The Carpenter's Children (5 page)

‘Our king and queen will lead us forward into a time of even greater prosperity,’ she said, and Tom Munday silently nodded; he and Eddie Cooper had attended a meeting in Everham Town Hall where their Member of Parliament had given a public lecture on the tremendous industrial advances made in the previous century, and how the social ill effects of that upheaval were now passing, while the advantages of mass production were becoming enjoyed by all, to the advantage of nation and Empire. Lady Neville seemed to be entirely in agreement, and her speech was greeted with enthusiastic applause. 

Practically all of North Camp came to the picnic, and families took their places on the grass or at trestle tables, to be waited on by Mrs Saville’s team of helpers, recruited from the Mothers’ Union. Older children sat at a separate long table, with the new curate, Mr Storey, in charge, assisted by young ladies who had willingly volunteered their services. These included Isabel, looking a picture in her summery dress and wide-brimmed straw hat, her glossy
red-brown
hair pinned up beneath it, with a few tendrils escaping at the nape of her neck.

‘She’s a proper little lady,’ thought Tom Munday, suddenly surprised at how much older she looked. Mr Storey, suitably attired in clerical black, gave her a briefly admiring smile as he handed her a tray of egg sandwiches to pass down the table. Isabel thought him very handsome, and wondered what it would be like to be a clergyman’s wife. Now that she had become a woman, her thoughts sometimes strayed to marriage and having babies; life in a vicarage must be ideally happy! She caught Mr Storey’s eye again over the laden table, and blushed furiously at the thought that sprung unbidden to her mind; she quickly lowered her eyes and turned away, little realising that Mark Storey had noted pretty Miss Munday from the post office. He thought how refreshingly shy and modest she was, compared to some of the young ladies who eyed him boldly and whispered to each other behind their hands,
which he found most disconcerting. He wondered how long he could expect to remain curate at St Peter’s; since Canon Harrington’s death, the Rev. Mr Saville had become vicar, and had been given the newly ordained Mark Storey as his assistant, a young unmarried man who occupied a room in the vicarage and joined the family for meals. It was an exciting life in the Lord’s service, as Mark saw it, and he hoped he would not be moved to another parish for at least the next two years.

‘What d’you think of Mr Storey, Isabel?’ whispered Grace, having noticed the glance that had passed between the curate and her sister.

‘Nothing at all,’ replied Isabel, frowning at Grace’s saucy manner.

‘He’s very handsome, isn’t he?’ observed Grace unabashed, but Isabel turned away to pour out cups of tea, wincing in case Mr Storey might have overheard Grace’s nonsense; what a disaster it would be!

And yet… She had noticed Phyllis Bird smiling at Ernest when he and Ted Bird set out with the Everham Cycling Club;
Ernest
of all people, her brother! The two lads pedalled off with the club every Saturday, but Mrs Munday would not allow her son to join them on Sundays.

‘If the Birds are willing to let their sons desert their church, that’s up to them, though I’m surprised at Mr Bird, a churchwarden,’ she declared. ‘But of
course, my Ernest wouldn’t
want
to miss going to church with his family.’

And it seemed she was right, for Ernest continued to attend St Peter’s without protest, and he also remained a member of Mr Woodman’s Bible study group on Sunday afternoons. Paul Woodman was now at Bristol in his final year of training for the ministry, though he had changed his allegiance from the Church of England to the Methodist form of worship. His parents, taken aback at first, had soon followed suit, which meant that they now had to walk all the way to South Camp each Sunday to attend the rather nondescript building with its corrugated iron roof, where the preacher weekly exhorted his largely impoverished flock of menial workers to turn away from sin and be saved, celebrating their conversion with hearty, ecstatic hymnsinging which gave rise to some local complaints about the noise.

