When Margaret was fifteen, she fell ill, an ordinary sickness at first, a fever and bad chest. But even once the worst had past and she should have been fresh and on her feet again, she could not seem to reach a point of feeling well.
‘I’m so tired all the time,’ she kept saying. ‘But I just can’t sleep.’
School became a torment of headaches, of a cloudiness in the head making it impossible to think or remember things and a desperate struggle to keep awake over a page of arithmetic or a reading of Greek myths. The slightest exertion exhausted her. Eventually she had to stay at home. Day after day there was the same dreary sense of unwellness and aches and pains, of fogginess, of being unable to sleep while being bone tired, so that she would lie there, wide-eyed, for hours while the rest of the household slept, then be unable to wake in the morning.
Her father came and prayed at her bedside, trying to exercise patience. But she also remembered lying in bed, the curtains drawn as the light hurt her eyes, and being so limp that she could barely move. Her father was pacing her and Annie’s room, still in his outdoor boots. He had come in from some errand in the village and the sight of her shrouded room had sparked rage in him.
‘We’ve all had quite enough of this, Margaret. It’s not like you to be so self-indulgent! I don’t want to see you lying in that bed again. Renew your prayers! Ask for God’s help, and strength will be granted you. Come along –’ He stripped back the bedclothes, baring her legs which she found mortifying, and seized hold of her hand, his eyes blazing at her in the gloom. ‘I say to thee – pick up thy bed and walk!’
He hauled her to her feet and she did her very best to obey him, her legs shaking.
‘Now get yourself dressed and come downstairs. Discipline yourself. I don’t want to see you languishing up here again.’
Through her fog of unwellness, she managed to dress painfully slowly and get down the stairs. When Annie came in from school at dinner time, she found Margaret collapsed on the couch, fast asleep again.
The sickness dragged on for three years, swallowing up her young life. The only people she saw were Alice Lamb and her family. She had not the strength even to attend church and began to be nervous of going out.
Despite her father’s remonstrations and the baffled attempts of the village doctor who suggested tonics, she just could not seem to get moving. Unlike Annie who was almost always full of an electric energy.
In gentler moods, her father would sit and read to her. They were sweet times. He would fold himself into the little wicker chair beside her bed, one long leg crossed over the other. She could feel his worry and care. They would say a prayer, he might read to her from scripture or some other improving book. (Annie read to her from different, more exciting books.) And sometimes she could not help weeping in despair.
After she had been ill for two years, Annie, ever sharp, said one day, ‘I think it’s that you’re sheltering from the world.’ It was not said in accusation. Annie was fifteen by then. The two of them spent a lot of time in each other’s company, were each other’s mother as well as sister. ‘One day, you’ll just emerge – like Lazarus.’
‘I’m not dead,’ Margaret whispered.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Annie said, sitting on the edge of her bed. ‘I just mean, you’ll get better. As if you’re in a box and you have to find where the handle is to get out.’
Annie’s energy and force of belief could make her believe it too and Margaret tried to cling to that. Some days though, it felt as if that time would never come. Her sentence of illness entered its third year. She was a young woman, soon to be eighteen, and still confined to her childhood bed.
‘Father,’ she sobbed to him one afternoon. ‘I long so much to do the Lord’s work, like you. But how can I know what He wants when I am like this?’
Her father was silent for a moment. His leg moved gently, rhythmically, as if he was trying to think what to say.
‘The Lord works in mysterious ways, Margaret,’ he began wearily.
But all the frustration and disappointment which she usually tried to accept or hide came pouring out to her father, whom she had seen as her pattern, her friend. She railed against this narrow, invalid life to which she had been reduced when she felt she surely must be called to much more. All her life she had been told that there would be a calling!
‘I thought I was to be a missionary,’ she wept. ‘I want to be like you, Father. I am ready – my mind and my heart. But my body fails me all the time. And I’m so tired of it.’
To her astonishment, her father did something he had never done before. He reached across and took her hand in his huge, warm one. It was a while before he said anything. She heard him swallow several times and she had the awe-inspiring realization that he was trying not to weep himself.
‘My dear,’ he managed eventually, in a choked voice. ‘My own life has not run smoothly in the ways I thought the Lord wanted for me. That is how I came to be in this . . . in this place, doing the Lord’s work among simple country people.’ He added swiftly, ‘People who, of course, are God’s children as much as any other.’
Margaret realized then the extent of her father’s disappointment; that the word he had managed not to say was probably ‘backwater’. He had regarded himself as destined for the great city missions, but he had not the constitution for it. Something in him, as a younger man, had broken down and the Church authorities had never thought him strong enough to be moved again.
‘I know your sister is likely to be destined for the missions.’ He gave a faint chuckle. ‘I had hopes for John, of course . . .’ He looked down for a moment, but then raised his head, his mouth turning up. ‘Annie seems to have the constitution of an ox and is full of certainty.’ He looked into her eyes and she was moved by the emotion in them. Never in her life had she loved her poor father so much or felt so close to him. ‘Perhaps some of us have to walk the quieter paths, where the trumpets of glory are heard but dimly.’
She still could not see him as having failed as he seemed to feel he had. She lay looking at him, this tall man who loomed so central in her life, and her eyes were full of love.
Her father laid his free hand on her forehead. ‘I pray hourly for your healing,’ he said. ‘Try and believe that all shall be well, my dear child. The Lord loves you abundantly and so do I.’
As he left the room, she let the tears run down her cheeks.
Soon after her eighteenth birthday, she began to feel a little improved. Having been shut away for so long in the house, she was frail, nervous of going out and uncertain of everything.
Annie, now sixteen, had completed her schooling and was busy in the village – Sunday school, running a Bible class, visiting and helping. She was already chafing to get away, a free spirit who argued with their father over almost every point, and seemed sure that some great mission awaited her.
Margaret had lost any certainty she ever had. Even walking along the lane that summer, trying to regain strength in her legs, seemed a challenge. She felt a floating sense that everything in life was unsure; her own being – even God – and it frightened her. No other option had ever been shown to her than marriage or the missions and there seemed no one she could ask or with whom she could share her uncertainty and loneliness. She ached for her mother. The only things she could do, she decided, were to remain obedient and pray and all would be revealed to her.
That summer, one evening when the three of them were seated around the tea table, their father announced that an assistant was to join him to work beside him in the church.
‘His name is Charles Barber,’ William Hanson told them. Margaret could hear a tremor of suppressed emotion in his voice that startled her. ‘He is a young minister who has been working in Salford. But lately, he has been struggling.’
‘A crisis of faith?’ Annie asked, not beating about the bush.
‘Annie,’ her father said sternly. ‘When Mr Barber comes, you must be gentle with him.’
‘I will,’ Annie said, spreading butter energetically on her bread. ‘I only asked what was wrong.’
‘I believe it is something like that, yes,’ their father said austerely. He seemed uncomfortable discussing it. ‘So far as I have heard, he has been working very hard and is feeling the strain. They have sent him here for a quieter ministry for a time.’ He told them that a Mr and Mrs Davis, members of the congregation whose sons had now left home, and who lived nearby, had offered to let Charles Barber lodge with them.
‘He will be arriving this weekend,’ William Hanson said. ‘And I know you will do all you can to care for him and make him welcome.’