This Cold Country Read online

  Daisy had once accompanied Valerie to the small market town nearby and the two girls had shopped together at Boots. Daisy watched as Valerie shopped for beauty products that she, Daisy, had never considered buying and, in some cases, had not known existed. Once a month Daisy stocked up on sanitary towels and such minor necessities as shampoo, toothpaste, stamps, and writing paper. Otherwise she saved her wages. She felt rich and pleasantly aware that at some stage a treat would present itself—for she, too, knew that the war devastating Europe would offer her freedoms and opportunities she had not been brought up to expect—and then she would have the saved days off, and money to be able to indulge herself fully.

  Queen-of-puddings followed the rabbit stew; Daisy helped herself enthusiastically. She was always hungry and ate three meals a day with appetite and enjoyment. Like the deep hot baths, well cooked food was a luxury she had not been used to before coming to Aberneth Farm; she associated it with the long days and hard physical work of the farm. She was happy, satisfied, pleasantly full of good food and aware that within an hour, before she had finished digesting her meal, she would be asleep.

  “I thought Patrick was rather taken with you,” Rosemary said, further depressing Valerie.

  Daisy looked puzzled. There was nothing coy about her confusion; it was merely that she had thought James, the younger and more attractive of the two officers, to have shown more interest.

  Chapter 2

  DAISY WAS RIPPED untimely—half past five—from the comfortable warm dark of her bed by the alarm clock. The room was bitterly cold. The peacetime house was centrally heated—George, Rosemary’s husband, was, if not rich, at least well enough off to live comfortably—but during the war all heat in the house emanated from either the Aga cooker in the kitchen or from individual wood-burning fireplaces. There was a small grate fireplace in Daisy’s room and she had even once on her Sunday off, lit a fire and spent the afternoon reading in bed and napping. A morning fire was not justified since she needed to be at the milking shed fifteen minutes after she had forced herself out of bed. Dressing quickly, putting on her knickers and socks before she took off her flannel nightdress, and averting her eyes from the bed for whose comfortable warmth she would that moment have given a year of her life, Daisy struggled into her clothes: two pairs of socks, a woolen vest under a sweater, a cardigan, and her uniform britches. When she was dressed, she left her room, walked quietly through the dark and silent house—she was the first one up—down the stairs, across the hall to the small room in which fishing rods, guns, riding boots, game bags, and the other accoutrements and protective clothing of sport were kept. Not all designed for the seasonal killing of small, usually edible, animals; there were also, for the summer months, a collection of tennis racquets in wooden presses and a croquet set. Dust and the occasional fine cobweb covered most of this equipment, since it pertained largely to peacetime pleasures. Though Rosemary, who was an accomplished fisherwoman, had occasionally spent a warm evening beside the small river that flowed along one side of the farm.

  Daisy pulled on her gumboots, stuffed her wool-covered arms into her overcoat, put on her hat and gloves, and opened the front door. She bicycled through the icy darkness down the avenue, the cold of the frozen metal handlebars penetrating the worn rubber grips and thick gloves to her aching fingers. There was enough light from the moon to silhouette the trees on either side. Nothing moved; it was as though they were frozen in place. Had she not been so cold, Daisy would have found the landscape mysterious and beautiful.

  The winter—the first winter of the war—was bitter, the coldest in many years. Flocks of birds had swept down on the berry-bearing trees and bushes and stripped them of every edible particle. Birds that now were to be seen dead, frozen in place on branches of the leafless trees.

  Daisy was used to the crunch of her bicycle wheels on the frozen mud, and puddles that looked as though thin, opaque glass had been shattered to show the dark brown water beneath. The leafless trees had become sculpture, the evergreens self-contained or, in the case of the rhododendron, drooping and defeated, playing dead and waiting for the spring thaw. Frost, ice, and freezing cold were common at Aberneth Farm; snow was unusual and its consequences visual rather than practical. All that winter it could be seen covering the top of the distant hills.

