The cow’s brindled flank was warm against her cheek. Shifting her position to strip out the back quarters, Meriel stared down into the brimming pail to watch the milk jets gradually reducing. Her back was stiff and her fingers ached. But Phoebe was her final cow for the afternoon milking, and it was satisfying to feel the great veined purse of her bag contract and finally relax.
‘Right-o old girl, you’re done.’ She spoke more for Stumpy’s benefit than the cow’s, as she extracted her stool and pail – for, although Pyecroft regularly milked twelve cows to her eight, Meriel could never quite resist a race to the finish.
After Dan Goodworth’s enlistment back in 1914, Meriel had surprised everyone by offering to take his place in the milking shed. Ned had quite enough to do, she said, in trying to meet the Agricultural Committee’s impossible demands for increased cereal yields from reduced manpower. Besides, she was an expert she assured them. She’d often undertaken the milking out in Queensland and Colombia – and if only Stumpy, who instructed her, had realised how little Meriel had learned from three or four encounters with old house cows, she’d proved so apt a pupil that no one else had found her out. The Bury shorthorns had fidgeted at first at the sound of her unfamiliar female voice. Three of them refused to let their milk down for her; and one cow, Marigold, had several times upset the pail with an exasperated hoof. But Meriel persevered, rising before Ned at five each morning to coax, cajole and threaten the reluctant beasts; milking Marigold for the first fortnight with her hocks roped together, and finally emerging victorious, as she’d known she would.
‘Another eight gallons for the cooler,’ she murmured in the voice they all used for the cattle; ‘talkin’ thin’, the cowmen called it. ‘I’m all through then Stumpy.’
She stretched to ease her back while the little man wasn’t looking. Bent forward on his stool beneath Victoria, he looked like something out of the Middle Ages, Meriel thought, with low brow and his lanky hair. And even after almost two years with her in the cowshed, he remained absurdly servile; too shy to speak to her directly without ducking like a nervous moorcock. ‘There now,’ she heard him tell Victoria, while she decanted Phoebe’s contribution into the nearest four-gallon bucket. ‘Milkin’ wants understandin’ ’ands, I reckon, an’ Mrs Edwin ’as ’em right ’nuf.’
‘No thanks to the Government and this ridiculous Summer Time idea of theirs,’ Meriel retorted. ‘Perhaps they’d like to send down a Food Commissioner to explain it to the cows?’
But if Pyecroft had anything to add about the change of milking times it was lost in the grumbling depths of Victoria’s rumen; and by the time she’d shed her overall and scoured the pail out in the dairy, Meriel could hear him crooning softly to the cow to help the milk to flow.
‘Oh we don’t want’er lose yer but we think y’oughtta go, for yer King an’ yer Country bof’ needs yer so…’ The limitations of Stumpy’s memory confined him to the choruses of no more than a handful of popular songs, repeated endlessly until Meriel could scream with irritation. ‘Oh we don’t wan’ter lose yer, but we think y’oughtta go…’
Witless little man! She slammed her pail onto its drying stump outside the dairy window and marched off towards the house. She had intended to help Stumpy drive the cows back to the meadow, until he started on that dreadful, bugle-tooting dirge. But now she’d had enough– enough of cowmen and recruitment songs; enough of letters and leaflets and newspaper reports about the wretched, bloody war, and talk, talk, talk about it everywhere you went! Up in the house it would be war and more war. War in the drawing room, with Grandmother-Margaret bullying the Rector’s wife and Madame Waedemon and all her other sewing ladies into producing more stinking anti-vermin underwear for Helen to rush through to the Hospital Supply Depôt at Southover; war in the kitchen, with Cook and Gertrude converting old socks to mittens and brewing up great vats of Soupe aux choux for anyone who was prepared to eat it – and war in the library, with Father-in-law wasting time with his map and packets of coloured flags, plotting minute fluctuations through unpronounceable villages up and down the long line of the Western Front with news of every ‘push’. After twenty-two months of conflict, Meriel knew all about ‘pushes’. They began with news of victory in all the papers; to be followed by confusing details, and then long lists of casualties – and finally by an alteration in Walter Ashby’s library map that was near invisible to the naked eye!
When Meriel reached the house, she slipped in quietly through the breakfast room French windows; and hearing Mrs Ashby belling like a bloodhound to her ladies in the drawing room, tiptoed down the hallway to the cellar door. As she lit a candle and closed the door behind her, the cold beery odours of the place rose up around her; and after the sticky heat of the cowshed, she plunged gratefully down to meet it. There was a gallon Sussex-ware jug in an alcove at the foot of the stairs. She wiped it out carefully with the hem of her skirt, then filled it to the rim from the tapped barrel. Despite its weight, she found that she could lift it easily with one hand – milking had done that for her – but had to support it against her body to take up the candle. The men would have manage without mugs and be grateful, Meriel decided.
