Family Drama 4 E-Book Bundle (156 page)

The visitors spilled out to World's End Cottage, for the income was needed now.

In September she wrote to Dr Kaplinsky, thanking him for his help and offering World's End as
a respite stop for any people he felt needed fresh air and quiet to get their broken lives back together again. All they needed to bring were their ration books.

She welcomed strangers, refugees, all sorts of humanity for a few weeks to walk the hills and draw breath. The path to World's End was well trod.

She often thought of Ben, working across the county now, getting on with his life without her to worry about. She'd sent him away in a fit of pique and bitterly regretted his absence. Cragside was not the same without his cheery banter. They had said stuff she wished could be unsaid. She almost wrote to him but then thought better of it. Best to leave well alone. It was enough to get through each week sober.

Her greatest thrill was a trip to Scarperton long overdue, stepping down the cobbled street to see Sam Layberg's shop to redeem Gran's brooch. As luck would have it, the brooch was still in its box after all those months.

He stared up at her over his glasses and smiled as he handed it back.

‘I said I'd come for it. Took longer than I thought,' she said.

He grinned. ‘You've kept your promise to yourself, young lady, and restored my faith in humanity. Wear it with pride. It's too beautiful a jewel to be in a pawnshop, just like yourself.'

There was a spring in her step after that little remark. She crossed the road to avoid reminders of the Golden Lion, making for the Copper Kettle tearoom instead. In half an hour it would be time to catch a bus to the hospital for her monthly meeting with Dr Kaplinsky. This rendezvous was her lifeline, her hope for the future, her own World's End.

1947 She can just see the dark head among the buttercups, ribbons and ringlets bobbing in the wind, chasing across Stubbins pasture but the child is out of sight and suddenly there are nettles and tall burned grasses hiding her from view. She calls and calls but there is no answer.

Mirren was woken by the chill, dragged from her dreaming, dragged from the solace of chasing Sylvia. Why did she have to wake up?

She heard herself calling out the lines from her favourite Rossetti poem. Asleep, fully clothed on top of her bed again, woken only by the chill of the icy bedroom stabbing her back into consciousness, this was getting to be a habit, a lazy habit.

It was Sunday, with twenty cows to be milked, but no breakfasts to make for the men and time to please herself, she hoped, while cracking the ice in the water bowl. Had she remembered to bank up the Rayburn to keep the back boiler going?

This falling asleep fully clothed, piled high with musty blankets, had to stop. She opened the shutters to look out on the February morning.

If only the sky was not so pigeon grey, darkening from the north. She needed no weatherglass to know there was snow on the wind. The old fears were creeping into the corners of her mind, closer, closer, making her uneasy. She hated snow.

She would have to crack the ice on the water tank again with the axe. The chores were all hers for the day: buckets of water to the indoor beasts, mucking out, chickens to feed, fields to scan for sheep. Thank God most were gathered down from the fellside closer into the farm, but there were stragglers out on the tops that would need rounding up.

The lorry would not be dropping off Kurt and Dieter from the German POW camp to help with evening milking. It was church in Scarperton for them and a long trek back for Sunday dinner.

Florrie might call in for tea as usual, walking up from Windebank after taking her Sunday school class, if it faired up. They had made a truce of sorts since Mirren's return. She liked to keep
an eye on her daughter-in-law, just in case. Even after all these sober months no one could quite believe she meant it.

Sunday or not, it was all the same here; udders must be emptied and milk collected up. The new live-in girl, Doreen, was visiting her parents, the cow man was courting down at Rigg village but if the weather closed in again she was in for a packet of trouble to deal with all by herself.

The snow fences needed repairing from the last downfall before Christmas, and they were getting low on fodder.

If it was bad Florrie would make straight for home back at Scar Head and she would be spared her incessant chatter about Ben's new job on a farm near York. He wrote to Florrie but not to her. There was nothing to say. She'd shoved him away from the nest and he'd made another life. Good luck to him.

