1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (24 page)

“Out! All of you! Out of this house, because it’s mine now, I’m the mistress here and from now on you can all find somewhere else to live!”

Grandfather was horrified. He thought his beautiful wife had gone mazed, and he was dismayed at the thought of people smugly nodding to him because he was foolish enough to ignore their warnings and court someone from so far away. But he let her finish, and followed her back into the kitchen, where she poured herself some tea.

Tentatively, he asked her: “Will ‘e tell me what you’re doin’?”

“What do you think?” she replied. “‘Tis one thing to live with all your relatives. I’m not about to share my house with your family’s ghosts as well.” He was nonplussed by her logic. “It’s all right,” she told him as she left to go and get dressed, “you can close the windows now.”

And as grandfather walked around shutting out the March wind that had blustered briefly through the house, he realized that his wife was stronger than he was, and that things were going to be different from now on.

§

They were. Grandmother decided that there were two of them, after all, and so that spring she joined her husband in every aspect of the running of the farm, castrating sheep as well as milking the cows, building fences just as she repaired the chicken coops; she took charge of the accounts, and went with him to market in Newton Abbot.

Gradually she rekindled in him his former spirit, and all that summer they worked outside from dawn to dusk, and then into the night together planning improved systems for irrigating their land, different crop rotations, and researching information on cattle breeding. They bought pigs and geese, and planted apple and pear trees in the tiny meadow across the brook. In July, a destitute labourer knocked on the farmhouse door and tried to sell them a ferret, producing pedigree charts which claimed to trace its lineage back to the very first pair introduced to Devon from Russia by Peter the Great, when as a young man he was sent to study the navigational skills of the British Navy in Plymouth. They bought the ferret and hired the labourer, and they needed him that harvest as they reaped from their meagre land a prodigious bounty.

It was after they had stored the grain and squeezed all the bales of hay and straw into the barn that grandmother confirmed she was pregnant, and they rejoiced at the evidence of their fecundity. Their optimism even provoked in her husband an expansion of his interests; he listened, entranced, as she read to him from books she’d brought with her, and they would discuss the names of characters as possible names for their child. He in turn told her some of the secrets of the farm, such as that theirs were the only hives for miles around because only their family knew of bee herbs, which had kept their bees free of foul-brood, a disease that periodically wiped out whole other colonies. He explained the necessity of greeting the rooks when they returned to the rookery in autumn, and informing them of any changes in the family or the ownership of the land, or otherwise bad luck would surely befall them.

Grandmother’s first pregnancy, however, was a difficult one: she felt seasick, even in the middle months. Unable to help on the farm and encourage her husband she could only observe helplessly as his willpower once more waned. Even milking the cows nauseated her, and the fowl seemed to glance at her with contempt in their eyes when she carried herself across the farmyard scattering their corn. There were days when her husband came in for his midday meal, and then supped his tea by the fire long into the afternoon, deaf to her reproaches and mindless of the fading light.

Grandmother retreated into her confinement and the child in her womb, regretting that she couldn’t carry it without it handicapping her and drop it easily in the field. She resented its existence, if only for its own sake; the circumstances of its birth were sabotaging its own future.

She knew that her husband would scrape a living for his family from the farm with the residue of responsibility that no peasant would abdicate. You could put little or much energy into the land and reap the same reward either way; to really profit took an almost savage commitment of will, and grandmother knew she would no longer be able to spare that amount of attention from the child almost ready to be born.

§

As the end of her term approached, grandmother became calm. She had to carry her overripe belly with both hands just to be able to walk about, but she felt at ease, somehow certain that her body, having accustomed itself to childbearing during the last few months, was ready to give birth without difficulty. When the child was due the then Granny Sims, village midwife, had one of her many grandchildren always ready to come and fetch her, anxious as she always was over a woman’s first birth, and grandfather’s sisters hovered around grandmother like irritating flies.

Grandmother’s instinct, though, was correct: her waters broke as she was preparing supper, she told the family her time was come, and she made her dignified way upstairs to the bed grandfather had made them.

