Winter Roses (23 page)

The next day Lizzie came up with the answer, just as Margaret was in the middle of telling her for the fourth time about the way to handle big audiences.

‘I’ve had an idea, Ma.’

‘You’re no cook, my girl.’

‘About these Land Army girls,’ her daughter explained patiently. ‘We’ll ask all the farmers to board them themselves. The Sharpes have room now Joey’s not there, and they were asking for more help, and so was Seb
Grendel; and Mrs Lilley was saying the numbers from the village are falling now.’

‘More babies what with menfolk on leave.’

‘Ma, I’m surprised at you.’ Lizzie giggled. ‘It’s not only that, anyway, it’s the unmarried ones going into munitions and this Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps they’re recruiting for. And Jenny Bertram was saying she’s off to join the Forage Corps. They’re looking for girls for the army camp at King’s Standing. If the Rectory takes the lead …’ Lizzie continued nonchalantly.

‘Of course,’ Margaret gulped valiantly. ‘I’ll speak to Mrs Lilley.’

She put off this unwelcome task in favour of going to see whether Nanny Oates could put a few from the ones she sent to Tunbridge Wells. With the spring coming on and eggs being a little more plentiful, she’d tell them about preserving them in fresh-slaked limewater so they’d last through next winter, even if the war didn’t. They were a luxury food now, according to the Food Controller, owing to only a quarter of their content having food value, thus making them expensive for what they gave you. To her mind, he was talking rubbish. There was nothing like a good egg – all of it.

Although they had not seen eye to eye when she lived in the Rectory, Margaret was now on better terms with Nanny Oates; especially since eggs had been scarce.

She put on her coat and hat, and marched purposefully up Bankside, where she was surprised to find the door shut, for Nanny didn’t go out now and had all her shopping delivered. It was nearly dinner time too, and the Rector
hadn’t said anything about her going away. She peered in the windows, but there was no sign of Nanny.

She’d been full of life yesterday, even pottering about her garden now. Worried, Margaret went round to the back to see if she could get in through the kitchen, but that was locked too. She debated what to do next. Fetch the Rector? Ask one of the neighbours? Fetch Joe Ifield, the village policeman? The Rector, she decided.

Five minutes later she was back, accompanied by the Rector and Agnes, as the most agile of them if they had to climb in a window, but the Rector managed to force the scullery door open. There was still no sign of Nanny, and Margaret braced herself. ‘I’ll go upstairs.’

‘I’ll go,’ the Rector said firmly, to her relief.

He disappeared up the staircase to the two small bedrooms upstairs, and they listened to his footsteps hurrying across the ceiling above them. A moment or two later he appeared again. ‘Agnes,’ he called gently. ‘Go to fetch Dr Marden, will you?’

As Agnes ran out, Margaret gathered her strength. She was needed up there, so up she went.

Nanny Oates had had a stroke. Dr Marden had come and said it would do more harm than good to move her immediately, and someone should sit with her to see what movement started to come back. At the moment she couldn’t speak more than a gabble of words, and couldn’t move her left side at all. Margaret had offered to stay, but Mrs Lilley had refused to let her, and gone over herself, having made arrangements for Mrs Hay, the midwife, to relieve her and
stay overnight. Mrs Lilley returned just in time for dinner, and Mrs Isabel had come over from the cinema as usual. Margaret was keeping an eye on Myrtle serving the soup and was witness to a most surprising conversation.

‘Can’t she come here?’ Mrs Isabel enquired, shocked at the news about Nanny.

‘Dr Marden thinks it best not to move her for the moment. We’ll have to find someone for tomorrow and tomorrow night. I’ll do it if necessary.’

‘No, I’ll do it,’ Mrs Isabel had said suddenly. You could have knocked Margaret down with a feather. ‘I could move in there and we’d just find relief for the times when I’m working.’

‘It means staying there until she’s well enough to be moved.’ Mrs Lilley was very doubtful, and rightly, in Margaret’s view. ‘And there’s only that cold tap, darling. Where would you sleep? The second bedroom is little more than a cupboard.’

‘I’ll manage.’ Mrs Isabel had that obstinate look on her face.

She’d never cope, of course, Margaret thought. Mrs Isabel liked her comforts, and as well as the one tap, Nanny only had an outside earth closet.

‘Isabel dear,’ her mother pointed out gently, ‘Nanny can’t turn herself, and she’d need help with
everything
.’

‘We’ve got that old commode chair. I’ll clean that up, and if I need help, I’ll … I’ll … get Ben Brock’s wife to help. The Norrington Arms is only a few doors along.’

The doubt still showed on Mrs Lilley’s face for Mrs Isabel burst out: ‘You don’t think I can, do you, Mother?
Or you, Father. You’re keeping very quiet. You don’t think I can do
anything
, but I can. I’ll show you.’

