The Land Endures (The Apple Tree Saga Book 4)

by Mary E. Pearce

  ‘I pity that pony,’ Granna said.

  At half-past-six the trap returned, and Betony went off again. It was cold and wet, but she wore a mackintosh cape and hood, and had galoshes on her feet.

  Beth Izzard went indoors, but Jesse and the old man went to the workshop, where, beneath the hanging lamps, the carpenters were still at work. There were eight men there, besides Dicky, and eight faces now looked up, wearing a bright expectancy. Great-grumpa Tewke spoke to them.

  ‘I suppose you’re hoping I’ll say you can leave early, on account of the polling, eh?’

  ‘It’d be a great kindness, gaffer,’ said Albert Tunniman.

  ‘All right. You can go. But mind you all vote for the right man!’

  The eight carpenters reached for their coats. In three minutes they were gone. Great-grumpa Tewke went into the house. Dicky remained at the bench, working.

  ‘Ent you going to vote?’ Jesse asked.

  ‘I’ll go when I’m finished,’ Dicky said.

  ‘The polling shuts down at eight o’clock. Do you think you’ll have finished that job by then?’

  ‘It don’t take me a month of Sundays to put a new floor in a damned tumbril!’

  Dicky, it seemed, was in a bad mood. He did not often sneer at his father. But Jesse, aware that he was slow, and a poor craftsman compared with his son, took it all in good part.

  ‘I reckon I’ll leave you to it, then. It ent worthwhile my starting again, seeing I’ve got my best suit on and all. I reckon I’ll follow your great-grumpa in.’

  But before he reached the door of the house, Beth came hurrying out to him, to say that Great-grumpa had collapsed.

  ‘All right, wife, keep calm!’ Jesse said. He himself was far from calm. ‘Is it bad, do you suppose?’

  ‘Yes,’ Beth said, ‘he’s slumped in his chair.’

  ‘Laws!’ Jesse said. ‘Oh, glory be!’

  He returned to the workshop and shouted for Dicky to go for the doctor. Dicky set off, white-faced, at a run.

  When Jesse entered the kitchen, Beth was loosening Great-grumpa’s clothes. His collar and stock were very tight and she had trouble removing them. His face was a dark and terrible colour and there was a wetness on the skin. He was making a noise as he fought for breath. Granna stood weeping on the hearth. She had her pinafore up to her face.

  ‘Silly old obstinate man!’ she said. ‘I knew he shouldn’t have gone to the poll. He’s done for hisself, he has, that’s a fact. He won’t never recover now.’

  Beth and Jesse exchanged a glance.

  News always travelled fast in Huntlip. Betony heard of the old man’s collapse from a group of voters outside the school. She drove home immediately. By the time she arrived, Great-grumpa Tewke was conscious again, and he had been got upstairs to his bed; and he had enough of his old spirit left in him to have ordered the doctor out of the room.

  ‘You’re not taking me to no hospital and that’s all-about-it, young fella-me-lad! If I’m going to die ‒ and I surely am ‒ I’d sooner do it in my own home!’

  Dr Day was with the family in the kitchen when Betony arrived.

  ‘It’s probably better for him to be at home. Rest and care, that’s what he needs, and he’ll have them here.’

  ‘He ent going to die, is he, doctor?’ Jesse asked anxiously.

  Dr Day spread his hands.

  ‘Anno domini, Mr Izzard. He’s a wonderful age, you must admit. I’ll call in again tomorrow morning.’

  ‘There!’ said Granna, when the doctor had gone. ‘As good as done for! What did I say?’

  The others were silent, lost in their thoughts. The old man was ninety-two; he had had a good innings certainly; yet the thought of his death was hard to accept. House and workshop would seem very strange without William Tewke to order the comings and goings there. Jesse Izzard looked at his wife. Dicky looked at Betony. Dicky felt the need to be occupied.

  ‘I’ll go and see to the pony,’ he said, ‘and there’s lamps to be douted in the workshop too.’

  Betony went upstairs and quietly entered the old man’s room. She sat in a chair beside the bed and after a while he opened his eyes. His face was now as pallid as yeast, and his voice when he spoke was just a whisper.

  ‘I know you’re there, child, watching me.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘You can tell me how the voting went.’

