‘God! I could spit!’ said Morton George. He snatched up his money and walked out. His loud voice could be heard in the yard as he talked to Starling and Billy Rye. ‘Economies! Sweet Jesus Christ! What economies does he make, I’d like to know?’
The rest of the men said nothing at all. They took their money and slouched away, each one avoiding Stephen’s glance. Their sullenness irked him; it got on his mind; and yet they had his sympathy. They were the ones who suffered most. It was their children who would go hungry when harvest was over and winter came.
All through the summer and autumn that year, there was a constant stream of men, most of them strangers to the district, calling at the farm in search of work. Aunt Doe would give them something to eat and perhaps put a shilling into their hands. But there was no work for them on the farm.
‘Surely there must be something?’ they would say. ‘Especially now, at haymaking time? Surely you need an extra man?’
But Stephen refused them, one and all.
‘Any extra work I have goes to the local men,’ he said.
He made it a rule, and kept to it. He hardened his heart to these ragged strangers and watched them trudge towards Outlands and Blagg. Challoner, he knew, sometimes employed these casual men. He paid them less than their work was worth and, as he said to Stephen once, it kept his own men on their toes.
‘They know, if they monkey with me, that I’ve got two or three chaps at my gate, ready to step straight into their shoes. That gives them something to think about, and keeps them from too much idling around!’
One man who called at Holland Farm was Eddie Templer from Outlands, the man who, at shearing time the summer before, had urged Stephen to count the fleeces.
‘Challoner’s given me the sack. I’m a union man and he hates our guts. It’s been in the wind for a year or more. I’ve come to ask you for a job.’
‘I’ve got all the labour I can use.’
‘I done you a favour once, remember, when Challoner was trying to cheat you.’
‘Is that why you did it?’ Stephen asked. ‘Against the day when you might want a favour in return?’
‘What if I did? What’s wrong with that?’
‘Did Mr Challoner really try to cheat me that time? Or was it just a trick of yours?’
‘Seems you’ve got a suspicious mind.’
‘You haven’t answered, yes or no.’
‘Are you going to give me a job or not?’
‘I’ve already told you, there’s nothing here. I’m sorry, Templer, but I can’t make work.’
‘Never mind the apologies! I can’t keep my wife and kids on them! Seems I backed the wrong bloody horse!’
Less than half an hour after Templer had gone, Aunt Doe came running up to the hayfield to say that the cattle were in the corn, in the twelve acre piece above Long Gains. Chris, coming home from school just then, was quick to believe that Eddie Templer was to blame. He had passed the man coming up the track.
‘He’s a bolshevik, one of the worst. Mr Challoner’s well shot of him. Thank goodness you didn’t take him on.’
‘We don’t know for sure that he let the cattle into the corn.’
‘They’re all the same, these unemployed. Good working men don’t get the sack. They’re either shirkers or bolshies or both and they ought to be put to mend the roads.’
‘Is that what Gerald Challoner says?’
‘I do have opinions of my own.’
‘And no doubt they coincide with his.’
‘Yes, on the whole, I think they do.’
‘I think that’s a pity,’ Stephen said.
‘Dammit, Dad! Gerald’s my friend!’
‘Yes, I know,’ Stephen said.
And that was a pity, too, he thought.
It was not only corn prices that had fallen so low. It was the same with cattle and pigs: the prices they fetched at market now hardly covered the cost of rearing them; and Stephen, going over his accounts, read the sad story on the page. Only the sale of fat lambs showed a worthwhile profit there. Sheep were keeping the farm alive. Sheep and Aunt Doe’s poultry yard.
Aunt Doe had savings in the bank, which brought her in fifty pounds a year. She wanted to remove her capital and give it to Stephen to pay off the mortgage on the farm. He would not hear of such a thing.
‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘I spend hardly anything on myself.’
‘Then it’s high time you did,’ Stephen said, and he looked critically at her shoes, the laces of which were bits of string.
‘You can talk! Just look at you! Ragged old jacket and that awful cap!’
