The Land Endures (The Apple Tree Saga Book 4) Page 3

  And of course there was always the work of the fields. They watched the men ploughing and drilling; they watched the shepherd delivering lambs; and they poked their noses into the sheds, eager to know what was going on.

  ‘What do you want?’ said Morton George.

  ‘Nothing much,’ Chris said.

  ‘Take it and go, then, and shut the door!’

  But the other men were friendly enough: Tupper and Hopson, especially, and the younger men, like Jenkins and Rye: the children were always welcome with them; and Chris, the eldest, now thirteen, was sometimes allowed to take the handles of Tupper’s plough or ride on the step behind the drill, keeping the grain on the move in the box and calling out when it ran low.

  Stephen’s health was improving a lot. The tightness in his chest and the pain in his side, legacies of the poison gas, rarely troubled him these days. He was doing more and more on the farm: milking every morning and evening; hoeing the rootcrops, digging the drains; ploughing his quota with the men.

  Sometimes the whole family were out in the field at the same time: working together in the sun and the wind; resting together, eating their food; returning home in the fading light, with the jingle of horse-chains and the rumble of wheels. They, as a family, were self-complete. They wanted no one but themselves.

  ‘You live in a world of your own up there,’ John Challoner used to say. ‘Aren’t you ever coming down?’

  This was because Stephen never wanted to go to the village whist drives; never joined the Crayle Hunt; never spent an evening at The Rose and Crown; never attended the N.F.U. ‘social evenings’. Challoner liked to do all these things. He sometimes called Stephen a dull dog.

  But Stephen did take some part in local affairs. Challoner had got him onto the parish council and the vicar, Mr Netherton, had voted him onto the board of managers of the village school. Stephen at first was against this. He felt it would be presumptuous of him to sit on the board of the village school when he sent his own children to schools in Chepsworth. But he was persuaded to change his mind. He already had a certain interest, for the school playground abutted on to his land, and he had agreed to the vicar’s request that the little meadow of three acres, just behind the school, might be used by the pupils for their summer games. And Stephen, as the vicar pointed out, was a useful man on any board because of his knowledge of the law.

  Nevertheless, Stephen felt some embarrassment when he met Miss Izzard, the mistress-in-charge. ‘I feel an intruder, poking into your school’s affairs when I’ve only lived here eighteen months.’

  But she said, in a straightforward way he liked, ‘You let us use your meadow, Mr Wayman. That’s passport enough as far as I’m concerned.’

  There was much news in the papers at that time of the hardships suffered by the coal-miners of England and Wales, who had been on strike for three months. Early in May, at a meeting of the school managers, the vicar reported that Miss Izzard wanted to hold a concert in the school, to raise funds for the miners’ children. The vicar, who was in his early fifties, was a man anxious to move with the times but always uncertain how far he should go. He tended to lean on younger men, especially those who knew their own minds.

  ‘I don’t know that I approve of this scheme. It could well be argued that we were encouraging men to strike. But Miss Izzard, as you know, is an obstinate young woman, and she insisted that I put it before the board.’

  One or two of the managers shared the vicar’s uncertainty, but Stephen took a firm stand.

  ‘The miners are striking for a fair living wage. That’s not much to ask, it seems to me. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, that’s no reason why their wives and children should starve!’

  So the concert was held and raised the sum of twenty pounds. Stephen took all his family, and Joanna was so much impressed by the young lady pianist from Cheltenham, who wore a long dress with net sleeves and played two pieces by Mendelssohn, that she went home filled with a new resolve to practise her scales before school every morning.

  ‘When’s your recital?’ Jamesy asked, putting his hands over his ears. ‘If I buy a ticket, can I stay away?’

  Joanna’s ambitions, musically, were apt to alter with the wind. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak, and her piano practice soon became as intermittent as it had been before.

  The dry spring gave way to a dry summer. The days began to be very hot, and the children gloried in the sun. They shed their school clothes the instant they got home and ran about in cotton shorts until, as Henry Goodshaw said, they were ‘brown as eggs, the lot of them.’