‘But the cooking—’ Mrs Lilley began helplessly, and this time Margaret spoke out.

‘I can manage that, Mrs Lilley. I’ll send Myrtle over with it, three times a day.’

‘That’s very good of you,’ Mrs Isabel replied. ‘I’m not a very good cook.’

She was no cook at all, in Margaret’s opinion, but this time Mrs Isabel stuck to her word and stayed for two weeks with Nanny Oates. Nanny got some movement back in her arms and legs, even getting on her feet with Isabel and a strong stick supporting her, and a few words came back to her. All the same, it was a great worry for the Rector, and though Mrs Isabel said she’d stay on, he wouldn’t let her. Instead, the Rector had come to see her, Margaret. She had known what he was going to ask immediately: ‘About Nanny, Mrs Dibble—’

‘We’ll manage, Rector. Bring her here.’

He looked amazed at her speedy acquiescence, but she squared up her shoulders. If Mrs Isabel could do it, so could she. ‘I could ask Lady Gwendolen—’

Margaret pooh-poohed this immediately. ‘What would Nanny Oates do in Wiltshire or Dover, Rector? Here’s where she lives.’

But where, was the problem, she’d realised after he’d gone. And after where would follow how and who. It was all very well doing your Christian duty, but the glow always came first and the hard work followed.

The evening post brought a forces letter with strange
handwriting. It couldn’t be Fred, for he couldn’t write. But it was in a way, for someone had written for him.

Now what did that mean? Why did everything have to happen together?
We’re
must mean they were moving somewhere else. Not on potatoes. What did that mean? It could mean anything from Fred having been put on peeling carrots, to going in the trenches. Margaret decided not to show the letter to Percy, he’d be upset. Then she decided she would. After all,
she
was upset, and what were husbands for?

Would this winter never end? It would soon be May and there was little sign of spring yet. Caroline missed the Ashdown Forest where the birdsong, flowers and trees gave more hints of changing seasons than the clifftops of Kent. Even the birds were keeping their heads down in this cold weather, and she envied them. Sometimes she could picture life at the Rectory so clearly, it seemed as though she had just to walk through a door and there she would be. Perhaps she was seeing an idealised Rectory, not the real beehive it was. Beehive wasn’t the right word, however, for bees worked for a common cause, whereas increasingly the Rectory seemed to house as many different causes as there were people. When she had last visited home for a weekend, two weeks ago, her mother was deep in the worries of planning to increase village food production, now that the Kaiser’s submarine campaign of unrestricted warfare was biting
deep, and her task was made more difficult with the long, hard winter slowing down the usual pattern of growth. The Board of Agriculture’s ‘Plough-up Britain’ campaign was all very well, but it needed organisation.

Caroline had been amused to hear that the very day the act came into force, an officer from The Towers had visited her mother, anxious to be co-operative. The two Land Army girls lodged at the Rectory had promptly been allotted to The Towers estate for belated hop-cultivation. After a few false starts, including a certain amount of misunderstanding by some of the soldiers detailed to work with them as to the girls’ role there, it was at last getting into shape. With the help of advice from Lizzie and one or two old hands from the village, the hops were already planted, stringing complete, and dressing in progress. There was markedly more interest among the co-opted soldiers in producing a hop harvest than fields of potatoes.

It was all splendid work, but what had happened to the Rectory, the serene hub of the village? With strangers in and out all day long, it reminded Caroline of her own office, and she acknowledged her nose was out of joint.

‘When this war ends, our old ways will return,’ her father assured her. The mere sight of the two Land Army girls at dinner had convinced her otherwise, however. Unlike Miss Burrows, who had, cuckoo in the nest or not, fitted in to the Rectory, these two had a self-assured awareness of their role in Ashden, and to them it was definitely not home.

Caroline had promptly nicknamed them Chalk and Cheese. Chalk was a stalwart fisherman’s daughter from Grimsby, Cheese a squire’s daughter from Gloucestershire,
shy and at first, so her mother told her, utterly bemused at finding herself in a Sussex rectory. Chalk had promptly clapped Cheese under her protective wing, especially when there were soldiers about, and with some initial difficulty over baths, all was now running smoothly. One of them had seen no need of the facility, the other had overindulged. Only if Lady Buckford appeared would Chalk promptly cede the role of Indian chief to Cheese.

Lady Buckford, once assured she would not have to sit (yet) at the same table as her former nanny, had begun to appear regularly in the dining room, and Caroline suspected she enjoyed the diversion of the two La-Las, as Father called them since he could never remember their names.