‘You’ll want that money for your old age. I’m paying the mortgage gradually. Another two years should see it through. There’s nothing for you to worry about. We’re keeping our heads above water ‒ just!’
‘And you are wearing yourself to a shade.’
Stephen’s angular, loose-knit face, with its high cheekbones and long lean jaw, had a tired look in it these days. She wished there was something she could do to smooth away the deepening lines and ease the burden of anxiety. But he would not take the money she offered, and she knew he would never change his mind. All she could do, she told herself, was to try and save him in every way.
Nothing was wasted in the house. Meatbones were boiled to make stock for soups; potatoes were always cooked in their skins; all manner of fruit was bottled and jammed. Used tealeaves were kept for cleaning the carpets, and soft soap was made at home. Cough-cure was made by baking onions with brown sugar, and all sorts of garden herbs were kept, for whatever ailments might come to the family. No one dared be ill in that house, for fear of Aunt Doe’s remedies, but her home-made wines were popular, especially the plum and the walnut-leaf.
Stephen would sometimes smile to himself, seeing her carefully hoarding the scraps that would go to make a curry for lunch the next day. Food, as he often reminded her, was the one thing that was plentiful on the farm.
‘I like to think I’m helping you, even if you don’t think my efforts are worthwhile.’
‘Of course you’re helping me,’ he said.
One afternoon at the end of July, Chris left school for good. He celebrated in true Chepsworth style by hurling his ‘boater’ from King Richard’s Bridge, into the swirling river below, and watching it float away downstream.
‘Poor old Wayman! He’s a farmer now!’ A school-friend stuck a straw in his mouth. ‘Don’t forget to set your alarm.’
‘Or wind up the cockerel,’ another boy said.
‘We’ll think of you Wayman, milking the cows at four o’clock!’
‘I’ll think of you next term,’ Chris said, ‘sweating blood over Shenstone’s impots!’
He and Jamesy ran for their bus.
A week later harvest began, and when the first field was cut, Chris was there in the first dim light, taking his place among the men, working beside them with his scythe. To his surprise nothing was said. There was no banter of any kind. The men worked in silence, in a row, cutting a way round the edge of the field so that the reaping-machine could get in.
The sun was not yet visible, and the men were shadowy, featureless shapes, mowing their way through the milk-white mist. Then the sun began to rise, burning over the earth’s edge, touching the oats with its molten redness. The men’s faces were crimson-flushed. Their scythe-blades, at every returning stroke, appeared for an instant to drip red fire. Only then did the mowers speak.
‘Who’s this new chap here with us, Billy?’
‘That’s the young master,’ Billy said.
‘What, him what was only last week at school?’
‘The very same,’ Billy said.
‘Well, I’ll say this for him, at any rate ‒ he’s no slug-abed, that’s for sure. Nor he don’t yap too much, neither, first thing. Seems to me we’ll keep him on.’
Chris, though he smiled to himself at this, said nothing in reply. He needed every ounce of breath if he was to keep pace with the other mowers.
The day came at last when Emma was to start at the village school. Stephen, as it happened, was attending a sale. He had to leave home at six o’clock.
‘You’ll take her down?’ he asked Aunt Doe.
‘I’ll take her down,’ Chris volunteered.
But when, at a quarter past eight, Chris came in to eat his breakfast, Emma was nowhere to be found. Her shoe-bag had gone from its place on the dresser. So had her luncheon, packed by Aunt Doe. Emma had slipped off to school alone, and nobody had seen her go.
On ordinary mornings, Betony Izzard walked the mile from her home to the school, but today, the first morning of the new term, she asked her brother for a lift and rode with him in the workshop cart, sitting beside him on the box, with her big canvas hold-all on her lap. It was not yet eight o’clock. She liked to be early on the first day of term. And behind her, in the cart, among the timber and the carpenter’s tools, stood two big baskets full of apples. The apples were her reason for wanting a lift.
When they arrived at the school, Dicky carried the baskets in and set them down as she directed, one in each of the two classrooms.
