The Land Endures (The Apple Tree Saga Book 4)

by Mary E. Pearce

  The Land Endures

  The Apple Tree Saga Book 4

  Mary E. Pearce

  Copyright © 2018 The Estate of Mary E. Pearce

  This edition first published 2018 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1978

  www.wyndhambooks.com/mary-e-pearce

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover artwork images: © Period Images / Veronika (Shutterstock)

  Cover design: © Wyndham Media Ltd

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  The Apple Tree Saga

  from Wyndham Books

  Apple Tree Lean Down

  Jack Mercybright

  The Sorrowing Wind

  The Land Endures

  Seedtime and Harvest

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Preview: Seedtime and Harvest by Mary E. Pearce

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  For

  Kathleen and Eric

  Chapter One

  The farmhouse welcomed them from the beginning. They felt they belonged there, all of them, as though the place cast a spell on them. Stephen had had his doubts, of course, and sometimes Gwen had shared in them, for the purchase had not been an easy one, and the outgoing farmer, Mr Gould, had driven a hard bargain over the valuation of the standing crops. But that was behind them; a thing of the past. Holland Farm was now theirs, even if it did have a mortgage on it, and when they clip-clopped into the yard and saw the old, quiet house waiting for them, they knew they had made the right decision.

  The house was not quiet for long. As Stephen and Gwen stood in the hall, waiting the arrival of the furniture van, the children ran from room to room, making their own discoveries. After the tiny house at Springs, the space of the farmhouse delighted them. Their voices rang out, echoing, and their feet pounded the bare boards.

  ‘Is it possible,’ Stephen said, ‘that four children can make so much noise?’

  ‘Does it distress you?’ Gwen asked. She followed him into the big kitchen. She still worried about him, ceaselessly, for the war had left its mark on him, and even now, more than a year after his discharge, his nerves were still badly frayed. ‘Shall I tell them to be quiet?’

  ‘God, no! Let them yell. They never had the chance in Prior’s Walk.’

  And yell the children certainly did. It seemed they meant to make up for the past.

  ‘Chris! Come and look! This bedroom is vast!’

  ‘Never mind the bedroom. You come up here. There’s a secret cupboard in this wall.’

  ‘I can see the cattle from up here. Our cattle. And some sheep. Yoo-hoo, Joanna, why don’t you come?’

  ‘Where’s Jamesy calling from?’

  ‘He’s up in the attic. So’s little Emma.’

  ‘The furniture’s coming!’ Jamesy shrieked. ‘I’ve seen the van coming up the track.’

  ‘It’s miles away yet,’ Joanna said, glancing out of the nearest window. ‘It’ll take all day, the rate it’s going.’

  But downstairs they ran, in search of their parents, and found them in the kitchen-cum-living room, where three casement windows looked out on the yard and where, in the big blackleaded iron range, the wood ashes were still warm, although the Goulds had been gone two days. There was a bundle of sticks in the hearth, together with a heap of logs: a gesture of Mr Gould’s goodwill. Stephen threw the sticks into the stove and blew on the ashes until they caught. Soon he had the split logs alight, and the children’s faces were lit by the flames.

  ‘The furniture’s coming,’ Chris said.

  ‘Is it?’ said Stephen. He looked at his watch. ‘Two o’clock. Bang on the nail.’

  ‘As soon as they’ve unpacked the kettle,’ said Gwen, ‘make sure they bring it to me.’

  It was cold for early October. They would all be glad of a cup of tea.

  Gradually, as the carpets were laid and the furniture was carried in, the house became more and more their own, beginning with the kitchen-cum-living-room, the most important room in the house. Wing-chair; book case; old sagging couch; the Monet print and the oval mirror: all these soon had a place and looked as though they had been there for years; but some disagreement arose as to where the dining-table and chairs should stand, and the carved mahogany sideboard, and the desk that had come from Stephen’s office. The removal men had their own ideas and the foreman especially argued with passion.

  ‘Oh, well!’ Gwen said. ‘I can always alter things afterwards.’

  But when, on leaving, the men came into the kitchen again, to receive Stephen’s tip, the foreman looked round at their handiwork and touched Gwen’s arm.

  ‘You won’t better that!’ he said to her. ‘Not if you try for a hundred years!’

  And he was right, as Gwen afterwards had to admit, for even when spring-cleaning time came round and the furniture had to be shifted about, she found herself putting it back again, item by item, as before. Holland Farm was like that. It was not a place that invited change.

  The weather was wet the day they moved in and remained wet throughout the weekend, but the four children were perfectly happy, poking into cupboards, attics, cellars, till the house had yielded all its secrets. Under a floorboard in the attic they found a broken china mug, a spinning-top, and a small wooden doll.

  ‘The Goulds had no children,’ Stephen said, ‘and they lived in this house nearly fifty years.’

  ‘Visitors’ children, perhaps,’ said Gwen.

