South Riding (14 page)

Gladys Hubbard’s voice was an exquisite natural instrument. Every artifice of vulgarity failed to ruin it. The girl shrugged and tossed her ringlets, squirmed and warbled, but the notes of her odious song glittered like a cascade of jewels, a fountain of pellucid music, sparkling, perfect.

Her successors shared her affectations without her talent. They sang songs about spooning, moonlight, triplets, ripe cheese, honeymoons and inebriation. Sarah watched in a turmoil of emotion. She did not know whether most to loathe or admire the draper’s indefatigable wife, who had obviously taken such pains to teach the children these tricks far better unlearned.

For the children were disciplined; they were word-perfect; they pronounced in flat Yorkshire voices with shrill precision the fatuous words of song and dialogue; they performed their tricks and pirouettes without an error. Whatever Madame Hubbard’s pupils might be, thought Sarah, it was evident that they had a highly talented teacher.

She moaned in spirit.

If she could have employed Madame Hubbard instead of— say—Miss Sigglesthwaite. . . .

The final turn before the interval was announced:

“A Humorous Duet—By Jeanette and Lydia.”

On to the stage waltzed two big well-grown girls, one dressed as a man in a morning-suit and topper, the other a “lady” in blue satin and tulle, bare to the waist behind, split to the thigh, revealing a jewelled garter between tulle frills. They began to shout and mime, for neither had any pretensions to tunefulness, a song of which the refrain ran thus:

“I’ve had my eye on yon

A long, long time.

I’ve sighed my sigh for you

A long, long time.

You know I’d die for you, I dunno
why
I do,

But ’less I die

I’ll soon have my—

More than my eye

On you—a long, long time.”

The words were idiotic, but seemed innocent enough, the gestures accompanying them were not. The dance was as frankly indecent as anything that Sarah had seen on an English stage. The girl taking the female part “shimmied” her well-formed breasts and stomach, leered and kicked, evoking whistles, shouts and cat-calls from the delighted young men in the audience. Her partner, after a robust and rabelaisian mimicry of courtship, ended her performance with a series of cartwheels across the stage, culminating in the splits; from which uncomfortable attitude she raised her hat and kissed her hand as the curtain fell. Sarah felt sick.

She had had enough. She had seen Madame Hubbard’s pupils. She would go home. She was preparing to rise when she saw the band return and stuff itself into the inadequate accommodation provided for it. The fat lady in the torn red cardigan beside her sighed, a long explosive sigh of satisfaction.

“Don’t they do it lovely?” she asked complacently.

“They’re very well trained.”

Sarah groped for her glove.

“That was our Jennie in the last bit.”

“Oh: which?”

“The one in the blue dress. She’s been two years with Mrs. Hubbard. Sings and dances lovely. She wants to go on the films. She was on the short list in the Kingsport Beauty Competition last year. They say she might have been queen if she was a bit stouter. The gentlemen were judging and I always say—never mind the fashions. A gentleman likes something to get hold of. She won’t eat potatoes, but I tell her all skin and grief never got anywhere. Her pa’s dead set against the pictures. But I say, a girl might do worse. They say it’s a hard life for a girl, but I used to get eight shillings a week as help to Mrs. Biggs—up and down them big houses on the front with the lodgers sleeping three in a bed, and sand in the basin and early morning tea and babies. Then since I married I’ve took visitors myself, and nine kiddies—six living—and him out of work as often as not, and my leg bad. I’d as soon be kicking in the chorus as standing all day at the washtub, leave alone the life of sin they talk about. You’re not married yourself, are you?”

“No,” said Sarah.

“Not yet, eh? Oh, well, Mr. Right’ll come along some day. You’re not all that old, are you? Jennie’s partner’s Lyd Holly. Madame Hubbard takes her free because she’s a natural acrobat. She’s going to High School next term. A real clever girl. Ought to have been three years back, but her poor ma was always expecting and Holly’s not all that. D’you like aniseed?”

Sarah found a sticky bag thrust upon her.

