Dark Harvest Read online

  What was she going to do? Here she was, living in a ruin with two eccentric old recluses at the top of Tillow Hill, way above the village. Before she came no one knew much about the two Norville sisters in their tumble-down castle. Now it had barbed wire all round and a ‘moat’ (which was nothing more than a pond) in case the Kaiser invaded Sussex. They were looking forward to having a baby in the house, so she’d persuaded Jamie it was best for her to stay on until he got back from the wars. They did not talk about why, but they both knew the reason. Mabel and Alfred Thorn were still insisting she went to them to have the baby. His parents didn’t want her, she knew that; they wanted someone there to help run the ironmongery like Jamie had done. She wouldn’t do it! She wouldn’t do it because of Len. Jamie’s brother had made his life a misery last year and his eyes crawled over every girl in Ashden. She couldn’t go to her own parents either. Even though she was married now, they didn’t have room in their hearts or their cottage for her.

  No, she’d have to stay in Castle Tillow, heating water on the range day after day. After all, women had managed this way for centuries, she told herself, tears gathering in her eyes. Why not her? Mrs Hay, the midwife, would be there when the baby came, so all would be well. Even Johnson had promised to toll the invasion bell he had rigged up last summer at the Norvilles’ behest, only this time it would be to warn Joe Ifield that the baby was on its way so he could cycle out to Mrs Hay who might not hear it where she lived. So why wasn’t she content with that?

  Agnes struggled out of bed, shivering in the cold, and washed. She felt a little better after that, but not like she used to feel in the nice warm Rectory, old Dribble Dibble or not.

  The thought of the Rectory, and the news she’d heard yesterday that Miss Caroline was back home, made her weep a little more, and she had to wash her face all over again in that icy water.

  Felicia crept down the stairs to avoid waking her family or alerting Mrs Dibble in the kitchen, on her way to walk to the railway station. Her trunk had been collected by the carrier yesterday so all she had was one suitcase. It was much too early for the first train which wasn’t due until twenty to eight, but she could not bear another farewell. She was still afraid her resolution might break. Even now she wished she could convince herself she should remain, because she could help Daniel best by staying here. It was too cruel to be leaving at this moment, when the doctors had at last confirmed that the paralysis might not be permanent. When she went to say goodbye yesterday Daniel had just been given the good news—Lady Hunney, against the doctors’ wishes, was convinced it would give him the will to fight. If so, Felicia had not detected it.

  He had been sitting in his invalid chair in the conservatory overlooking the gardens, listlessly looking out towards the world he had longed to travel. He had not even turned his head, but he must have sensed her arrival.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ he said.

  There was a daffodil in the stone pot on the terrace steps. She saw every detail of it still, etched on her memory.

  ‘I could stay.’ She was not as strong as she had thought.

  ‘No.’ Daniel’s voice was detached. ‘Even if the paralysis improves, nothing else will.’ He slightly emphasised the ‘nothing’ and then that too lay between them. She knew it was not the leg he was thinking of but that he would never be a normal man again.

  ‘There is a perhaps, though?’ The words ground out of her; she couldn’t help them. There was no one else for her, only Daniel.

  ‘No, Felicia.’

  Had it not been for the sudden throb in his steady voice, she would have been fooled into believing he was relieved she was going. He had never told her otherwise; in fact he had encouraged it. She changed the subject. ‘Did I tell you about the rota of local women to help on the farms? Caroline has talked Mother into helping her organise it,’ she said brightly. ‘The local branch of Women’s Farm and Garden Union heard about it and got in touch.’

  ‘I thought they existed only to promote Gertrude Jekylls.’

  ‘Hydes too, apparently,’ she managed to joke. ‘They’re interested in steering their activities towards war work. Caroline went along to talk it over with them, and now the idea is to approach the Board of Agriculture for their cooperation. I can see Caroline conquering Whitehall, can’t you?’

  ‘It’s Ashden she’ll have to win round, especially if my mother has anything to do with it.’

