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Sam had supervised Robbie Pearson’s clumsy attempts at cleaning and oiling the Earl’s meagre horde of antiquated gardening implements and returned them to the potting shed. The war was over, it had been over for six years, but he despaired of ever being given new tools to replace those donated to the war effort. If he had a nice sharp pair of secateurs, he could do a proper job of pruning the roses instead of hacking at them with a warped and blunted handsaw. With a few decent tools, he wouldn’t have to put up with Nell Pearson sniffing in disapproval at his handiwork and telling him that her slow-witted nephew could do a better job. He knew that was what she was hoping for. Any little slip up, and his job would be taken away and given to Robbie, who wouldn’t know a rose from a turnip. That’s what she was waiting for.
He surveyed the windblown rose garden and the recently truncated rosebushes. Robbie Pearson had already sloped off to wherever it was he spent his evenings. Sam decided that he’d done all he could do for one day, and he didn’t owe it to the Earl to spend any more time kneeling in the mud with cramp in his bad leg and his sciatica screaming for relief. In fact, he thought, he didn’t owe the Earl anything; not a thing. It was people like the Earl who had sent peasants like Sam “over the top” in that terrible war while they stayed behind the lines in comfort.
As for the last war, what had the Earl suffered? Nothing! He’d been safe and warm in his own home, and when the night raids came, he’d only to go down the stairs to his own cellar and sit them out in comfort; him and Nell Pearson and that cold witch of a daughter. It hadn’t been that way for Sam; not when they made him air-raid warden; not on the night the bomb fell.