The evangelical tone of the Bible study group remained much the same as it had always been, and Ernest, now one of the older members, was sometimes asked by Mr Woodman to lead the younger boys in prayer. He also found himself thoroughly enjoying the Saturday explorations of the all-male cycling club, pedalling out to Guildford and the Hog’s Back, and to Hindhead and the Devil’s Punch Bowl. The sun and the wind on his face were exhilarating, as was the sheer physical exertion when they had to pedal uphill, and Ernest
would overtake half of his puffing companions, some of whom had been scornful classmates at Everham Council School.

‘Are you looking forward to leaving home and going to that commercial college, Ernest?’ Isabel asked him one evening towards the end of August.

‘I think I am,’ he replied with a smile. ‘It’ll be good to know that I’m training to do the sort of work I know I could do well.’

‘You mean like being manager of some big firm?’

‘Perhaps one day,’ he said, though he privately saw himself as a chief librarian who also wrote and published poetry.

‘But you’d have to start off as a junior in some poky little office, wouldn’t you?’ Grace chimed in, having heard their parents discussing his future prospects.

‘I’ll be quite happy to work my way up!’

‘D’you think you’ll miss us
lots
?’ persisted Grace.

‘Yes, but I’ll be home at weekends, so Saturdays and Sundays will be the same as now,’ he answered, smiling, and Isabel wondered if he was thinking about Phyllis Bird.

‘I want to get away from North Camp just as soon as I’m old enough,’ said Grace with a pout. ‘It’s a
boring
place, and nothing ever happens unless you count church fêtes and picnics.’ She wrinkled her nose at the mention of these tame entertainments.
‘Everything’s always the same here from one week’s end to another.’

But in this she was mistaken. Two days later old Mr Cox died in his sleep, leaving Mrs Cooper with nobody to call on and care for every day. She enquired in vain for some useful work, looking after some other old person or housebound invalid, anything to get her out of the empty house during the day, and keep her mind off the temptation up in the loft. She even offered her services free of charge.

‘That’s where she’s making a mistake,’ said the North Camp gossips. ‘People don’t appreciate anything they don’t have to pay for, and with
her
reputation…’ Heads were shaken and knowing looks exchanged.

Until they were shocked into silence. For in the end Joy Cooper could not hold out against her enemy, and one afternoon she climbed the rickety ladder up into the loft, grabbing at the brandy bottle and drinking straight out of it. Within the next hour she had got on a bus to Everham which put her down at the railway station. She bought a platform ticket and waited for the express train for Southampton, due to come hurtling through before three o’clock; the brandy helped her to perform her last desperate act, and she threw herself in front of it.

At the coroner’s inquest the train driver said that he’d had to make an instant decision whether to brake the train at full speed, putting at risk the
passengers in the carriages behind him, or go straight ahead and then slow to a stop, having run over the woman on the line. The coroner agreed that he had been wise to choose the latter course.

The head shaking turned to gasps of horror on hearing the dreadful news, and Mrs Munday was not the only one to shed tears; in fact more of Joy Cooper’s neighbours turned out to mourn at her funeral than had ever shown her friendship in life. Eddie Cooper and Mary stood beside the grave while Mr Saville read the Burial Service from the prayer book, and after her body had been committed to earth, Eddie turned round to shake the hands of Bert Lansdowne and Tom Munday. Mary kissed Isabel and told her not to cry, and then the bereaved husband and daughter abruptly left the churchyard, cutting short the tentative expressions of sympathy.

Violet Munday was unusually quiet and thoughtful as she walked home.

Just what is that boy going to do with his life?

