Читать книгу The Land Girl: An unforgettable historical novel of love and hope - Allie Burns - Страница 14

February 1916

Mrs L Cotham

HopBine House

New Lane

Chartleigh

Kent

The envelope sat on the mantelpiece for an entire morning, peeking out from behind the photograph of John in a frame painted with forget-me-nots. Finally, the three of them – Emily, Mother and Cecil – gathered in the sitting room. Emily took the opener and slashed open the envelope.

The War Office had completed its investigations and Officer John Cotham was now officially regarded as having died.

Her mother whimpered. Cradled her face with her hands.

‘No wonder Kitchener wanted bachelors.’ Cecil’s bottom lip trembled as he spoke.

Emily tumbled into a long, black tunnel that stretched to eternity; the same tunnel she’d fallen into when her father had died. No matter how far she fell, the dark hole stretched into the shadows. Her legs were filled with a substance as heavy and clogged as the mud Theo described in the trenches. She’d wanted to hide in her bedroom until someone came to tell her it was over, that it wasn’t true. But Mother needed them both. She wept uncontrollably as if there was no room in the house for her or Cecil to grieve as well.

When friends and neighbours called on them, Mother put on a show.

‘I’m but one of thousands of mothers in the same position.’

Privately, Mother fretted, ‘Would I have treated him differently as a baby had I known?’ Her food went untouched. She paced about the house in the dead of the night, wept until her throat was sore and winced as she swallowed her tea. Worst of all, she became fixated with John’s whereabouts. In a husky voice, she speculated that the War Office had got it wrong. Perhaps they’d confused him with another man.

‘It must be difficult to keep track of them all, so many men, scores missing or killed.’

Then one of the sets of John’s identity tags was returned to them in the post, along with the diary full of the names of the men he had lost in battle. The officer uniform that they had paid for arrived wrapped in brown paper.

Emily flicked through the pages, pressing her fingers to the inked names, and then at the very last page, at the end of the list she added one last soldier:

John Cotham.

And then she added his service number after his name.

Emily encouraged Mother to write to an old friend of her family. Lady Heath had been widowed when her husband had been killed on the first day of the Somme in 1914. Lady Heath wrote back suggesting that her friend make a remembrance book. Mother pasted in photographs, letters, press cuttings and John’s identity tags. Lady Heath shared the poetry she had written about her husband, but Mother said she just didn’t have the words.

There was nothing that she could do to reach her.

The letters and bills piled up in the library, but Mother wouldn’t allow her to open them.

‘We can’t ignore our problems forever,’ Emily insisted. ‘We will have to do something.’

Despite the lack of sleep and loss of appetite, Mother rapped the glass with her fists and yelled that the vegetable garden needed to go. Emily agreed for once. Her hopes of doing any war work had died with John and the plot was a cruel reminder, but even so it was one of the last things she’d done with her brother and she couldn’t let it go back to the roses yet.

Desperate to soothe Mother’s grief, Emily suggested a memorial service.

‘We could hold a service at the church, followed by a wake on the lawn.’

She had to do something to help Mother find her strength. She still couldn’t believe it herself, and dear John deserved a fitting tribute. The problem was Cecil. Now that word about his conscientious objection was travelling around the village, they might be alone at the service. The memorial might be for John, but it could end up being about Cecil.

*

March 1916

Emily rushed down to the hallway as the front door slammed shut.

‘No good,’ Mother said, tossing her gloves onto the hall table, her voice still hoarse. She barged past Emily and Daisy on her way to the kitchen.

‘What did they say?’ Emily cantered to keep up with Mother.

‘They were a bunch of jumped-up old has-beens dizzy on the power bestowed upon them by the Crown. It could hardly be called a hearing, because Cecil wasn’t heard at all. They didn’t even let him speak. Not once.’ She paused to clear her own throat. ‘He had written a stirring and powerful speech in defence of his principles.’

Mother searched about her, opening cupboards and slamming them shut. The servants’ indicator board behind her was a reminder that they were on the other side of the house now.

‘They imprisoned him there and then.’

Emily gripped the kitchen table. First John, and now Cecil, gone within a matter of weeks.

Mother asked Edna for a glass of something stiff. Edna lifted her hands from the butler sink in the scullery, dried them on her apron and took a bottle of cooking sherry out of the cupboard. She set down a thin-waisted glass, but Mother leant over her and took a whisky tumbler down instead.

‘Fill her up, please.’

Mother knocked it back and flung open the scullery door, Emily chasing behind her.

Emily was too late to catch her. She was already down at the vegetable garden kicking up the earth.

‘Mother! Please! Don’t do that. It’s John’s …’

‘It isn’t. It has nothing to do with your poor brother. He didn’t ever show an interest in farming and crops in all his twenty-four years. It’s just another of your ideas.’

Tears pricked at Emily’s eyes. Without a grave to tend, Mother might have found comfort in nurturing this garden and seeing it yield crops. Instead, Mother knocked it all up. Soil and tender shoots flew everywhere.

‘And what will Lady Radford say? Her titled relatives are losing sons like a flower surrenders its seeds to the wind. And I suppose you’ve heard about Lady Clara?’

Emily shook her head.

‘She’s gone to France to set up a hospital in an abbey near Paris with the French Red Cross. She’s taken her car to use as an ambulance.’

That stung Emily. Still Mother refused to see that Emily could and should be doing her bit too.

‘Meanwhile, Cecil has been dragged off to prison.’ Mother slowed down now. ‘I couldn’t go on if I was on my own, I really couldn’t.’ For a moment, she actually stopped and her steel-blue gaze settled on Emily’s face, her eyes searching. She steadied her hands on Emily’s shoulders and then her body collapsed as she gave into a sob. Emily filled with warmth and reached out to embrace Mother.

‘I need a lie-down,’ Mother said, straightening up and dusting down her skirt.

‘What is going to happen about the house?’ Emily blurted out. They couldn’t go on not communicating with one another if it was just the two of them. She had to do as John had asked and ensure they pulled together.

But the moment was gone. Mother returned to the house and closed the door behind her.

*

She dug up the seed potatoes herself, and dismantled the frames for the runner beans that had survived Mother’s rampage.

Pieter and Stefan, the Belgian refugees, came to help her plant the new rose bushes. The poor Belgians, who had come to England with nothing, were grateful that John had given them a safe home for the war. They would call it John’s Rose Garden.

All the while, Mother was in bed. Absent from life in all but body.

The rose bushes were already mature and within a week were budding up. As the green seams of the buds receded, crimson red pushed through.