  Often it was difficult to get the three older ones into bed, for the evenings never really grew dark. But there came a moment eventually when peace descended on the house, and Stephen and Gwen would walk out into the fields, glad to see the sun go down, after its fierceness during the day, and thankful for the coolness of the falling dew.

  One evening it rained, a rain so light it was almost unreal, falling softly and silently from clouds so high they could not be seen. Stephen and Gwen walked out in this rain and stood with their faces upturned to it. They held out their arms and spread their hands and asked for the rain to soak the earth. The scent of it as it touched the grass; touched the hot surface of the soil; was a miracle of coolness and sweetness, and they drank it in through nostrils and mouth, greedily, with a kind of lust.

  Gwen went forward into the rain, and her dark hair, with its loose fronds, caught and held the droplets of light. Her eyebrows and lashes were speckled with them; her face, her throat, her naked arms, shone with the wetness of the rain; and her white cotton dress clung to her, showing the long shape of her thighs. She spun around and her wet skirts flared out. Then, suddenly, she was still.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘Can’t I look at my own wife?’

  ‘Only if you tell me what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I was wondering what the children would say if they could see you twirling about.’

  ‘You think it’s unseemly at my age?’

  ‘It’s my thoughts that are unseemly,’ Stephen said. During the course of a busy day, Gwen was many things to him: a voice calling him in to his meals; a pair of eyes that saw things he missed; a pair of hands outstretched to help; mother of his children and mistress of his house. But at moments like this she was none of these things. He had time now to look at her; to rediscover the girl in her; to rediscover himself as a lover.

  ‘You look even younger than when I married you. You might be eighteen, standing there.’

  ‘The light is fading, that’s why.’

  But there was enough daylight left for her to see the look in his eyes, and for him to see the hint of warmth kindling under her clear skin.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter with us?’ she said.

  ‘It must be the rain,’ Stephen said. ‘It’s making us drunk.’ Then, later, walking home: ‘It won’t do much good, a sprinkle like this. What we need is a thorough soak.’

  ‘You don’t think we’ll get it?’ Gwen asked.

  ‘Not a chance,’ Stephen said.

  In a few minutes more, the rain had stopped, a teasing promise unfulfilled. The next day was as hot as ever.

  Hay harvest that year was all over within a week, but the hay was poor stuff, very light and dry. The aftermath of grass in the fields, instead of growing fresh and green, remained as it was, just short pallid stalks, with all its goodness burnt away. People began to speak of a drought.

  During the summer of 1921, the newspapers made sorry reading. Famine in Russia; riots in Egypt; and in Germany terrible bitterness at the severity of the war reparations being exacted by the Allies. Republican atrocities in Ireland; continuing strife in industry at home; a decline in prosperity on the land. The threatened repeal of the Corn Act became reality in June, and John Challoner, along with every other farmer in England, felt that he had been betrayed.

  ‘The same old story! We might have known! The farmer was a
hero during the war. Now he can go and hang himself! Don’t you mention Lloyd George to me!’

  But Challoner found some crumb of comfort in the fact that the Wages Board was to be abolished, together with the power of the county council to enforce their own rules on cultivation.

  ‘At least we can damn well grow what we please! And decide for ourselves what to pay a man when he’s finished work at the end of the week. I shall have something to say to them, especially those union tykes, when we’ve finished with harvest this back-end!’

  Stephen, however, was sick at heart. ‘We may be able to grow what we please, but shall we be able to sell it?’ he said. And, walking with Gwen in the cornfields, with their bright illusion of riches to come, for the first time he began to have doubts of his wisdom in buying Holland Farm.

  ‘It won’t be too bad this harvest, I suppose, with the government paying compensation. But as for next year! ‒ My God! What then?’