Ernest was uncomfortably aware of his father’s unspoken question, though Tom Munday had not recently broached the subject with him. The final term at the commercial college would be starting after Easter, and the question of employment at the end of it loomed large; fellow students like Ernest’s friend Jim Quayle were applying for posts and going for interviews. Mrs Munday had always believed that Ernest would be in demand with his new qualifications, confirmed by a certificate of proficiency in basic business skills, but looking ahead to the end of that last term, there were not any obvious openings in the Guildford area for newly trained clerks. When Brights department store advertised for an assistant floor manager, the post had been quickly filled, and
in any case Mrs Munday hoped for something better for her son. The college superintendent frequently told students that the best opportunities were in London, but country-loving Ernest had no wish to rent a room in the sprawling capital, and besides, he wanted to keep up his membership of both the Bible study group and the cycling club, though his weekends at home had curtailed any chance of a social life in Guildford. Jim Quayle, who also lodged at Mrs Green’s, had introduced Ernest to tennis which they practised on weekday evenings, and after a while Jim had invited two enthusiastic girls from the college to join them in mixed doubles. It soon became apparent that Jim had a fancy for one of the girls, and began to court her seriously; but when no similar attraction developed between Ernest and the other girl, the foursome had broken up, amicably enough, but leaving Ernest with a puzzling sense of loss. He and Jim had shared a lot in common, or so he’d thought, but this appeared to be the parting of their ways.

For Isabel Munday life was more certain and much brighter. At fifteen she was leaving the post office to become Miss Daniells’ teaching assistant at the start of the summer term, and there she would remain for the next two years, before enrolling at a teachers’ training college. A sweet-faced girl with a genuine love of children, her parents regarded her with pride: Tom with quiet satisfaction, his wife far
more volubly, irritating the parents of other North Camp girls. Betty Goddard helped her father to keep the accounts at Thomas and Gibson’s, and was referred to as his secretary by her mother, and as a shopgirl by Mrs Munday. Phyllis Bird took over Isabel’s place in the post office, and Rosie Lansdowne assisted in her father’s dairy, with a view to enrolling as a nursing cadet at Everham Hospital the following year. Mary Cooper had moved into the Yeomans’ farmhouse to assist Mrs Yeomans who had surprised herself by having another baby at forty, and so needed more help in the house, especially at haymaking and harvesting, when hired labourers clumped into the stone-floored kitchen for bread, cheese and beer. And Eddie Cooper had astounded North Camp by marrying again, his new bride being Annie the barmaid at the Tradesmen’s Arms, a lady of about thirty who expertly drew pints for others but was herself teetotal. It soon became known that Mary and her stepmother did not get on, and this was borne out when the second Mrs Cooper produced a baby son, but Mary stayed on at the farm to help Mrs Yeomans with her new baby, also a boy. The older Yeomans children, two girls and a boy, were all working; the boy, now twenty, was his father’s right-hand man.

Tom Munday was getting more demands on his skill than he could reasonably deal with, so took on another apprentice school-leaver who showed more
aptitude for carpentry than Ernest ever had. Tom and Eddie agreed that times were good and getting better for working men as wages rose and prices fell; Lady Neville’s confident prediction, and that of the MP, seemed to be justified, that Great Britain was surely marching forward to ever greater prosperity.

And then suddenly in mid April came news of a terrible disaster, the shock-waves from which reverberated around the world. The great new passenger liner
Titanic
of the White Star line, alleged to be unsinkable, struck an iceberg in mid Atlantic on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, and had sunk with the loss of fifteen hundred lives. The news cast a shadow over every conversation, and there were those who asked why God should allow such loss of life on so great a scale. Mr Saville preached a sermon pointing out to his congregation that the liner’s wealthy passengers had been enjoying every luxury, drinking, dancing and playing cards when sudden death and destruction had come upon them, and he counselled his hearers to trust in the Lord’s justice, and give thanks for the survival of some seven hundred souls, rescued from the freezing cold sea by the liner
Carpathia
. It should give them all pause for thought, he warned, to review and perhaps renew their lives.

Tom Munday, listening to this, was not so certain about the theology of it; but he felt a nameless unease, something he could not put into words, a
sense of the precariousness of human life, in spite of the wealth and prosperity of the age. He agreed that the tragedy had shaken them all out of their complacency, for if the unsinkable
Titanic
had proved unable to withstand an iceberg, who knew what other disasters awaited a generation that increasingly put its faith in scientific advance?

