Where Bluebells Chime

‘And I think I want you, Tim. When you touch me and kiss me something goes boing inside me and I think how lovely it would be to make a baby with you.’

They had stopped walking again and she stepped away from him because all at once she knew that if he held her close, laid his mouth on hers, there would be no crying, ‘No, Tim!’ because she wouldn’t want to say it.

‘Make a baby! Are you mad? I could get killed any night and then where would you be?’

‘Pregnant and alone, I suppose, and people would call me a tart.’

‘And would you care?’

‘Only that you were dead,’ she said softly, sadly. ‘But it doesn’t arise because I wouldn’t know what to do. I’ve never done it before …’

The pulsating need between them had passed now. They linked little fingers and began their upward climb and she didn’t know whether to be sad or glad.

‘I’d teach you, henny. And there wouldn’t be any babies. No mistakes – I’d see to that. They tell you how to keep your nose clean in the RAF – if you don’t already know, that is.’

‘So you know how?’ She felt mildly cheated. ‘You’ve made love before, Tim?’

‘Aye. It was offered, so I took it. It wasn’t lovemaking though, because I didn’t love her. It would be different with you, sweetheart. We’d be special together.’

‘We wouldn’t. I’d spoil it thinking about Grandmother Petrovska.’

‘Not when I make love to you you won’t!’

They scuffed the lately flowering heather as they walked, not looking at each other.

‘So shall we, Tim …?’

‘Aye. When the mood is on us. It doesn’t happen to order, you know – leastways not for a man.’

‘And will I know when?’

‘Oh, my lovely love – you’ll know when.’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Darling lassie, we’ll both know.’

‘There, now.’ Catchpole straightened up, hands in the small of his back. ‘That’s them seen to. Plenty for the house and for me and Lily, and two score extra for the vegetable man. Just got them in in nice time for the rain.’

‘But how do you know it’s going to rain?’

‘A gardener alus knows, Gracie. Don’t need no newspapers nor men on the wireless to tell me what the weather’s going to be like. A drop of nice steady rain towards nightfall and them sprouts’ll be standing up straight as little soldiers in the morning. You’ll learn, lass.’

‘I hope so, Mr C. I like being here.’ She liked everything about being a land girl except being away from Mam and Dad and Grandad. ‘I had a letter from Drew this morning. He said he’d write, but I never expected him to.’

‘Why not? Drew don’t say things he don’t mean.’

‘I’m sure he doesn’t, but he’s a sir, and I come from mill folk.’

‘He’s a sailor and you’m a friend and sailors like getting letters. You write back to him and tell him about the garden and what we’re doing, so he can see it all as if it was real.’

‘But he didn’t give me an address. He just put Somewhere in England and the date, because he’s expecting to be sent to a ship, he says.’

‘Then he’ll send it later, or you can get it from Daisy Dwerryhouse. She’ll have it, that’s for sure, her being related.’

‘Mmm. I know she’s his half-sister, but how come?’ Gracie concentrated on wiping clean her fork and spade before putting them away; one of Mr Catchpole’s ten commandments. ‘What I mean is – well, I know Mrs Dwerryhouse is Drew’s real mother, but she’s the gamekeeper’s wife now, and you’d think the gentry wouldn’t be so friendly with their servants – and I don’t mean that in a snobby way,’ she hastened.

‘I know you didn’t, lass. And to someone as don’t know the history of the Suttons – both families – it might seem a bit peculiar. But Daisy’s mam came to Rowangarth a bit of a lass nigh on thirty years ago. Worked as a housemaid till they realized she’d a talent with a needle and thread, and so made her sewing-maid.’

He rinsed his hands at the standtap then dried them on a piece of sacking with irritating slowness.

‘And then, Mr Catchpole?’

‘Well, one summer – before the Great War it was – Miss Julia went to London to stay at her Aunt Anne Lavinia’s house. A maiden lady, Miss Anne Lavinia Sutton was and alus popping over to France, so her ladyship sent Alice with Miss Julia – Alice Hawthorn her was then. In them days, a young lady couldn’t go out alone, not even to the shops. Alice was a sort of – of …’

‘Chaperon?’

‘That’s the word! Any road, Alice went as chaperon and to see to Miss Julia’s clothes and things, and there was all sorts of talk below stairs when the two of them got back. For one thing, they’d got themselves into a fight with London bobbies and for another, Miss Julia had met a young man and them not introduced neither.’

‘So Daisy’s mam wasn’t very good at chaperoning?’

‘Nay. Nothing like that. Miss Julia had fallen real hard for that young man and her mind was made up. Headstrong she’s always been and not ten chaperons could have done much about it. A doctor that young man was, name of MacMalcolm. Was him seen to her when she got knocked out in the fight. That was the start of it.’

‘But I can’t imagine Mrs Sutton fighting, nor Mrs Dwerryhouse. What had they done?’

‘Gone to a suffragette meeting, that’s what. Those suffragettes were agitating for women to get a say in things. Women couldn’t vote, in those days.’ Jack Catchpole wasn’t altogether sure that giving votes to women had been a wise move, though he’d never said so within his wife’s hearing.

‘So then what?’

‘Then nothing, Gracie Fielding. It’s a quarter to six and time us was off home. Lily’ll have the supper on and her can’t abide lateness.’

‘But you’ll tell me some more tomorrow?’ The Sutton story had the makings of a love book about it, but unlike love stories it was real.

‘Happen I will. But what’s told within these walls isn’t for blabbing around the hostel, remember!’

‘Not a word. Hand on heart.’ Besides, she liked Drew and Daisy too much to pass on scandal about them – if scandal there was to be.

‘Right then, lass. We’ll shut up shop for the night. See you in t’morning.’

Amicably they walked together to the ornate iron gates that Catchpole regarded as his drawbridge and portcullis both, though Gracie knew they would not be chained and padlocked until he had made his final evening rounds – just to be sure. On the lookout for cats an’ things he’d assured her, but it was really, she supposed, to bid his garden good night.

‘Wonder what’ll be on the six o’clock news,’ Gracie murmured. ‘It’s worrying, isn’t it?’

‘It is. All those German bombers coming day after day cheeky as you like in broad daylight!’

‘But they aren’t getting it all their own way!’

‘No.’ And thank God for a handful of young lads and their fighters and for young girls, an’ all, that were in the thick of it. He wouldn’t want a lass of his firing an anti-aircraft gun. If they’d had bairns, that was. Happen, he thought as he clanged shut the gates, if him and Lily had no family to laugh over then they had none to worry over now. It worked both ways. ‘Good night, Gracie.’

‘’Night, Mr Catchpole. Take care.’

Reichmarshal Goering had sent a signal to his commanders that his Luftwaffe was to rid the skies of the Royal Air Force, though how the papers knew what Goering was saying to his underlings, or how our own fighter pilots knew the German bombers were on their way – as soon as they had taken off, almost – no one rightly knew. All the man in the street could be sure of – and the Ministry of Information could, sometimes, get it right – was that for every fighter we lost, the Luftwaffe paid three of their bombers for it. Talk even had it that one German bomber ace had asked Goering for a squadron of Spitfires to protect them on their raids over the south of England and that fat Hermann Goering hadn’t been best pleased about the request!