‘I dunno what Great-grumpa will say when he finds you’ve been at his precious apples. Nor Dad and Mother, come to that. They won’t be best pleased if you ask me.’
‘They needn’t know if you don’t tell them.’
‘They’ll notice the apples is in short supply.’
‘I shall say the mice have been eating them.’
‘Ah, two-legged mice!’ Dicky said, glancing round at the empty desks. ‘You spoil them kids. You do, that’s a fact.’ Betony hung up her coat, closed the cupboard, and went to her desk.
‘One apple a day for each child! Do you call that spoiling, Dicky?’ she asked. ‘For some of them ‒ those whose fathers are out of work ‒ that apple will be all they have to eat between coming to school in the morning and going home in the afternoon.’
‘And what they thieve in the fields on the way!’
‘Do you grudge them a slice of raw turnip?’
‘You can’t feed all the poor of the parish and it’s no use your trying,’ Dicky said. ‘But I ent got time to stop chatting here. I’m meeting Dad at Mr Twill’s. We’re building him a summer-house to go with his brand-new tennis-court.’
‘And farmers complain that they have no money!’
‘Seems to me I’d better be off, before you get on your hobby-horse.’
The door closed and Dicky was gone. She heard him turning the cart in the playground. Stillness and quietness stole on her. She liked the hour between eight and nine, when she had the building to herself, and on the first morning of term, especially, there was always much to be done.
Out of her big brown canvas bag she took a roll of coloured posters, bought on a recent visit to London. She began pinning them up on the walls. They depicted people in history and were painted in bold lines and colours. Alexander taming his horse. Stephenson watching the boiling kettle. Captain Scott at the South Pole. Nurse Cavell, facing her captors. And others not so instantly recognizable, such as Ptolemy and Caractacus, William Willett and John Brown, to stir her pupils’ curiosity. In the course of the term the children would come to know them all as intimately as they knew one another.
Next she took out a spray of hops and hung it above the classroom door. The scent of the flowers, and their stickiness, remained on her fingers and her palms. She wiped them clean on a piece of rag. She took out sprays of hips and haws, oakleaves and acorns, ashleaves and keys, and put them into a stoneware vase, up on one of the window-sills. The morning sunlight shone on them: scarlet rose-hips and crimson haws; acorns beginning to turn yellow; ashkeys already parchment-brown. She fetched a jug of water and filled the vase.
The school was really one large room. It was divided into two by a sliding partition of wood and glass. When Betony had first been made headmistress, there had been a hundred and nineteen pupils, but now, when the children reached the age of eleven, they went to the school at Middle Cross. There was more room at Huntlip now. When attendance was at its peak, there were sixty-seven children in all.
At half past eight Sue Vernon arrived. She was Betony’s sole assistant. Small, neat, dark-haired and dark-eyed, she walked in with a sharp briskness as though impatient to start the day’s work. She enquired after Betony’s holidays and answered a query about her own, but her glance kept straying to the basket of apples standing beside Betony’s desk.
‘I brought them from home,’ Betony said. ‘There’s another one in your room. The children can have one apple each when they stop for the morning break.’
‘How generous you are. I hope they appreciate it, that’s all.’
‘The apples won’t last long, I’m afraid. Not unless attendance is low.’
‘No doubt it will be, seeing the harvest is still going on. I saw some children in the fields as I cycled past Moat Farm just now. I nearly stopped and spoke to them, but I know your feelings on the subject, and I thought I’d better leave it to you. I can give you the names of three of them.’
‘No, there’s no need,’ Betony said. She set up her easel and put in the pegs. ‘I shall know about it soon enough.’
Sue Vernon’s gaze was critical.
‘Mr Pugh says it’s a downright disgrace, these absences at harvest time. He says we teachers are to blame. We delay in reporting them to him.’
Mr Pugh was the school attendance officer, a personal friend of Sue’s family. He lived in the house next door to theirs, in one of the better parts of Chepsworth.
Betony reached for the blackboard and lifted it up onto the easel. The argument was an old one between them. It varied little from year to year.