She set the jug down for a moment in the porch to collect an old garden hat of Helen’s from a peg behind the door. The chaplet of tattered cornflowers round the crown reminded her of the Mater’s hat with the melting cherries. But appearances be damned. She’d only wear the thing as an example to the boys to keep their hats on in the hayfield, and it was plenty good enough for that.
Outside, the sun had reached the topmost beeches of the wood to wash the valley with its yellow light. In the stable yard Meriel paused to pour off a little beer and rest the jug, which had proved heavier than she thought. More than half the stables were empty, now that the Remount people had taken their second working team. Warry Hurst was out in France. Henshaw was assembling trench howitzers in Eastbourne; and without anyone to care for it, the place had a neglected look. Mayweed had got a hold between the cobbles and the whole yard reeked of it. There were thistles on the maxon, already making heads – and Meriel made a mental note to fetch a swaphook to them, tomorrow after morning milking. There was always something these days for tomorrow.
They were haying up in the Sellington Meadow this week, in the place where they’d put up the stalls and hired the merry-go-round for that last Sheep Fair at the beginning of the war – before the Ministry had brought in size-grading for the lambs and made the whole thing pointless. Shad Caldwell was stacking with his usual deliberate method. Pierre Waedemon, chewing tobacco, was loafing at the horse’s head with an expression of ennui on his fat Belgian face that made Meriel itch to snatch the bridle from him. Ned, dear Ned was pitching up and managing to do the dog’s share of the work as usual. It really was too bad, she thought, the way he let the men exploit him.
Meriel did nothing to attract his attention, concentrating on holding the jug steady as she toiled up the meadow. But there was something about her husband’s large body that told her that he’d seen her coming; something overt about his movements as he stooped and flexed and strode towards her through the haycocks – the great show off! He still reminded her so much of the young Neptune who’d bobbed up from the sea in his stripey bathing costume, the day of her first picnic at the Gap. At thirty-three, he was still by far the best looking man she’d ever seen – although as she climbed the hill towards him, she felt a sudden knot of apprehension tighten in her stomach. Because Ned was standing just where the recruitment officer stood on the merry-go-round two summers back; and thinking of the idiotic major spouting all that nonsense at them about self-sacrifice, Meriel couldn’t help but wonder if Ned was thinking of him too?
After her first statements on the subject, while Dan Goodworth was still training up at Colchester, she and Ned had never talked about the war, except to argue. She had been adamant; he simply wasn’t going. She said it again the day they sent him his National Registration Certificate, and unexpectedly his grandmother had backed her up.
‘She’s right. There’s nothin’ to be gained by schoolboy heroics for a man of your responsibilities,’ Grandmother-Margaret bellowed across the drawing room. ‘Take a leaf from your wife’s book, boy. It’s not what you’d rather do, it’s what you ought – an’ you ought to stay an’ work the land. That’s your job so long as the U boats are tryin’ to starve the country out.’ And long before they’d got around to extending conscription to his age group, Mrs Ashby had personally seen to it that the Local Tribunal, headed by Lord Southbourne, were acquainted with her grandson’s second class degree in zoology, and consequent indispensability to the Land Army.
But even then – even after Ned was starred as officially exempt, they had found ways of getting at him, the rats! They’d printed taunting yellow cards for display in cottage windows: A man has gone from this house to fight for King and Country; and they’d sent charabancs of military wounded from the Eastern General Hospital in Brighton, to parade through the valley and applaud the gallant farm workers. Blue boys, they called them; confoundedly cheerful creatures in shapeless royal blue convalescent uniforms, with bandages around their heads. Or white slings. Or empty flapping sleeves. Meriel had seen Ned’s face as they called out to him – seen him grip the handle of his shovel like a crutch; and afterwards she’d run down to the gateway he’d been chalking, to seize him by the forearms and try to shake the frightening expression from his eyes.
‘No Ned, no. I won’t have you see them as heroes, because they aren’t – they are pathetic! My idea of a hero starts with someone who has two good arms and two good legs and all the right bits in between. My kind of hero wouldn’t want a wife who pitied him. Do you hear me, Noggin? He wouldn’t come home maimed or crippled unable to eat without dribbling or function as a husband and a father!’
