Germanophobia had been rife in Britain for some time, but the Cabinet had been divided. Prime Minister Asquith abhorred the thought of war, but he hated even more the idea that Britain should break her word. Britain had pledged to safeguard Belgium and therefore had no choice. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, who had lived many years in Germany and was a distinguished philosopher of the German school, felt the same. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, wavered until the last moment, but John Burns, President of the Board of Trade, resigned his office rather than be in a Cabinet of whose position he disapproved. The War Party centred on Winston Churchill, the young man whom the people felt had the vision and imagination to conduct a war.
‘Over by Christmas,’ said the visionaries and enthusiasts.
‘At least three years,’ pronounced the realists like Lord Kitchener and Lord Roberts, and they began to prepare for a long conflict. Lord Haldane’s Territorials were recalled from their summer camps and London stations were full of them. Keir Hardie harangued the crowds in Trafalgar Square from the plinth of Nelson’s Column, hardly the best place for a speech advocating retraction. The crowds outside Buckingham Palace went mad with delight when the proclamation of war was declared. Did they not realize that like crowds were shouting themselves hoarse in Berlin?
In the first months of the war, little changed in Aberannoch. Farmers were not conscripted and so the harvest went on as it had always done. Kirsty and her mother read about the bank rate jumping to 10 per cent and back down to 5 per cent, but that hardly affected their little nest-egg. They saw pictures of London’s bus drivers enlisting en masse and heading off to Avonmouth, and ‘H’ Company, the Post Office Recruits Column, learning to march in Regent’s Park.
‘Who on earth will deliver letters if the entire Post Office joins the army?’ asked Jessie.
‘Women, I suppose,’ muttered Kirsty as she struggled with the Merit Class essays, and Jessie chuckled, for surely the world could not go quite so mad as that.
Kirsty took the train to Arbroath every morning that autumn and winter of 1914. Cycling in the rain was no fun, and it seemed as if it would never stop raining. She was supposed to have had an infants’ class, but had come back after the summer holidays to find herself in charge of the Merit Class, which was composed of most of the oldest and brightest children. Every young male teacher had rushed off to enlist almost before war had been declared.
‘What do you think of my promotion chances when I return as a decorated veteran?’ young Mr Tobias had asked the staff.
‘Director of Education, lad, straight away.’ Mr Watson, who had tried to enlist but who had been turned down because of his age, slapped the young man on the shoulder. ‘Give ’em hell for me, lad. Your job will be here for you, never fret.’
Miss Purdy had agreed to delay her retirement until the cessation of hostilities. ‘If I live that long,’ she had said sadly in the staff room. She remembered the Boer War, and agreed with Lord Kitchener that this would be a long struggle.
The infants were probably unaware of the war, but the older children followed every event and their teacher had to read the papers closely every day to keep herself informed. She took out a subscription to the Glasgow Herald and had it delivered to the school, and part of each day was set aside for what the teacher called ‘Current Affairs’ and her pupils called ‘The War’.
Every evening, Kirsty corrected papers and read the newspapers while Jessie sewed. To their great surprise, Lady Sybill Granville-Baker had returned to Aberannoch as soon as war was declared and had turned the castle into a hive of industry. A sewing circle was started, and to Kirsty’s delight her mother’s name had been among the first suggested to Lady Sybill.
‘Don’t you think being a teacher is enough duty for me, Mother?’ Kirsty had asked rather wickedly. She still loathed needlework of any kind, but the entire county seemed to be sewing: bandages, pyjamas for wounded soldiers, baby clothes for destitute wives. ‘I’ll be much better off growing vegetables and saving my pennies for the “Cigarettes for Soldiers” campaign.’
‘Save for cigarettes, by all means, Kirsty – after all, the men do deserve their little luxuries – but you should join Lady Sybill’s group. All the nice people have joined. It’s lovely.’
All the nice people. Kirsty could hear the joy in her mother’s voice, and she was happy for her. Jessie Robertson’s married life had been very narrow, and the past four years even more restricted. Jessie had devoted herself exclusively to her daughter but now, thanks to the war, she was meeting all the nice people. For herself, she didn’t want to meet the right people, especially if one of them was called Hugh.
