A Spell of Winter (31 page)

We fished for carp and shot duck on the lake at Ash Court. Mr Bullivant had made his lake before he went. He’d left enough money to keep everything immaculate as a stopped clock, but once the war took hold you could buy everything but men to work for you. One by one men had leaked out of the village. Not many went from choice, but some did. It’s hard now to remember how it was then. I only knew one well, and that was George Semple, but I couldn’t say what it was that made him go. Then they brought in conscription and the hunger of the war began to close in on the village. Suddenly all the things that had been difficult became easy: men who’d never been five miles from the village had their travel warrants issued and they were gone. Men who’d always worked alone, ploughing with a cloud of starlings for company, now marched and drilled and slept in a flock, like starlings themselves. And the things that had been easy were difficult. It was hard to get up and put on your working boots and go to the job you’d been doing all your life.

The Tribunal was set up and whatever reason a man pleaded for exemption, they’d knock it back at him again, blinding him with quick office words as he stood there in his Sunday clothes twisting his hat in his hands. The men who’d hoped to melt into the land were winkled out and conscripted. It made an empty quietness in the village, as if it was always haymaking with the men gone to the fields and the sun moving along whitened doorsteps while a baby wailed.

One June day I went out with my gun at dawn. There was a smell of fox round the hen-run, but nothing was harmed. He must have come padding round the wire, busy and quick, not wasting his time when he saw he’d get nothing. Mist lay on Mr Bullivant’s lake. A duck took off, running across the top of the water before he whirred into the air. My gun followed his flight and as soon as he was over the marshy end of the lake I shot him and he dropped plumb into the meadowsweet. I waded through the black, boggy ground. The reedmace quivered stiffly in the shallow water at my side. The duck had made a hollow in the mud where it fell, and there was a light sweet sound as I pulled it out, like the pulling of a tooth when it hangs by a thread. The mist was changing to pale blue, thinning as if cream were being skimmed out of it. The noise of the gun rippled outwards like sun’s heat, clearing the sky.

George Semple was dead almost before people had begun to believe this war would lead to dying. I met him in the lane before he went, on a dry November day which was so still it felt warm. The war had been going on for three months. He was walking one way and I the other, but the day was perfect and as we stood there its perfection was borne in on us like a scent, light and evasive on the air. The ground was printed with exact shadows, and the air was sweet and a little fermented, like an apple that had lain in long grass for a week. Brown oak leaves rattled lightly in the hedge, and the sun fell on us, low and slanting. Through the hedge we saw the ridges cut deep in the ploughed field, made deeper by the late afternoon sun which was turning the earth damson in the shadows of each ridge. George had been ploughing there till yesterday.

‘I’m off,’ he said, ‘off tomorrow.’

‘Where?’

‘Slinsden first, to the barracks. Then for training.’

‘Just you? Not Michael and Theodore?’

He shook his head slowly, amused. ‘No, not them. They won’t go till they get a shove.’ He laughed, because that was never going to happen. ‘They think I’ve been a fool to myself,’ he went on, and reached out to pick a spray of rosehips. The hips were slim and a perfect dark red, slightly overripe. Their flesh would be mushy, and the seeds dark yellow. He held them and looked at them abstractedly. ‘Pretty,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’re right. I wonder if they have such things in France.’

I thought of mimosa and my mother, and the navy swell of a warm sea in winter. She was safe where she was. And now here was George going to France before me.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I expect it’s like here.’

‘Maybe. You know how you think there’s nowhere like your own place. But I’m sure they think the same.’

Our words pattered like dry berries in the quiet dust of the lane.

‘I can’t remember such an autumn,’ I said. ‘Usually it’s a sea of mud here by now.’

‘Yes, there’s a seam of clay across here. Comes up every year and you can squeeze water out of it like wringing a cloth. Mucky stuff.’

There was no mud now. My boots were coated with silky dust, and the hem of my skirt was white too, white as harvest. The hollow of the lane held fragile warmth. If we stirred it would be gone.

‘Better be going,’ said George. ‘Ma’s made a steak pudding, seeing it’s my last day. If I’m not back in time the others’ll eat it for me.’ He grinned. His eyes were the palest blue, like starch-water. Neither of us moved. The lane tunnelled away beyond us, turning corners he’d soon turn too.