Then later, in the Flat and in the dark, she offered herself to him blatantly as she had so often in the past. Ruthless in her choice of weapon. Oh yes, she knew how to win her Ned round all right – and when he smiled at her as he was smiling now, walking down to meet her through the scented hay, she knew why she had to. Everything in Ned’s face lifted when he smiled. The lines beneath his eyes criss-crossed, fanned out above his cheek bones – each dear line underscoring her own purpose in living.
‘There you are then, not that you deserve it,’ she said roughly, thrusting the jug into his hands. ‘At the rate you’re going, I’d say you haven’t a hope of getting this lot in tonight.’
Ned extracted a long yellow bent from the corner of his mouth, and stooped beneath her hat brim to kiss his wife on the very tip of her small, sunburned nose.
‘Darling, you’re a marvel,’ he told her, ‘and if there’s any justice in this world the District Sub-Committee will mention you in dispatches.’
At which, to Meriel’s disgust, he passed the beer straight to Pierre Waedemon!
After the fall of Antwerp, she’d felt as sorry as anyone for the Belgian refugees. They’d all heard such awful stories of their attempts to cross the Channel in all sorts of unseaworthy craft, many of them drowning in the process. So Meriel had by no means disapproved when Grandmother-Margaret wrote to the Relief Committee to offer a Belgian family house-room at The Bury. But that was eighteen months ago – while her sympathy had survived less than a week of the Waedemons, who accepted everything as no more than their due; ate like horses, relinquished all responsibility for two ghastly little boys who peed in the garden, refused to speak English, and had to be bullied into doing anything remotely useful round the place.
And now here was Ned, presenting the beer she’d carried for him all this way to the wretchedly bone-idle Belgian!
Betty and the boys, her two, and two horrid little Belgians playing havoc with the haycocks, were all the scapegoats that she needed.
‘LEAVE – THAT – HAY – ALONE!’ So far as volume was concerned, Meriel could compete with Grandmother-Margaret any day she chose to. ‘Betty! What do you mean by allowing the children to get in Mr Edwin’s way? Why aren’t they in at tea – and where in the name of goodness is Master Robert’s hat?’
‘It’s all right, Meri, don’t get in a state. I told the boys they could play in the hay if they didn’t scatter it too much – and Gran gave them the all-clear for a picnic tea; Cook sent it up an hour ago.’
Ned was clearly going to be obstructive. So Meriel ignored him.
‘ROBBIE – if that sunhat isn’t on your head by the time I’ve counted up to ten, there’ll be no supper for you and no story either. Now – ONE, TWO…’
Robbie smiled engagingly and pointed to a sheep-trod that tacked up the steep side of the valley. ‘I was Amu’sen, Mummy. Pat was Scott, an’ the Belgies were the huskies – an’ I had to leave my hat on the South Pole to prove I got there first. Look, there it is!’ High above them on the hilltop, the sun illuminated a tiny parasol of white starched cotton perched on an upright stick.
‘Oh for pity’s sake! I blame you for this, Betty,’ Meriel scolded. ‘How could you let him leave it there?’
‘Don’t worry, Mummy. Me an’ Patrick can fetch it down directly. Shall we? Shall we, Pat? Yes let’s!’
At the age of seven Robbie was the living image of his father, with Ned’s hair, Ned’s smile and Ned’s blue eyes. But there was something of his mother in him too; something in his confident and breezy attitude to life that always took the wind out of her sails at times like this. He was such a little charmer – so different to his brother that Meriel still found it hard to believe sometimes that she had given birth to Patrick; still felt surprised to have produced someone so alien to her own nature. He was so quiet, that boy, so hard to understand. Whereas with Robbie – why his mother understood him from the moment he’d reached from his crib to yank the silver locket from its chain around her neck!
She pretended to consider the sheep-path, the sunbaked South Pole and her son’s eager little face. But the child in her was already up there with him treading on his heels. ‘Well then you rascal, we’d better get a move on, hadn’t we?’ she said. ‘Before a blizzard sets in and cuts the Pole off for the winter.
‘Not you, Patrick,’ she added sharply as her older moved up to join them. ‘You stay and help the others hatchel up those haycocks – and you’d better hold the horse now, Betty. Then Mr Waedemon will be free to help pitch up another load.’
She was holding Robbie’s hand as they started up the path. But he soon wriggled free and scrambled on ahead, elbows thrusting, short little legs working furiously; and at the sight of his linen shorts caught in the crease of his bustling little bottom, even Meriel had to laugh.
‘Not so fast, Amundsen; you’ve already won the race, remember?’ But Robbie paused only for the time it took to look back at his mother, and to smile.
