Nenna, on the whole, was patient under her sister’s criticisms. She had made up her mind to endure them calmly. But acts of interference she would not allow, and one day there were words between them.

  It was a warm Sunday morning in summer, and Linn, now nine months, was crawling about the floor barefoot. Nenna went out to the garden for a moment to pick fresh mint and to tell Jack that dinner was very nearly ready. She returned to find Philippa holding the child down hard on her lap, forcing on the second of her tiny shoes, over a twisted, much-wrinkled stocking. Linn was crying bitterly, and Nenna, snatching the child up into her arms, took off both the shoes and the stockings and flung them into a corner of the settle.

  ‘It’s none of your business!’ she said fiercely. ‘How dare you make the poor child cry?’

  ‘She shouldn’t be going about barefoot like that. On this cold brick floor! On the rough garden path! She’ll do herself an injury.’

  ‘It’s none of your business!’ Nenna repeated. ‘You have absolutely no right to interfere. If you think you know so much about raising children and caring for them, it’s time you got married and had your own, before you find you’ve left it too late!’

  Jack came in to an atmosphere that sparked and prickled. He stood glancing from one red angry face to the other. Then he went forward and lifted Linn out of Nenna’s arms.

  ‘Them there taters is boiling all over the stove,’ he said. ‘They’ll put the fire out in another minute. Here, come to your dad, Miss Mercybright, and he’ll give you a ride like Jack-a-Dando.’

  He sat down in the basketwork chair with the child on his knees, facing towards him, and jiggled her about until she laughed.

  ‘Jack-a-Dando rode to Warwick

  With his newly wedded bride ‒

  Bumpety-bump up and down,

  Bumpety-bump from side to side ‒

  Jack-a-Dando’s famous ride!’

  Linn was now croodling and blowing bubbles, leaning towards him, hands clutching at his waistcoat pocket, where she knew she would find a pod of green peas. Nenna smiled from across the kitchen. She liked to see Jack and the child together. But Miss Philippa took much longer to thaw, and was still rather cool when she left after dinner.

  ‘Well?’ Nenna said, defiantly, confronting Jack afterwards. ‘Whose child is she I’d like to know ‒ hers or mine?’

  ‘Mine,’ he said, to avoid disagreement. ‘You can tell she’s mine by the way she’s so fond of her bread and cheese.’

  Often that summer, when Nenna went out to help in the hay-fields, she would take Linn with her and put her to sleep in the shade of the hedgerow, somewhere nearby, where she could keep a watchful eye. And at harvest-time, too, Linn would be out in the fields all day, safe in the charge of the older children, playing in a corner, well away from the reaping machine and the mowers at work with their sharp scythes.

  One hot day young Bobby Luppitt caught a large grass-snake and carried it across the harvest field to show it to the other children. Nenna ran up in some consternation, for Linn was awake and would surely be frightened. But when she arrived, Linn had the grass-snake in her arms and was trying to cuddle it against her body, enchanted by its warmth and the way it wriggled in her grasp. She was laughing and gurgling all the time, and cried only when the snake escaped her, vanishing into the shady hedgerow.

  ‘Dolly?’ she called, crawling along on hands and knees. ‘Dolly? Dolly? Cheep, cheep?’ Every pet or plaything was ‘dolly’ to her.

  She was a forward child from the first, and a happy one, as Nenna had promised. She was pretty, too, and had fair hair with more than a hint of red in it, which Nenna herself kept trimmed short, so that it grew in little fine feathery waves all over her head. Her eyes and lashes were dark, like her mother’s, and her skin golden.

  ‘Someone I know is a bobby-dazzler,’ Jack would say, lifting her up till her hands touched the rafters. ‘Someone I know is as bright as a button. Now I wonder who it is? You got any idea, have you?’

  ‘Dolly! Dolly!’ Linn would say. ‘Dolly Doucey! Bobby-dazzler!’

  She could say many words by the time she was fully a twelvemonth old.

