This Cold Country Read online

  At that moment in the afternoon, though, she could have been reasonably sure of accurately picturing the greater part of the population of England; they were listening to the King’s Speech.

  The King’s Speech; just a trace of his stutter. Daisy imagined him and the rest of the royal family, the Queen, the little princesses, Queen Mary, at Buckingham Palace. Their subjects drew more and more comfort and reassurance from the presence and example of the royal family, and newspapers and magazines were full of photographs and accounts of their life. A mixture of intimacy and example, the little princesses engaged in minor war work, their mother visiting wounded sailors, the family spending Christmas Day together, while sharing some form of deprivation with the rest of the populace.

  Daisy dozed in front of the fire, when she woke up she realized that she had missed the end of the speech. It was an hour later and tea was being brought in. The wireless was still on; Rosemary was knitting and half listening to the seasonal programming of the BBC.

  “Tea,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Daisy said, “I must have dropped off. The fire and overeating at lunch.”

  Nevertheless, Daisy allowed Rosemary to cut her a large slice of the Aberneth Farm Christmas cake with her cup of tea. Since rationing was imminent, the heavy cake, with its rich and exotic ingredients, might be the last they would eat until the war was over. Soon even tea would be scarce. Eight eggs had gone into the cake; Daisy was grateful and a little guilty.

  The afternoon concert ended and the news began. Both Rosemary and Daisy increased their level of attention; Rosemary sat forward a little in her chair. The news was, in the main, good. More about the Graf Spee hunted by British cruisers and scuttled off Montevideo. The Finns valiantly pushing back their Russian invaders. Daisy did not underestimate the importance of the news she was listening to, but she sometimes had difficulty remembering where specific places were located, or their comparative strategic importance. The third news item was easier to understand since it required no geographic knowledge and felt a little like gossip. Sir Guy Wilcox, a founding member of the British Union of Fascists, had fled the country, just hours before he was to be arrested for treason. The whereabouts of Lady Wilcox was not known.

  “I was at school with her,” Rosemary said.

  “You were? Really?”

  “She was in the sixth form, just about to leave when I arrived as a very small new girl, so I wasn’t the recipient of any girlish confidences. But there weren’t any visible indications that she would marry a Fascist and become chummy with Hitler.”

  “So what was she like?”

  Rosemary closed her eyes for a second, remembering.

  “She had a cruel streak,” she said after a moment, “—at least if the rumors that circulated her last summer term had some basis of truth. There was a curate who took some kind of responsibility for the spiritual well-being of the school, like preparing the girls for confirmation. He used to come to lunch on Thursdays and we were given a somewhat better meal that day. He was very handsome, or at least we thought so. Looking back I can see that he was unsure of himself in lots of ways—the school was rather grand and full of little snobs and he hadn’t quite managed to lose his suburban accent. He was the object of giggling but not serious admiration—it was rumored that he got a special delivery of post on St. Valentine’s Day. Anyway Emily Haverley set her cap at the poor curate. First she developed some religious doubts and he was consulted. They had long discussions and at the end of it he was in love with her. She apparently led him on for the remaining few weeks of the term, then school broke up. She went on to be the most beautiful deb of her year while he had some kind of nervous breakdown.”

  “Where do you think she is?”

  “The same place that he is, I imagine, having traveled there by a more comfortable route.”

  “Christmas Day seems a strange time to decide to arrest him—them—Were they after her, too?”

  Rosemary leaned over and turned down the wireless, now broadcasting the weather forecast.

  “What could be a better day to disappear?” she asked. “The day on which no one is really paying attention.”

  “The best day for him to escape, but not the best day for them to catch him, surely?”

  “Not completely an accident, I imagine.”

  Daisy looked shocked and Rosemary smiled, with the pleasure most of us take in a display of greater worldly wisdom or justified cynicism.

  “He wasn’t the only Englishman to believe that fascism was the political system that would save the country. And he did, you know, attempt reforms as a member of another party and other political organizations. It was just that when it became clear what Hitler and Mussolini were up to he didn’t revert to the poetic heroism and self-sacrifice of the generation who perished in the Great War. There are plenty of former Fascist sprigs in the Foreign Office who would rather see him spend the rest of the war out of harm’s way than in a prison cell.”

  “Where do you think he’s—they’ve—gone?”

  “It’ll be interesting to find out. It’ll give a pretty good idea of how much help he had from the top. I hope it’s Germany.”

  Daisy looked surprised. The wireless was now playing popular music, unheard by either woman.

  “It would serve him right. Just imagine—he’d have burned his boats here and it isn’t as though he’d be of any use to the Germans or that they’d trust him. During the last war there were a few Irishmen who thought of England as the enemy and so regarded Germany as an ally.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They were used and discarded—sick, lonely, and unhappy. Some of them tried to get back to Ireland—most of them died. Casement, of course, was hanged.”

  Something in Rosemary’s voice made Daisy say, “But he was a traitor, wasn’t he?”

  “Not everyone in Ireland thinks so.”

