She always thought of Richmond when she saw the bluebells.
They were out early that spring, to fill the wood with fragrance – and with the exquisite, limpid colour that Simmie thought so lovely, and so sad. They reminded her of the days when she and Kit had first begun their solitary rambles in the park, the year before she first met Robert there. She’d picked a great armful of bluebells in the woods near Pembroke Lodge – how the perfume brought it all back – burying her face in a mass of rustling bell flowers, hurrying down the hill, so eager to get home with them for Isobel. How strange that they still had the power to sadden her after all these years, because her stepmother had laughed at her gift of wildflowers and left them on the doorstep to wilt.
‘Come on up here with us, Simmie – Gladdie’s almost made it!’
Robbie’s gleeful voice soon put paid to any nostalgic nonsense of that kind; and Simmie looked up gratefully to where he stood on the very top of the lopsided structure they’d just built. Poor Gladys was clinging desperately to the last shreds of her professional dignity, and to an old rick-ladder propped against its side. The Hut in the Bury wood was a tradition dating back to Walter Ashby’s childhood, when he and his cousins first built themselves a bivvy-house up from saplings and dead branches roofed with turf – and when his mother had consented to ‘open’ an improved version a few years later with a speech delivered from its roof, the Hut’s future as an institution was established.
‘Come on, hurry up, Simmie! Great-Grannie’ll be along any minute, and we have to make sure the roof’s strong enough – ’cos she’s beastly heavy and I think she might fall through!’
Patrick at the foot of the ladder squealed with pleasure at the thought of his dignified great-grandparent slowly sinking through the roof of the new Hut; and the two little Belgian boys, who imitated everything he did, both began to giggle too.
‘And thank goodness for the children,’ Simmie thought, ‘when adults can be such a disappointment.’
Gladys, meantime, had seized the chance of making good her escape. ‘You kin test it for ’em, Mum, an’ welcome,’ she declared. ‘I ain’t no one for ’ights an’ never was.
Simmie laughed. ‘No I’m sorry, Robbie; wild horses wouldn’t get me up onto that roof,’ she told him ‘I’ve seen what’s underneath it, don’t forget! And I’m afraid you boys will have to face the fact that your Great-Grannie won’t be coming up this year. It really isn’t safe for a grown-up; and certainly not for anyone as old as…’
‘Stuff’n nonsense!’ Margaret Ashby’s bass voice from close behind her, sent Simmie upwards anyway, several inches clear. ‘The day that an Ashby child fails to build a Hut strong enough to support my weight, Miss Sims, will be a sad day for The Bury I can tell you; and however decrepit I may seem, I’m not quite ready for the scrap heap!
‘Come along down now, Robert,’ she commanded, ‘and make way for the old lady.’
She waited only for her great-grandson to slither to the ground, before thrusting her blackthorn stick at Simmie and beginning her ponderous ascent. From below she made a fearful spectacle in her long black silk, gold chains and tricorn hat, climbing the rick-ladder like a Catholic martyr to her certain doom. One of the supporting branches creaked. Several twigs snapped loudly; and down amongst the bluebells, the small boys confronted one another with madly flickering grins.
‘She is going to fall through, Pat, I know she is!’ Robbie whispered excitedly.
But miraculously she didn’t. In an impressive act of faith, the old lady stepped off the ladder onto the sagging turf – staggered briefly, regained her balance, and launched straight into a version of her customary bazaar-opening address.
‘Ladies an’ gentlemen,’ Mrs Ashby bellowed through the wood, ‘we are foregathered this afternoon for one of the most important events in the Sellington calendar.’ She paused dramatically to survey her audience of four small boys on Easter holiday, an elderly spaniel, a middle-aged spinster and her maid, the bemused and bespectacled Belgian couple who’d walked up with her from the house – and Meriel, striding through the bluebells in her working overalls, dragging off her cotton head-scarf as she hurried up to join them. Only Helen, absorbed with her Supply Depôt and canteen work, was absent – and Ned of course, somewhere in the turmoil of the German counter-offensive across the Channel.