  Five minutes later she arrived at the milking shed. The cows were moving slowly, but with purpose, toward the shed. All but one—Duchess, the only mixed breed in the herd of black-and-white Friesians, and Daisy’s favorite—would amble to their places, stick their heads through the bails, and begin to munch the hay provided to keep them from becoming restless while they were milked.

  Daisy worked in the milking shed washing the milking machines and, if the milkers were shorthanded, stripping down the cows—hand-milking the last drops that the machine had not squeezed from their teats. Stripping down was the part of her work that Daisy enjoyed most. She liked cows; she found their unhurried gait calming. She liked their dreamy gaze and the way, in summer, they would stand immobile, chewing the cud, occasionally flicking away a fly with a swish of the tail, while staring at the horizon. She liked the sound milk made as it hit the metal pail and the simple rhythm set by the alternating jets bouncing off the bucket. She liked the smell of cows, and most of all, on those winter mornings, she liked their warmth. Sixty cows in a milking shed generated a certain amount of heat; an individual cow provided a warm flank for Daisy to rest her forehead on as she stripped down the teats so much warmer than her painfully cold and stiff fingers.

  Unfortunately, though this morning was a stripping down morning—some of the milkers having claimed accumulated time off to sleep in before chapel—the greater part of Daisy’s work took place in a cement-floored room adjacent to the shed. It was where she washed the milking equipment. The milking machines and churns were washed in cold water. They had to be kept spotlessly clean; every surface needed to be scoured and every angle and crevice thoroughly scrubbed. Daisy had a hose with good water pressure and scrubbing brushes of different shapes and sizes, but she suffered dreadfully from the pitiless cold. Cold water on the cold damp concrete made her feet ache, and her hands were raw, red, and, this winter, covered with chilblains.

  The chilblains, three on her right hand, one on her left, had developed when the weather had first become relentlessly cold. In every other way, Daisy was healthier than she had been when she joined up. She took more exercise, she slept better, and she ate more and probably healthier food. The jacket of the coat and skirt she had worn on the last prewar Sunday no longer fitted her, although the skirt did; her shoulders were broader and she was sometimes surprised by the hardness of the muscles in her upper arms.

  Daisy was hungry; she was tired; she was very cold. She felt lonely, neglected, hard done by, although she didn’t connect all these feelings or add to them that it had been a very long time since she had felt an affectionate or prolonged touch from another human being. Instead, she felt a tear trickle down her cheek, and she thought, I want my mother.

  Her mother, she thought, not without humor although a matching tear rolled down from her other eye, would not be much use to her this morning. Daisy’s father had three services to conduct—Holy Communion twice and a sermon—and although the unemotional atmosphere of the rectory precluded panic, there would be the usual anxiety about surplices and misplaced glasses and gloves.

  The rector had three surplices, none of them new; the household economy of the rectory did not lend itself to reserves of linen of any kind, either for divine worship or for bedding. Mrs. Creed tried to make the surplices last. She darned, snipped frayed edges, and tried not to launder them too often. During the summer it was easier; she left the drying laundry out to bleach in the sun. Bewildered bees would be thwarted on their journeys to the purple and blue flowers on the rosemary bushes by the voluminous stretches of white cloth, with embroidered and lace cuffs, that now covered them. The surplices, her father used to say, had a pleasant herbal scent th
at sometimes inspired—or distracted—him while conducting services.

  Daisy leaned her forehead against Duchess’s flank, feeling a little comfort from the sensation of life beside her; her hands were too cold to draw any feeling of warmth from Duchess’s teats. Her fingers seemed as thick as the teats and she saw that one of her chilblains had split open; it was raw and oozing. She started to cry, without pausing in the rhythm that drew the last drops of milk from the independent cow’s teats. Two or three of her tears dropped into the milk.

  Rosemary greeted Daisy on her return to the hall.

  “Happy Christmas, Daisy dear,” she said, and then noticing the misery behind Daisy’s smile, although the tears had long since been conquered, “What’s the matter?”

  “My chilblain burst,” Daisy said, sounding to herself like a child. “And, like most of the population, I’m cold.”