  But there were other discoveries: drawings of animals on the walls, revealed when the wallpaper was removed; a girl’s name, Rosina Lane, entwined in a pattern of vine-leaves; and, under another loose floorboard, a bunch of herbs in a sealed jar that bore a label and these faded words: ‘Gathered by me on Midsummer’s Eve: Cicely Lane, aged eleven; year of grace, 1860.’

  The two sisters, if sisters they were, would now be old ladies of seventy or more, but to the Wayman children, coming to the house in 1919, Cicely and Rosina Lane were still two children like themselves, held up as models to one another or used to excuse some fall from grace. ‘Cicely would never have bitten her nails,’ Joanna said to little Emma, and Jamesy, having borrowed something w
ithout permission, said scornfully: ‘Rosina would never have made such a fuss about a rotten box of paints!’

  After the house, there were the farm buildings to be explored: stables, cowsheds, cartsheds, barns; and all around lay the meadows and fields, almost two hundred and fifty acres, spreading their slopes to the south-west, and running down to the Derrent brook. The freedom of it went to their heads; released from school at the weekends, they ran wild from dawn to dusk; clattered into the house for meals, and bundled out again in a rush, the instant they were given leave.

  ‘Look after Emma!’ Gwen would call, but they would be gone like mad things, helter-skelter across the yard, with Emma trotting along behind.

  ‘No doubt what they think of Holland Farm,’ Stephen said. ‘How did we manage to keep all that energy pent up close in the house at Springs?’ And sometimes he would say to his wife: ‘What do you feel, now we’re here?’

  ‘Ask me in a few years’ time!’

  It was only a joke, and they both knew it. Leaving Springs and buying the farm was the best thing they had ever done. There were no regrets on either side. They wondered why they had waited so long.

  It was the war that had made up their minds, by showing them where their values lay. Stephen had been gassed in 1918, and the doctor’s advice had been very blunt.

  ‘Get out of doors as much as you can. It’s the only thing for lungs like yours. If you go back to your damned office, you’ll be asking for trouble, no doubt of that!’

  So Stephen sold his partnership in the legal firm of Hallam and Dobbs and worked for a year on a farm near Springs, helping an ex-Army man like himself, and learning something about the land. He had always had a hankering to farm, and Gwen was a Worcestershire farmer’s daughter. They had no one to consider but themselves and their children, for Gwen’s parents were both dead and so were Stephen’s, and the only relations they had left in the world were his two cousins, who lived in India. Land prices were high just then, but he had the money from his partnership and a small gratuity from the Army, and, after raising a mortgage, he was able to buy Holland Farm. His own house and his own land! What better investment could there be for the future of his family? But he worried sometimes, nevertheless.

  ‘I must make a go of it,’ he said. ‘I can’t afford to make mistakes.’

  ‘Of course we shall make a go of it! Why shouldn’t we?’ Gwen said.

  Why not indeed? Farm prices were pretty good, having risen throughout the war, and there were government guarantees. But Stephen knew that the good times would probably not last forever. He therefore went cautiously and was always ready to take advice, either from the neighbouring farmers or from the men who worked for him. These men were there when he took the farm. He made no changes but hoped for the best.

  ‘They’re not a bad bunch,’ Gould had said. ‘There’s only one you’ve got to watch and you’ll soon find out which one that is. He belongs to the union. You’ll soon hear from him!’

  Stephen thought this was prejudice. He was inclined to be amused.

  ‘Is there only one union man among them?’

  ‘One’s enough!’ Gould had said.

  The man in question was Morton George. He had a watchful, suspicious manner, but never looked you in the eye. Stephen decided to reserve judgment. Of the eight men there, he found he liked Bob Tupper best. The others, when they gave advice, made a mystery of the reasons behind it, but Bob Tupper gave it straight.

  ‘I shouldn’t plough the Home Field yet, ’cos that’ll still be workable later on, even when it’s wet. I’d start with the Freelands and the Goose Ground ‒ they’re dry enough now but they won’t be for long.’

  It was the same when buying stock. Bob would go with him to the sales and, with a few quiet words in his ear, tell him what to guard against.

  ‘Not only in the cow,’ as Stephen, laughing, said to Gwen, ‘but in the farmer who’s selling her!’

  Bob knew the district inside out; he was an expert in everything; and Stephen was thankful to have such a man. Bob was in his early forties. Except for two years away in the war, he had been at Holland Farm since the age of eleven, thirty-two years in all, longer than any other man there.

  ‘You should be foreman by rights,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Mr Gould didn’t hold with that, setting one man above the rest. He didn’t hold with paying the extra wages neither.’

  ‘I’m not Mr Gould,’ Stephen said.

  Most of the other men were pleased when Bob’s new status became known. Their jibes were friendly, good-humoured, broad.

  ‘Twopence to speak to you now, is it, Bob?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you wear a bowler hat?’

  ‘Will the news be printed in The Gazette?’

  Billy Rye said the promotion made little difference that he could see.

  ‘Bob’s been telling us what to do for donkey’s years. It’s just been made official, that’s all.’

