Born of Woman (13 page)

Strange how little Lyn ever mentioned his father. True, he had never known him, but didn't he ever
think
about him, speculate, wonder how things might have been had Thomas lived? It was as if Hester had loomed so large in his life, there wasn't room for a father, not even thoughts of him.

Jennifer rummaged in the trunk again, picked out a
Letter Book
, copies of correspondence in staid and careful copperplate, all of them relating to the farm. Records of rents and tenancies, interest rates and wages. As she read, Hernhope surged and expanded, prospered, shivered, fell.

She was suddenly greedy to be part of all this history, to keep it going, further it. She
was
already part of it—a Winterton, the same name which had marched through all those letters, collected all those monies, shot and stalked and hunted, given birth and died. It was as if these books and records were underlining what she had felt already, out in the sunset and the snow. Almost like a calling—something urging her to stay here, add their story to the house, carry on its history and tradition, make Hernhope live again. Why should the name and house become a ruin? She had seen other ruins dotted on the hills, once cherished houses left to crumble, weeds choking them, snow spitting in their faces. Hernhope was too ancient and too precious to end as a heap of stones.

All the history of the house was there beneath her hands—ledgers and account books, annals and anthologies, catalogues from shops and sales, manuals for machinery—endless records joining her to all Lyn's ancestors, linking her with Hester. Her hands were grimed and gritty, a soft dust had settled on her clothes. The insistent reek of antiseptic fumes had filled the whole cellar now like some vital elixir, fusing her childhood with her future. She was cold, cramped, uncomfortable, yet she hardly cared. It was as if she had entered some strange, soundless other century.

She dug deeper into the chest. At the very bottom, jammed beneath a Bible so large she could barely lift it, was a bulky package wrapped in newspaper. She dragged it out, feeling excitement mixed with guilt. It had obviously been hidden there. She fumbled with the wrappings, revealed a large brown envelope sealed with sticky tape and a cache of notebooks strung together, some with stiff-backed mottled covers, others cheap and scraggy like school jotters. She opened the one on top. Every page was covered with close-packed script in a bold and vigorous hand. She recognised that hand. It was younger, firmer, but still the distinctive writing she had seen on Hester's Christmas letters. Only Hester gave her l's those strange bulging loops, crossed her t's with that over-emphatic stroke as if she were angry with them.

The only gaps in the writing were those between one day's date and the next. The dates were written out in full, and underlined. The thing must be a diary—Hester's diary—books and books of it. She shouldn't pry. Diaries were always private and Hester sounded the most strictly private person ever born. She must return the books to their wrappings and go upstairs to Lyn. She had been so deep in his past, she had almost forgotten he was a living person with a streaming cold.

Her eye trespassed down the page, took in a date or two. 1914. So this was a
child's
diary—well, still half and half a child. Hester was as old as the century, so she had been fourteen when she wrote it. That made it different, surely. It was probably only some school thing anyway, some trifling teenage outpouring. It couldn't hurt to read a bit.

‘31st October 1914. A telegram arrived this morning. My brother has been killed in Ypres. I cried all day. My mother appeared at dinner, but could not speak. I had already bought his birthday present. He would have been nineteen in a fortnight.'

Jennifer stared in horror at the page. An eighteen-year-old stripling snuffed out in the mud and carnage of the trenches, and before war had hardly started. She tried to read no further, but the words sobbed and stumbled on, written by a schoolgirl already dressed in mourning. Simple misspelt sentences mopping up world wars, riversful of carnage flowing between a quiet, sedate account of a country childhood. Yellowed photographs of battle scenes, torn raggedly from newspapers, slipped between pages describing boating trips or strawberry parties. Anguished letters from her eldest brother, nicknamed Tubby, still alive, but fighting at the Marne.

‘
My dearest sister
…' Fancy loops and arabesques describing bullet wounds and sieges. The vellum was expensive, the writing was an officer's. Hester's family was clearly rich, respected. She wrote about ponies, servants, her mother's social round. So how had she become a humble house-keeper? What had happened to her? Why had she been driven into service when her family was high-born and superior, with servants of its own?