  “Take off your gloves and boots, and I’ll paint them for you.” Rosemary had already given Daisy the medicine that ameliorated the symptoms of, but didn’t cure, chilblains. But she knew that being taken care of would to some extent make up for Daisy not being allowed to warm her hands or feet by the fire or to immerse them in hot water, either temporary relief being the worst thing one could do for chilblains. The liquid that Rosemary dabbed on Daisy’s toes and fingers was blue and seemed both old-fashioned and magical. When her toes were dry she slipped them into her bedroom slippers and went in to breakfast.

  “Coffee,” Rosemary announced proudly. “The last pound from before the war. And marmalade. Coffee and Seville oranges are going to be one of the great pleasures of peace.”

  Valerie was on leave, so there were only Daisy, Rosemary, and an overexcited Sarah at the breakfast table. Sarah was bouncier than usual.

  “The smell of marmalade, the smell of freshly ground coffee—after the war I’ll keep the door to the kitchen open.”

  “Look at Sarah,” Daisy said. “She’s the only one who doesn’t think about ‘after the war.’”

  “She was awake all night—weren’t you, darling?—I have to keep myself from apologizing to her for this modified Christmas.”

  “It doesn’t seem modified to me,” Daisy said politely, sincerely. “A fire at breakfast, holly on the mantelpiece, and real coffee and marmalade.”

  “I know, but I feel guilty and responsible and at the same time rather like a character out of Little Women.”

  “Little Women. It was the first chapter book I read for myself. My mother gave up in disgust just after the Christmas scene you’re thinking of—I can see, now, it embarrassed her. I finished it on my own and wept over it.”

  “I’m afraid I might weep over it now with George away at the war and the small sad presents I’m giving this year.”

  “Presents,” Sarah said. She gestured with her spoon, smiling and overexcited.

  “After breakfast,” her mother said, with unconvincing firmness. “When you’ve eaten all your porridge.”

  Sarah patted her food happily with her spoon, but did not use it to carry any to her mouth.

  “Presents,” she said again, this time almost in a whisper.

  Daisy was reminded of the comparative privilege of Rosemary’s life when she saw the presents for which Rosemary had, not only from good-mannered modesty, apologized. And again she thought how gracefully Rosemary carried that privilege. Sarah tore off the paper that wrapped her presents; the garish reds and crude greens of the botanically incorrect holly pattern, on any other day, would not have been found in the library. Sarah was the only one to tear into the paper and, even so, her mother managed to salvage most of it and sat, absentmindedly refolding it, as she watched her daughter’s delight.

  The Christmas tree was in the library. A wartime Christmas tree, a little smaller than the ones that had stood in the hall in the years before Daisy had come to Aberneth Farm. There was no practical reason for a smaller tree—regardless of the size, it would be cut from the woods at Aberneth Farm and the morning after Twelfth Night chopped up for firewood—but Rosemary had made Christmas a smaller, cozier celebration than it had been in the past. A more intimate, feminine affair.

  When Sarah stopped tearing open packages to play with a dolls’ tea set—tiny china plates, cups, and saucers that, without being antique or valuable, clearly had not come from a toy shop—Daisy and Rosemary opened their own packages. It had been suggested by Rosemary, and gratefully agreed to by Daisy, that not only all presents but also Christmas letters and cards should be saved for Christmas morning. Not for the first time, Daisy marveled that Rosemary—a grown-up married woman and a mother, but not so many years older than herself—should have such finely developed instincts and tact.

  As though reading Daisy’s grateful thoughts, Rosemary smiled at her.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “For your sake, I’m sorry you’re not with your family but, selfishly, for Sarah and me, I’m happy you’re here. I’m not quite sure I could have pulled it off without you.”

  Sometime around the beginning of November, Daisy had started to worry about Christmas. She knew Rosemary would get it right, but she was less confident in her own part in the festivities. She gave a good deal of thought to presents, to what she should give Sarah and Rosemary. In the end, the problem had solved itself almost effortlessly. On leave, at home with her family, her grandmother—her mother’s mother, who lived at the rectory, ignoring her son-in-law and quarreling with her daughter, more often the cause of problems than the solution to others not of her own making—had asked Daisy what she planned to give Rosemary and Sarah for Christmas. Without waiting for a reply, her grandmother told her that she would make Sarah one of her patchwork pigs. She added that she was already embroidering six small linen handkerchiefs with Rosemary’s initial. When Daisy had tried to thank her, her grandmother had dismissively waved her gratitude away.

