The Carpenter's Children (4 page)

She wondered about Ernest; had Tom said anything to him about growing up? For seven months now they had worked together as master
and apprentice, and she supposed that Tom must have had some sort of man-to-man talk with his son when a suitable opportunity arose.

Ernest was wondering how much longer he could go on pretending that he wanted to follow his father’s trade as a carpenter and joiner, whether
self-employed
like Tom or with a builder’s firm such as Harry Hutchinson’s, who employed a bricklayer, carpenter, plasterer and painter, and towed his sacks of sand and cement on a trailer attached to his Ford Model T, the wonder of North Camp. Tom Munday had advised his son to choose the latter course, because he was clearly never going to be up to his father’s standard of craftsmanship, and the boy felt this; he suspected that Dad did not even like to see his precious tools being used, or rather misused in Ernest’s uncertain hands. Tom Munday’s toolbag was his trademark, and he carried it with pride; it was cut from leather instead of the usual strong calico, and when opened it was in the form of a circle with pockets for the various kinds and sizes of tools, the hammers and chisels, bradawls and screwdrivers. It folded in half and was tied with sturdy tapes, with leather carrying handles. Larger tools like planes were kept in a separate bag, as were the saws, their teeth protected by narrow wooden shields into which the blades slotted; everything was cleaned and polished to shining perfection. The tool
shed was Tom’s own creation, built from elm, its roof sealed with pitch and its window kept as sparkling as those of the house. Shelves lined the walls, holding tins of paint, creosote and varnish; brushes were graded according to size, and cleaned with white spirit. There were small wooden boxes with a variety of nails and screws, and a locked cupboard where he kept his paperwork, the invoices and receipts; here too were his carpenter’s pencils, rulers, tape measures, set squares and compasses. Nobody was allowed in the tool shed, which was kept locked; Mrs Munday called it the holy of holies, and Ernest never felt comfortable in it. He dreamt of books and of writing poetry – which he did, secretly in his room, and sometimes in his head while working, to the detriment of his concentration.

‘Ernest! What the devil are you dreaming about now?’ his father would ask with increasing exasperation as the months went by and Ernest seemed as slow to learn as when he’d begun. Worst of all, he showed no pleasure in woodwork, no keenness to improve.

Violet Munday sensed the lack of camaraderie that ought to exist between father and son, and renewed her suggestion that Ernest should be sent to the commercial college at Guildford to learn basic office skills that would stand him in good stead as a junior clerk with a legal firm or bank. At first Tom had disagreed with her, but now that Ernest was almost eighteen and was clearly never going to be a
practical man, he began to wonder if she was right. What he dreaded most was to hear his son spoken of disparagingly, as not being up to his dad’s standard, not a chip off the old block; Tom thought he would feel the shame of it perhaps more than his son. But commercial college would have to be paid for, and the boy would need to get lodgings in Guildford, a good fifteen miles away, and there was as yet no regular railway service from North Camp. Ernest would have to cycle to Everham Station to board the Guildford train, and Tom pointed this out to Violet who disliked the idea of her boy living in lodgings.

She frowned. ‘He’s very young, Tom.’

‘Good heavens, there are boys of eleven or twelve working in mills up north where every penny counts for families living in poverty, they’ve got no choice. What that boy needs is to start fending for himself and learning a bit of independence.’

And to get away from your mollycoddling, he added to himself. Much as he loved his only son, he occasionally felt like giving him a boot up the backside, and it would be good for him to get out from under the too comfortable parental roof.

And so it was decided. Mrs Munday made an appointment for Ernest to attend an interview with the superintendent of the college, and she accompanied him. They learnt that Ernest would be enrolled as a student for a one-year course in business studies, commencing in September. He
would become proficient at typing and Pitman’s shorthand, bookkeeping and accountancy, together with basic French and German. It was pointed out that male students were outnumbered three to one by their female counterparts, but the numbers evened out in the more advanced subjects. Mrs Munday had no criticism to make about this, and her husband thought it a definite advantage, for Ernest was not a good mixer; Tom had become aware of the opposite sex at an earlier age than Ernest, and a year later had set his eyes on pretty Violet Terry; it was high time for Ernest to wake up and start to use his eyes and ears.