Nanny had been allotted Aunt Tilly’s room with her permission since it overlooked the driveway and her chair could be pulled close to the window to give her a view almost as lively as she’d had on Bankside. She had recovered more feeling, and was able to hobble round her room with the help of two sticks and an anxious eye. Her speech, thanks chiefly to Isabel who spent many hours encouraging her, was also returning little by little. Would she return to Bankside? Caroline had asked, but no one knew the answer.

Her mother still missed Phoebe and George. Phoebe was at the end of her drilling training in Folkestone which Caroline had often watched from the office window with great amusement. Who would have thought that smart khaki-clad young lady was the slapdash Phoebe to whom sewing on a button ranked bottom in her list of abilities? She had grown annoyed when Caroline laughed at the drilling.

‘I’m trained to drive motor cars, not march,’ she said crossly.

‘It’s the discipline,’ Caroline pointed out sweetly.

‘You try it,’ Phoebe had replied vehemently. ‘Only a few days, and I’ll be overseas. The first contingent left at the end of March, and now it’s my turn. Oh, the bliss.’

‘Where to?’ Bliss wasn’t the word Caroline would have used.

‘I won’t tell you what I’ve applied for because I haven’t heard yet and it’s bad luck.’

‘Father says there’s no such thing.’

‘Father isn’t in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.’ That’s what the new organisation would be called, even if despite the recruitment and training in progress, the Army authorities were still arguing over the details of setting it up.

Robert too had now gone overseas and Isabel had been very depressed when Caroline had last seen her. He’d had an unexpected forty-eight hour leave, and then been rushed off to France, where reinforcements were urgently needed for observation balloons on the front at Arras where the new British offensive had begun, with what really seemed like success this time. Caroline had been vastly relieved that it was not Ypres, though most of their information from Belgium earlier in the year had pointed to that. It was another sign that more immediate results could be gained for St Omer by observation over the front.

She had been growing uneasy about her work in Folkestone, and had discussed it with James Swan, but always Luke brushed aside any such debate. In March the Germans had unbelievably begun to retreat to the
Siegfried Line in the St Quentin area, and the office had buzzed with speculation as to whether they were heading back to Germany, or repositioning for a new offensive by strengthening their line. They had burnt everything in a fifteen-kilometre-wide area in front of the line, and forced the population east with them. The indications they received in Folkestone that they were planning to attack had turned out to be false, though understandable in the circumstances. Somehow the Germans had got wind that Arras was where the British would strike, and were strengthening their defence.

Going into the bureau was both relief and torture. She knew she was involved in an important job which filled her daily life and gave her companionship, but it rammed home that Yves was no longer there. Now she knew he was in this country, it was obvious he still came to Folkestone to visit the Belgian section if not their own, yet she had heard no word of him. She devoured the
Franco
-
Belge
every week, for her French was now up to it, but she never saw his name.

Early in April, Daniel had come down to Folkestone to crow over the good news that his predictions over the Zimmermann telegram were right. Just in the nick of time, with the uncertain position on the Russian front now the Tsar had abdicated, America had declared war.

‘I feel as though I’m responsible for it all by myself,’ he boasted.

‘You are,’ she assured him earnestly, hunting through her stew to see if she could track down any meat. So much for
casserole au printemps
. Vegetable stew or not, she
was delighted to be out with Daniel for she seldom went out in the evenings now. Suppose she met Yves at one of the Belgian clubs, and he was forced to display politeness towards her? She knew this was cowardly; if women were to claim their new place in society, they had to accept the bad as well as the good. Fathers could no longer protect their daughters’ aching hearts by demanding an honourable return of recalcitrant lovers. She may have the vote when she was thirty, but she wouldn’t have Yves. Just at the moment, it didn’t seem much compensation.

On 23rd April Luke took her to the cinema to see
Intolerance
, the new American film directed by D. W. Griffith set in biblical times but oh, how relevant to today. It did not exactly cheer her up, and as they picked their way back to Sandgate Road, stumbling in the dark over kerbstones, she decided to tackle Luke head-on about her concern in the office. She was forestalled by Luke’s announcing:

‘I’ve managed to persuade Lissy to come to Paris for two days in May.’

‘You have remarkable powers of persuasion. She doesn’t like Paris.’

‘I didn’t realise she knew it.’

‘She was at school there at Grandmother’s insistence for six unhappy months until Father came over to rescue her. She was so shy.’

‘That’s very interesting. Do you recognise the same woman now?’

‘No, but I understand the same woman. Does that make sense?’

‘Caroline, you always make sense. When we’re related—’

‘If,’ she corrected politely.

‘Silence, woman. On the other hand, ignore that last order. You said you didn’t know why Daniel won’t marry her. Do you ever hazard a guess?’