  ‘Oh, we shall manage!’ Gwen said. ‘We’ll have to cut down a bit, that’s all.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Stephen said, but he was more vexed than comforted by the cheerful way she brushed it aside. ‘Maybe you’re right. Let’s hope you are.’

  ‘Did you sell those weaners today?’

  ‘Sell them? I practically gave them away! The market’s glutted with pigs just now. You’ve read the papers, haven’t you?’

  ‘There’s no need to bite my head off.’

  ‘Sorry!’ he said, in a loud voice. But what in God’s name, he thought, did she expect?

  The hot weather was getting him down. The drought, according to the national press, was ‘serious but not yet grave’. Stephen fretfully disagreed.

  ‘They should see Holland Farm!’ he said to Gwen.

  Water was low in ponds and wells, and the pastures were badly burnt up. The cows were sickly, swallowing so much dust as they grazed, and the heat was affecting their milk-yield. Turnip seed and mangold seed, three times sown in the Twelve Acres, had each time failed to germinate, and peas and beans in the Goose Ground were all shrivelled in their pods.

  Even in the meadows, like Long Gains and Gicks, the ground had opened in terrible fissures, and Stephen gave orders that a close watch be kept on the cattle in case they should stumble into the cracks. Such an accident had happened at Lucketts, a farm on the other side of the brook, and the cow in question, having broken her leg, had had to be destroyed.

  Everywhere it was the same, the parched land crying out for rain, sheep and cattle suffering, and in places the early slaughter of beasts because there was not enough food for them. On a farm near Peggleton, a man had been gored to death by a bull, never before known to be vicious. The heat, it seemed, had maddened it. On the railway at Bounds, sparks from an engine had set fire to the grass and broom on the bank, and the fire had spread into cornfields nearby, destroying thirty acres of oats. Fires broke out repeatedly on Springs Hill and the Burlows beyond, and when the fires had been put out, the burnt patches could be seen, like great black scars, as though the smooth green flanks of the hills had been branded by an enormous iron.

  Fire was Stephen’s constant dread. He kept a close watch on his men, for they were smokers, one and all. And sure enough, in the stackyard one day, a sudden whoomphing assault of flame! Bob Tupper was at work with his prong, clearing the yard of old hay and straw, ready for the building of the new cornstacks. The fire shot up from the loose hay as he was forking it into a cart. It leapt at him like an angry dog, and the searing heat, sucked quickly in as he caught his breath, burnt his mouth and throat and lungs.

  He ran to the nearest drinking-trough, put his head into the water, and doused the rest of himself with a splash. Then he turned to deal with the fire. By that time Stephen and most of the other men were there and the flames were douted in a trice. Bob, much blackened about the face, with a sore throat and singed eyebrows, now gave vent to some choice language, and it seemed he knew where to lay the blame, for Jimmy Jenkins had passed through the yard a few minutes before, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

  ‘Supposing the kids had been playing here?’ Bob Tupper said to him, and Jimmy, who was only seventeen, looked at him in horror.

  ‘I’ll never smoke another bloody fag,’ he said, ‘until we’ve had some bloody rain!’

  ‘If you break that promise,’ Stephen said, ‘I swear I’ll sack you on the spot!’

  Harvest was going to be early that year, but all the corn crops were woefully poor. Oats in the One-and-Twenty Field were so thin and light in the grain, they were not worth cutting after all, and Stephen folded the cattle there to eat the oat-crop as it stood.

  The water shortage became acute. In the house there was strict rationing; every drop must be saved for the stock; but there was some slight relief when Stephen, poking about in the Bratch, where an old cottage had once stood, found a well full of brackish water and piped it to the pastures below. Most of the ponds had dried up, and even the deep dark Copsey Pond, shaded by surrounding trees, had been reduced to a mere puddle, six feet or so below its banks. Because of the steepness of these banks, and the low level of the pond, the sheep who came from the meadows to drink were in danger of toppling in and drowning, so Stephen gave orders to Bob Tupper that someone should be sent to fence it round.