‘Now I’ve seen a good many Huts built in this wood in my time,’ the old lady bawled with thunderous emphasis. ‘With one or two regrettable exceptions, I should say that most have been well up to the mark. But ladies an’ gentlemen, I’m sure you will agree with me that this year’s effort is somethin’ in the nature of an engineerin’ triumph!’
She paused again, swaying gently as she bent her steel blue gaze on Simmie. ‘A round of applause is in order I would think for our intrepid builders; Masters Patrick and Robert Ashby…’ The boys both flushed and squirmed with pleasure at such public recognition, while their mother gave her head-scarf a violent twist. ‘…with able assistance,’ Margaret added, ‘from Messieurs Gaston and Bruno Waedemon, and from Miss Beatrice Sims.’
‘Ye gods!’ Meriel rolled up her eyes and wrenched her scarf impatiently into a knot. ‘Be a dear and send Gladys down to buck Gertie up with the tea things, would you Simmie? I hate to think what those girls will be up to in the dairy; and at the rate G.M.’s going, it will be positively ages before I can get back!’ Which was a little inconsiderate of Meriel, Simmie thought, knowing as she did of the friction that still existed between Gladys and the Bury indoor staff.
But Gladys had gone readily enough, marching as to war through the bluebells – to reappear only a few minutes later, stern-first, backing up the path through the wood on one end of the tea hamper, with Gertrude on the other.
‘And now isn’t that amazing?’ thought Simmie. Only this morning the two women had been at daggers-drawn, manufacturing grievances out of silver polish and boot-blacking – and now here they were, not only helping one another with the hamper, but talking like old cronies!
The explanation came with the final blast of Mrs Ashby’s speech; when Gertrude carefully set down her end of the hamper, and edged across to Meriel with the rictus of a nervous smile twitching at the corners of her mouth.
‘So it is with the greatest of pleasure, ladies and gentlemen, that I declare this year’s Hut well and truly open! ’
The birdsong in the wood ceased suddenly for Simmie.
The Belgian couple’s solid backs concealed the yellow telegram from the old lady as it passed from Gertrude’s hand to Meriel’s. But Simmie saw it – to re-live the icy stab of fear she’d felt back in September when Gladys handed her Meriel’s black-bordered letter. Except that this time she knew there could be little hope of a reprieve.
Meriel opened the telegram without a second’s hesitation – and the next moment turned on her with such vehemence, that Simmie actually let out a little squeak.
‘Well you can wipe that barmy, suffering-angel expression off your face right now, Simmie!’ she said, throwing up her head defiantly. ‘It says he’s missing. Have you got that, MISSING! So don’t start telling me he’s dead; because, whatever the War Office likes ‘to presume’, I know that he isn’t!’
For Simmie the weeks that followed the building of the Hut in the bluebell wood were one long nightmare of concern. From the day that they’d received the telegram pronouncing Ned: MISSING PRESUMED DEAD, she’d watched Meriel intently, hoping to take her own cue from the way she acted. But Simmie wasn’t capable of Meriel’s blind optimism, and had to settle in the end for hiding from her what she really felt.
‘Listen to me; HE–IS–NOT–DEAD!’ Meriel repeated after milking that first evening in a tone of voice that left no room for doubt – and as she said it, snatched up a studio photograph of Ned in his Second Lieutenant’s uniform to hold it under Simmie’s nose. ‘Look at that if you don’t believe me! Go and look at the clothes up in his wardrobe – go and look at Puck. Go on, Simmie – go and look! And if you still think he is dead, then I don’t want to hear it.’
And Simmie looked sadly at the patience, at the loving-kindness in Ned’s smiling portrait, and lied to Meriel as best she could.
‘After all,’ she told herself, ‘there’s nothing yet to prove her wrong.’