Florrie found comfort in her chapel work and seemed to think it was just what Mirren needed to come out of herself and be more sociable. Once she sat down to wolf down a plate of ham and eggs, there was no stopping her. It made Mirren's ears ache, all that wittering on about having no new clothes to wear. Who had, after six years of war and nearly two more years of make do and mend?

Clothing coupons were the least of her worries.
How was she going to manage when Kurt and Dieter were repatriated? She'd fallen lucky with them. They were almost family now. They were farmers' sons and needed no training up on chores. She saw to it that they were well fed and muscled up for the job. The rhythm of a farming life knew no war zones or language barriers. It was a good arrangement.

Then Sam Lund, the shepherd, put her in a mood by going on about the ring round the moon the other week and it being Candlemas. He didn't like the signs if the sun was breaking through the clouds as it was now.

‘Aye, Missus Sowerby, three circles is a bad sign. A pale moon is growing snow, I reckon,' he sighed, scratching his cap, searching the sky. ‘I'd rather see a wolf running with me flock than the sun out on Candlemas morn.'

She ignored his warning. Everyone knew February could go either way: snow or rain, black or white. Only a fool thought winter was over. It mostly never started until the back end of January but they'd had such a poor summer and rough December, a mild New Year ought to even things out, but when was life ever fair?

She was glad that Christmas was behind them. Florrie wanted to do it the traditional way: visiting other farms, cards round the table and chapel singalongs. Mirren tried to make a bit of an effort, inviting their Germans for a meal now that the
rules against fraternisation were lifted, killing a cockerel and boiling an apology for a Christmas pud just to show willing, but her heart wasn't in it. Going through the motions sapped every ounce of her energy.

Christmas was for kiddies and families, and a dangerous time for drinkers. The big old Yewell celebrations before the war was what Florrie yearned for, before…No use going over all that.

There were just the three of them now, Mirren, Tom and Florrie, with lodgers in Cragside when they could get them. World's End was deserted. Her supply of refugees had dried up for the winter. It was too grim in a cold farmhouse at the mercy of every whim of the weather.

Uncle Tom liked to feel he was in charge and gave her orders each week like some farm hand, but Mirren sometimes wished he'd stay put and leave her to get on with things her way.

‘Mirren Sowerby, you're getting an old grump,' Florrie would tease. ‘Just look how you're letting yerself go. When was the last time you looked in the mirror? Ben wouldn't recognise you,' she cajoled, as if Mirren was interested in her appearance.

Sometimes she felt as old as the hills with all the sorrows of the world on her back.

There was the usual selection of cast-off overcoats to pile on her shoulders: army greatcoats
from the Great War, Ben's Home Guard one that drowned her, and some tattered mackintoshes at her disposal. There was always one standing stiff with frost like a guard on sentry duty by the range, others hanging on the pulley over the kitchen range to dry off. If they were all sodden then she could pile on the sacks over her head like Sam did. Sheep didn't care what you looked like in a storm.

Responsibility weighed heavy; she was no shirker of duty. This was her portion and she must swallow it.

No use looking backwards to what once was. One day at a time in soberness. That was her philosophy and it would get her up of a morning in the refrigerated bedroom. She was keeping up the family tradition as best she could. There was no other life on offer. A woman could run this farm as well as any man. No one could say she didn't do a man's job as well as most.

There were enough on the tops ready to point the finger at her drunken past, saying that farming was not women's work, but perhaps she was best kept from the town. There were enough men around the place to keep busy. Doreen might not be much help outdoors but she would give a hand with butter making and kept the surfaces clean enough.

Not that they did much of that now, with all
the regulations for subsidies. It was hardly worth the bother.

She missed Ben. He'd kept well out of her way ever since their falling-out. She heard news of him through Uncle Wesley. She'd let a good friend go. No one could fault him. He was reliable and trustworthy, a good stockman who never clock-watched. He could hold his beer and never made a fool of himself, not like her lapses…They'd been a team, two work horses hitched to the same wagon for a while.

When he left she carried on, knocked sideways by her sudden need of him. She had thrown stuff back at him in anger and lost a friend.