  ‘Why?’ Felicia was immediately wary. She was tolerated by Lady Hunney, but was well aware of her implacable opposition to Caroline and Reggie’s marriage. ‘Surely it’s an excellent idea?’

  ‘A woman’s place is in organising concerts to terrorise the troops, especially wounded ones who can’t get away.’ He might laugh at his awe-inspiring mother but Felicia knew how close the bond was between them.

  ‘But women have always helped on the land everywhere, not just in Ashden. Caroline is merely organising it more efficiently in view of the war situation. She’s encouraging women who might not have considered it, whether they do it for the war effort or for the money.’

  ‘Not all women. Not women like you and Caroline. Especially Caroline. I fear the pitchforks will be out for her. I take it she doesn’t intend to have a personal hand in the work.’

  ‘I don’t know, but if so, a pitchfork won’t stop her.’

  ‘Reggie might, if Mother digs her heels in.’

  ‘Surely he wouldn’t.’

  ‘Not if these were normal times, but he’s out there.’ Daniel was quiet for a moment. ‘Where are you going, Felicia?’

  ‘Wimereux,’ she told him promptly. ‘The new hospital run by Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson and Dr Flora Murray. They were running a hospital in the Hotel Claridge in Paris, but they’ve had to leave it. They’ve found a large house, Château Mauricien near Boulogne and they need staff.’

  She had answered too promptly. ‘And what exactly will you do there?’

  Go straight to the front, but she could not tell him that. ‘Whatever they need. Maybe I’ll go on to another hospital. Rouen. Even Paris perhaps.’

  ‘This is the first time you’ve ever prevaricated with me. You normally talk direct to my heart. That’s why I—’

  Please, please don’t say it. Not now. She could not bear it. Those words that would have meant so much last summer would be bitter-sweet now, and the last shreds of her resolve would vanish.

  ‘Know you’re lying,’ Daniel finished jerkily, and she relaxed.

  ‘I must be going. I promised Ahab I’d take him for a last walk.’ Speak cheerfully—if you can.

  ‘Lucky Ahab.’

  She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Goodbye, Daniel.’

  ‘Keep safe, Felicia, keep safe,’ he called after her as she went out through the garden door.

  She did not look back, but she knew he would be watching until she turned the corner by the chestnut tree.

  She could not face another such ordeal this morning, but she should have known that Caroline might guess she’d do something like this. When she opened the front door her sister was there, shivering on the porch, hunched up in her navy blue coat, and there were Poppy and the trap.

  ‘It’s Poppy’s fault I’m here. I heard her neighing and when I came down to investigate it was obvious she was set on trotting to the railway station.’

  ‘How very kind of Poppy.’ Felicia flung her arms round Caroline’s neck. ‘And you,’ she whispered.

  The clip-clop of Poppy’s feet broke the silence that fell between them. There was for once nothing to be said. They both knew why she was going and where.

  ‘Give my love to Aunt Tilly,’ Caroline said at last, plunging to the heart of the matter.

  ‘I can’t have any secrets from you, can I?

  ‘Do you have joint plans?’ Now that she’d pried so far, she might as well go further.

  ‘Of course,’ Felicia replied blithely. ‘We thought we might spend a few days in Cannes. It is the height of the season, after all.’

  Car
oline laughed as she reined in Poppy outside the dark red brick of Ashden railway station, and asked no more.

  She remained with her sister on the platform until the train for East Grinstead and London steamed in; it would be her last sight of Felicia for goodness knew how long, and she drank it in: the dark hair piled up loosely under the green felt hat, the neat navy costume and coat. Soon she’d be back in VAD uniform presumably, like Aunt Tilly, though attached to the FANYs; her beautiful dark eyes would be looking out from under a coif. She still felt protective of her younger sister, unable quite to believe her apparent transformation.

  ‘Keep safe, Felicia, keep safe,’ she whispered as the train bearing her sister away puffed into the blue and grey distance.

