Red Sky in the Morning (35 page)

‘There’s a can in the barn that Douglas left for you.’

Luke’s mouth tightened. ‘I’m not using that—’

Anna sprang up and caught hold of his arm. ‘Oh please, Grandpa. Just this once. For Buster. Please.’

‘All right.’ Luke gave in, but added sternly, ‘But don’t you go telling that feller or his son, else he’ll think he’s got the better of me.’

Anna hugged him. ‘I won’t, Grandpa. I won’t.’

‘Now, go and get some breakfast and then join me and the girls in the fields. I need all the help I can get this morning to round up those lambs.’

‘There’s three missing. I know there is.’ Betty was adamant. ‘We’ve got nineteen and there should be twenty-two.’

‘Are you sure you haven’t miscounted, lass?’ Luke said. ‘The little blighters keep moving about.’

Betty shook her head. ‘No. Rita helped me and we counted ’em out of this pen and into that one.’ The lambs that were being sent for slaughter were all in the barn now.

‘What about the three I’m keeping to rear? The ones I marked with red paint.’

Betty and Rita glanced at each other. ‘There’s only two in the field with red paint on their backs,’ Betty said. ‘But we left another female lamb there. We knew you
wanted to keep three back. We started with twenty-five, didn’t we?’

Luke nodded.

‘So,’ she went on, ‘take away the three that we’ve left in the field for rearing and we should have twenty-two and we haven’t. We’ve only got
nineteen.’

They all looked at the lambs milling about in the makeshift pen inside the barn. There was no lamb with a red paint mark on its back.

Luke scratched his head. ‘Well, I dunno. We’d better go and have a look round the fields.’ Then he muttered, ‘Just when we could have done with Buster.’ He looked
round. ‘I don’t suppose he’s recovered enough to help us, has he, Anna?’

Anna shook her head. She had gone straight to look at the dog on returning to the yard. ‘He’s in his kennel. Sleeping.’

Luke glanced at her, then turned on his heel and left the barn. Anna, Betty and Rita exchanged a worried look and then went to peer out of the door. They saw Luke bend down and reach into the
kennel. Then he straightened up and came back towards them. He was smiling. ‘He’s sleeping right enough. I can’t understand it. There doesn’t seem much wrong with
him.’

‘But you’re still going to take him to the vet, aren’t you?’

‘Well—’ Luke hesitated.

‘Oh please, Grandpa.’

‘All right then. As soon as they’ve been for the lambs.’

‘We’d better get back to the fields and see if we can find the other three,’ Betty said and laughed. ‘Now I know how Bo Peep felt.’

‘They’ll be down a dyke side somewhere, I expect,’ Anna said confidently as she and the two girls set off, leaving Luke to wait in the yard for the lorry.

But Anna was wrong. They scoured the fields and the dykes but there was no sign of the three missing lambs. Tired and dispirited, they went back to the farmyard. The lorry had just arrived and
the lambs were being shepherded into the back of the vehicle. As soon as they were loaded and the lorry had trundled its way down the narrow lane from the farm, Anna turned to Luke.
‘
Now
can we take Buster to the vet?’

‘Well, I can’t find anything physically wrong with him, Luke,’ the vet, who was an old friend, said. He was a portly man in his early sixties who had been the
local vet for ‘more years than he cared to remember’, as he always said. He smiled at Anna, who was standing close by, a worried expression on her face.

‘I knew it was a waste of time and petrol bringing him,’ Luke grumbled.

‘Hold on a minute.’ The vet looked at Luke over the top of his spectacles. ‘I hadn’t quite finished. As I said, there’s nothing physically wrong with him and
without taking blood samples to prove it, I can’t be sure, but I’d take an educated guess that this dog’s been drugged.’

‘Drugged! Who on earth—?’ Luke began and then, as realization began to dawn, his mouth tightened and his eyes sparked anger. ‘That explains it, then.’

‘Explains what?’ the vet asked.

‘I sent my lambs to slaughter this morning and three were missing. Someone must have come in the night and stolen them.’

‘And drugged the dog to stop him barking, you mean.’

Luke nodded. Anna pulled at his sleeve. ‘Grandpa, I remember now. I should have said before, but with everything happening I forgot.’

They both turned to look at her. ‘What, lass?’