It was true certainly that the news from France since the beginning of the German counter-offensive, had been more confused and contradictory than ever. In many places along the Front communications had entirely broken down; and in the absence of definite information the War Office was always prepared to encourage hope. In recent weeks receiving hospitals on both sides of the Channel had been flooded with casualties; many of them still to be identified. As in any retreat, numbers of prisoners had been taken by the enemy. There were thousands, tens of thousands still to be accounted for – and one of them could well be Ned.
If only Meriel hadn’t closed her mind to the alternative. If only she would make allowance for how others felt – for her two boys, who were so much in need of love and reassurance. But Meriel made no allowances. So sure was she of Ned’s survival that she left the daily scanning of The Times casualty lists to his grandmother, sitting grim-faced in her upstairs sitting room, and to Helen the letters of sympathy from well-meaning friends. She even scorned to pray for Ned’s deliverance with the rest of the family and the servants at Prayers in the breakfast room each morning. Instead, she spent every minute she could spare from the farm at her father-in-law’s old desk – composing appeals for the personal columns of papers; firing off demands for information to the War Office, to a cousin of Reggie Baxter’s in the Foreign Office, to Ned’s Colonel in France. Even to the enemy by way of the Geneva Red Cross.
‘Someone, somewhere knows where Ned is,’ she insisted. ‘And sooner or later I’m going to find them!’
In July the tide began to turn for the Allies. The German advance had been halted, and then pushed back. In August Albert was reoccupied, with the gilded figure of its famous Virgin lying shattered in the ruins of the basilica – and through it all the Red Cross continued to pursue its enquiries for missing persons. The name of Lieut. E.C.Ashby was near the top of the alphabetical lists its Searchers carried from bed to bed through hospitals in France, in England and Germany – from man to man on parade grounds, on troop trains and in prisoner-of-war camps from Westphalia to West Sussex. But there it remained, without annotations of any kind.
In September, at the end of a difficult harvest, The Bury foreman Shad Caldwell succumbed to the influenza epidemic that was sweeping across Europe, to die of pneumonia a fortnight later in a crowded annexe of the Victoria Hospital in Lewes; and shortly afterwards the official Bury estate trustees were granted legal control of the farm, pro tempore, on the presumption of Edwin Ashby’s death.
Meriel, meanwhile, remained stubbornly unshaken in her belief.
‘But darling, how can you be so sure that Ned’s survived?’ Simmie had once plucked up the courage to ask when she’d gone down to help her in the dairy.
‘I am, that’s all,’ said Meriel, busy with the milk-cooler. ‘You think what you like, Simmie. But I’m not creeping round like some snivelling war widow, not for you or anyone. And if you aren’t going to make yourself useful, I’d be grateful if you’d get out of my way before you go and make me and knock something over!’
Later on the Rough, compressing her mouth to a thin line as she thrust and jabbed with her dodging-stick, felling a creeping thistle with every utterance, Meriel had tried to justify the terrifying way her mind worked to her greatest friend. ‘Why can’t you people understand? What’s so difficult about it? He’s GOT to come back, can’t you see that, Simmie? Because otherwise there’d be no point to this – to any of it, would there?’
She flourished the thistle-dodger in the general direction of the house and buildings. ‘What good would The Bury be to anyone? What good would I be without Ned? Answer that!’
On the second Monday in November, with news of the Kaiser’s flight to Holland still dominating conversation on the Seaford station platform, Simmie and Gladys caught the first available train to London. It was a pilgrimage that they’d made at intervals over the past year, to air the house, collect stray mail, and catch up on local gossip by way of Gladys’ niece in Percy Street – a journey, Simmie felt, that even the War Office must grant to be ‘essential’.
For Gladys, who’d left London under protest in the first place, these brief returns to the smoke were the very breath of life; something to sustain her through weeks of heathen Sussex. Each time their train pulled into Victoria, she rushed to be the first to open the carriage door and breathe the sooty soul of the place into her lungs. But for Simmie, the sight of her home under dust sheets was invariably depressing. She came to dread the sound of the lock turning over to her latchkey, the sight of stairs bare of carpets, of the front hall as dark and fusty as the entrance to some forgotten tomb.