She hesitated. ‘Yes. Something to do with his injuries.’

‘And if we’re right, which would you say was the best life for Felicia – with me and a family, or with Daniel, whom she loves?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t understand. I don’t presume to know how men think, how my own sister thinks, nothing,’ she answered vehemently.

‘Then let us discuss work like two patriotic souls doing their bit for their country.’

Caroline grasped the opportunity he had unwittingly given her. ‘Have you noticed, Luke, there’s something odd about the intelligence we’re getting?’

‘In what way?’

Was it her imagination or did Luke’s voice suddenly sound detached?

‘None of it seems to turn out right although it fits in with the current situation. Does that sound silly?’ she added uncertainly, for he said nothing when she paused. ‘For instance,’ she continued, ‘in March, our intelligence pointed to an attack by Prince Rupprecht’s command in the north, which seemed to be confirmed by those crack troops arriving in Belgium from Romania – yet nothing happened, except that our resources may have been deflected from their prime need at Arras. Yet it’s not false information, because those German troops could easily have been sent
down to Arras when the Germans realised the offensive was there and not on the Belgian front. Since we’ve no links in northern France, we wouldn’t know.

‘And, again,’ she added, when he did not reply, ‘it’s obvious the enemy is concentrating on defending the Siegfried Line when our intelligence suggested all these extra divisions were being moved up to Sixth Army—’

‘It’s always easier with hindsight to realise why troops were sent to any one place,’ Luke interrupted lightly. He began to whistle ‘Oh, oh what a lovely war’ which irritated her intensely.

‘This isn’t a vague observation,’ she said impatiently. ‘I can pinpoint the source. It’s the information collected by Olivier Fabre that—’

He stopped her with a sharp, ‘Caroline, that’s enough.’

His lack of interest puzzled her. ‘But surely if I have suspicions I’m right to report them to you. And look at the reports he brought from the network last week. One was supposed to be from Raoul Mishaert, but he usually uses a mapping pen. This was typed.’

‘Caroline, please hold on to your hat.’

At last she understood. ‘You know.’

‘Take great care, Caroline. Forget everything about Olivier Fabre. Go on thinking if you must, but never, never suggest what you’ve just told me in your digests, or let it influence you in any way. Clear?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Didn’t your father ever tell you there are no buts in the Kingdom of Heaven?’

She managed to laugh. ‘You’d fit well into our family.’

‘That’s the nicest compliment you’ve ever paid me. Come to that, it’s the only one.’

All very well, she ruminated when she was back in her room, but how did Yves fit into this? Yves had been with Olivier Fabre in Ashden at Christmas together with Henri and, apparently independently, Luke. Now Yves had disappeared, and she had had suspicions about Olivier Fabre’s loyalty. All sorts of wild, fanciful thoughts raced through her mind: was Yves himself compromised in his work? Did he too now believe that Belgium’s best chance of economic survival might lie with Germany? No. Even the foggy thinking of late evening rejected this. She had to trust her own judgement, and her love for Yves had grown out of respect for his integrity; she was not being swayed by emotion.

Then a worse fear arose. If Fabre was a German plant, had Yves discovered this fact, and Fabre murdered him? She told herself this nightmare would disappear with the coming of the day, but sleep did not come for some long while.

Today she had received a letter from home, sending on a recent letter from George to her parents and then passed on to her (thank you, little brother) full of jolly talk of how much he enjoyed the flying in France, and the glorious deeds of 56 Squadron and the famous Albert Ball. The squadron had been in France for only a week when he wrote the letter but at least it gave the reassurance that he was still alive. And so were Felicia and Tilly, but for how much longer? Luke guessed Haig would make an all-out attack to win the war, after the success of Arras. And where else could it be than Ypres?

The following evening was Phoebe’s last in Folkestone, and Caroline dined with her at the Metropole – if dine was the word with army rations. Privacy was impossible sitting on long tables and surrounded by a muddy sea of khaki, but afterwards they managed to find a quiet spot to talk.

Despite the drab effect of the khaki on a face meant for bright colours, Phoebe sparkled in a way Caroline hadn’t seen since Harry’s death. ‘I can tell you what I’m going to do now,’ she said, bubbling with enthusiasm. ‘I didn’t think the War Office would confirm it till I got to France, but they have. I’m going to be one of the drivers for Lena Ashwell’s concert parties, and other entertainers. I’ll be attached to St Omer, but picking up at Calais and Boulogne, and taking the singers round the bases.’

‘Oh, Phoebe, what a splendid job.’

‘You mean you’re glad I’m not going to be sitting in a front-line trench like Felicia,’ Phoebe retorted percipiently.

‘Perhaps a little of that. Two of you there would be very hard for us all.’