Miss Clare Remembers and Emily Davis (9 page)

Dolly loved Mrs Davis dearly. Her warm and casual friendliness made her feel part of the family, and her self-assurance grew.

In the corner of the cottage living-room sat old Mr Davis, Emily's grandfather. He had been a carter, but now, unable to work regularly, he made a few pence by mending pots and pans for the neighbours. His right hand was encased in a black kid glove, which fascinated young Dolly.

One day, soon after her arrival at Beech Green, the old man caught the child's eyes fixed upon his hand. A soldering iron was heating in the open fire, and between his knees old Mr Davis held an upturned kettle.

'You be wondering why I keeps me glove on, I'll wager,' he grunted.

Dolly smiled shyly.

'Well, I ain't agoing to take it off to show you, me little maid, or you'd 'ave a fright. I ain't got much of me fingers left, if the truth be told.'

He bent forward, breathless with the effort, and removed the red-hot iron from the fire. Dolly, with a thrill of horror, saw how he held it gripped in the palm of his hand. He dipped the iron in a little tin on the fender, and a hot pungent smoke rose from the sizzling liquid.

'I was out in that of snowstorm for two days,' said the old man. 'Afore you was born or thought of, that was. In 1881—getting on for fourteen year ago. I'd taken a load of hay over to Springbourne that day, and it was snowing pretty lively as I went. But how the Hanover I got back as fur as I did that afternoon, I never could tell. Just this side of the downs I 'ad to give in. I cut the horses loose and said: "Git on 'ome, you two, while you can." I felt fair lonely watching them slipping and sliding down the hill, up to their bellies in snow, leaving me on me own.'

'You should have sat on one,' said Dolly gravely.

'Easier said than done,' grunted Mr Davis, applying his soldering iron to the kettle. There was silence while he surveyed his handiwork for a minute or two, and then he resumed.

'The snow was that thick, and swirling around so, them two horses vanished pretty quick. I could 'ear 'em snorting with fright and shaking their heads. They 'adn't seen nothing like it, you see. Nor me, for that matter.

'There I was, and I couldn't make up me mind to stop in the cart or try and plod on home and risk it.'

'What did you do?' asked Dolly.

'Risked it,' said the old man laconically. 'Risked it, and fell in a dam' ditch I never knew was there, and 'ad to stop there two days. I ain't seen nothing like that blizzard before or since. If it 'adn't a been for the two horses getting back I reckon I'd a been there still. They never got home till next day, and it took four chaps searching in turn to find me, it was that cruel.'

'Did you shout?' asked Dolly.

'I was past shouting after the first 'alf-hour,' answered Mr Davis, holding the kettle to the light and squinting inside it. 'By the time they dug me out I was as stiff as this 'ere iron. Stayed in bed a week, I did, and 'ad to 'ave three fingers and two toes plucked orf. The frost-bite, you see.'

Dolly nodded, appalled.

'I shan't forget 1881 in a 'urry,' said the old man, and thrust the soldering iron back into the red heart of the coals with a deft thrust of his maimed hand.

***

The Davises were not the only new friends. Francis and Mary Clare blossomed in their country surroundings, and the neighbourliness which they had missed so sorely in Caxley now seemed doubly dear.

The family had for so long been thrust in upon itself. The next door neighbours at Caxley, cross and aged, had been ever present in Mary's thoughts, and Dolly and Ada were often scolded for making a noise that might penetrate the thin dividing wall. Fear of strangers, and particularly of 'the marsh lot', kept country-bred Mary from making many friends in Caxley. Francis's illness and their pinching poverty were other factors in 'keeping themselves to themselves'.

Back in the country again, fellows of a small community, Mary and Francis felt their tension relax. A move is always an excitement in a village, and by the end of the first long day the family had met more than a dozen neighbours, some prompted by kindness, some by curiosity, who had called to welcome them.