To Gladys, who was hopelessly outflanked by the Bury staff and never allowed to do enough there, the house in Harpur Street still offered her some justification for existence. So she blundered about happily, flinging windows open and rattling buckets, filling the silent rooms with the sound of her harsh voice. ‘Will you look at the state o’ this soap, Mum! Did you ever? ’Arf et-up by mice, fer gracious sake, artful little beggars! Well I may as well finish it up on the kitchen, wouldn’ ye think, Mum? “Start wiv the kitchen floor,” that’s wot my ol’ sister Eliza always said. “Once that’s clean y’er ’arf way there, gel!”’
But for Simmie, alone in the hall passage, her old home that grey November day was little more than a shell; a relic inhabited by the phantoms of another time – so many ghosts: Cécile Llewellen, emerging from the bathroom in a cloud of scented steam – young men, so many of them, young soldiers in the making, pounding the stairs, shaking the whole house with their energy – fat little Gussie – and George, pestering her for his afternoon milk. Poor George, who’d gone missing the week after arriving in Sellington; to be discovered at threshing time halfway through the wheat stack, so very dead, poor dear!
Simmie hesitated, as she always did before entering the parlour. Because of course the strongest memories were there. It smelled of camphor mothballs now, no longer of potpourri. The old Kidderminster rug had been rolled up and tied, and all the ornaments and photographs wrapped carefully in newspaper and locked away. The light from Simmie’s oil lamp revealed square patches of unfaded wallpaper where her favourite pictures had once hung; the Raphael Madonna, the view from Richmond Hill and the lovely mauvey watercolour of Dartmoor by Widgery. The light fell on the empty fireplace where Ned burnt Robert’s letter – and on the bare unpolished boards of the hearth where she’d first seen Ned himself, kneeling crimson-faced in the ruins of her mantelshelf.
Simmie had already left the parlour fumbling for her hanky, when she was halted on the stairs by a sudden explosion of air raid maroons, that was echoed and re-echoed by others, booming across the city. ‘A daylight raid,’ she thought, ‘it can’t be!’
And then she heard a noise outside, the start of a commotion. Then someone cheered, and Gladys thundered up the kitchen stairs with a scrubbing brush in her hand and a look on her face that could only mean one thing.
‘The war’s over!’ They said it to each other, just as everyone else was saying it in every other house in Harpur Street, and every street in London – shopkeepers to their customers, cabbies to their fares, perfect strangers turning to each other on the pavements of Theobald’s Road and Bloomsbury Square.
‘It’s over; the war’s over! Germany signed the Armistice at five o’clock this morning.’ Nobody thought of saying, ‘We’ve won the war!’ Because for the millions whose sons and husbands and brothers and fathers had died in that tragically mismanaged conflict, we hadn’t.
Simmie was already sobbing before Gladys crushed her to her bony bosom. She felt no sense of pleasure, no relief. Nothing but weariness – and a quotation she’d once heard, goodness knows where, appearing like a cinematic title to explain the picture: Nought’s had, all’s spent, when our desire is got without content.
Ned’s four black Very lights – that’s how Simmie felt.
Outside, the crowds were already gathering; blowing whistles, beating tin trays, commandeering omnibuses and taxis – flocking back to Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace, just as they had in 1914, to hear the Guards’ band playing Tipperary.
‘But how different they are today,’ thought Simmie, when Gladys finally released her. There were no familiar muffin-men or organ-grinders in their ranks now; they’d all abandoned their occupations long since. Or died. There were precious few straw hats or butterfly collars either, because most of the men were in khaki or hospital blue; so many of them with crutches. Many of the women wore uniforms of one kind or another – as WAACs or nurses or overalled munitions workers. Those who were over thirty had the vote now, could even sit in Parliament. And so many other barriers had fallen for the younger girls in overalls and office suits and abbreviated skirts. In November 1918, at the end of the war to end all wars, the kind of girl whose life and prospects could be ruined by a brief, reckless liaison with a married man, was someone who no longer existed.