‘Last night. Before I fell asleep, I heard Buster barking. I was just going to get out of bed and come and fetch you but – but he stopped. Oh Grandpa, if only I’d come and
woken you, then – then—’

Luke put his arm around her. ‘It’s not your fault, lass. You weren’t to know. Mind you, I would have gone and had a look. Buster’s a good guard dog. He only barks for a
reason.’ He nodded again. ‘That’d be it. They’d come and drug him first, stop him barking a warning when they went into the fields to pinch me sheep. We never tie him up,
you see. If he’d heard a disturbance out in the fields, he’d have been off like a rocket.’

‘Sounds to me as if it was someone who knew just what they were doing,’ the vet said mildly.

‘Yes,’ Luke said grimly. ‘It does, doesn’t it?’

‘Dad, how can you possibly accuse Douglas of such a thing?’ May was angry and tearful.

‘I’m not.’ The words were grudging.

‘Yes, you are. You’ve never liked him. Just because he’s smart and – and has a fancy car.’

‘And dabbles in the black market,’ Luke shot back. ‘He admitted that himself.’

‘Yes, and you weren’t above using the petrol he brought you when you needed it.’

Luke said nothing but gave a low growl, sounding very like Buster when Douglas or Bruce were around. He glanced at Betty across the supper table. ‘You’re not saying much, lass. You
know him better than any of us. What do you reckon? Am I being unfair?’

Betty regarded him with her clear, blue eyes. ‘I honestly don’t know. I know he wheels and deals, if you know what I mean. But I didn’t think he’d stoop to theft. I know
one thing, though.’ She glanced across at May. ‘I don’t know if he’s stolen your sheep, but I do know he’s causing trouble between you and your family. And that alone
makes me sorry I ever brought him here.’

‘Well, I’m not,’ May said boldly and glared at her father. ‘And don’t you go saying anything to him, Dad. You’ve no proof. I look forward to him coming. And
his lad. We’d be buried alive out here, if it wasn’t for them coming at a weekend. I never wanted to stay on the farm. Why do you think I married Ken and moved to the city? And now,
because of this blasted war, I’ve had to come back.’ Tears of anger and frustration poured down May’s face as she rushed from the room and ran up the stairs.

For the quiet, usually docile May to react in such a way shocked them all.

‘Oh dear,’ Betty said. ‘I think she’s got it bad.’

‘Oh dear indeed,’ Luke muttered as he got up from the table.

Nothing was said about the lambs when Douglas and Bruce arrived as usual for Sunday dinner, after which Douglas took May for a drive in his car and Bruce and Anna walked to the
river bank.

‘What sort of a price did your grandpa get for his lambs then?’ Bruce asked as soon as they were alone. They walked side by side, he with his hands in his pockets, Anna with her arm
through his.

‘
I
don’t know,’ Anna said.

Bruce grinned. ‘I thought you might be in for a bit of extra pocket money if he was feeling generous.’

It was on the tip of her tongue to confide in him, to tell him that three lambs had been lost and that the vet suspected their dog had been drugged. But the knowledge that her grandfather would
be angry kept her silent.

‘Don’t you go saying anything to either of them when they come,’ Luke had demanded of them all. ‘You hear me, May? And you too, Anna.’

He didn’t even need to press the point home to the two Land Army girls. To May and Anna’s dismay, it seemed as if he trusted the two girls more than his own flesh and blood.

Over the next few weeks nothing more was stolen from Clayton’s Farm, but Luke heard that several of the farms nearby were missing chickens and geese on a regular
basis.

‘They don’t take many at a time,’ Jed told Luke, ‘but me uncle’s lost four hens now. He reckons that who-ever’s doing it thinks that out of fifty hens or so
we won’t notice a couple have gone. But it’s getting regular and it always happens at a weekend.’

Luke eyed him shrewdly. ‘Aye, it’s when these townies come out to the countryside. You’ve seen the two that come to our place?’

Jed nodded, his mouth tightening at the thought of Bruce.

‘I don’t mind telling you, Jed lad, I’m not keen on them. Too flash for my liking, but the girls like the company.’

‘I’d noticed,’ Jed said dryly and Luke cast him a shrewd look.

‘Ah,’ he said slowly, knowingly. ‘Like that, is it, lad?’

‘Aye, Mr Clayton. As you say, it’s like that.’

Jed turned away, but Luke watched him go and chewed thoughtfully on his pipe. Now there was a lad he’d be happy to let Anna go to the ends of the earth with. Because he knew she’d be
safe with Jed and, what’s more, Jed would always bring her back home.

‘Not long now before I join the army,’ Bruce told Anna towards the end of the year.

