South Riding (8 page)

No, by God. If this was Burton’s daughter he’d see her further before he’d trust Midge to her.

In the discussion following Miss Burton’s withdrawal from the room, Carne was the only governor who opposed her appointment.

T
WO
M
ILES
south of Kiplington, between the cliffs and the road to Maythorpe, stood a group of dwellings known locally as The Shacks. They consisted of two railway coaches, three caravans, one converted omnibus, and five huts of varying sizes and designs. Around these human habitations leaned, drooped and squatted other minor structures, pig-sties, hen-runs, a goat-house, and, near the hedge, half a dozen tall narrow cupboards like up-ended coffins, cause of unending indignation to the sanitary inspectors. A war raged between Kiplington Urban District Council and the South Riding County Council over the tolerated existence of The Shacks.

In winter the adjacent ground was trampled mud, crossed by cinder paths trodden into accidental mosaic with broken pottery and abandoned sardine tins. In summer the worn and shabby turf was littered with paper, stale bread, orange skins, chicken food, empty bottles, and the droppings of three goats, four dogs, one donkey, three motor-bicycles, thirty-six hens and two babies. In summer The Shacks hummed with exuberant human life. Young men rattled down at week-ends on motor-bicycles from Kingsport. Young women tumbled, laughing and giggling and clutching parcels, from the buses. Urban youths with pimpled faces and curvature of the spine exposed their blotches and blisters to the sun, turning limp somersaults over the creaking gate, hoping thus to cultivate within the brief summer months the athleticism which they associated with football teams, the M.C.C. and the Olympic Games. Gramophones blared, loud-speakers uttered extracts of disquieting information about world politics or unemployment in cultured voices, children screamed, mothers scolded, schoolboys fought, revellers returned late from Kiplington bars; the lighted tents glowed like luminous convolvulus flowers in the dark humid nights.

But from October to April only two families remained in residence—the Mitchells and the Hollies.

The Mitchells, a young couple from Kingsport, had married on hope and found small substance for it. Mr. Mitchell had been a clerk in a coal-exporter’s office. Owing to the contraction of the European markets, he found himself one day without a job, without a shilling saved, his wife pregnant, and the instalments on his furniture and house in North Park Avenue still incompletely paid. From the shameful fear of creditors, from the yet more shameful patronage of relatives, from the apprehensive benevolence of friends and the ruin of their romantic love, the Mitchells fled to the simple life in the form of a tarred wood and corrugated iron hut in this rural slum. From thence Mr. Mitchell, still natty, urban, conscientious, haggard, sallied daily on his bicycle armed with an insurance “book” bought as a final ransom from responsibility by his uncle, eager to persuade Cold Harbour colonists and South Riding tradespeople to buy from the Diamond Assurance Company that security which he had failed himself to find.

He wrote laborious letters in careful clerical script on paper headed “Bella Vista, Maythorpe Road, Kiplington,” and preserved thus his sense of still belonging to the middle classes.

The Hollies had no such pretensions. Mr. Holly was, when in work, a builder’s labourer; when out of work he drew unemployment insurance benefit for himself, his wife and six dependent children. When unemployed he was actually two shillings a week better off than when employed, because he could walk or cycle to the Kiplington Labour Exchange; but to reach the housing estates near Kingsport he must travel by bus or train. The rent of his railway coach amounted to five pounds a year, and his wife, a competent stout, impatient woman of forty-three, cooked on a small oil stove with a box oven, washed, baked, ate, slept, scolded and loved in one of the two compartments, and in the other brought up seven children in the fear of the Lord, the sanitary inspector and the Poor Law Authorities. Mr. Holly himself took life more easily. He liked his glass of beer when he could get it, and would play darts for hours in local pubs contentedly on the strength of a half-pint or a packet of Woodbines.

One July afternoon Lydia Holly sat on the roof of the untenanted railway coach and tasted rapture.

From her sun-warmed seat she could see, if she lifted her eyes, beyond the squalor of huts, hen-runs and garbage, the long green undulating land, netted with dykes like glittering silver wires, and cut short on her left by the serrated cliff. The fields changed colour from week to week, springing or ripening, but the sea altered from hour to hour and Lydia loved it. The wide serenity of the South Riding plain, the huge march of the clouds, the tides that ran nearly a mile out over the ruddy sand, had become part of her nature. But when she dropped her eyes on to the page before her she became sharply conscious of a very different beauty.

“That very time I saw (but thou could’st not)

Flying between the cold moon and the earth,

Cupid all arm’d: a certain aim he took

At a fair vestal throned by the west,

And loos’d his love-shaft smartly from his bow,

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts:

But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft

Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moons

And the imperial votaress passed on,

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.”

She did not know what it meant, but it was glorious. She forgot the angry sawing cry of a very young baby, lamenting life from the pram near Bella Vista. She forgot her mother’s weary voice, scolding Gertie for letting Lennie, the latest baby, cut his lip on a discarded salmon tin. She only heard, as a gentle and appropriate accompaniment to Shakespeare’s words, the Light Orchestral Concert played on the wireless belonging to two young men living in “Coachways.”

“Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell:

It fell upon a little western flower,

Before milk white, now purple with love’s wound,

And maidens call it love-in-idleness.”

Mr. Mitchell had lent her the complete Works of Shakespeare. In Bella Vista stood a splendid bureau, with desk below and glass-fronted bookcase above, legacy of better days, certificate of respectability, pledge that one day Nancy Mitchell might return to dining-room, drawing-room, alabaster light bowl, pastry forks, walnut suite and a “girl” to push the pram. What meant social resurrection to her meant Self Improvement to Fred, her husband. When the news of Lydia’s scholarship reached the Shacks, he said, “Better try to improve your mind. Read something worth while. Culture— not just this trash. Read Shakespeare.” He lent her a book. She, bewildered, enchanted, intimidated, read:

“I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,

The more you beat me, I will fawn on you:

Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me.

Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,

Unworthy as I am, to follow you.”

A fond way to carry on, thought fourteen-year-old Lydia Holly. She’d see a man further before she’d feel like that about him. Yet she had known her mother, a proud, scolding, impatient woman, give way almost as softly to her father, and it was her mother whom she loved and could admire. Her mother was brave; her mother was a fighter; her mother had insisted that she should take the second chance of a scholarship to Kiplington High School. When she was eleven she had won a place at Kiplington, but her parents had needed her to escort her small sisters to the village school, so she had missed her chance. Now Daisy was old enough to take her place there, the transfer could be arranged, and she might go to the High School.

Below the magic of Shakespeare’s uncomprehended words, the wood near Athens, the silvery sweetness of Mendelssohn from the wireless, the benign warmth of afternoon sun on her arms and shoulders, below all these present pleasures lay the lovely glowing assurance of future joy.

Bert was working at Tadman’s. Daisy was getting real handy about the house. Lennie was ten months old. Mother thought that he was the last, thank God, and Dr. Campbell told her he must be, anyway.

So Lydia Holly was going to the High School. She had, her teacher said, exceptional ability, a big brown strong girl born before her mother’s vitality had been exhausted. She could climb and run like a boy, do splits and cart-wheels at Madame Hubbard’s dancing class (Madame took her free—a tribute to her agility). She could add up sums faster than Mr. Mitchell, and write sprawling untidy blotted essays about “Heroes” or “Why I like History Lessons,” which Miss Tudling read, with difficulty, but with approval, aloud to the class at the Maythorpe Village School.

So bliss awaited her. She was to wear a brown tunic and white shirt blouses, a brown felt hat with a green crest on the ribbon. She was to ride to Kiplington daily on Mrs. Mitchell’s cycle, to eat her dinners at school, to learn French and Science, to play hockey, to have a desk and locker, and to read books and books and books, unreprimanded, because it was her business. Only she must work, read and learn and lay hold fast upon her knowledge.

She bent her head.

“. . . I pray thee give it me.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows;

Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk roses and with eglantine. . . .”

That rich Warwickshire woodland flowered across the bare blossomless landscape. Lydia Holly had never been inside a proper wood. Violets she knew; with wild thyme she had academic acquaintance. There was a song played by the caravaners’ gramophone:

“When we find wild thyme

I’ll have a wild time with you.”

Lydia thought it pretty. But woods, musk roses and eglantine were beyond her experience.

Happiness encircled her. Glory enfolded her. The words, the sun, the brilliant summer day, the salt wind fanning her cheek, the music seducing her heart, all these flowered into a symphony of rapture—Oh, lovely world. Oh, certainty of splendour. Oh, glowing illimitable royal summer. Her brown chin on her fists, her bare toes beating the roof of the railway carriage, Lydia lay loving her life, her future.

“Lydi—
ar
! Lydi—
ar
! Come down. Your mother wants you!”

Down scrambled Lydia from glory—an untidy fat loutish girl in a torn overall.

She entered the railway coach that was her home and stood blinking, dazzled. It smelled of lamp oil and unwashed clothes and beds and onions and of something else—not unfamiliar.

“Our Gertie’s been sick again,” said Mrs. Holly. “Wash her and put her to bed while I clear up, will you? And keep an eye on Lennie. Where’ve you been hiding yourself all afternoon? Can’t trust one of you out of my sight a minute. They’ve been eating raw turnips again, if you ask me.”

“It was only a teeny weeny bit,” sobbed Gertie. “We were playing at ladies—at a whist drive.”

“And the imperial votaress passed on,

“In maiden meditation fancy free,” sang Lydia’s heart.

She fetched water in a dipper from the rain tub; she poured it into a cracked enamel basin.

“There’s a dead fly in it. I won’t be washed with a fly,” protested Gertie, and was very sick again.

“Now, do you think you’ve finished?” asked Lydia patiently.

“No,” the child gulped. “Oh, Lyddie, I do feel bad. I’ve got such a pain.”

“Well, you shouldn’t eat things. You know what happened before.”

“. . . Fetch me that flower; the herb I show’d thee once . . .”

Lydia’s mind jerked free from the dark stifling bedroom of the railway coach. She was a robust child, uncritical of her surroundings and well fitted by nature to ignore them. Attending to Gertie, her mind ranged free through moonlit Athenian forests.

Eventually she got her sister to bed, but Gertie’s pain continued; her sickness persisted; she grew hotter and more querulous. The summer afternoon became a hurried nightmare. Bert, home hungry and clamorous for tea, was sent straight back for Dr. Campbell. He was out, but his young assistant came, diagnosed appendicitis, wrapped the child in a blanket and took her, with Mrs. Holly, in his car, to Kiplington Cottage Hospital.

Mr. Holly returned soon after they had gone. Even he was hushed by the catastrophe. Lydia prepared the “tea”— kippers for Dad and Bert, jam for the children. They ate doggedly, silently oppressed by apprehension.

After tea Mr. Holly could bear it no longer. He was softhearted and pain distressed him; he was volatile and trouble bored him. Gertie, after Lydia, was his favourite child. Poor little lass. Poor Gertie. He felt helpless and clumsy, as during his wife’s confinements. He borrowed a shilling from Pat and Jerry and went off to the Nag’s Head at Maythorpe where he had good luck with the darts, won an extra florin, drank it, remembered his sick child, told Grandad Sellers all about it, had another half pint offered from sympathy, and set off home tearful with beer and remorse to find Mrs. Holly, footsore and weary, climbing out of the Kiplington bus at the field corner.