The college bursar, having taken the enrolment fee, recommended a Mrs Green who took student lodgers, and on leaving the college they went to call on her.

‘She seems a clean, respectable sort of woman,’ Mrs Munday reported to Tom. ‘She only takes young gentlemen, and I made arrangements with her for Ernest to take up residence when the new term begins. I told her he’d be coming home at
weekends
.’

‘Mm. Do him a world o’ good to stay in Guildford, Vi.’

‘There’s something I’d like to mention, Tom,’ she went on, sitting at her dressing table, brushing her long hair. ‘Have you had a word with Ernest, I mean about…well, the things he ought to know
about growing up? Isabel had rather a shock when her first, er, period came on, and I don’t want that to happen with Grace – well, she’ll find out from Isabel, of course, with them sharing the same room. But what about Ernest? Have you spoken to him at all?’

‘Mm. Boys don’t have periods, do they?’ he said with a flicker of amusement that irritated her.

‘Don’t be tiresome, Tom. You know perfectly well what I mean. Ernest is old enough to…er—’

‘To clap his eyes on a pretty girl, you mean, like I did, remember?’ He grinned as he pulled back the eiderdown for her to get in beside him.

‘No, I’m quite serious, Tom. It’s your
duty
to speak to your son, and warn him about the…the ways of the world, especially if he’s going into lodgings, the temptations that await him, like—’

‘Like meeting a saucy little minx with bold black eyes and a come-hither look?’

‘Oh, you’re impossible! No, take your hand away. Will you just answer my question, Tom Munday, whether you’ve had a talk with Ernest or not?’

‘Violet, my love, I did try when he was in his last year at school, but we didn’t get very far. He went as red as a beetroot, and said he’d never joined any of the other boys when they, er, played around.’ It was Tom’s turn to feel awkward.

‘Played around? What, like football or something?’

‘No, Vi, I’m sorry to say that some boys have a habit of playing with themselves – and each other – in the school lavs, you know, erecting their cocks for the…just to be rude. I’m sorry, but that’s what some o’ them get up to on the quiet, and Ernest said he’d never had anything to do with such, er, immature fellows. And that was as far as I got, I’m afraid.’

After an initial gasp of disbelief, his wife was too shocked to answer, and to Tom’s relief she plumped her two pillows, turned over and went to sleep.

But poor Mrs Munday was in for another and worse shock. The following day she took Grace aside in the front parlour, intending to have a private talk. Her youngest child was now a high-spirited
eleven-year
-old who loved looking in the mirror at her pretty little face.

‘Sit down, dear, and listen to me carefully. I expect you’ve noticed that Isabel has started her periods – that’s something that happens to all girls when they become women. Do you know what I mean, Grace?’

‘Oh, Mum, I knew all about
those
before Isabel started hers,’ answered naughty Grace in a matter-
of-fact
tone. ‘It shows she’s ready to have a baby.’

‘Oh, my goodness, not yet!’ exclaimed her mother, taken aback by her younger daughter’s knowledge. ‘We’ll talk about babies later, when you’re older. We’ll just talk about periods this morning, and what happens when the, er, flow of blood occurs.’

‘But Mum, we all know that it’s when the womb gets ready to catch an egg on its way down, and if it doesn’t grow into a baby, it comes out with the blood, and that’s a period,’ said Grace with deliberate casualness, knowing that her mother would be horrified. ‘And some o’ the big girls told us what makes an egg grow into a baby,’ she added slyly, with a sideways look at her mother to see how this was received.

Violet Munday’s jaw had literally dropped. ‘Who told you this? Tell me at once!’ she ordered.

‘Oh, Mum, the big girls talk about it all the time, and we
all
know how it’s done!’ protested Grace, rather alarmed at her mother’s reaction, for Mrs Munday had turned quite white as she continued her questioning.

‘But which of them told
you
, Grace, things you’re not nearly ready to know yet. Who was it told you?’

‘There was a crowd o’ them stood at the back o’ the girls’ cloakrooms, and we could hear what they were saying,’ replied Grace, beginning to wish that she had not spoken so boldly.

‘Which girl in particular did you hear it from? I insist upon knowing, and won’t let you leave this room until you tell me!’

Now Grace had no wish to get any of her fellow pupils in the first year at Everham Council School into trouble, so she hit on the idea of naming the
girls in Isabel’s year, those who had left the school now and were working.