  But Daisy still saw things in black and white. Traitors were shot or hanged—you felt sorry for their families, provided they weren’t traitors, too. Although it was horrifying to execute one of your own countrymen, there wasn’t any choice.

  “How about another slice of cake?” Rosemary asked.

  Chapter 3

  THERE’S POST FOR you, Miss. Two letters,” Elsie said as Daisy used the step outside the kitchen door to prize off her muddy gumboots. Daisy came inside and hung up her jacket, wet from a warm early summer shower. “On the hall table.”

  Elsie had not been instructed by Rosemary on how to treat the two young women who now lived in the house. Had it only been Daisy, it would have been easier for the staff. They could place her socially—Daisy’s father was a country rector, her grandfather landed gentry. Her family’s lack of affluence or her position as paid manual labor did not affect the attitude of household employees at Aberneth Farm. They thought of her as employed by the Crown, rather than by Rosemary. And she had a uniform; she was part of the War Effort. Lunch in working clothes, in the kitchen; dinner in the dining room. But the presence of Valerie clouded the issue. Elsie and Mrs. Thomas knew that, in peacetime, Valerie would be unlikely to sit at the dining-room table at Aberneth Farm—which didn’t mean she would have belonged in the kitchen, either—and felt that she did so now under false pretenses. Daisy sometimes wondered what would have happened if a working class girl had been stationed at Aberneth Farm. And why one never had been. Was it by chance or were such things arranged? Fixed? And if they were, how was it done? What code, what euphemisms or words were employed ? “She’ll be good with animals; she has experience with horses and fox-hunting” ? Was it possible that the Land Army was as hierarchical and class conscious as the world to which Daisy, in the now seemingly remote pre-war past, had belonged?

  Stocking-footed, Daisy walked along the corridor from the kitchen to the polished wood of the hall, the surface beneath her feet changing from scratchy to smooth wood, from wood to the tightly woven Turkish carpet and back to polished wood.

  Daisy was twenty years
old; letters had associations only of pleasure and excitement. Bills, taxes, appeals, and obligations were not yet part of her life. The post brought letters from home and occasionally news from friends. It was her only personal communication with the outside world; the wireless connected her with the world in general, the post with people she knew. Now, of course, Daisy would sometimes hear on the six o’clock news about bombing raids on places where family and friends lived or were stationed.

  There were two letters, and the envelopes were larger and thicker than those Daisy was now used to. Pre-war stock. She did not recognize the handwriting on either envelope. She opened the larger first. Inside was a stiff white invitation card. Daisy was puzzled; she seemed to have been invited to a dance. Quite a smart one, by the looks of it. A pre-war dance. Daisy did not recognize either the name of her hostess or the location of the dance. Without wasting too much time puzzling over it, she opened the second envelope. As she had imagined, the letter cast some light on the invitation. It was from Lady Nugent, who introduced herself as James Nugent’s mother and hoped that Daisy could stay for the weekend of her eldest daughter’s coming-out dance. Lady Nugent went on to say that James, as well as she, hoped Daisy would be able to come and that she would arrange for someone to collect Daisy from the nearest railroad station.

  Valerie entered through the front door and took off her boots. She tended to avoid going through the kitchen unless she was wet or dirty. In a general way, Valerie did not get as dirty as Daisy did. Her work was no less hard, but it tended to be cleaner. Valerie went to some lengths to avoid working in “blood, shit, and mud,” as the girls called it. Daisy was not squeamish and was very much aware that cow manure and rabbit blood were not what Churchill had been referring to when he had told the English people that he had only “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” to offer them. But since it was all she had to give her country—since she had arrived at Aberneth Farm, Germany had seemingly effortlessly invaded and occupied Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Belgium—she did her work cheerfully and as best she knew how.

  “You’ve got blood on your invitation,” Valerie said with unconcealed disgust.

  Daisy looked down; a faint bloody thumbprint now sullied the pristine whiteness of the invitation card.

  Valerie loitered.

  “I’ve been invited to a dance. In...”—Daisy glanced at the letter—“Near Ambleside, in Westmoreland.”

  “When?”

  Daisy glanced down; the date was some weeks ahead. For reasons she did not quite understand, she felt relieved there was so much time.

  “It’s a whole weekend. I don’t know if I’ll be able to go.”

  Valerie looked at her with the pity and scorn she reserved for those unable to keep their priorities straight.

  “I’ll ask Rosemary,” Daisy said, intending to ask her employer a good deal more than permission to take a clump of her days off all at the same time.

  Among the first questions—and there would be others—were why had she been asked, should she accept, what should she wear, how would she get to the North of England? And an implicit unspoken question: How did Rosemary feel about Daisy’s accepting an invitation to stay with Rosemary’s relatives, to respond to interest shown by a male member of that family? Daisy felt that such a question was not premature; if Rosemary disapproved, or if she even had reservations, to refuse the invitation now rather than to beat a social retreat later would be simpler for all concerned. Even though the prospect of a house party and a ball and the attention of a handsome young man was a treat and adventure more thrilling than Daisy had ever before been offered. Even in peacetime.