While they were on the lower slopes, the sun was still hidden from them by the Bury wood, and the colours of the wildflowers glowed like gems in the long grass: spikes of deep blue bugloss, pink mignonette and purple knapweed. But crossing from the shadows of the valley to the sunlit hillside, was like entering another world; a lighter, brighter realm of butterflies and buzzing bees and aromatic thyme. From somewhere even higher, from the sky itself, the clear notes of a skylark could be heard – like sound turned into crystal. Searching for the singer, Meriel at last located him as a tiny speck against the blue, and tried to remember was it was the bird was meant to sing. What did Ned say? – ‘Christ is risen,’ that was it! ‘Christ is risen! Christ is risen!’ As she looked back from the skylark to the bobbing golden head of her small son, she thought in spite of everything how good it was to be alive.
A minute later the advance party of her expedition reached the Pole, and uprooted it with a hoot of triumph. ‘Got it, Mum! Can we go back to Pat now?’
‘Robbie, for goodness sake hold on for a minute while I get my breath – and just look at all the things that we can see from up here. Look, there’s the house down in the trees, and that’s your nursery window.’
‘Which one? I can’t see.’ The little boy screwed up his entire face to squint into the sun.
‘That one there, with the bolsters on the sill still where the silly maid has left them.’ But while his mother stared into the valley, Robbie knelt to search for snail shells in the grass.
She could hear the seagulls at the Gap, and the voices of the men down in the meadow. She could see Vine with his ewe flock on the bare slope beyond the Bury-house; could even make out the old field patterns in the Rough above the Brooks, where they’d ploughed up the chalk in the Napoleonic wars. They’d soon be ploughing them again for corn if the new Agricultural Committee had its way.
‘But with dairy products at the price they are, it would be better to sow rye-grass and increase the milking herd’, Meriel considered; and thought she’d try the idea out on Ned, perhaps in bed that night?
Her gaze returned to the endearing figure of her husband in the field below her, still showing off, still tossing up four shocks to the idle Belgian’s one, with his big Clumber spaniel, Puck, padding at his heels as he strode back and forth. It was strange to think she would have turned away from sights like this two years ago, when Ned’s devotion to the farm and valley had so rankled with her. It was something then that he had shared with other men, with Danny and the rest. Something of him that she couldn’t reach. Then there’d been that last Sheep Fair and the ranting major, and Dan Goodworth marching off to war. And from the day she understood that Ned’s own attitude had changed, Meriel had begun to see the farm, the valley and the other men, not as rivals but as allies in her struggle to keep Ned at home where he belonged.
A warm breeze rustled in the grassheads at her feet, some of them already seeding before the flocks returned. Everything up here was scaled both to the wind and to the grazing sheep; a high pasture of short grass and creeping herbs that flowered and seeded close against the chalk – bents, clover, trefoil, thyme and yellow horseshoe vetch; the food source of the small blue butterflies that in a few weeks would outnumber all the rest. Just now most of the butterflies were brown.
‘But how odd,’ thought Meriel, watching them. ‘I’ve never seen them doing that before.’ The butterflies were rising from the blossoms all at once and to a kind of pulse that she felt in herself, in her own body – settling raggedly, only to rise again as if to an agreed signal.
Meriel turned to show her son what they were doing. But Robbie beat her to it. The little boy was lying on his back with his short arms flung wide, like a butterfly himself with his wings spread to catch the sun. ‘Bom!’ he chanted, ‘Bom! Bom! Bom! There’s a giant inside this hill, Mummy, ’cos I can hear his heart..’ The things the child came out with! ‘Come on, Mummy, you listen. Bom! Bom! Bom!…’
‘Well just this one game, then we must go down to give your Daddy a hand. I don’t think Monsieur Waedemon’s ever going to be much use, do you?’ She pushed back Helen’s hat to make a proper pantomime of putting her ear to the turf… only to remain there motionless while Robbie laughed aloud at the sudden change of her expression.
Oh God! Good God, the child was right – the entire hillside was quivering and thudding! But Meriel wouldn’t panic or act the fool. She’d stand up. That’s what she would do, and stop shaking for pity’s sake! There was bound to be an explanation – bound to be.
But it was instinct rather than intellect that prompted her to turn towards the Gap. And as she did so, a fresh gust of wind carried the sound to Meriel’s ears; like someone dropping a whole library of Mrs Beetons, one by one.
Down in the Sellington Meadow the haymakers heard it too, and Puck began to bark. The men stopped working, leaning on their prong forks, then turned as she had towards the sea.
It was the sound of guns they heard; of a great artillery bombardment across sixty miles of water.