‘So many berries everywhere,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be a hard winter.’

‘Not where I’m going. France – it’s hot there.’

‘Are you glad to go?’ I asked, but it was the wrong question.

He shrugged. ‘Find out when I get there, shan’t I?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Best be going, then.’

‘Enjoy the steak pudding,’ I said, and that was the last time I saw him.

Theodore would never have volunteered, nor would Michael. There was something set in them against it, though they never said what it was. ‘I’m not such a fool,’ said Theodore once, before George died, when his letters from camp were talked of round the village like an achievement everybody shared. But he said it as if it were code for something he couldn’t express. He had that fine feeling for words which would make him use none rather than the wrong ones. He would tell me of things I ought to know, a broken field drain or a blocked ditch. He talked to me as he used to talk to Rob, as if I weren’t a woman to him any more. I liked it.

The second year of the war, after George had gone, he taught me to plough. ‘Go gentle,’ he’d say. ‘No need to rush it. This field’ll be here tomorrow, and the day after.’ When Theodore ploughed, a long, sure seam of earth opened behind him, ripping and crumbling like a wave as it breaks into foam. The fresh earth showed colours which dulled almost immediately, as the colour dulls on a fish when it’s caught and landed. It was chocolate and bramble and iron-blue, then the wind dried it and it was plain brown earth. Seagulls followed us, swooping low so I saw their pale green eyes looking emptily into mine as they sailed a tight turn above the plough. It was slower when I ploughed. The blade jagged at the soil and the mare dragged heavily, baffled. I looked back and saw the ugly line of the furrow.

‘Let the mare go to her work,’ said Theodore. ‘She knows how, only you won’t let her.’

I tried again. It was on the second day that I caught the rhythm. The mare relaxed, trusting me, and the plough ran deep and straight.

‘Now you’ve got it,’ said Theodore, and at once I lost it as the plough juddered. But I got it back again. I was ploughing, turning the earth so it could ripen in the frost. But the mare was old. We would get one more season of work out of her at most.

‘If he hadn’t of gone to Canada he’d be driving the plough. Think of that now. You’ll not have had many letters with the war,’ said Theodore.

‘No, not many.’

‘He’ll have got a place of his own by now. Land’s cheap there.’ Theodore probed by statements, not questions.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘there’s plenty of land out there.’ I didn’t tell him that Rob had none, as far as I knew.

‘It’ll have some kind of foreign name, the place he’s living at.’

‘It’s called Rivière-du-Loup. That’s where he was when he last wrote. It means Wolf River.’

‘That’d be the Canadian language.’

‘It’s French. He’s in the part where they speak French.’

‘They got wolves there then, I suppose. He’ll like that. Plenty of shooting.’

‘Do they shoot wolves? I don’t know.’

‘Couldn’t have wolves running around the town.’

‘No.’ Wolves running, heads down, on the icy tracks of a sledge. He wrote that the river froze solid in winter, first a mush of ice, then big slabs, then an iron road you could drive across with a sledge and horses. He said nothing about Kate. He hoped to go to Quebec and get a job there for a while before going on westward, but he was learning French first. The kind of French he’d studied at school was worse than useless. He was sharing a house with a trapper who came into town for the winter to drink away his profits. The noise went on all night sometimes. There was only one page of writing. I held the letter in my hand and thought of how far it had come, but even its long journey couldn’t make it anything but dead in my hand. Grandfather read it and then it was left lying open on the sideboard. When I next looked I couldn’t find it. I began to wonder if I had made it up: the horses galloping on the frozen river, the trapper insensible with alcohol, my brother learning French in a room from which he could hear wolves howling. I took my atlas and worked west through the place names. Glace Bay, Halifax, Quebec, Trois-Rivières, Montreal, Sault Ste-Marie, Thunder Bay, and then the map broke up into a thousand lakes without names. I wondered how far Rob would go. Would he get beyond the towns to where there wasn’t any language spoken at all?

‘Hard when it’s your own flesh and blood, in another world as it might be,’ said Theodore. He tossed aside the crust of his bread-and-cheese and a seagull plunged down the air, feet first, and stabbed at it. The bird looked big and evil, its feathers oily, its beak a razor. Like this it would come down on the head of a drowning man at sea. I knew that Theodore had forgotten Rob now. He was thinking of George, ploughed into earth none of the Semples had ever touched, earth whose colour and texture was unfamiliar.