Jennifer turned page after page, then moved to the second notebook. The same padded leather cover and heavy expensive paper recording war, losses, death—Tubby blown to bits by a grenade; then only six weeks later, her last remaining brother shot down at Messines. Hester's father collapsing with a stroke brought on by grief and shock. The widow bravely struggling on, staunching her tears for the sake of her two daughters—the only children left now.

Hester rarely mentioned her sister, despite the fact the girls seemed close in age. Had they been jealous of each other, Ellen prettier than Hester, or favoured by the parents? Jennifer went on reading, found Ellen featured again—both girls staying with their grandmother in a summer by the sea Hester recorded all the details—swimming, shrimping, rainstorms, a fall off a cousin's bicycle, ices on the pier. There were even a few photographs leafed between the pages, their backgrounds brown and faded, their subjects speckled with mould—a moustachioed man in a one-piece bathing-suit, a woman with a parasol strolling on the sea-front, a shot of crashing waves.

But after that visit to the grandmother, dated July 1918, the entries suddenly stopped. The rest of the notebook was blank, its pages empty and unused. What had happened to the diarist? There had been gaps before, sometimes of several months, but the writing had always started up again. Was she ill, busy, mourning, or had she simply wearied of scribbling all those words?

No, the diaries continued in a score of other notebooks, going right up to the forties. Jennifer rubbed her eyes, eased her aching legs. She would need days and days to read them all. She ought to pack them away now and start again in the morning, with Lyn to share her find. Yet she had reached such a crucial point, it was impossible to stop. 1918 was the most momentous year of the war and July its turning-point. November would bring the Armistice, the end of the war to end all wars. She burned to know what Hester had written about it, her feelings of relief, what victory celebrations she had witnessed.

She opened the next notebook in the pile—the war must be continued there. No. That was headed 1920 and the next one a year later. So where were the months between? She could find nothing until February 1919 which was the date on the thinnest, cheapest notebook, tucked away at the bottom of the pile. No stiff cover this time or heavy expensive paper. Even the writing seemed to have fallen off in quality and was now so cramped and squashed together, Jennifer could hardly make it out. It was as if Hester had made it deliberately illegible.

‘22/2', she deciphered. So Hester had jumped ahead from the summer, ignoring all the drama and upheavals of the last lap of the war and the first sweet months of peace. Perhaps she was too shocked and overcome by her bereavements to share in the general rejoicing, and had only picked up her pen again after a spell of private mourning.

Jennifer held the page closer to the lamp, which was dimming now and flickering. Slowly, she made the words out.
‘St Saviour's Hostel, Southwark. Today my son was born after twenty hours in labour. I was mostly left alone. He is nine pounds and bald.'

Jennifer stared.
What
son? Hester had borne no child until her forties. Even Matthew, who was only her charge and not her child, had not arrived till 1934. This was 1919. And why was she in Southwark? Molly had told her Hester's family came from Fernfield. She was a native there, a country girl. She had just been reading about that country life in Hester's own words. The snug Northumbrian mansion with its gardens and its stables, the local ties and friendships, the secure and solid family. Where were they all when Hester had her baby? Why was she left alone and in a hostel?

Jennifer stared at the page again. She had stumbled on a scandal, some secret buried for over sixty years. Hester's baby must surely have been illegitimate. That would explain her sudden flight to London. There was no record of a marriage, no reference to a husband. Molly had mentioned neither. Hester for her was just the housekeeper, and one who had never had a child till Lyn was born, twenty long years later.

Lyn! This would be an utter shock to him. She was almost certain he knew nothing of Hester's past. He had often said how reticent she was, how little she had told him. All he knew was that she had led a hard and blinkered life with stern and modest parents long since dead. But now this puritanical mother appeared to have flouted all her own rules, fallen pregnant at eighteen with no husband on the scene, and been forced to flee from a grand and gracious home. How would Lyn feel to know he was no longer her first-born, had never been her unique and only son? He had never had to share her before, not even with a husband or a father. There had been always just the two of them, almost oppressively exclusive, Hester's rigid moral standards shutting out the world. A bastard brother would break all that apart, make Lyn doubt his own identity, sow new resentment and confusion in his mind.

