The scene is the same. The cows stand ruminating and watching. Alfred is batting. He is nineteen, and has been playing with the big men for two years. No nervous stripling now, no handsome boy, he is a young man and everyone is watching him, not only Mrs. Lane, who is in a chair under her oak tree, fanning herself, and Alfred’s mother, in tears that are intended to be seen.
If Mrs. Lane’s face shows varieties of ironic comment, then it is understandable.
On the day after we saw them all last, Daisy returned from London to say she intended to start with her friend Emily as a probationer at the Royal Free. Now it had happened, it was obvious that Mrs. Lane could have foreseen it all. Daisy had always admired Emily, and had emulated her when her own talents would permit. Mrs. Lane was shaken, shocked to the heart, and she could not stop weeping, until her husband, upset by his daughter, even more by her, called the doctor and told his wife, ‘Now, my dear, that is really enough. You are taking it much too hard.’ Mrs. Lane did not know that anybody could weep as she was doing. Her little girl, whom she often privately called her little fairy, her little angel, was in that hospital wiping the bottoms of the very poor. That Emily had chosen to do it was dreadful, but she was at least a big strong girl, but her own little daughter, that frail child…When a parent weeps and is inconsolable because a child does not go in the direction the parent wants, then at least one question has to be asked. Why is she so checked, so overthrown, as if given a death sentence, or at least part of her has? Or, for that matter, him: John McVeagh was ill with grief, so it was said.
And Mrs. Tayler was noisily weeping over there, near the pitch, in a position where she had to be seen by everyone. Her Alfred, equably batting while people admired and applauded – he had been offered a variety of jobs by banks as far as Luton and Ipswich, not because of his aptness with the pen or with figures, but because they wanted him for their cricket teams. And he was good at billiards too, at snooker, at bowls – this young star was being competed for, his mother was as pleased as when her other son was chosen for his cleverness, but Alfred said, no, he would rather die than be a bank clerk, he had hated every minute of his two years in an Allied Essex and Suffolk bank. He was going to work for Mr. Redway, the farmer who yearly lent his field for this festivity. Bert Redway was his good friend, they had grown up together; Alfred had in fact spent his childhood playing with the farmers’ sons, along the hedgerows and in the fields.
‘He’s going to be a farmer’s boy,’ wept his mother. ‘He’s just like his father. They only care about making me miserable.’ And she had gone from kitchen to kitchen among the wives, complaining.
Alfred had only said, ‘Mother, I am not going to be stuck in a bank, and that’s the end of it.’
That morning he had emphasized his point by collecting the cow dung from all over the field, while the stewards, the supervisors of the children’s games, the men who were making perfect the cricket pitch watched and grinned, or laughed, when the mother couldn’t see. His father, briefly detaching himself from the church organ, had said, ‘Well done, Alfred. I wish I could do the same.’
Mrs. Lane was sorry for Alfred’s mother, but convinced her own disappointment had to be worse. Alfred had been a farmer’s boy all his life: nothing new about that. But that her little girl, Daisy…Mrs. Lane sent to London every week a large fruit cake, a box of pies, all kinds of treats. Emily and Daisy slept in a room with six other probationers, scum from the East End, so Mrs. Lane thought and said. The parcels did not have a crumb left in them ten minutes after they were opened: all the girls were hungry. The probationers had very little time off, and when Mrs. Lane did see her daughter and Emily she was as shocked and grieved as she had expected. They were so thin, so exhausted. She had not exaggerated the hardships: she did not know how these gently brought-up girls survived.
She was expecting Emily to give in, apologize to her father, go home repentant. She did not. When Mrs. Lane delicately enquired of her daughter if this might happen, Daisy said simply, ‘But she couldn’t do that. It’s her pride, Mother.’ And besides, Emily had never ever indicated that she felt she had made a mistake.
Pride, scorned Mrs. Lane. It was stubbornness, it was sheer wrong-headed silliness. The girls’ hands were rubbed red and raw, they both looked like skivvies; they were skivvies. That was all they did in their work, empty bedpans, scrub, dust, clean, wash floors, walls, ceilings, at it from dawn to dusk, and when they did get an afternoon off they fell on their beds and slept.
Mrs. Lane told her husband she was so mortified she would die of it, but if she could have seen into the future…Her fairy child, little Daisy ended up as an examiner of nurses, and a steely glance from those spectacles dissolved many a poor examinee into tears. She was known as a strict examiner, but just of course, just, and fair.
Mrs. Lane, who had longed for grandchildren, never did get any, for Daisy married, rather late, an eminent surgeon and was busy helping Emily with her charitable work.
But this afternoon, while feeling her heart would break, had broken, Mrs. Lane banished any trace of tears and sat waiting for the girls, who had an afternoon off. She had checked that the food on the trestles was plentiful. She knew Emily and Daisy would fall on it the moment they arrived. She had already had words with the trustees of several hospitals, with well-known matrons and schools of nursing. It was wicked and short-sighted to expect girls to do such hard work on such poor food. She was planning a letter to The Times.
When the girls arrived, Mrs. Lane would not allow herself to comment on how thin and bad they looked. They kissed her and at once attacked the food.
With laden plates they sat on cushions beside Mrs. Lane and ate. Mrs. Lane could not bear to look at those roughened hands: she literally averted her eyes.
‘We cannot stay long,’ said Emily and Daisy. They were both on night duty. Not probationers now, Mrs. Lane had to remind herself. They were in their second year, were actually nursing patients. How time did fly, they all agreed.
Alfred, tea-time announced for the players, came over. He greeted Daisy, whom he had always known, but not Emily. He did not recognize her. He remembered Emily as a robust, tall girl – surely athletic: he had witnessed her leap over the fence.
He said to Mrs. Lane, ‘One reason I’m glad not to be going of to Luton or somewhere: I like dropping in for a bit of your fruit cake.’ And his smile was certainly enough to win the heart of anybody at all who was not his mother.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t be in the bank. You know me.’
‘Yes, Alfred, and I’m so glad you won’t be going away.’
Daisy did not hear this, or pretended not to: she thought Alfred did not know she would be even more glad.
‘Perhaps I’ll drop in and see you when I come up to London,’ said Alfred to Daisy.
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ said Daisy.
Alfred was called back to the game; and soon the girls kissed Mrs. Lane and went off back to London.