Do they shoot wolves? I don’t know.

But they shoot men every day.

‘Best be getting on then,’ said Theodore.

The Semples’ chapel minister was said to be against the war, but no one walked those miles over the fields to find out if it were true. Then the tribunals started, with Livvy’s father one of the local dignitaries on the board. Livvy had no brothers, so it was easy for him to write those words that meant a man went or stayed. Livvy rolled bandages two days a week; she had married a Staff Officer. She smiled when we met, but she was a young matron now, not a mermaid.

‘They can’t take all three of ’em from me,’ said Mrs Semple, who had no patriotism in her. Her boys were what she cared about. The village had always thought she cared for them more than was decent. ‘She’d step on a dead man’s face to get to one of her boys.’

Grandfather showed me a correspondence in
The Times
. A woman had written in to say that she had sent every one of her six sons to the war.

In these times a mother’s heart, wrung as it is with sorrow, beats high with pride and the knowledge that among all those fine young men her own flesh and blood is marching. Mothers of England who have given and given and given again, our sacrifice will never be forgotten.

All the next week people wrote in to say they had sent more. Six was nothing; here were eight, or ten. Impossibly the figures piled up like the huge weight of cabbages at a village show. The crowning letter came from a mother who had eighteen close male relations at the front, and the correspondence closed.

‘There you are,’ said Grandfather, folding up the paper. ‘We might show this to Annie Semple, eh? Do you think it would do her good? Well, we’ve no one to send, have we, Catherine?’

‘You’ll manage,’ said Theodore to me. ‘You’re coming on. Only for the mare’s lameness, you’d be fine. What’ll you do?’ He was really asking me what money we had. I knew how little it was and how much it had to do. We’d be lucky to buy another plough horse.

‘You’re going then,’ I said.

‘Got to,’ said Theodore. ‘Me and Michael both. Ma’s terrible, I wish you’d look in and see her when we’re gone. Pity she never had a daughter, times like this.’

‘She didn’t want a daughter. You three were all she wanted.’

It was true. She’d gloried in them from when they were babies. She loved their maleness: the creak of their boots as they came in, their hair dark with sweat at the roots, their sudden scuffling fights, their appetites.

‘Quakers don’t have to go. They can join the ambulance service,’ I said.

‘I dare say,’ said Theodore, ‘but it’ud be a bit late to be turning Quaker now.’

Rumours were coming back of what they did to conchies, how they made them run all night naked on freezing beaches near Scarborough, how they put them up for shooting practice or sent them over the top without guns. I wondered if Theodore had heard those rumours too.

‘What did the Board say?’

‘Stood us there,’ said Theodore, ‘and read out our medical reports. Michael was six foot in his stockinged feet when he was measured.
”Magnificent specimens
”, that’s what they called us. We didn’t tell Ma. You’ll keep things going here, then.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Take it slow. You don’t want to lose heart with rushing at it.’

I knew about taking it slow now. I even chewed slowly, tasting each morsel, while the surface of my mind grazed at peace. At night I was often too tired to dream. Muscle by muscle I fell into sleep like someone swallowed by deep water, and in the morning I began the day as soon as I woke and worked through it steadily, my hands on the ropes. On Sundays I crouched by the fire like a dog, watching the flames for hours, too stupid to read.

‘He’s getting old,’ said Theodore. He meant my grandfather. It was true, and though it hadn’t happened suddenly, it was suddenly final and there would never be any going back on it. He got up late and went for long shambling walks in the woods, poking at things with sticks. He was like a fire banked up for the night: if you broke the crust there was heat hidden there, but more and more often all I saw was the dulled surface of him, giving out nothing. At first I’d wanted him to notice everything I was doing. I thought he’d be glad of it. I’d come back and tell him how I’d cleared a ditch, or learned to use the double-handled saw with Theodore, but he was irritable, as if the reality I described had nothing to do with him. He could not believe in the world he found himself in, with all that huge struggle come to nothing but an old man in a leaking house, wife, daughter and grandson gone, granddaughter working as hard as any Shawl Ellen in skirts that showed her legs. I watched him disappear into the woods, his head bowed and his stick ferreting.