  Rosemary’s reaction was flattering. Daisy silently and gratefully compared it with the conversation she would have had with her mother had she still been living at home. Girls serving in the Land Army apparently weren’t asked questions containing words like “chaperone.”

  “Of course you must go. It’ll be an outing for you and you’ve been cooped up on the farm for far too long. It’s just a matter of logistics and even they aren’t so very complicated. You’ll have to look up the train connections and make sure you have what you need to wear. I’ll help you. It’s not the warmest house in England, and I’d better fill you in on the family eccentricities before you go. The thumbprint, I take it, is yours, not Aunt Hilda’s?”

  “My thumb—rabbit blood.”

  “How many did you get?”

  The cows were milked twice a day. The washing of the dairy and milking machinery took place afterward. Then there was a longish stretch of time when Daisy had no regularly defined duties. Work, changing with the season, was found for her. Now, once a week, she and the shepherd picked up a couple of ferrets from the gardener’s shed and carried them and a large net up to the rabbit warren on the hill.

  If the day was warm, despite a certain sympathy for the rabbits and a reluctance to cause pain, Daisy enjoyed these outings. Frank was English and friendlier to Daisy than most of the Welshmen who worked on the farm. They were suspicious of strangers and although they could, when they had something to say to Daisy, speak perfectly good English, while conversing among themselves in her presence they usually spoke Welsh. They let her know, without resorting much to either language, that a girl had no business working on the farm. Her position was not simplified when one day a small dark woman, her face contorted with vituperation, screamed abuse at her. It took Daisy some time and a grudging, embarrassed partial explanation from one of the milkers to understand that the woman was accusing Daisy of having seduced her husband. Even after asking Rosemary which of the farmworkers was husband to the shrew, Daisy did not immediately understand that the woman suspected, or claimed she suspected, Daisy of carrying on with the painfully shy dairyman with the slightly twisted spine. Rosemary and Valerie were sympathetic, but Daisy suspected they thought the incident, on some level, funny; Daisy did not. She knew it to be ridiculous but so sad and squalid she would not have been amused even if it were not she who had been humiliated. Daisy was snubbed, ignored, or put in her place, but Frank, the shepherd, was a pariah. He was an Englishman, a foreigner. He came from Herefordshire, a county that shared a border with Wales. Rosemary reminded Daisy that historically the Welsh—and the Irish and Scottish—had more often considered England the enemy than they had Germany.

  When Daisy and Frank reached the warren, they would spread the net over the entrances, then Daisy would take a ferret from the sack in which it had been carried, muzzle it, and send it down a rabbit hole. Rabbits would shoot up the other tunnels into the waiting nets, where Daisy would grab them and, with one swift movement, break their necks. The ferret would be caught in the same manner—-its capture requiring more skill since it was wirier and had to be reincarcerated without damage to its person—and replaced in the sack. If everything went well.

  “We got twelve, but we’re short a ferret. The small female got laid up in the wood at the end of the long pasture. We left the nets—I’ll go back later and see if she’s surfaced.”

  Occasionally a ferret, inside the burrow, would disembarrass itself of its muzzle and catch an unwary or slow rabbit. It would eat the rabbit, curl up, and sleep off the substantial and unexpected meal. Short of digging out the burrow—hard work that also risked the loss of the well-fed ferret—the only solution was to leave the nets over all the possible exits and return later to retrieve the missing animal. Daisy knew that although she was not responsible for the predatory animal going AWOL, she was accountable. “It wasn’t my fault” was not a wartime excuse. Nevertheless, she did not burden herself with a fruitless feeling of guilt. She had done nothing wrong. The ferret had been properly muzzled when it had been pushed down the rabbit hole into the warren.

  A little later, after they had listened to the six o’clock news, Daisy walked back up the hill. The summer evening was warm and after a little time she was able to push away the fear that she felt listening to the BBC’s increasingly grim news. She had for the first time been afraid when a S
unday in May—just before the evacuation of Dunkirk—had been designated a Day of Prayer. Every church in England had been full as an entire nation prayed. Prayed for victory. Prayed for peace. England stood alone and the German bombing raids had become more frequent and intense. The possibility of invasion was never far from anyone’s thoughts.

  Chapter 4

  DAISY WORE HER uniform on the train. Uniforms were a great leveler. When she had been at school, Daisy had complained as energetically as the next girl about the navy blue gym slips, the gray kneesocks, and the mandatory lace-up brown walking shoes—and in truth the uniform was aesthetically unpleasing and not particularly comfortable—but she was, as were, she suspected, many other girls from the less affluent families, often grateful to be relieved of the competitive aspects of clothing.

  At school, the uniform had concealed from the critical eyes of her fellow pupils that in winter both her skirts had once been her mother’s and were cut down to fit Daisy. Clothes rationing had recently been imposed and already it was changing attitudes about clothing; few girls Daisy knew would now be ashamed to wear a hand-me-down skirt. The evening dress she packed to take to Westmoreland was Rosemary’s. Even if it were recognized as such by another guest, there was now little shame attached to it being borrowed.