The war was now three years old and yet there was no talk of it ending soon. There had been the heartening news of Monty’s triumph at El Alamein and, for once, the sound of church bells
was heard in celebration. But still the fighting continued.

‘I – I’ll miss you,’ Anna said.

‘I’ll be home on leave in me smart uniform. All the girls like a man in uniform.’

‘I – like you anyway,’ Anna said quietly and Bruce squeezed her arm. There was a pause and then she asked, ‘Will you have to go abroad? To – to where the fighting
is?’

‘ ’Spect so.’

‘You will be careful, won’t you?’

Bruce stopped and turned to face her. He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her gently on the lips. ‘Course I will, as long as I know you’re my girl.’ He raised his head
and looked about him, his sweeping glance taking in all the land around them. All the land that belonged to her grandfather. Then he murmured, so low that Anna only just caught his words.
‘And there’s all this for me to come back to.’

The following spring Bruce went into the army. Anna missed him and counted the days to his next leave. When he came home he was full of tales of service life.

‘The training’s hard, but I love it.’ He flexed his arms. ‘You should see my muscles. And look – I brought this to show you.’ From a sheath attached to his
belt, he pulled out a long, cruel-looking weapon. ‘This is a bayonet. You fix it to the end of your gun and have to run at sacks of straw and thrust it in.’ He demonstrated with vicious
delight. ‘You have to imagine it’s the enemy.’

Anna gasped, scandalized. ‘They teach you to do that to someone? You could kill them.’

‘That’s the general idea.’ Bruce eyed her scathingly. ‘What do you think war is? A picnic? Living out here in the back of beyond, you’re sheltered from what’s
really going on. Oh, you hear the planes and read the papers, but you don’t know what it’s really like.’ His eyes were shining as he added, ‘I can’t wait to get out
there. I just hope it’s not all over by the time I get overseas. I want to get at ’em.’

Anna shuddered. He was right, she knew he was. It was people like him, with that kind of attitude, who could win the war. It needed fearless people like him, but this didn’t stop her being
appalled by the brutality of it. To her it seemed that Bruce was actually relishing the idea of killing.

‘Of course I know what war is,’ Anna was stung to retort. ‘I should do. I lost my dad, didn’t I? But I didn’t realize you had to – had to—’ She
gulped back the tears as the sudden, horrifying picture of her lovely father being trained in hand-to-hand fighting came into her mind.

‘It’s either us or them,’ Bruce was saying harshly. ‘You’ve got to get them first before they get you.’

‘Yes,’ Anna murmured, unable to take her eyes off the bayonet. Had her father been killed in such a way, too gentle to be the first to strike?

‘I’ve got me own knife an’ all, but it’s not standard issue, so I have to be careful the Sarge doesn’t see it.’

Now he showed her a short, dagger-like knife. ‘This is better up close.’ He made an upward, stabbing movement. ‘Straight through the heart.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it any more,’ she said, turning away.

‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ Bruce said at once, putting his arm around her. ‘I was forgetting about your dad. I’m sorry, Anna, honestly.’ He adopted a hangdog
expression, like a little boy caught scrumping apples. ‘Forgiven?’

Anna smiled and nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re forgiven.’

Even though Bruce was away, Douglas still came every weekend, bringing nylons, chocolates and flowers for May and for Betty and Rita too. He still brought Luke’s
favourite brand of tobacco, but the old man refused to touch it.

It was lambing time again, and after school and at weekends Anna was out in the fields or in the barn with her grandfather and the two Land Army girls.

‘Do you know,’ Betty said with a comical expression, ‘if anyone’d’ve told me before the war that I’d be sitting in a barn in the middle of the night, dressed
in these awful clothes, helping bring lambs into the world, I’d’ve said they’d gone off their rocker.’ Luke, Rita and Anna laughed, but Betty added seriously, ‘But
I’ll tell you something, I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.’

There was a cosy intimacy in the warm darkness of the barn. Strangely, the feeling was still there even when they were out in the bitter cold when sheep gave birth in the fields. The four of
them were united in helping the ewes and preserving the young, fragile lives. Three lambs had to be suckled by hand and Anna had charge of these in the big farmhouse kitchen. Luke taught her how to
feed the lambs with a bottle and keep them warm near the huge range. One ewe, the mother of twin lambs, had died and another had rejected her offspring.

‘Isn’t it sad,’ Betty remarked, tears in her eyes as she stroked the soft wool of the little creature’s coat, ‘when a mother rejects her own?’