  Towards the end of harvest that year there were five days of heavy rain, holding the harvesters back, fretting, and beating down the corn still standing uncut on forty-five acres. And when Jack went up with the other men on the sixth day, determined to cut the oats and barley in the Top Ground, however wet, he found that Gauntlet’s sheep had got in from the rough grazing above. The field was a nightmare, the sprouting corn all trodden into the miry ground, and the sheep with their bellies so distended that they lay about, unable to move, having gorged themselves on the undersowing of grass and clover.

  ‘They warnt here last night!’ Gauntlet said. ‘I was up here going the rounds at ten and they was all safe in the leazings then. It’s Farmer Tuller that has let ’em in here, or one of the scum that dirties for him!’

  When Miss Philippa saw the state of the field, she stood for a time with the tears glistening in her eyes. It really hurt her to see the corn mined. But then anger got the upper hand.

  ‘I’ll have the law on Tuller this time, as Mr Tapyard said I ought.’

  ‘There’s not enough evidence,’ Jack said. ‘Farmer Tuller has seen to that. It’s our own sheep that have got in and he’s took good care that them holes in the hedge should look as if they was accidental.’

  ‘Then what can we do?’

  ‘We can see that it don’t happen again.’

  So every night after that he patrolled the boundary, armed with a double-barrelled shotgun, and one night he challenged a man who was creeping across the sunken trackway. The man turned and ran, and Jack fired one barrel into the branches of a nearby oak tree.

  ‘Tell your master,’ he called out, ‘that the next man he sends won’t be half so lucky!’

  The message, it seemed, went home; there were no more intruders after that; but Jack, working all day to finish the harvest and patrolling five or six hours every night, was in danger of wearing himself to a shadow, and Nenna complained to her sister about it.

  ‘Is it my fault?’ Philippa said. ‘I never asked him to patrol, did I?’

  ‘Then perhaps you’ll ask him to stop,’ Nenna said, ‘before he kills himself with lack of sleep.’

  ‘I shan’t stop him. Not until the harvest is safely in. After all, it was all through Jack that I quarrelled with Tuller in the first place, so no doubt he feels himself somewhat to blame.’

  The harvest was got in at last without further damage. Jack was able to sleep at nights in his own bed, and to put John Tuller out of his mind, at least until the Top Ground fields had been ploughed and re-sown. Then, perhaps, there might be a need for vigilance again.

  That autumn, however, there was a change that removed the problem. Maryhope Farm was put up for sale. Jack was driving home from Hotcham and saw a man in the act of nailing up the poster, on the trunk of a tree in Felpy Lane. ‘Maryhope Farm: two hundred acres of freehold land, with dwelling-house, barns, out-houses, byres, and sundry other buildings pertaining: to be sold by auction on Thursday, October 28th., unless previously sold by private treaty.’

  Jack went in search of his sister-in-law and found her in the dairy, up to her elbows in the cheese-tub.

  ‘Seems your friend Tuller is selling out. I’ve just seen a poster in the lane. Maryhope Farm is on the market.’

  ‘Yes, I know, and I’m going to buy it,’ she said calmly. ‘I’ve seen Mr Todds about raising a mortgage and he will be arranging the whole transaction for me.’

  Jack was struck dumb. He stood watching her bare white arms as she swirled the curds to and fro in the tub. She looked at him with a little smile, enjoying his surprise, making the most of her moment of triumph.

  ‘Are you mad?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘With farming going downhill all the time? And no sign of any improvement?’

  ‘It means the land is going begging. I couldn’t afford it, if it weren’t cheap. And things can’t stay bad for ever and ever. You’ve said so often enough yourself. Farming is bound to pick up in the end and when it does this will be one of the finest holdings in the country.’

  ‘That land of Tuller’s is in worse case than this here land of yours used to be. He’s bled it white and you damn well know it. It’d take years to put it back into heart again. Five years at least. Probably longer.’

  ‘That’s where you come in,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, I thought it might be. I had this feeling in my bones.’

  ‘I hoped you’d be pleased, having a bigger farm to manage.’

  ‘I’m happy enough as I am,’ he said.

  ‘But you will take the Maryhope land in hand, too, won’t you? I can’t do it without your help.’

  ‘Yes, well, I’ll do my best about it, surely.’

  At home that evening, when he passed the news on to Nenna, she was at first inclined to be angry.