Isabel had similar thoughts when Miss Daniells led the school in prayer, impressing on them the need to live good Christian lives, and not to follow the ways of this world, which to her meant modesty in dress and behaviour, especially on the part of young women who played tennis and golf, even on the Lord’s day.

‘I simply don’t know what the world’s coming to, Miss Munday,’ she sighed, though she commended Isabel’s brother Ernest for putting his church before cycling on the Sabbath. If only all families would follow the example of the Mundays, she said, how much better life would be for the whole nation.

But just one week into the new term, the exemplary Mundays were called upon to face a humiliating blow. What they had dismissed as Grace’s self-will and naughtiness was now a real cause for concern – to the extent that Mr Chisman the headmaster had summoned her parents to his private office where he informed them that their thirteen-year-old daughter’s behaviour would soon result in expulsion unless she changed her ways as a persistent troublemaker. The
Mundays stood together before Mr Chisman’s desk as if they were the culprits, and begged for Grace to be given another chance.

‘It is only because I know you as respectable and caring parents that I have not taken this step before,’ he told them gravely. ‘I had hoped that she would improve as she grew older, but this has not been the case. Cheating in the weekly class tests and copying other pupils’ homework is one thing, but using foul language – which I know she won’t have learnt at home – and attacking her classmates with fists and nails is something that cannot go on. Other parents have complained of injuries inflicted by her on girls and boys alike. And I’m sorry to say that Grace has the ability to turn into an angel of light when challenged, and will break down in tears, pleading that she had only been defending a younger child who was being bullied.’

‘She’s told us about an incident like that, Mr Chisman, and I can assure you that she has often stood up to bullying, both in school and out of it,’ said Mrs Munday, anxious to defend her daughter.

‘That may be so, Mrs Munday, but I have to tell you that she is thoroughly disruptive in class,’ said Mr Chisman. ‘She has a regrettable tendency to stir up trouble and then disappear from the scene, leaving others to take the blame. I’m sorry, but this cannot be allowed to continue.’

He frowned and turned to address Tom Munday.
‘I am prepared, more for your sakes than hers, to overlook her behaviour on this occasion, but there will not be another reprieve. Do I make myself clear, Mr Munday?’

Tom nodded and murmured his thanks, but the ignominy of the situation reduced his wife to tears; Tom looked very grave as they left the school.

‘We’ve spoilt her, Violet. We’ve let her wrap us around her little finger, and it hasn’t done her any good – quite the opposite.’

‘Heavens, Tom, she’s only thirteen, a child as yet, and it’s probably just a phase she’s going through. We just need to be a little bit firmer with her, let her see how upset we are, and I’m sure she’ll take it to heart and make up her mind to be good in future,’ said Mrs Munday, wiping her eyes.

‘If it isn’t already too late,’ muttered Tom, half under his breath. He blamed himself entirely for his blindness and lack of firmness with his wife as well as his daughter. It’s up to me, he thought, to see that things would be different from now on.

At Miss Daniells’ school Isabel blossomed. Seated at a small table near to Miss Daniells’ desk, she was adored by the children, especially the five-year-olds who were her particular responsibility. She showed them how to form letters and numerals on their slates, allowing for their mixed abilities; from seven onwards the children had exercise books supplied
by the parish council, but reusable slates were more economical for the little ones’ scribbles. Her duties extended to their physical needs, and she took them to the lavatory, wiped runny noses and sticky hands, and was always there to pacify and encourage. She could play the piano when required, freeing Miss Daniells to stand in front of the whole school to teach a new song or chorus and explain the scriptural message it conveyed, made simple and tuneful for little voices. Miss Daniells was delighted with the benefits Isabel brought to the school and to herself, for she now felt far less tired. She praised Miss Munday to the Reverend Mr Saville on his regular visits to the school as chairman of the parish council and school governor; Miss Daniells assured him that her young assistant was worth every penny of the seven shillings and sixpence she was paid weekly.