Was it her fault that Cragside, once full of coats and gumboots and the noise of dogs and men, had fallen silent? Only the coats were left to bear evidence: Gran and Grandpa Joe passed away, Jack gone, Ben, Daisy married and away, and Sylvia buried in the churchyard. There was no future in this place now.

She had tried to fill the emptiness with whisky, but no longer. There were evacuees who came and went, refugees who lived in for a while up in the cottage, hired hands and POWs to fill the spaces left by Ben and Jack, but no one could stomach the bad winters or the isolation. You have to be born to it, she thought.

This stone house was built to withstand all that
wind and blizzard could throw at it, low-roofed, elongated at the back in the old style, with small mullioned windows set into walls filled with rubble, windows glinting south-westwards to catch all the sun's rays, set foursquare on the cragside, sheltered with a small copse of ash, rowans and beech; a good mile up the track from the Windebank road, easily cut off by snow. Man and beast lived side by side. Sometimes the cattle sheds were the warmest place to shelter, amongst the flesh of the beasts.

She padded downstairs in her rough wool socks. There was yesterday's porridge stiff on the range. She poured in some milk and hot water, stirring it around. It was lumpy but it would do. Food was fuel. Her appetite was basic but she had to eat to stay warm. Why couldn't she lie in bed and carry on dreaming?

‘You come to me in dreams that I may live my very life again though cold in death…' No use going over the past, look forward, but it was weeks since she'd been to a meeting. Somehow it got harder to make the effort. It was time she proved she could go it alone.

Piling on the layers she went to check the water in the shippon. Milking was warm work with cheeks soothed by the flanks of her beasts, its fug of warm straw and dung. She only hoped there was enough fodder to see them through a bad spell.

Crossing the yard with the can full of milk strapped to her back from the cows in the outbarn, she felt the first flakes of snow settling on her cheeks, and shivered. The fight was on again. Sam Lund was right. They were in for another blow-in.

The sooner she did her chores, the sooner she and Jet could drop the latch and turn to the peat fire for comfort. Florrie wouldn't walk up here in snow. She'd more sense than to risk getting caught on foot.

This would mean Mirren wouldn't have to take a pan of hot water upstairs and do a strip wash, change her clothes and put on something half decent to show it was her half-day off. She needn't change the rug in the parlour for the best one, or lay the table properly as Granny Adey used to do every Sunday, the embroidered cloth with the hollyhocks in the corners and lace trim. She could make do with something on her knees in the kitchen, hugging the iron range. There she would have only dogs and ghosts for company.

The old place was full of spirits, rattling, chattering in the wind, stomping hob-nailed boots along the stone-flagged passageways. She didn't mind them. They had as much right to be here as she did. Sometimes she wished she might catch a glimpse of loved ones, of old Miriam her namesake, her guardian; of Sylvia, but her spirit was
elusive. She sensed she wasn't tied to a house place but roamed free over the fields with a line of old farm dogs chasing behind.

Lately she noticed after evening jobs she was that whacked she fell asleep, nodding off by the firelight like Granny Mutch, but there was no one to tell her off for skipping her darning. Even when she was sitting, there was always mending and knitting, unravelling old jumpers to reknit into something warm to wear that fooled no one. They always held back a fleece to spin up and dye. Florrie did a whole baby layette for Sylvia.

Florrie was always trying to get her interested in sewing. Mirren was happiest left to herself, and that was taken wrong among the other farmers' wives, who thought her snooty and standoffish. She was a drunkard who by rights ought not to be running Cragside, taking jobs from the men. They were suspicious. She didn't go to the Women's Institute or to church. Her trips down to Scarperton on market days were brief and she lingered only at the library to change her books. There was always temptation to sniff the air and she might be lost again. Funny, spirits no longer had a hold of her senses. They just made her feel sad at those wasted months.

Florrie was right about her appearance, though. She must look a fright in a pair of old jodhpurs and holey jumper, but who was to know if she
missed her lick and a promise, she smiled. It was too cold to get undressed. Happen she smelled of the farmyard to strangers, but could smell nothing amiss herself.