It was only in retrospect that the strange, golden spring and summer of 1939 was thought of as golden and strange by some of the people of Markham.
Golden, because it was the driest summer ever recorded in England, and green all but disappeared from the landscape.
Strange, because in that bee-humming, woodbine-scented, blue-domed land, people were burrowing holes in the earth and roofing them over with iron sheets to make bomb-shelters. Strange, because swaying carts loaded with fast-grown, sweet sun-dried hay, passed wheel to wheel with lorries taking to store piles of stretchers, hundreds of flat-folded brown board coffins and great bolts of pretty flowery fabric bought up cheap for the making of shrouds.
Markham. It had been a settlement long before its first tiny Saxon church had been built, or the Normans came to change it, influencing the style of windows, turning it into a great abbey for future tourists. At the time of that golden and strange summer, Markham was an insignificant market town, its days of any real importance long gone. The town was about a mile square. Five roads led out of it, three of them steeply uphill.
As well as being an ancient cattle market, it was now a bakery and a brewery town. At times the air made people salivate with its illusory aroma of home-made oven-baked. At others it reeked of hops and yeast and malt and pungent effluent. A town of 6,000 inhabitants and 101 pubs. Until one got to the town boundaries, it was not necessary to walk for more than five minutes in any direction to obtain a drink of beer.
There was an old saying: ‘He’s that drunk, he must have been to Markham. ’ These days there wasn’t much drunkenness: Markham men could hold their beer. Or perhaps it was, as visiting Northerners said, that Markham beer was gnats’ pee put up in barrels.
Until the summer of 1939, Markham had only dipped its toe in the twentieth century.
True there was a cinema, a Co-op, a new Woolworth’s, and the railway station, but people remained parochial and life was still lived at a rural pace. There were very few cars, and cattle and sheep were still driven through the streets on Market Day. Milk was brought by horse and cart direct from the cow in brass churns, still containing its farm-fresh bovine TB. Beasts were slaughtered behind butcher-shops from where the occasional bullock escaped its tether and ran terrifyingly amok through the lanes and back-streets.
If Markham had a character, it was smug and phlegmatic; if it had a style, it was a century out of date.
Most employment for men and single girls was provided by Hardy’s Bakery and the local brewery. There were one or two small employers, such as Southern Cereals where Georgia and Hugh Kennedy had been employed, and a bit of horticulture and retail shop-work. Almost all other men’s work was beyond the town boundaries – farms, Southampton Docks, and Southern Railway.
Unlike their sisters in the potteries and mill towns, few women went out to work after marriage. Not only was there little employment available, a working wife was frowned upon and a working mother viewed with disgust. Of course, there was the Oaklands Estate mansion where there was occasional skivvying to be had, but Markham people didn’t like working for The Estate. Years ago, a poacher had been hanged for the death of a gamekeeper. Markhambrians had long and unforgiving memories.
From a vantage point on any of the surrounding hills, the eye was always drawn to the elegant thrusting spire of the abbey and the twin erections of the bakery and brewery chimneys.
Whether or not the children of the town were aware that their parents were preparing themselves for war, it is difficult to say, for they scuffed their way to school and raced their way home as they had always done. To them, every summer was strange and golden and, as always in July and August, they gathered each morning by certain special hedgerows bordering certain special meadows, or at the places where the River Bliss provided a little shallow bay. At the chosen place they laid out their bags of lemonade, broken biscuits and dripping bread, and prepared to hurl themselves into meadows, trees, hay, water.
Old bent men leaned on bridges and watched, and their weathered wives halted momentarily and listened, remembering their own calling, laughing, squabbling, leaping and splashing, tiddler-jar days. Nothing had changed in a hundred years. In the rented terraces and council houses, the busy generation looked at their kids returning home late in the evening, river-washed and sun-burned, and supposed that the Germans must never have had that sort of fun. What else could account for them being like they were?
If Markham had a voice, it would have said, ‘Don’t nobody come here telling us what to do, we done all right up to now.’