.

  ‘It might be a comfort,’ Rose suggested but Maggie shook her head, her expression bleak.

  ‘Nothing is a comfort now,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Maggie.’ Rose’s eyes shimmered with tears. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Maggie held the letters tightly in her hands. ‘Thank you for everything you did, Rose,’ she said with difficulty. ‘I know you loved him too.’

  Unable to speak, Rose nodded and turned away, leaving Maggie to read Ralph’s last letters to her alone.

  I’m due some leave after Christmas. I’ll come home then, my darling. Wait for me. Yours forever and always.

  The words wavered so badly that Maggie could hardly read them. Tears crowded her throat and threatened to suffocate her, but still she couldn’t cry. Pressing the heels of her hands hard against her eyes, she waited until she could push the grief back down inside her once more. Then she put Ralph’s letters away with the others, scrubbed her face and got back to work.

  It was a bleak Christmas. Maggie sent Frank home for two days and milked the cows herself. She took Elijah a plum pudding that Dot had made before she left, but otherwise she spoke to no one. In previous years she had been to church on Christmas Eve and sung carols with the rest of the congregation, but she hadn’t set foot in church since Ralph’s death.

  Unable to forgive God for killing him, she spent Christmas alone at Emmerdale Farm, loneliness snapped around her heart like a vice. Grief was snipping and slicing at her until she was pared down to essentials. There was no softness to Maggie now, no warmth. She was hard work and pride, and nothing else, trudging across a barren landscape into a barren future because there was nothing else to do.

  She had trudged as far as March and now the sheep were about to lamb. Following Elijah’s instructions, Maggie brought the sheep down to the field behind the farmhouse, a process that had been easier than she had expected. All she had to do was to dangle some hay in front of the sheep and they followed her obligingly down the hillside in single file, with Fly bringing up the rear and nipping at any stragglers.

  Once in the field, Maggie closed the gate and looked at the sheep huddling together against the sleety rain. They looked back at her.

  ‘Let nature tek its course,’ said Elijah. Maggie had nothing to do but wait.

  The first lamb was born on a day when the rain fell like curtain rods. Maggie nearly missed it. The ewe had found a private place among the bumps and hollows of the land behind tufts of rushes to give birth, and by the time Maggie saw it, the lamb was already on its feet and suckling, careless of the weather.

  It gave her a jolt to see it, battling so tenaciously against the elements.

  Her first lamb.

  Day by day, the flock grew, and Maggie found herself pacing the field hour after hour, whatever the weather, chasing away the crows and foxes that were quick to take advantage of a newborn lamb. She hadn’t been expecting the spurt of pride and pleasure she felt every time she counted a new addition to the flock. The pregnant ewes clearly knew more about the business than she did, and Maggie discovered a new respect for their stoical endurance.

  Most of the lambs were born without fuss. The first time Maggie came across a ewe struggling to give birth, she was taken aback by the rush of concern. There was no time to run to Elijah’s cottage for advice and besides, she couldn’t go to him every time she had a problem with the sheep. She would have to deal with this herself. Maggie made herself stop and remember everything he had told her.

  Squatting down, she examined the ewe carefully. The lamb seemed to be stuck and Maggie was afraid that if she didn’t help it out, it would die and its mother with it. Reaching into the bag she carried with her according to Elijah’s instructions, she pulled out a jar of butter and slathered it over her right hand and arm.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ she muttered to the ewe as she bunched her fingers and thumb into a cone shape and cautiously pushed inside it. She could feel the lamb’s nose but no hooves.

  What was it Elijah had said? Biting her lip, praying that she was doing the right thing, Maggie gently manoeuvred the lamb’s head back into the uterus until she could locate the legs and help them into position.

  ‘Now, up you get, lass,’ she said, hauling the ewe up, and watched in triumph as the lamb slithered out.

  She had other successes – saving a lamb in breech position, helping a ewe give birth to twins – but when that first lamb wobbled to its feet and began to suckle, the ice around Maggie’s heart began to crack at last.

  There were failures too: lambs that died, born in the middle of the night when she wasn’t there to help, three dead ewes. It was frustrating, but what could she do? She couldn’t be in the field all day and all night, though she often got up in the small hours and carried her lamp up to the field, just to check on the sheep.

  By the time the last ewe had lambed, Maggie was exhausted. Leaning on the dry-stone wall, she surveyed her flock with pride. She never tired of watching the lambs suckling, their tails wagging contentedly.

  As if to atone for its earlier disappointments, spring had burst back with a glorious burst of colour. A pale blue sky arched over the hills, already hazed green with new grass. The field banks were bright with yellow celandine while paler primroses clustered along the walls. The blackthorns bloomed a dense, dazzling white, as if someone had thrown a tablecloth over them, while new leaves on the trees unfurled an intense, vivid green and the hedgerows were busy with birds cheeping and twittering.

  Ralph was still dead. Missing him was still a dull ache inside her but as Maggie turned her face up to the sun and thought about her sheep grazing contently, she let herself believe that the long, bleak winter was over at last.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘Where are
you off to, Rose?’

  Rose bit her lip. She had hoped to slip out of the back door without being seen but her father had come out of his study just as she was tiptoeing across the hall to fetch an umbrella.

  ‘Just for a walk.’

  ‘It’s pouring!’

  ‘It’s just a shower.’ Rose pulled the umbrella out of the stand. ‘And I’ll have this.’ April had been characteristically fickle, frequent cloudbursts interspersed with breezy sunshine. ‘It’ll pass.’

  Charles Haywood frowned. ‘I don’t like the way you wander around on your own so much, Rose. It’s not safe, particularly not this afternoon. The troops are leaving for the front tomorrow. This is the end of their embarkation leave and they’ll be in a wild mood.’

  Rose knew the company at the training camp would be marching out the next day. She was on her way to say goodbye to Mick Dingle, and there was a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach at the thought.

  ‘I’ll be fine, Papa,’ she said as patiently as she could, but he wasn’t reassured.

  ‘These men are not gentlemen, Rose. You have never come across men of this type before and I’m afraid that if found yourself in a difficult situation, you couldn’t rely on them to behave as a gentleman would. It’s not their fault,’ he went on as she opened her mouth to object. ‘Different classes have different values. The war has upset the conventions, and we must face the fact that while these troops are bravely going to do their duty, many are what in other times we would undoubtedly call riff-raff.’

  Rose thought of Mick Dingle. He would be riff-raff as far as her father was concerned.

  It was hard to remember now just how it had happened, but that unplanned encounter with Mick under the bridge had turned into a regular meeting whenever he could get away from the camp.

  At first, the secrecy of the meetings had been a distraction from her grief. Rose had mourned Ralph all the more for knowing had he never been hers. She had found herself telling Mick about Ralph and Maggie and she thought that he had understood. He hadn’t offered sympathy, and he hadn’t told her to consider herself lucky compared to others. Instead he had teased her and challenged her and made her smile again, after Rose had been sure that she never would.