  “It isn’t as though your poor mother can be much help to you,” she said, and Daisy, still thankful, realized she had once again become a pawn in her grandmother’s battle with her daughter. Daisy’s mother didn’t need pawns or hostages since she was, most of the time, actually or tactically unaware of her mother’s barbs.

  Sarah was now unwrapping her pig. Daisy’s grandmother had taken fragments of pink and red, some of them patterned—checked and floral—from her patchwork bag and had fashioned them into a loosely stuffed pig. When Daisy had wrapped it for Sarah, she had found it mysteriously evocative. After a moment she had realized that some of the patches were familiar, and she sat down on her bed and looked carefully at both sides of the pig. She recognized a patch from a dressing gown she had worn as a small child, a hand-me-down from her sister; she had loved its pink warmth and the white bunny rabbits patched onto the small pockets. There was also a scrap from a slightly later velvet party dress and a summer skirt of her mother’s. The other patches were less familiar, some not at all; her grandmother had cast a wide net in her quest for material for her pigs. She had completed the stuffed animal with a small tail made from strands of wool, and the eyes were covered buttons. The pig was soft enough for a little girl to put her head on as she went to sleep.

  Her grandmother had knitted Daisy a pair of thick socks, the kind that came up to the knee. Rosemary had given her two pairs of fine stockings; stockings were now hard to come by and Daisy found it hard to imagine a circumstance that would justify her wearing them.

  Rosemary was silent as she read her Christmas letters; she spent a little time and a sad smile on the two pages from her husband that she had, with admirable self-control, kept unopened for four days. Daisy thought perhaps George was capable of a little more sentiment in the written word than he appeared to be in person. He seemed, to Daisy, middle-aged and a little rough. At the end of a recent weekend leave, Daisy had been shocked that his parting endearment to his wife had been “old girl” and his last physical gesture an affectionate pat on the bottom.

  Daisy opened the cards and letter from her family. There were two others; on
e from a girl with whom she had been at school, now a nurse in a hospital in the Midlands, and one that bore the stamp of a military origin. Inside the second was a card—a good quality reproduction on thick, stiff white paper of a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth with a rather affecting little ermine, its neck circled by a small, ornate, gold coronet, on her lap.

  Daisy opened the card. Inside was written:

  This made me think of you.

  Happy Christmas,

  Patrick

  Daisy laughed and Rosemary looked up. Daisy handed her the card.

  “Ah, Patrick,” she said, smiling also. “He’s my favorite and also my most distantly related cousin. There’s probably a connection that doesn’t bear going into.”

  Rosemary, Daisy, and even Sarah were going to evensong, so after breakfast, Daisy went up to her room. One of her presents was a copy of Cold Comfort Farm and she was going to read in bed and then sleep until lunchtime.

  Apart from the faint sadness of being young and unmated, which Daisy often felt when she was alone and not engaged in physical work, and the itching of her chilblains, she was happy.

  “Marmalade,” she murmured happily, just before she drifted off to sleep.

  AT ANY GIVEN moment of the day Daisy had a reasonable expectation of being able to picture her family, or at least her parents and grandmother—her sister Joan’s life, since she had enlisted in the WRNS, was a little harder to imagine and not one evoked by Daisy during her rare moments of homesickness—going about their everyday lives. They were creatures of habit and her father’s parochial duties provided milestones of obligation throughout the day and week. Christmas Day was easy to imagine. Daisy could be reasonably sure that her mother’s domestic ineptitude and lack of interest would have, as it had even before the shortage of many of the imported ingredients of a traditional Christmas lunch added to the problem, produced an overcooked and unappetizing meal; that her grandmother’s disapproval had been voiced or mimed; that her tired father was attempting to maintain his Christmas spirit until evensong.