  ‘Philippa puts on you,’ she said. ‘I will not allow it!’ But the very next time she mentioned the matter, after discussing it with her sister, she spoke of it as a settled thing.

  ‘The farmhouse at Maryhope will be sold separately and will keep the name,’ she said. ‘The land will become part of Brown Elms and a new field-map is drawn up already. It’ll really be quite a sizeable holding now.’

  ‘You’ve changed your tune a bit, ent you?’ he said.

  ‘It will be for the best in the end,’ she said, ‘seeing the farm will pass to our children.’

  ‘Oh? Who says so?’

  ‘Philippa says so. She never intends to marry, she said, so our sons will inherit the farm.’

  ‘What sons?’ he said, to tease her. ‘Have you been keeping something a secret?’

  ‘No, I haven’t!’ she exclaimed. ‘I only wish I could say otherwise!’

  ‘Well, lumme … it’s early days to be tamping about it. We ent been married two years yet ‒’

  ‘But Linn came so soon! It was all so easy in every way! I can’t understand why other babies haven’t followed.’ Nenna longed for more children. She felt a hungry impatience for them. And it made her angry that she should be denied.

  ‘Why is it?’ she asked. ‘Why don’t I ever get my own way? It isn’t a wicked thing to wish for, is it, so why should God deny me more children?’

  ‘Don’t worry yourself about it,’ he said gently. ‘I daresay they’ll come when they’re good and ready.’

  Chapter Nine

  So now he had charge of six hundred acres, a holding which, if he stood at the top of Tootle Barrow, was laid out all round for him to see, spreading its slopes to the south and west.

  ‘Aren’t you proud,’ Nenna said, ‘to be bailiff of such a farm as this?’

  ‘I shall be a lot prouder when the Maryhope lands is in some sort of fettle,’ he said.

  It all took time. There were no short cuts to salvation on the land. There was only labour. But changes were wrought, little by little, and at the end of two years those changes could be seen plainly: as the wet pastures were drained and sweetened; as the poor starved arable grounds were manured and rested; as the rough grey leazings were cleared and ploughed and sown anew, and slowly, with patience, coaxed into kindliness, the new grass growing close and thick together, bright green and glistening under the spring and summer sun.

  ‘It warms my heart,’ said William Gauntlet, ‘to see this land all smiling again.’

  Jack was somebody nowadays. Farmers sought him out at market and sometimes drove up to Brown Elms to see the improvements he was making there. They asked his advice about grassland and stock and machinery and the use of artificial manures. He was known by name for some miles around and held in some regard, too, and he was pleased because of Nenna. She took such pride in all he did that he could not help but be proud himself. He had never been so cared for before. He had never known such warmth and comfort and satisfaction.

  Sometimes, when he worked in the fields nearest the cottage, he would see Nenna’s duster fluttering out of an upper window, or would see her going about the garden, scattering corn for the hens and the geese. Sometimes, resting his team at the end of a furrow, he would take off his cap and wave to her, and she would wave back lifting Linn up to do the same.

  Sometimes Nenna and the child would come hand in hand across the fields to see him, bringing his midday meal in a basket, with a big stoneware bottle full of cold sweet tea. If the day were a mild one, they would stay in the field and eat with him, sitting on a rug beneath the hedge, and on these occasions, Linn would bring her very own dinner, wrapped in her own red chequered napkin and carried in the tiny chipwood basket that had her initials done in pokerwork on the handle.

  ‘What’ve you got for bait today, then?’ he would ask her. ‘It’s not bread and cheese by any chance?’

  And it always was bread and cheese, for she had to eat whatever he ate, and would even have had a raw onion, eating it with a knife as he did, but that she knew it would make her cry.

  When her dinner was eaten, she would wander off, stepping carefully from clod to clod, to speak to the horses and offer them her last crust. Jack had to watch her, ready to order her away, for she had no fear and would if allowed have passed to and fro under the horses’ bellies or gone behind them to pick at the mud drying on their fetlocks. She thought they were all like old Shiner at home, whose tail she swung on and whose poor, split hooves she polished every day with a little boot-brush.

