“Yes, Oi be. Sorry, Miss, Oi didn’t realise the train ’ad cum.”
The boy came shuffling across the yard dragging behind him a dilapidated-looking handcart, on which he put Mona’s suitcase.
“It be a tidy step,” he said, “but it won’t tike we no more than a quarter of the hour.”
They set out in the twilight. It was raining softly but steadily, and Mona wished she had a mackintosh. Soon she was soaked through and her hair lay damply against her cheeks.
‘Not a very good beginning,’ she thought to herself.
But she walked on without complaint, side by side with Bill, who was whistling tunelessly through a missing front tooth.
Nineteen
“Auntie Mona, look, there’s a big pussy in the garden.”
Mona, who was scrubbing the floor, straightened her back and got to her feet.
“Where, darling?” she asked.
The small boy pointed to the end of the garden where a large tabby cat was surrounded by an admiring ring of small children.
“It’s a lovely pussy,” Mona said. “Be very gentle with it or you will frighten it.”
“Will it hurt us?” asked the child.
“Not unless you are unkind to it,” Mona answered. “Stroke it, but I shouldn’t try to pick it up.”
She remembered last week that one of the toddlers had brought a kitten that he had found in the farmyard, holding it so tightly round its neck that the poor animal was more dead than alive by the time she could rescue it.
They meant well, but they were all town children who had never before had the handling of animals. Some of them were even afraid of the hens and at the sight of cows they clung to her with screams of terror. It was funny when one thought what they had been through. Most of them had lived in the very worst-bombed areas, and yet it was exceptional to have a child whose nerves were affected.
But some of them had suffered from sleeping permanently in underground shelters. They were pale, with dark shadows under their eyes and their thin white bodies seemed starved for sunshine and air. On the whole, the standard of health was a high one, but it was almost like a miracle to see how, after only a few weeks in the country, they filled out, became sturdier and daring and were always ready for a second helping at mealtimes.
When she looked at them, sitting round the long table in the dining room, Mona thought that they were worth all the backaches, all the weariness and the long hours of fatigue from which she had suffered since she came to Ivydene.
The staff of three were undoubtedly run off their feet. Matron was a capable woman who had retired shortly before the war from the charge of a big children’s hospital. Under her was Sister Williams, a trained nurse who had been for many years in private practice and who, while extremely knowledgeable, seemed to Mona to personify the inhibitions of her particular profession. She liked things ‘just so’, and she found it difficult to adapt herself to what, of necessity, must often be a patchwork job of expediency.
Matron had been promised two or even three other helpers when she had taken over Ivydene, but the only person who had arrived had been Mona. Their task was further complicated by the servant problem.
Fulton-under-Slough was a little west-country village where, before the war, the passing of two or three cars was an event of importance. Now, only five miles away, an aerodrome was being constructed and even nearer, on the outskirts of the village itself, a small factory had been started for the production of precision instruments. Although a large amount of skilled labour had been imported, there was also a demand for local workers and every girl in the village, and most of the married women who could spare the time, had offered their services. Domestic help was, therefore, at a premium and the only person Matron could get ‘to oblige’ was Gladys, a girl whom the neighbours described as “a softie.”
Gladys was certainly neither quick nor able and although she was willing enough, at times, her mind simply ceased to function.
“She’s often in a dream world,” Matron told Mona, “but any pair of hands seems to be better than none. At least she can cook a little.”
But Glady’s “little” was very little, and soon Mona found herself becoming proficient at every household task. Someone had to do the domestic work, and so they took it in turns.
Sister Williams made such heavy weather about her share that Matron and Mona often preferred to add to their own burden rather than listen to her grumbles. Sometimes, when Mona crawled upstairs almost too tired to undress, she would wonder if she too were living in a dream or whether all this was real.
She thought back over the years when she had lived in luxury – of her flat in Paris, where the concierge’s wife had looked after her and had been ready at any moment to cook her a meal fit for an epicure – of her apartment in New York, where an old woman had hurried in every morning, to keep the place spotless, and always, before she left to go back to Harlem, putting something appetising and delicious in the icebox for supper. It was amusing now to think of the hotels she had found uncomfortable, of the beds she had complained about, of the service that she had often described as “abominable.”
Now in an unheated bedroom, lying on a bed with a hard and lumpy mattress and a shortage of blankets, she wondered if, when peace came, she would ever grumble again. But even getting up in the freezing cold, cooking the breakfast, washing and dressing a dozen children, and being on one’s feet all day, was worthwhile, because it gave her a greater sense of satisfaction than anything she had ever done in her fife.
She was proud of her own capabilities – proud, too, that she could do all that was required of her. She had, of course, fits of depression and moments of desperate loneliness when she felt she could carry on no longer. And sometimes when a letter, forwarded by Mrs. Marchant, came from her mother or from Michael, it was hard not to renounce her self-appointed task and to take the next train back to Little Cobble.
Michael’s letters were pathetic. She knew that although he said very little, he was bewildered, uncertain and afraid. He did not understand what had happened, and his one fear was that he might lose her, that she might never return to him.
He asked her questions.
“Had he been too hasty? Had he demanded too much? If he had, she must forgive him and attribute it to a happiness that was beyond his control.”
“Poor Michael!” Mona whispered as she read these letters, and yet daily the knowledge grew within her that one day they would be able to be happy together and that their happiness would be all the more intense because of this voluntary separation.
Occasionally she allowed herself to answer him, but only occasionally, and then her letters were short and practical, speaking mostly of care and attention on the children of Ivydene. To her mother she wrote more fully, expressing her thoughts and her feelings and even hinting at her hopes for the future. A new intimacy had grown up between mother and daughter that had never been there before. It was very sweet to Mona to feel that she had someone in whom she could confide and speak of anything and everything which came into her mind.
Leaning over the window-sill to watch the children, she felt the spring sunshine on her face and raised her eyes to the sky. There were small, fleecy white clouds against the blue, blown along by a south wind, which seemed to carry the promise of summer. Already the trees were in bud and the crocuses were out in the flowerbeds, which the last owner of Ivydene had tended with such care. Now the garden was neglected and, by the summer, was likely to become a wilderness unless someone found time to work in it.
But the children wouldn’t care, Mona thought, watching them run after the cat who had escaped from their attentions and jumped out of reach on top of the brick wall. Their laughter and excited voices rang out and there was no mistaking that they were happy and that the world, so far as they were concerned, was a very wonderful place.
‘I’m wasting time,’ Mona thought.
She finished scrubbing the kitchen floor and put the brush and bucket away under the sink. Gladys had her points, but cleanliness was not one of them. As Mona dried her hands on the towel behind the door, she realised how much they had coarsened in the last two months. The short, unvarnished nails and the rough and reddened skin looked very different from the delicate white hands of which she had once been proud.
She thought of the men who had kissed her hands, Lionel and Michael especially, and with a smile that was half whimsical, half dismayed, she told herself that no-one would want to kiss them now!
There was no time for vanity at Ivydene.
Getting up when it was still dark Mona would pull on her clothes, run a comb through her hair and hurry downstairs without bothering even to look in a glass. It was funny how easily one grew to do without face creams and powder, without all the little aids to beauty that had once seemed so indispensable.