Since they had moved into the little cottage, Hugh had visited at least once during each of his leaves, and each of these visits left Kirsty feeling unsatisfied, vaguely unhappy. Why, she did not know. His car or his horse would appear at the gate where it would be either parked or tethered, and he would stroll in to chat, perfectly and naturally at home in the tiny cottage. Once Kirsty had even found him sitting on the hearth balancing a mug of tea and a scone while Jessie cut out curtains at the table.
‘Little snob,’ he’d teased when Kirsty had made to change his mug for the Sunday china.
‘We do know how to behave,’ she’d snapped.
‘Your mother does,’ he’d laughed back at her.
Apart from the drive into Arbroath to deliver the trout to Meg’s parents, Kirsty had never really been alone with him.
‘He treats me like a . . . I don’t know what he treats me like, another boy? A chum, a sister? And I can’t get him out of my mind. I think about him all day, every day and I even dream about him at night, and why?’
On his last leave Hugh had even driven past the cottage with not one but two beautiful, sophisticated young women in his car, and had tooted and waved enthusiastically to Kirsty. She had stopped weeding to watch him disappear in a swirl of dust, the laughter of the carefree young people blowing back on the wind to where she stood. Conscious of her old dress, her hair, her labourer’s smock, she had looked down at her hands clutching the heavy fork and seen the dirt under her nails and ingrained in the skin.
‘He sees me as some wee lassie who must be humoured by the knight in shining armour,’ she said to her reflection in the mirror as, her weeding abandoned, she viciously scrubbed her dirty hands. From that day she wore gloves in the garden and rigorously obeyed a suggestion in her mother’s herbal that, twice a week, she steep her hands first in warm oil and then in a horsetail decoction for ten minutes. She also resolved to apply chamomile lotion to her hands every day. Luckily Jessie believed strongly in the medicinal benefits of chamomile and always had plenty of dried flowers in her store cupboard for winter use.
*
Hugh knew exactly what he thought of Kirsty. She was a young girl living on his father’s estate who needed protection. The reason given for Mr Buchanan’s early retirement was ill health, a euphemism – thought the town of Arbroath – for alcoholism. Colonel Granville-Baker was one of the few who knew the whole truth.
‘That poor child,’ he had said to his son, ‘barely sixteen years old and entrusted to his care . . .’
Hugh had looked at his father incredulously. ‘You don’t mean . . . he didn’t . . . she hasn’t been . . .’
‘The bastard’s impotent. I suppose one ought to have a feeling of pity for him,’ said the Colonel, ‘but to try to reawaken his manhood by abusing a young girl? Fella ought to be horsewhipped, but there’s his wife, poor woman, and Miss Robertson, of course. The truth came out, there would bound to be some idiot who preferred to believe she’d been raped, although being handled by that madman must have been frightening enough for such a cloistered child. Keep an eye on them when I’m away, Hugh. We ought, perhaps, to have been more alert when the Dominie died.’
And so Hugh had taken to dropping in on the Robertsons, no hardship since Kirsty really was a pretty little thing and Mrs Robertson gave a fellow such a good tea. He had stayed well away from Kirsty physically for several months, feeling, wrongly, that she might well be afraid of all men. Now, as he prepared to leave for France, it was her face that came between him and the nightmare of war he was trying not to think about. Like most young men of his class, Hugh had several young ladies who shared his leisure hours and, occasionally, his bed. He smiled ruefully when he thought of his last few days in London. A chap could have a really good time in town, could forget a place called Mons where several of his class at Sandhurst had bought it. Alex Carlyle was dead – Alex, who’d been to prep school with him and Oxford and Sandhurst, who’d shared his London flat and his London girls, and who’d wanted to retire, a general at forty, to an island anywhere. Death was so bloody permanent: he’d never see Alex again, or Buff, or stupid old George whom he’d never really liked but who certainly hadn’t deserved to have half his body blown into the next county or whatever the hell they called counties in la belle France. Not so bloody belle now. Did it hurt to die? Falling off a horse hurt; bashing against the other side in rugby hurt. God, he was scared. Scared of dying, scared of not being able to bear the pain, scared of letting everyone else see that he was scared. Kirsty. Think of Kirsty and keep sane.
‘Come on, chaps. Let’s get this over with. There’s a girl at home I have to get back to. Come on, look lively. Seasick? That the only thing that worries you till you get home again, McNaught, you’ll be a very lucky man.’