  ‘I’ll put a paragraph in the parish mag if you like,’ George offered. Caroline was hunched up over the desk in the morning room, surrounded by pieces of paper and home-made alphabetised books for names and addresses; she was glad of something to concentrate on other than the offensive at Neuve Chapelle and whether Reggie had been in it. The attack had been a great success, thank goodness, with gains made and held. There had been casualties, of course, they had read. How many wasn’t yet clear. Nor who they were … No, she would not think of that.

  ‘Would you?’ She looked up grateful at George’s offer. ‘Paid volunteers wanted for farm work, men and women of all ages.’ Well nearly, she didn’t want Jacob Timms staggering up offering his services, two sticks and all. Not that he’d want to. He’d miss his mornings putting the village to rights from the seat under the oak tree, a task continued in the Norville Arms on Bankside at lunchtime over ale, bread, cheese and a ha’porth of pickles, and in the evenings over more ale. He claimed he had a right to comment on the news. He’d been newsagent for forty years. ‘That won’t work alone, of course,’ she continued. ‘I’ll have to bang on some doors, but at least they’ll be prepared. And we’re also looking for women who will look after babies and children at their homes if the mothers want to work.’

  ‘I could even get a bit in the Leopard,’ George announced in a burst of enthusiasm. ‘Not looking after kids though. Help on Saturday afternoons picking, that sort of thing. That’s if chaps aren’t barred in your missionary fervour for women hogging the jobs that men could do.’

  She flung her book of addresses at him, but he dodged. ‘That’s a generous offer.’ She meant it. For George to give space to her doings in the Skinner’s school magazine meant recognition indeed for women’s right to work.

  ‘Makes a change from reading what the old boys are up to in France,’ he grunted. ‘I might as well help that way, there’s precious little else I can do. Pa won’t even let me join the Volunteer Training Corps at the Wells. Not exactly helping the war effort to spend my time reading in the Courier about Skinner’s old boys being POWs in Germany.’

  ‘You sound almost envious.’

  ‘Pa’s still set on Oxford. I ask you. Now. When he knows I’m just hanging around waiting till I’m old enough to do my bit. Do you know, I nearly got a white feather last week, till she saw the Skinner’s uniform and even then she hesitated. The war will be over by the time I’m seventeen.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Yes.’ George had the decency to flush. ‘I know you want Reggie back and all that, but you must see it’s different for me. I’m a chap.’

  Different for him? No, she didn’t see. After she’d given him a piece of her mind, she tried once more to organise her lists. She had had no idea of the varied jobs that farmers, or rather those who entertained the idea of paid women workers, required. Even in the winter there was dairying and stock care, cleaning and oiling machinery, chaff cutting and food mixing—not to mention mending, that bane of a woman’s life anywhere it seemed, and on farms it was sacks. Now in March there was a need for potato planting, weeding, cabbage planting, and grass seeding.

  In a rough division of work, it had been agreed that Mother would organise the rotas into times, days and jobs with the workers, and Caroline would negotiate with the farmers and seek out volunteers. It had not been easy. Some farmers even refused to see her, word having got round about her mission. One simply told her, women to the stove, men to the field, adding triumphantly he was applying for soldiers, and boys to be let off school, to help the harvest. She simply couldn’t understand it.

  Then she had had an idea. Meeting a refusal from Cyril Mutter at Robin’s Farm, she mentioned idly that George Thorn had also refused and it was nice to see them in agreement about something. Next day his son Norman Mutter had appeared at the Rectory to announce they had changed their minds, they’d be only too pleased. They would undoubtedly deter as many Thorns as encourage Mutters into adopting her scheme, but she banked on mercenary motives bringing the Thorns into line in due course.

  Women had been quick to volunteer: women like Lizzie Dibble, left on parish relief of five shillings a week and what her parents could spare after Rudolf was recalled to Germany; or Ginny Patterson, trying to manage on the stingy family allowances with four small children. The last of the Mutters had finally fallen into line with his clan, ‘I need a gel to turn manure muck ready for me mangold wurzels,’ he announced belligerently.

  ‘You shall have one,’ she had replied cheerfully, ‘even if it has to be me.’ That had silenced him.