  Bob sent Morton George and Jimmy Jenkins. They put a roll of wire netting into a barrow, together with their tools and a bundle of stakes, and threw their luncheon-bags on top. This was a day in early July, a day as hot as any that summer so far, and the two men sweated in the heat. The pond had dried up completely now. The bottom was merely a black morass, and out of it stuck an old waggon-wheel, a few dead boughs from the trees around, and the grey skeleton of a pig. In one of the meadows next to the pond, sheep, grazing the stalky grass, stopped eating and stared at the men, ears twitching at the noise they made as they hammered the stakes into the ground.

  Two thirds of the way round, their roll of netting came to an end. They would have to go back to the farm for more.

  ‘It’s almost dinner-time now,’ George said. ‘I’m just about dying of flaming thirst, so how about going up to the pub? We’ll finish this when we get back.’

  They took their satchels from the barrow and tramped, melting, across the fields to where, on the edge of Huntlip Common, stood a small public house called The Black Ram. The landlord gave them his paper to read. They talked about Dempsey and the big fight. The pub, with its sunken stone-flagged floor, was cool. They stayed there, drinking, until it closed.

  When they got back to Copsey Pond, Jimmy, the younger of the two, offered to go for the netting alone.

  ‘Oh, sod the netting!’ George said. ‘Seems to me it’s a waste of time. No sheep is going to drown in there. How can they when the water’s gone? If Tupper asks me about this job, I shall say it’s a bloody waste of time.’

  He threw his satchel into the barrow and began trundling it away. Jimmy shrugged and followed him. Behind them, under the willow trees, one third of the pond remained unfenced. A moorhen emerged from her nest in the bank and picked her way across the mud. A wagtail perched on the broken wheel.

  In the farmyard, when George and Jenkins returned, they were called upon to take a turn at the pump, with orders to fill the water-cart. The electric motor had broken down; the water had to be pumped by hand. Stephen was in the cartshed, overhauling the reaper-and-binder. He stopped work and called to George.

  ‘Did you put that fence round Copsey Pond?’

  ‘We ran out of wire,’ George said. ‘But the water’s all dried away now. No sheep’s going to drown itself in there. There’s no need to worry until we’ve had rain.’

  Stephen gave an impatient sigh. The men had been gone since eleven o’clock. Now it was almost half past three.

  ‘Oh, very well!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’d better leave it for today. Get a move on, filling that water-cart. The troughs are empty in the top pastures.’

  He went back to work on the reaper-and-binder, feel
ing fretted and annoyed. The two men had wasted half a day, just when time was becoming precious, for Nate Hopson had broken his leg and was going to be laid up for some time, and harvest was getting under way. The fence round the pond would have to wait.

  They started cutting in the Oak Field and then went on to the Eighteen Acre, and every day as they toiled in the heat, they were choked by the everlasting dust that rose and enveloped them like a cloud. Stirred up by the horses’ hooves and the blades of the reaper going round, the dust seemed to blast itself into their skin. Their eyes were on fire with it; bloodshot, inflamed; and their throats ached intolerably.

  ‘Oh for some rain!’ groaned Billy Rye, and nobody there upbraided him for a prayer so strange at harvest-time. ‘God be good and send some rain!’

  But no rain came. There was no relief. The pillar of dust towered above them, and all day long they followed it, toiling and suffering in their sweat. The sun was a tyrant over them, and their day of deliverance was not yet come.

  Sometimes, in the distance, thunder could be heard, but the promise of a storm remained unfulfilled. The hot sky pressed on the earth. There was no breath of air between the two. There was only the weight of heat pressing down and the throbbing current of heat rising up, visible in its shimmering waves. And out of the heavy, sagging sky the tiny black thrips or thunder-bugs descended on all living things to crawl, minute but maddening, and add their torment to suffering skin.

  Emma came running into the house, weeping because of the tiny thrips that crawled on her face, her scalp, her arms, and were clustered, black, on the front of her frock.