“Go on. Good for the digestion. I always get two penn’orth every Friday, qualifying for the Christmas Club at Bosworth’s. Good-evening, Mrs. Pinker. Eeh, your little Gracie, she’s a born dancer.” She turned back to Sarah. “Got a floating kidney and her Gracie’s a bit feeble, but Madame Hubbard’s brought her on wonderful with the dancing. Any amount of patience. Have an aniseed ball, love. A1 for flatulence.”

“But I haven’t got flatulence,” cried Sarah into a horrid silence caused by the parting of the curtains, revealing a flower-tableau woefully marred by the presence of a small dusty gentleman who clutched tenaciously at the gilded chair on which the Première Danseuse, dressed as a butterfly, precariously balanced.

“That’ll be Mr. Hubbard again,” observed Sarah’s neighbour happily. “Last concert he wanted to come on and play the triangle. Wouldn’t be shifted, so she just had to let him. He sat in the front and held his triangle all through. Gentle as a babe once he has his way. But she doesn’t really like it.”

“I suppose not,” agreed Sarah, fascinated by the spectacle of the entire company endeavouring heroically to ignore the wrestling match taking place between Madame Hubbard and her stage-struck husband.

It occurred to Sarah that the songs about drunken homecomers and bullying wives which she had found so gross dealt after all with commonplaces in the lives of these young singers. Was it not perhaps more wholesome to be taught to laugh at them by the Hubbard method than to turn them into such a tragedy as her father’s habits had seemed to her mother’s ambitious, anxious, serious mind? Jokes about ripe cheese and personal hygiene—(“Take your feet off the table, Father, and give the cheese a chance!”), about child-birth and deformity and deafness—were not these perhaps necessary armaments for defence in a world besieged by poverty, ugliness, squalor and misfortune?

But Madame Hubbard was winning. Suddenly retreating to the wings she called in a deep stentorian voice, “Time Gentlemen, Time!” and Mr. Hubbard, slowly detaching himself from the ballet, lurched off grumbling quietly into the wings.

Madame Hubbard hurled herself at the piano. The chorus, stimulated to even greater efforts by this alluring interlude, embarked upon the plaintive query:

“Have you heard the tale of Love-in-a-Mist?

(Love in a mist might lie!)

Have you heard of the fairy who’d never been kissed?

(Love in a mist knows why.)”

Sarah had passed beyond judgment and beyond criticism.

She watched a Gipsy Ballet, a Fairy Ballet. She heard Gladys Hubbard sing “Lily of Laguna.” She watched Lydia Holly romp with noisy and cheerful athleticism through a Dutch Doll Dance.

She endured until the end. But the end surprised her.

The curtains were down. The conductor, cornet in hand, rallied his men. “Grand Patriotic Finale,” announced the programme.

The Kiplington Memorial Subscription Band crashed into the smashing affirmation of “Land of Hope and Glory” as only a local brass band well plied with beer and enthusiasm in a too small room can play it. The curtains parted. On to the stage marched the Highly Talented Pupils dressed in costumes intended to represent the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Nursing Services. As the tune changed, Gladys Hubbard, a flirtatious and unorthodox V.A.D., tripped forward to sing:

“On Sunday, I walk out with a soldier.”

while the obedient babies trotted round her to take their places as soldier, sailor, Boy Scout and other escorts. Again their serenity and beauty affected Sarah irrationally, but this time another emotion also was besieging her.

Like many women of her generation, she could not listen unmoved to the familiar tunes which circumstance had associated with intolerable memory.

“If you were the only girl in the world,” sang Madame Gordon, and Sarah bit her lip remembering a last leave and a matinée of
The Bing Boys.

“Keep the Home Fires Burning,” sang Jeanette Marsh, and the inappropriate tears pricked Sarah’s hot eyes.

“There’s a long, long trail,” wailed the chorus, and Sarah wanted to run away.