  Only Morton George seemed less than pleased. He lounged in the office doorway, nibbling a straw.

  ‘I suppose it’s on account of the war.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Well, you’re both old soldiers, you and him.’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it. Bob is the senior man here. It’s only right to recognize that.’

  ‘We should’ve voted among ourselves. That’s the proper way to get a foreman.’

  ‘Now look here,’ Stephen began, but was interrupted by Billy Rye.

  ‘If we had’ve voted,’ Billy said, ‘Bob would be foreman just the same ’cos he’s the best man for the job and we all know it.’ And then, to make light of it all, Billy gave Bob Tupper a nudge. ‘If I don’t get a drink outa you after that, I shall want to know the reason why!’

  Bob Tupper was not the only war veteran at Holland Farm. Nate Hopson was another. On November the eleventh, Armistice Day, these two men arrived for work wearing sprigs of evergreen in their caps, and later on that same morning, carting muck from the muck-bury, they stopped work at eleven o’clock and, removing their caps, stood bare-headed in the rain, remembering their fallen comrades.

  It was not true that Stephen favoured these veterans, but it was inevitable that he should feel some kinship with them. The war had left its stamp on him and them, as on all those men who had gone to the edge of the pit and looked in, and that stamp could be recognized at a glance. Tupper and Hopson saw at once that Stephen had been out at the Front. They heard the huskiness in his voice and knew he had suffered poisoning by gas. They noticed the three crooked fingers of his right hand and the deep scar running up his arm, and they recognized it as a shrapnel wound. And they, although they bore no visible scars, were just as easily known to him. They had a certain look in their eyes, as though they marvelled at everything they saw and yet were weary in their souls.

  They gave themselves away, too, in their habits of speech and the jokes they made, as when Bob referred to his sandwiches as ‘wads’ or gave the time as ‘thirteen-fifteen’. Once, when the cattle were being driven up an unfenced track between two fields and kept straying out over the ploughland on one side, Tupper, walking behind the plough, shouted to Hopson, in charge of the herd: ‘Watch your dressing by the right there!’

  Stephen would smile on hearing these things, even while he shrank inside. Neither he nor they ever talked of the war. They tried to put it out of their minds, though they couldn’t of course, and would never be able to, all their lives. Still, something was salvaged from the waste: the kinship was there, and it made him smile.

  As for Morton George, who sneered behind Stephen’s back, it was partly because he felt left out.

  ‘What do you talk about, you and him? All about how you beat the Hun?’

  ‘The trouble with Mort is, he’s jealous,’ said Nate.

  ‘He should’ve said so before,’ said Bob. ‘He could’ve had my place out there if only he’d asked me in 1916.’

  ‘He was too busy running the union.’


  ‘Oh, you can laugh!’ George exclaimed. ‘Who got your wages up to forty-eight-and-six a week?’

  ‘I shall have to do something about that union of yours.’

  ‘Join it, d’you mean?’

  ‘I shall have to remember it in my prayers!’

  Stephen was determined from the beginning that Gwen should have help in the house, and it happened that there were two women already there, who had worked for Mr and Mrs Gould and were now willing to work for the Waymans. Gwen had been ill with ’flu the previous winter, and the illness had pulled her down badly. She herself would never admit it; she liked to think she was as strong as a horse; but Stephen was concerned for her, and tried to save her all he could.

  The duties of a farmer’s wife overflowed the house itself. The dairy claimed a lot of her time, and there were the chickens, the turkeys, the geese. There were sickly lambs to hand-rear and often a calf that had to be weaned, and later on, at harvest times, she would be needed in the fields. It was useless for Stephen to say that Gwen must not do all these things: she wanted to do everything; it was therefore a comfort to him when Mrs Bessemer agreed to stay on, for she was a cheerful Amazon, with mighty arms and enormous hands, who would surely make nothing of the household chores.

  But Gwen and he soon perceived that although Mrs Bessemer would polish fanatically at the tops of tables, she had a dislike of bending her back, and it was in fact Agnes Mayle, short and dumpy and quick-tempered, who worked the hardest and got things done. Agnes would scold Mrs Bessemer, who spent a whole morning cleaning the silver, and would chivvy her from place to place, thrusting a bucket and mop into her hands and doing her best to make her ashamed.

  ‘How can you sit there, rub-rub-rub, when Mrs Wayman’s slaving away, scrubbing and scouring for all she’s worth? Get into that dairy and give her a hand!’

  There were ding-dong battles between these two, and Agnes Mayle’s rough tongue often prevailed where Gwen’s civil entreaties failed. But on one score at least the two women were in accord, and that was in their devotion to the children. Agnes was an excellent cook, and during the school holidays, the children would sneak in repeatedly, sure of being given a tart or a rock-cake each, still warm from the oven. And Mrs Bessemer, not to be outdone, was a specialist in providing drinks. On cold winter days it was hot cocoa or beef-tea, and in summer-time, when the hot days came, it was ice-cold gingerade, the recipe for which was a jealously guarded secret.