Within a few weeks Francis had the cottage garden dug and planted, and found he had already promised to exhibit something in the local autumn flower show which was to be held at Fairacre. Mary, to her surprise, found that she had been persuaded to join the Glee Club, run on Friday nights by the redoubtable Mr Finch in his schoolroom.

'Us makes our own fun,' Mrs Davis said to Mary. ''Tis all very fine for the gentry to go to Caxley in their carriages for a ball at the Corn Exchange, but us ordinary folk, as goes on Shanks's pony, gets our fun in the village.'

And Mary, with her two little girls safely at school all day, and a husband back at work, was only too ready to join in the simple homely fun of which she had been starved for so long.

Dolly and Ada took to the village school like ducks to water. They had been well drilled at Caxley and found that the work here was well within their grasp. Their classmates were somewhat impressed by the two new girls who had experienced the superior instruction of a town school, and Dolly and Ada felt pleasantly distinguished.

The smaller numbers made school life much less frightening for timid Dolly, and gave Ada greater scope for her powers of leadership. In no time she was the acknowledged queen of the playground, and had all the younger children vying for her favours, and the thrill of 'playing with Ada'. Mr Finch, who hid a genuine fondness for children beneath his pompous veneer, was glad to have such a bright pupil among his scholars, and Mrs Finch, who had some difficulty with discipline, was relieved to find that Dolly was as sedate as she was hardworking.

But the greatest joy for Dolly in this happy new life was the discovery of the infinite beauties in the natural world about her. That first glimpse of Beech Green and the realisation that she had found her real home, was repeated daily in a hundred different ways. The walk to school took about a quarter of an hour, and revealed dozens of enchanting things.

In that first spring, Dolly discovered that a bed of white violets grew on the left-hand bank just before the farm gate. They were well hidden by fine dry grass, but their heady scent betrayed them, and the child exulted in the pure whiteness, enhanced by the spot of yellow stamens lurking in its depths, of each small flower. Almost opposite grew a rarer type of violet, almost pink in colour, which was much sought after by the little girls of Beech Green. Dolly soon grew wise enough to keep the news of its flowering to herself.

Nearer the school, the lane was shaded by elm trees which grew upon steep banks. Here Dolly found a pink and fleshy plant, which Mr Finch told her was toothwort. It was unattractive, and reminded Dolly of the pink pendulous sows in the farmyard as they lumbered about among their squealing young. But it had its fascination for the town-bred child, and she felt proud to see it put on the window-sill at school, neatly labelled by Mr Finch's own pen.

There were terrifying things too to encounter on the walk to school. Behind the farm gate, just beyond the violet bed, a dozen grey and white geese honked and hissed, stretching sinuous waving necks, and menacing the child with their icy blue eyes and cruel orange bills. Dolly shouted as bravely as the other children when the geese were safely barred, but sometimes the gate was open, and the geese paraded triumphantly up and down the lane. Then Dolly would scramble up the steep bank, over the roots of the elm trees and the toothwort, and try to gain the safety of the cornfield beyond, while the geese stretched their great wings and ran, hideously fast, creating a clamour that could be heard a mile away.

The geese were frightening enough, but even more disconcerting was Mabel, who lived in a cottage half way to school. She was a grotesque, misshapen figure, almost as broad as she was tall, the victim of some glandular disease which was incurable at that time. Mentally she was aged about six, although she had been born thirty years earlier, and she played with a magnificent doll all day long. In the winter Mabel was invisible to Beech Green, for she was closely, and lovingly, confined in the stuffy little house by her doting parents. But during the warm weather the pathetic stumpy figure sat in a basket chair placed on the front path. From there she watched the neighbours go by as she nursed the expensive doll.

'Them poor Bells,' the villagers said, with genuine sympathy, ''as got enough to drive them silly theirselves with that Mabel. Got to be watched every minute of the day! But don't 'er mother keep 'er beautiful?'