‘Well, there was, er…’ Grace thought of making up a name, but was awed by the fury in her mother’s eyes. If she said Betty Goddard or Phyllis Bird or Rosie Lansdowne, Mrs Munday would go straight to their mothers. She thought quickly. ‘Well, there was, er, let me see, there was Mary Cooper, I
think
, yes, I think she might’ve been one o’ them,’ she said. Nobody went to the Coopers’ home, and people only asked Mary round to visit them because they were sorry for her.

‘
Mary Cooper
? The girl I’ve tried to befriend and asked to tea, and made an effort to treat her the same as any girl from a respectable home? And is this the thanks I get, filthy talk that no young girl should hear? Wait till I see her parents, I’ll give them a piece of my mind!’

‘Oh,
please
, Mum, don’t get her into trouble!’ begged Grace, now very much regretting that she had mentioned Mary’s name. ‘She wasn’t the only one – oh,
please
, Mummy, I don’t think it was her, it was another girl, some girl whose name I’ve forgotten!’ She said
Mummy
to make herself sound younger, the little girl who had usually been able to get her own way with either parent.

But Violet Munday had heard enough, and dismissed Grace to her piano practice. Not even hearing about the goings-on of adolescent boys had
shocked and upset her as much as this; she could hardly bring herself to tell Tom what she had heard from their little Grace – and when she did, he was not as angry as she thought he ought to be.

‘Stands to reason, girls talk between themselves about that sort o’ thing, Vi. Boys may mess about with themselves, but girls are more for talking. It just shows it’s best to start early, telling them the truth.’

This failed to impress Mrs Munday who made it her business to speak to mothers of girls who had been in Mary’s year, to warn them about her, even though these girls had now left school. Bert Lansdowne and his wife thought it a big fuss over nothing much, and continued to be friendly towards Mary, now in service to Mrs Yeomans at Yeomans’ farm. And Isabel surprised her parents by standing up stoutly for her old school friend.

‘It’s not her fault that her mother drinks, and anyway, look how kind Mrs Cooper was to me when I had to come home from the post office—’ She stopped speaking at the recollection of that shameful episode, and Tom Munday nodded.

‘That’s right, my girl, the day old Cox had a stroke in his kitchen, and Mrs Cooper went for Dr Stringer. That was two good deeds in one day, poor woman.’

‘Poor Eddie, that’s what
I
say,’ sniffed Mrs Munday, ‘and I won’t have that girl round here again.’

‘There’s no need to, now that she works for Mrs
Yeomans all day,’ muttered Isabel; the friends had inevitably drifted apart now that their schooldays were over.

As for Grace, she had learnt her lesson, and kept quiet at home, though at school she continued to instruct her awestruck classmates in the mysteries of human reproduction.

On the twenty-second of June there was great excitement and rejoicing all over the country when the new King George V was crowned in Westminster Abbey with his beautiful Queen Mary at his side. Special services were held in thousands of churches, and towns and villages were bedecked in flags and bunting to celebrate the momentous event. Many years ago the Princess May, as the Queen had formerly been known, had been engaged to George’s elder brother Albert, the Duke of Clarence who had suddenly and tragically died quite young, so George, being the next in line to the throne, had inherited both the crown and the princess; but this was ancient history, and the royal pair, now in their forties and married for seventeen years, had raised a family of five sons and a daughter. Their photographs showed them as regal and upright, a picture of devotion and domestic harmony.

‘They’re a proper example of what family life should be,’ said Mrs Munday approvingly, and the rest of the country must have thought the same,
judging by the crowds who stood outside the abbey while the three-hour coronation ceremony was taking place, and who cheered the king and queen as they progressed along the route in the state carriage, as handsome as their portraits.

At St Peter’s a special thanksgiving service was held at the same time as the coronation, followed by a picnic organised by the vicar’s wife Mrs Saville, held on the vicarage lawn. Lady Neville drove over from Hassett Hall with Miss Neville, a pale, thin young woman who was seldom seen in public, and gave an opening speech in which she reminded her hearers of the honour they shared as subjects of Great Britain, presiding over a worldwide empire, in which her husband Sir Arnold and their son played their role, assisting the Viceroy of India in his duties as the king’s representative.