  ‘From what people say, it looks as though Mr Crown will win, but we shan’t really know until tomorrow, of course.’ The old man closed his eyes. His breathing, though heavy, was regular. Betony sat in her upright chair and kept watch over him while he slept, and at ten o’clock, quietly, her mother came and took her place.

  The next morning he was better. When Betony left for school, he was eating a breakfast of porridge and milk. Janie, her married sister, had come and was sitting with him, pouring his tea. At eleven o’clock the doctor came and pronounced himself pleased with the old man’s condition. He advised him, however, to stay in bed.

  Jesse gave orders that no noisy work should be done in the workshop that day. There was plenty of painting the men could do. But the old man missed the hammering; the noise of the saw at work in the sawpit; the voices shouting in the yard.

  ‘What’s the matter with them all down there? Why ent they working?’ he said to Beth.

  Only with the customary sounds coming from the workshop and the yard could he lie peacefully in his bed.

  After lunch the vicar called.

  ‘Are you in a hurry to bury me?’ the old man demanded with a scowl. ‘I see you’ve brought the books along.’

  ‘I thought perhaps a short prayer …’

  ‘Can’t do much harm, anyway. But don’t expect me to join in. I’ve got things to think about.’

  The vicar read the eighty-fourth psalm, followed by a prayer for the sick. The old man sat propped against his pillows and listened patiently to the end. Abruptly he spoke.

  ‘What worries me is them gates!’ he said.

  ‘Gates?’ said Mr Netherton. His mind being full of piety, he thought of St Peter and the gates of heaven. ‘What precisely do you mean?’

  ‘The churchyard gates, of course, what else? You’ve been needing new ones these two years past. Have a word with Jesse while you’re here. Better still with his boy Dicky. He’ll let you know what that’ll cost.’

  He would not have Granna in the room. ‘Her long face makes me sick,’ he said. Only Beth was allowed to sit with him, and Betony when she came home; and by then he was weak again; he was beginning to talk to himself.

  ‘Better to bring the old tree down, once the rot’s got in at the roots. Put a couple of wedges in … and bring it down, clean and straight … out of the way of them bits of saplings.’

  Betony looked at her mother’s face. Was the old man wandering? ‒ Talking of the oak in the workshop yard, felled in the autumn of 1913? No, he wasn’t wandering. After a lifetime working with timber, he saw himself as an old tree. He had stood like a stubborn oak for years. No one had ever seen him yield. And now, when he knew his time was come, the woodman had no fears for him.

  At three o’clock, Dicky came into the house with a newspaper, fetched hot-foot from Jeremy Rye’s. It contained the latest election news. In Chepsworth, as Betony had said, the Liberal member had kept his seat, but in the country as a whole, there had been a swing to the left. The next government would be a Labour one.

  ‘Laws!’ Jesse said. He was much upset. ‘A Labour government! I dunno! I’d have thought the country had more sense!’ He dropped the paper in disgust. ‘Your Great-grumpa Tewke won’t care for that. He won’t care for it at all.’

  And then Betony came in to them, to say that Great-grumpa Tewke was dead.

  On the day of the old man’s burial, the carpenter’s shop was closed all day. The carpenters attended the funeral and six of them, with Jesse and Dicky, bore the coffin to the grave. The vicar prefaced his address with words from Ecclesiasticus: ‘Let
us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.’ For William Henry Tewke, carpenter, had been a famous man in his way, as the many mourners gathered in the church testified. He had lived to a great age, and before he died there had been five generations of his family living in the parish. Now he was gone and the four generations remaining sat in the church to honour him …

  As Dicky said afterwards, the vicar might not be much of a mucher outside his church, but in the pulpit there was no one to beat him.

  Later that day, at Cobbs, when the last of the mourners had left the house, Dicky went to the workshop yard and walked about, his hands in his pockets, among the criss-crossed stacks of timber, good oak and elm, ash and beechwood, and the softwood planks of foreign deal. He was gazing into the sawpit when his father came looking for him.

  ‘At least we can get rid of this lot now.’ Dicky kicked at a baulk of timber, so that it toppled into the pit. ‘We can get all our stuff from the sawmill now, instead of sawing it all by hand as though we was Noah building his ark.’

  Jesse looked at his son in horror.