And there were the days when the vicar had other duties and responsibilities, and sent his curate Mr Storey in his place. Isabel blushed as she answered this visitor’s courteous questions about her duties with the little ones, and was rewarded by his smiling approval. He would then take time to go among her small pupils, praising whatever they’d scrawled on their slates and commending their teacher. To Isabel he was the epitome of all that a good clergyman should be, and it was impossible
not
to imagine falling in love with such an excellent young man, some ten years older than herself. She was thankful
that he could not know how her heart fluttered when he came to the school, though she was unable to hide her blushes and hoped he put them down to shyness. As long as he remained unaware of her feelings, she thought, there was no great harm in indulging in her half-acknowledged dreams.

How little she suspected Mark Storey’s own thoughts, and his dilemma over this beautiful young girl! He had been used to dropping in at the post office with letters to hand in or collect for the vicarage, and exchanging a smile and perhaps a casual remark about the weather with her. On the day he went in and noticed that she was no longer there, he was utterly dismayed, supposing that she had left North Camp to take up a new job; but on learning from Mr Teasdale that she was now a pupil-teacher at the church school, he gladly looked forward to many more opportunities to see and speak with her again: to feast his eyes upon her unspoilt beauty.

For Mark Storey was in love, and had been ever since he had first seen her. And now his thoughts turned to the serious possibility of marrying her in another two or three years’ time. Girls married at eighteen, and he reasoned that if he had been appointed to a living by then, there would be a house available; and even if not, there might still be a house for a married curate, a home to which he could take her as a bride if she accepted him and her parents approved. But if he was moved from North
Camp before then, another man might step in and claim her. For him she was everything that could be desired in a clergyman’s wife: a devout Christian, a dutiful daughter and good with children – ideal in every way except for the matter of her age. Mark’s thoughts circled round and round, without coming to any resolution.

Then came a visit from the bishop of the Winchester diocese to Everham and its surrounding villages, North and South Camp and Hassett. His lordship was a pleasantly jovial man, outwardly uncritical, though neither Mr Saville nor his wife forgot for one moment that this was an inspection. Mark did not expect the great man to have much to say to a humble curate, but to his surprise he was taken aside during an informal tea at the vicarage, and asked to accompany his lordship on a walk in the garden, or rather the grounds, for this was where fêtes and parish picnics were held. After a few questions about his curacy, the bishop surprised Mark by asking with a fatherly smile if there was any young lady in the parish that he particularly admired.

‘Such as a sensible, industrious young woman, Storey, not necessarily a beauty, but amiable and likely to make a good wife for a clergyman – somebody who would discreetly support you in your parish work, never causing embarrassment by injudicious talk. Tell me in confidence, have you met anybody who might suit?’

Mark Storey was speechless, and for one mad moment imagined himself answering, Yes, indeed, my lord, I am desperately in love with a girl of barely sixteen, and dream of her by day and night. She’s the daughter of a local tradesman, and is the sweetest, most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. I’m willing to wait until she’s older, but please don’t send me away from North Camp, my lord, because if another man came and took her from me, I don’t think that I could… well, I’d join the China Inland Mission and leave this country for ever.

But of course he said nothing of the sort, and the bishop interpreted his silence as meaning that he had in fact got a suitable young woman in mind.

‘No great hurry, of course, Storey, but think over what I’ve said. A bachelor vicar can find himself in an awkward, even scandalous situation, there being many young ladies in every parish who are drawn to the cloth – and a few older ones, too,’ he added with a smile. ‘A good clergyman needs a good wife to look after him, that’s what I say to all you newly ordained men. Anyway, if there
is
a young lady in your sights, Storey, I won’t move you for the time being, though I don’t usually keep single curates in one place for longer than two years, because you need to widen your experience of parish life. What do you say, Storey?’