  This morning, however, she faced a formidable assignment and one she had been putting off. William Swinford-Browne’s hop farm. His lordship had generously offered her fifteen minutes of his valuable time.

  Caroline knocked at the door of The Towers determined on peaceful negotiation. Its butler answered after a short pause. Most of The Towers’ staff had volunteered—the Kaiser, it was rumoured in the village, held fewer terrors for them than the Swinford-Brownes. The butler remained, but in the gargoyle stakes he was on long odds against Parker at Ashden Dower House. The Towers, Caroline thought, as she marched in, could have stepped right out of a Grimms’ fairy-tale, only it wasn’t the princesses who dwelt within this one but the beasts.

  The dark trees surrounding the house made it seem even gloomier than its architecture. It tried so hard to be grand with towers, gables and crenellated roof edges, that it was bound to fade as soon as one was ushered into the presence of the Swinford-Brownes: William, pear-shaped with his small darting eyes and hands that were only too eager to follow suit (witness his former housemaid Ruth Horner) and Edith, over-anxious, over-fussy in dress and manners, and over-organising. Caroline had been careful to make it clear to William, that this was a business meeting and to choose a day when she knew from Isabel that Edith was in London visiting the headquarters of the Belgian Relief Committee.

  ‘Good morning, Caroline.’ William heaved his bulk up from behind his desk.

  What a nuisance that being related by marriage through Isabel gave him the right to call her by her Christian name.

  ‘I’m here about our Ashden Agricultural Labour Organisation, Mr Swinford-Browne. I expect you have heard about it.’

  ‘I have, yes. Go on.’

  ‘Your hopgardens. Can we organise you paid women’s help for stringing, digging, hoeing, and nidgeting? And in due course, picking?’

  ‘I could take a few. I pay by eight bushels to the shilling.’

  ‘By the hour for stringing and hoeing,’ she interrupted firmly. ‘Four shillings for one eight-hour day. And most hop farmers are paying five bushels now.’

  ‘Ridiculous. We’re talking about untrained women.’

  ‘We’re talking about the cost of living, which is forty per cent up from before the war.’

  ‘Maybe, young woman. That’s not my concern. What is, is that with men at the front there’s less beer drunk. The brewing business isn’t thriving. I might grow and brew my own hops, but I have to sell beer at the end of it. That clear to you?’

  ‘Perfectly, thank you. Unfortunately I can’t guarantee workers for you unless you guarantee our standard wages.’

  She held her breath. It was a gamble, for she needed
his support. To her amazement, after drumming his fingers impatiently on the table for a moment or two, he gave in. ‘Have it your own way. You can discuss all the details with Eliot. I told him to expect you. Not too hard to guess what you were coming for. You take after your aunt.’

  Delighted at her easy victory, and taking his comparison to Tilly as the compliment he had not intended, Caroline escaped. She was still very puzzled—perhaps, she reasoned, he really did have an acute labour shortage, for all his brave words. Many of the farmers freely acknowledged they had a problem. Schoolboys were being paid half a crown a day for scaring crows, and cutting nettles, but there were few jobs of this sort they could do, and their interest in weeding vanished rapidly when faced with muddy fields and a Canterbury hoe.

  She set off down the track to Frank Eliot’s home, Hop Cottage. It took her past Hop House where Isabel was living. Caroline debated whether to call in to see her but decided to get her business concluded first. As it happened Isabel spotted her going by and ran after her.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Hop Cottage. About workers for the hopgardens.’ Caroline stopped as Isabel reached her.

  ‘I’ll come with you. I need some fresh air—I’ll just get my coat.’

  Fresh air? Isabel? Caroline laughed to herself, but if Isabel needed company, why not? She led a lonely enough life and somehow she couldn’t see her sister putting her name down on the Government register for women prepared to work, which was being set up this month.

  Beside Isabel, Caroline felt dowdy in her old costume which dragged round her ankles. Isabel’s new walking skirt showed not only her ankles but some of her calves as well. Her neat little boots picked their way daintily over the rough track while Caroline strode ahead in her well-worn ones. She had had quite enough fresh air in the last two weeks without dawdling.