Cleanliness was a much-prized virtue in Beech Green, and Mabel was held up as a shining example of Mrs Bell's industry. The poor idiot was always clothed in good quality dresses, covered with a snowy starched and goffered pinafore. Her coarse scanty hair, as bristly as that which grew upon the pigs' backs in the farmyard nearby, was tied back with a beautiful satin ribbon. Her podgy yellow face, from which two dark eyes glinted from slanting slits, was shiny with soap, and her fat little legs were always encased in the finest black stockings, with never so much as a pinpoint of a hole in sight.

To Dolly's terror, Mabel took an instant liking to her, and would waddle to the gate, holding up the doll and uttering thick guttural cries of pleasure. Dolly's first impulse was to run away, but her mother had spoken to her firmly.

'You can thank your stars you weren't born like Mabel, and just you be extra kind to that poor child—for child she is, for all her thirty years. No flinching now, if she comes up to you, and you let her touch you too, if she's a mind to! She's as gentle as a lamb, and the Bells have enough to put up with without people giving their only one the cold shoulder!'

And so Dolly steeled herself to smile upon the squat unlovely figure behind the cottage gate, and sometimes put a violet or two into that thick clumsy hand, and admired the doll with sincerity. She never saw Mabel outside the house or the garden, and never understood one word that fell from those thick lips; but when, in three or four years' time, the child mercifully died, she missed her sorely, and could only guess at the loss suffered by Mr Bell, and still more by Mrs Bell, whose clothes line had fluttered daily with the brave array of Mabel's finery.

Looking back later, to those early days at Beech Green, Miss Clare was amazed to think how many subnormal and eccentric people there were among that small number in those late Victorian days. There were many reasons. Inbreeding was a common cause, for lack of transport meant that the boys and girls of the village tended to marry each other, and the few families there became intricately related. Lack of skilled medical attention, particularly during childbirth, accounted for some deformities of mind and body, and the dread of mental hospitals—sadly justified in many cases—kept others from seeking help with their problems. Certainly, when Dolly first went to live at Beech Green, there were half a dozen souls in the neighbourhood who were as much in need of attention as poor Mabel.

There was the boy who had epileptic fits, who sat in the desk next to Ada, and was looked upon with more affection than distress by his classmates, as the means of enlivening Mr Finch's boring lessons. There was old Mrs Marble, who gibbered and shook her fist at the children from the broken window of her filthy cottage near the school, and who would certainly have been ducked in the horsepond had she had the misfortune to have been born a century earlier. There was a very nasty man who delighted in walking about the woods and lanes with his trousers over his arm, frightening the women and little girls out of their wits, but excused by the men as 'only happening when the moon was at the full, poor fellow.'

Then there were the three White children, abysmally slow at lessons, but with tempers of such uncontrollable violence that the whole school went in terror of them. How much of this vicious frenzy was due to mental disorder, and how much to their parents' treatment of it, was debatable. It was the custom of Mr and Mrs White to lock their refractory offspring in a cupboard under the stairs where, in the smelly darkness among the old shoes and coats that hung there, they were allowed to scream, sob, fight, pummel the door, and exhaust their hysteria before being let out again, some hours later, white and wild-eyed and ready to fall into their nightmarehaunted beds.

Even the great ones of the village had their sufferings. The lady of the manor, Mrs Evans, whose visits to the school meant much curtseying and bobbing, had one frail chick among her six sturdy ones, and Miss Lilian was never seen without a maid or her governess in attendance ready to direct her charge's wan looks towards anything of cheer.

As young Dolly soon discovered, Beech Green had its darker side, the reverse of the bright flower-decked face which charmed the newcomers. But it all added to the excitement of daily living. It gave the solemn little girl a chance to observe human frailties and quirks of behaviour, and gave her too an
insight into the courage and good humour with which her fellows faced personal tragedy.

These early lessons were to stand her in good stead, for before long she too would be involved in a family disaster whose repercussions were to echo down many years of her adult life.