‘The parents need the extra money. This year, perhaps, more than ever before.’
‘Well, I think it’s very wrong indeed, that the children’s schooling should be neglected just for the sake of a few coppers.’
‘What’s the use of filling their heads if their bellies are empty?’ Betony said. She took chalk and duster from the cupboard and placed them in the tray pegged to the easel. ‘A few coppers are not to be sneezed at, to a labourer with a family.’
Sue Vernon walked away, into her own classroom next door, and laid her small suitcase on her desk. Miss Izzard’s use of the word ‘bellies’ was really rather typical. Sometimes she seemed to set out to offend. Or was the coarseness ingrained in her? Something that could not be overcome?
Miss Vernon, not for the first time, took herself severely to task. For she was the daughter of a church organist, a man of standing and refinement, and she had enjoyed advantages denied to such as Betony Izzard, whose father was a village carpenter. A good enough man in his way, no doubt ‒ even well-to-do, in fact, for the family business was a flourishing one ‒ but a countryman of no education: slow, simple, unlettered, uncouth, and almost laughably broad in his speech.
‘Really,’ Miss Vernon told herself, ‘one must make allowances, after all.’
Acting on her good resolution, she took a piece of paper from her case and carried it in to Betony.
‘I’ve drawn up a list of hymns for the term. I thought you’d like to see it first.’
One of Miss Izzard’s disadvantages was that she could not play the piano. As mistress-in-charge she must feel it keenly. Miss Vernon therefore deferred to her whenever it seemed reasonable to do so. Betony took the neatly written list.
‘Not three-three-one. At least not today. It’s not very cheerful, is it?’ she said. ‘Let’s have “To be a pilgrim” instead. The children like it. So do I.’
Miss Vernon drew a deep breath. Her good intentions were draining away.
‘I haven’t practised it, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m sure you can play it, even so.’
‘Oh, I can play it, certainly. But it won’t be up to a high standard.’
‘The children won’t mind. Neither shall I. We’ll do our best to drown you out.’
‘Oh, how true!’ Miss Vernon
said, with more than a touch of bitterness. But when she met Betony’s glance, she was gradually obliged to smile. ‘Oh, how true!’ she said again, and the truth of it made them laugh together, with real amusement on both sides. ‘As for that dreadful piano in there ‒!’ She returned once more to her own room.
Betony Izzard went to her desk. She took out pen-tray, inkwell, register. She opened the register out on her desk and wrote the date at the top of the page: Tuesday, September the 4th, 1923.
Her watch, which was pinned to the front of her dress, told her that it was five-and-twenty to nine. She stepped up onto a wooden form and looked out of the high window. The playground below was still deserted. No children had come to stir the dust. Only a movement in the ‘back-house’ showed where the cleaner, Mr Miles, was filling a bucket at the tap.
Betony was proud of that tap. Not many country schools had a piped water supply indoors. It had taken three years to get it installed. But she was not so proud of the school privies, housed in a hut among the trees. How many years would pass, she wondered, before the managers would admit that four latrines were inadequate for sixty-seven children, girls and boys?
She was about to step down from the form when she saw a child in the playground. It was Emma Wayman from Holland Farm. For her first day at the village school Emma evidently meant to be in good time, but, finding herself alone in the playground, she stood uncertainly at the gate, swinging her shoe-bag on its string. A tiny thing, very small for her age, she wore a plain blue cotton frock and a clean white pinafore, crisply starched. Except that she carried a change of shoes, there was nothing to set her apart from the rest of the village children; nothing to show that hitherto she had gone to a private school in the town and mixed with the daughters of professional men. She was dressed like any Huntlip schoolchild. Plainly her aunt, Miss Skeine, had sense. Betony went to fetch her in.
‘Didn’t anyone bring you, on your first day?’
‘No,’ Emma said, ‘I came by myself.’
‘Are they busy up at the farm?’
‘Yes, they’re harvesting,’ Emma said.
The Land Endures (The Apple Tree Saga Book 4) Page 10