Other men might take the whole thing lightly, treat a deceased mother's teenage pregnancy as little more than a long-forgotten escapade with no bearing on their lives. But Lyn was so unpredictable, there was no knowing what he'd do. He was in mourning already for an old and respected mother who had led a chaste and blameless life. It would be a double death to kill her off and replace her with this lax and reckless girl.

A thousand questions were whirling through Jennifer's head. What had happened to the child? Who had fathered it and why had he disappeared? Where had Hester gone from Southwark? Yet she hardly dared read on. She had already trespassed too far, unravelled a past kept locked and barricaded for a lifetime. Supposing she discovered some still more damaging secret? A baby abandoned somewhere, cruelly treated …

Fearfully, she turned the page—found only a list of prices on the next one—random jottings, doodlings, blots. The diary started up again in March and still with a Southwark heading. Jennifer raced through the entries, seeking some reference to the child. Had it been adopted, left behind at the hostel, or kept secretly by Hester down in London? There was nothing, nothing. Not the slightest mention of a baby, no record of its growth (or even death), no correspondence with children's home or foster-parent. There were very few personal details at all, until Hester applied for a job in a large hotel and moved her lodgings. Even then, she presented herself as single, a modest young girl with only herself to support.

If Lyn found out that his strict and sinless mother had not only had a bastard child, but had turned her back on it, perhaps even left it to die of cold or exposure … Jennifer shuddered. She mustn't dramatise. There was no proof of that at all. Yet why had Hester lived so closed and strange a life? Why did people seem so hostile to her? Perhaps her secret had seeped out and harmed her reputation.

She turned to the later notebooks, the ones written in the ‘thirties, when Hester had come to Hernhope. Was there some clue there, perhaps? No. Again, she had come single and childless—a simple spinster housekeeper to Thomas Winterton and Matthew Thomas Charles, his baby son. The entries were briefer now, mostly recording her work. Hester hadn't time for ponies, parties, long indulgent ramblings, only household chores and farmwork or attending to the child. Matthew featured often.
‘The child was awake five hours last night with croup. Mr Winterton was not disturbed.' Matthew refused to eat again this morning.' ‘My charge continues sick and under sized'.
Nan had already mentioned Matthew's puniness, but how much more vivid it was in Hester's words, and with all the problems of the farm erupting in the background.
‘A third of our lambs were lost in the recent snowstorm'.‘The vet came again but could do nothing for the cow. It seems that we shall lose her'.

The squallings of the 'thirties burst into the shriek of a second bloody war. Thomas Winterton, as farmer, was excused from active service. Bombs were rarely heard in Mepperton. Evacuees from Newcastle stared at cows and wept for trolley-buses. The war dragged on through yet another notebook. D-day wasn't recorded. There were more omissions now. Was Hester just too busy, or had she lost her will to write about a broken world?

A few thin pages covered eight long years. Jennifer turned to 1948, the year that Lyn was born. The diary stopped long before his birthday. There was one last entry, the writing wobbly, stumbling, bursting into tears of blots.

‘I am writing this the day my husband died. If you can call him husband. We were married a few short months and he will never see his child.'

Tears were pricking at Jennifer's eyes. Hester seemed to have been built for tragedy. Her father and three brothers dead before she was twenty—her youth and home and status lost as well. Pregnant and presumably disowned for it, she had fled to the shame and loneliness of London, swapping her party flounces for a cap and apron. The baby she had suffered for had died or disappeared. When, at last, she returned to her native Northumberland, it was not to her family, but as a servant and a stranger, and with no one she could really call her own. A second war added hardships, shock and struggle. Then, at Molly Bertram's age, the husband she had lacked for half a lifetime died after a few months' marriage, leaving her pregnant, bankrupt and alone.