  ‘That ent no way to talk, boy, with your Great-grumpa Tewke hardly cold in his grave.’

  ‘He wouldn’t care,’ Dicky said. ‘He was no humbug, I will say that. The living came first with him all along. He wasted no time on ’em once they was dead.’

  ‘You should show some respect all the same. Your Great-grumpa Tewke, he started this place. He was its founder, as they say.’

  ‘The business has got to carry on.’

  ‘Ah. But you was talking of making changes.’

  ‘Shall we be keeping the sawpit, then, just ’cos Great-grumpa started it, way back in 1850? Shall we still be sawing by hand in another ten or twenty years?’

  ‘I never said that,’ Jesse said.

  ‘There’s got to be changes, you know, Dad.’

  ‘H’mm, and it seems you’ve decided how, where, and when!’

  But Jesse, in fact, was quite content to allow Dicky to take the reins, and Dicky knew it. Jesse rarely asserted himself. His wife, his daughter, and his son, could impose on him just as they pleased. His wife knew best in everything, and he trusted her. His first-born child, Betony, was always the apple of his eye. And Dicky, shedding his youthful fecklessness, was already showing signs of the drive that would keep the business flourishing.

  In the days following the funeral, the changes were already showing themselves. When Joe Kyte called, to discuss the repairs at his granary, Jesse at once summoned Dicky.

  ‘My son is the chap you need to see. He’ll come along with you to the farm and give you an estimate of the cost. You’ll find there’s a lot of old Mr Tewke in him. He’s got a better business head than I’ll ever have in a hundred years.’

  But there was one small business matter, not connected with the workshop, which Jesse always dealt with himself. He owned a cottage known as the Pikehouse, which stood three miles out, on the old Norton road. It had been left to him by his mother; he was its owner, and he alone; and the ownership gave him a certain importance. He let the Pikehouse, for a weekly rent of one-and-sixpence, to a stonemason named Horace Nash, and every Friday on his way home from work Nash called at Cobbs to pay his rent.

  Jesse always looked out for him and made a fuss if he was late. The money went into a small cashbox, which was carefully locked afterwards, and the rent-book was signed with immense pains; always in ink, never in pencil; always carefully blotted dry, and breathed upon for good measure. It was a family joke at Cobbs and Beth said once to Betony: ‘Your father can sign a rent-book more slowly than anyone else in the world.’

  It happened one night that Nash came early, in Jesse’s absence. Beth took the money and signed the rent-book. And Jesse, coming in, was almost angry. He looked at the money as though it were defiled.

  ‘That’s my job to sign for the Pikehouse rent. It ent no one else’s, I’ll be bound.’

  ‘How could you sign it when you wasn’t here?’

  ‘Nash could’ve waited, couldn’t he? You knew I’d be in by seven o’clock.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who signs the book. It’s just a sort of formality, that’s all, to show that the rent has been paid.’

  But Jesse was not to be persuaded. He returned to the matter again and again. His Friday evening had been quite spoilt.

  ‘It’s my job to sign for the Pikehouse rent. If Nash comes early another time, you make him wait.’

  Every two or three months or so, Jesse took the money out of the box and paid it into the post office. This was another great day in his life, and for some time beforehand, whenever he went to the cashbox, he would give it a little shake and say, ‘That’s beginning to get fuller again. I’ll soon have to go to the Huntlip bank.’ Once he said to Betony, ‘That’s twenty-one shillings in there. It’s amazing how quickly it all mounts up.’

  ‘Seeing that you’re so rich,’ she said, ‘why not give it to the Fund?’

  There was a scheme afoot in the village to raise money for a parish hall, and Betony was on the committee.

  ‘Oh, no!’ Jesse said. ‘That’s Pikehouse money, and it goes in the bank, ’cos I never know when that might be needed to pay for repairs. But I daresay I’ll find something for your Fund.’

  He gave her ten shillings the very next day, but the rent-money must never be touched. It was sacred, Dicky said.

  On December the fourteenth, there was a concert in the school, to raise funds for the parish hall. Jesse was rather shocked that Betony should join in the entertainment, less than a week after Great-grumpa’s funeral, but all the rest of the family went, even Granna, and Jesse as always was over-ruled.