For though, apart from the death of young Roy Carbery, she had suffered less from the war than many women, seen less of it, remained less keenly conscious of its long-drawn catastrophe, the further it receded into the past, the less bearable its memory became. With increasing awareness every year she realised what it had meant of horror, desperation, anxiety, and loss to her generation. She knew that the dead are most needed, not when they are mourned, but in a world robbed of their stabilising presence. Ten million men, she told herself, who should now have been between forty and fifty-five—our scientists, our rulers, our philosophers, the foremen in our workshops, the head masters in our schools, were mud and dust, and the world did ill without them.

She was haunted by the menace of another war. Constantly, when she least expected it, that spectre threatened her, undermining her confidence in her work, her faith, her future. A joke, a picture, a tune, could trap her into a blinding waste of misery and helplessness.

She gazed through burning eyes at the medley of khaki, blue and scarlet. The first notes of “Tipperary” shook her into sick despair. She no longer disliked the precocious unpleasant children. She no longer resented the perverse efficiency of Madame Hubbard. She only felt it intolerable that the greed and arrogance and intellectual lethargy, the departmental pride and wanton folly of an adult world, should endanger those unsuspecting children.

The helpless tender charm of the smallest singers wrung her heart. She longed, to save and to redeem them, no longer from the nauseating inadequacy of the well-intentioned Hubbards, but from the splintering shrapnel, the fog of poison gas.

The passion of all crusaders, missionaries and saviours tore her soul.

For to hear them singing, as jolly dancing tunes, the songs so pregnant with association; to see them marching, drilling, obeying the barked commands, “Form Fours I Salute!” as though these motions, these melodies meant no more to them than the gipsy ballet and the flower chorus; to watch their youth and silly innocence aping that which had meant anguish of apprehension and pain and panic—all this was too much for her. She could not bear it. She could not bear it for them. What she herself had been through, what still confronted her, were matters between her and her own conscience. But for them, these silly children . . .

In the darkened, stifling, stamping, shouting, audience, Sarah dropped her head into her hands and wept shamelessly.

She became aware of some one patting her knee, of a motherly voice saying below the din:

“There, there. It’s all right, love.”

“I know.” She fumbled for her handkerchief. “It’s nothing. I’ve no right . . .”

“It takes you like that sometimes. I know. I lost my man.”

The first notes of
God Save the King
swept them to their feet. Sarah and Mrs. Marsh stood up together. Mrs. Marsh knew that Sarah suffered from unaccountable weaknesses. Sarah knew that Mrs. Marsh suffered from unaccountable weaknesses. Sarah knew that Mrs. Marsh’s “man” was not her present husband.

They had shared an experience.

“3.
The Ministry of Transport have intimated that they will make a grant of 60 per cent of the cost of constructing the new road from Skerrow to Kiplington, and instructions have therefore been given for the work to proceed.
”

Extract from the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Highways and
Bridges Committee of the South Riding County Council. County
Hall, Flintonbridge. November 1932.

O
NE
N
OVEMBER
morning, hounds were to meet at Garfield Cross and the day promised good sport. As Hicks trotted to the meet on the little bay mare he was schooling for sale next spring, behind Carne’s heavyweight Black Hussar, he sniffed with satisfaction. The morning was moist and warm yet fogless, the air fragrant with burning wicks, damp earth and horses. An untidy litter of rooks, like smuts from a giant chimney, blew across the grey sky. On Turnbull’s land the wheat already stood three inches high. Robins and tits sang in the rusty tangle of brambles. The mare danced merrily.

“Bucking a bit?” asked Carne.

“Wick as a kitten,” grinned the groom. “She’ll be all right when we’ve taken the tickle out of her feet. Easy, my lass.”

Carne eyed her affectionately. “I could get a hundred and fifty for her if she does anything like she should in the Rimsey Point to Point.”

Hicks frowned. This preoccupation with money jarred on him. He was a sportsman. Horses were bred for pleasure. It was alien to Carne’s nature to regard them as so many potential pounds, shillings and pence. Hicks had never considered his own wages inadequate, but he hated to feel his employer short of money.