  Shiner always let her do just as she pleased and would stand looking down at her over one shoulder as she rubbed spit on a wart on his leg or pulled the sticky-burrs out of the long coarse hairs on his feet. He would come to her with a little whicker of welcome the moment she squeezed through the bars of the gate into the orchard. She and Shiner were great friends. He knew she always brought him something. All the loaf sugar would have gone to him, had Nenna not kept her cupboards fastened.

  Linn wanted to be friends with every living creature on earth and would run after the geese in the garden, her small bare arms outstretched towards them, calling out: ‘I’ll catch you, geeses! ‒ I’ll catch you, geeses!’ And would then stand forlorn, on the brink of tears, because they would not stay and let her embrace them. The tears seldom came. Something would certainly happen to distract her: a jackdaw perching on the pig’s back, or an apple falling, smack, off the tree, and she would be rocking with laughter instead.

  When Jack was at home, she hardly ever left his side, but wanted to watch whatever he was doing. Everything he did was such a splendid joke.

  Every six months or so, he cleaned the chimney with four long beanpoles tied end to end and a big branch of holly as a brush. Linn would be out in the garden, waiting, and when the ‘brush’ shot out of the chimney, she would go off into fits of trilling laughter.

  ‘Again?’ she would call to Jack, indoors. ‘Dad? Dad? Do it again?’

  In wintertime, whenever there was a hard frost, he would lift her up so that she could reach the icicles hanging along the eaves of the thatch. She would break one off and lick its point.

  ‘Ooo! Birr! It’s cold. It’s cold.’

  ‘Well, of course it’s cold! Whoever heard of a hot daglet?’

  ‘I did!’ she said, tilting her chin, saucily. ‘I seen ’em, too.’

  ‘Oh? Where was that?’

  ‘Not going to tell you!’

  ‘That’s because it ent true.’

  ‘’Tis true!’ she said, and held her icicle against his throat, threatening to drop it inside his shirt. ‘Shall I?’ she said. ‘Shall I drop it down?’

  ‘You do,’ he warned, ‘and I shall put one in your drawers!’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes, I would.’

  ‘It’d melt on me. It’d make me wet.’

  ‘And jolly well serve you right, too ‒ you with your yams about hot daglets!’

  ‘How do they come? The icicles?’

  ‘Drip, drip, drip, that’s how they come, and get catched in the act when the weather turns frosty.’

  ‘Why does the weather turn frosty?’

  ‘Now we’re off! We’re in for it now ‒ why? why? ‒ sure as Worcester shines against Gloucester. Supposing you ask why little tongues must always waggle?’

  ‘Why must they?’

  ‘Ah. Why? You’ve got me there. I reckon they must want something to do.’

  In the springtime one year, when the birds were nesting, he climbed his ladder to put a ‘cat’ on the cottage roof, to scare away the sparrows making holes in the thatch. The ‘cat’ was made of old velveteen, stuffed with straw, and had two green glass beads stuck in for eyes. It had a humpty back and looked ferocious. But its long upright tail was soon pecked to pieces; its glaring eyes disappeared; the birds were just as busy as ever.

  ‘Damn and hammer it!’ Jack said to Linn. ‘I reckon you told ’em that cat warnt real.’

  ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘I never telled ’em.’

  ‘Who was it, then, if it warnt you?’

  ‘A little bird telled ’em!’ she exclaimed.

  She was always laughing. Everything was a joke to her. Even when she was being scolded, she always managed to turn it aside.

  ‘Whose little dirty black hands’ve been here?’ Jack demanded, pointing to the five tell-tale smudges on the white wall.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Linn said, considering the matter.

  ‘Then let’s have a look-see who fits, shall we, and maybe we shall learn something.’

  He took hold of her hand and put it up against the wall, fitting thumb and then fingers into the smudges. But long before the fourth and last finger was pressed firmly into its place, the child was already wriggling and spluttering with delighted laughter. This was the best joke of all: to see her own hand fitting the imprint on the wall.

  ‘Someone,’ he said, ‘is proved to be a dirty rascal.’

  ‘You,’ she said. ‘Dirty lascal!’

  ‘Someone was told to go to mother and get herself washed in time for bed, warnt they?’

 

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