  ‘It’ll be a good thing if Huntlip gets a parish hall,’ Dicky said when he got home. ‘I spoke to the vicar about it tonight and he promised that we should have the job of building it.’

  ‘Laws!’ Jesse said. ‘Did you ask him outright?’

  ‘I don’t believe in passing things by.’

  Dicky, as foretold, was treading the path Great-grumpa had trod. Doing business was in his blood.

  Chapter Nine

  On December the twenty-first, when the village school broke up for Christmas, the children were given those pieces of work which they had done during the term and were allowed to take them home. Emma had a small raffia basket, a peg-doll dressed in blue paper, and a knitted kettle-holder. But out in the playground, before going home, she gave these things to Winnie Aston, who gave her a pear-drop in exchange.

  ‘Surely you want your little doll? I think she’s nice, all dressed in blue.’

  ‘No, you can have it,’ Emma said.

  ‘I shan’t give them back, once I’ve took them home.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to ask you to.’

  Emma, twirling her shoe-bag on its string, walked backwards to the gate. Miss Izzard and Miss Vernon stood outside the school porch, wishing their pupils a happy Christmas. Miss Izzard wore a dark blue suit, and had a black band of silk sewn to one sleeve. She had worn the black band for a fortnight now and Emma knew, having asked Florrie Ricks, that it was because Miss Izzard was in mourning for her great-grandfather, William Tewke.

  ‘Happy Christmas, Emma!’ Winnie said.

  ‘Happy Christmas, Winnie!’ Emma replied.

  Emma walked up Holland Lane. It was too wet to go by the fields. The weather just lately had been very bad. When she was half way up the lane she stopped and took something from her pocket. It was her end-of-term report. She took it from its envelope and read her marks. She then read the sentences at the bottom, written by Miss Vernon in a large clear hand. ‘Emma must try and concentrate. She is too much given to day-dreaming.’ Emma tore the report to bits and scattered them in the dark puddles. Swinging her shoe-bag, she went on her way, sucking the pear-drop Winnie had given her.

  All over Christmas the weather was cold, with sleet and snow showers coming by turns. This was the hated time of year, when the farm became a sea of mud, and the men as they squelched
about the yards were inclined to be surly and quarrelsome.

  ‘I hope it’s cheerful, this play of yours,’ Stephen said to his older children. ‘We could do with cheering up a bit, especially the men.’

  ‘D’you think they’ll come?’ Chris asked.

  ‘I don’t see why not. They’ve received their invitations, I understand. I heard Tupper and Rye talking about it this morning.’

  ‘What were they saying?’ Joanna asked.

  ‘Tupper was wondering,’ Stephen said, ‘whether he ought to wear white tie and tails!’

  Up in the attic with Jamesy and Joanna, Chris gave a reading of Act II, which he had completed on Boxing Day.

  ‘The curtain rises on the posh drawing-room of a house in Kent ‒’

  ‘Posh?’ shrieked Joanna, outraged. ‘You can’t say posh, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘I don’t see why not. The audience won’t see the stage-directions.’

  ‘If we are going to do this wretched play, at least let us do it properly.’ Joanna spoke with a touch of hauteur. She was already feeling her way into the part of her heroine, the Lady Rosina Cavendish.

  ‘Oh, very well,’ Chris agreed. He altered the word in his exercise book. ‘The curtain rises on the elegant drawing-room ‒’

  ‘That’s better,’ Joanna said. ‘But whereabouts in Kent exactly?’

  ‘Cripes!’ said Jamesy impatiently. ‘When are we going to start rehearsing?’

  Rehearsals brought new difficulties. Joanna, as the haughty heroine, having been abducted by the wicked pirate, Captain Terror, and thrown into the hold of his ship, The Scourge, was there to find the hero, Chris, lying unconscious on the floor, bleeding from a wound in his right temple.

  ‘A goodly looking youth but reeks of garlic!’ Joanna cried tragically. ‘How am I to bandage his wounds?’

  ‘Bind his wounds, not bandage them!’ Chris reminded for the seventh time. ‘They didn’t have bandages in those days.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be unconscious.’

  ‘I can still hear you making a muff of your lines.’

  ‘Order! Order!’ Jamesy said, bringing his cutlass down, smack, on the side of his gumboot. ‘Or I’ll have you marooned, you mutinous dogs!’