The pain was intense but she controlled it with the breathing methods Granny Sims had taught her and with her own calm surety that all would be well, and in the early hours of the morning Granny Sims handed her a wailing baby girl, with a crop of hair black as her own, so small she couldn’t believe such a tiny thing could have caused all that fuss inside her; she asked Granny Sims whether there wasn’t another still hiding, as she automatically quieted the baby by putting it to her breast.

“Don’t be silly,” Granny Sims replied, “‘er weighs a good seven pounds, I should say.”

§

A few days later grandmother weighed herself, too, on the scales in the barn with which grandfather assessed the worth of his sheep, and she found she’d gained over a stone since the last time she’d weighed herself, a year previously.

Grandmother continued to grow larger, without trying, with or without another baby in her belly, and she let her body put on the weight it seemed to require for those years of fertility. Every time she recovered from one birth sufficiently to want to lie with grandfather, she seemed to conceive another, and her children were all born within little more than a year of each other. The only trouble was, they were all girls. When they had three grandmother suggested that was enough for one family, and that they could take their time together in working out ways of enjoying the pleasures of marriage uninterrupted by their procreative consequences. For the first time since their wedding she sensed the muscles of her husband’s willpower tense, something inside him steel itself, something like anger except that it never showed itself: it was an implacable resolve, the foundation of his character, that lived deep down inside him, too far from his tongue and his ear to argue with.

“Who’s to inherit the farm?” he demanded.

“Why not one of the girls? Idn’t nothing wrong with that.”

He shook his head. “Some young bugger’ll come along and marry ‘er; take ‘er name and the farm too. No, us ‘as got to ‘ave a bay.”

She knew, somehow, that there was no point in arguing. He’d made up his mind and there was no changing it, unless she was prepared to enter into a battle of attrition whose end might never come. She gave way, and her duly apparent pregnancy filled him with hope. Nature, however, was not so compliant: it was another girl, and so was the next.

§

Somewhere in the middle of my five aunts funnelling as if on tap, at similarly brief intervals, into the world, grandfather’s father passed away, and he found himself the only male in a household of women and noisy baby girls who between them demanded the full attention of any man foolish enough to linger indoors. It was then that grandfather resumed his long working days out in the fields, except that this time it wasn’t with the short-lived empire-building energy of a newly-wed but rather as an escape from his own family. More than anything else, he was driven into the fields by the sound of his daughters crying. He noticed that there was a moment, before the pain of a scraped knee or knocked elbow assailed them, just before they burst into tears, when their faces assumed a look of utter confusion and bemusement, as if asking: “Why is life doing this to me?” It tore his heart in two, and not only could he do nothing to assuage their suffering, he seemed only to make it worse: when he lifted them up to offer them all the comfort he could give, they only cried all the more and called for their mother, who would calm them down, translate for him their strange toddlers’ utterances into the English language, and set them right with a medicinal kiss.

And so he crept out of the house at dawn with a flask of tea, leaving with relief the pandemonium of women and children awakening, hearing the first of his babies behind him as he crossed the yard, crying even as she awoke, as if betrayed once more by reality. He didn’t return until dusk, slipping in by the kitchen door to consume alone the enormous plateful of food left for him in the oven and tiptoeing upstairs to bed, where he waited, smoking his pipe, for grandmother to join him, and he would lose himself, murmuring with gratitude, in the welcoming expanse of her generous body.

Convinced for no good reason that their next child would be a son, grandfather wasn’t worried when a year went by, and then a second, without grandmother becoming pregnant with her usual punctuality. In fact he took it as a good sign, proof that the cycle of regular female babies was about to be broken. He was discovering, meanwhile, a vocation for farming he’d never imagined he possessed. His reluctance to traipse home at the end of the day, even when darkness fell, became in part because there was always another job he wanted to do; ideas for improving the farm came to him as he immersed himself in its rhythms and laws and possibilities. “Us only needs to buy they two bumpy fields over back, what Father Howard never uses, and us could keep back another twenty ewes next year,” he told grandmother as he pressed his head against her body. “And there’s a new cow I sin down Newton market, from up Scotland. Tough-lookin’ thing ‘tis, wide horns and long ‘air. Reckon us could try a couple or three of they.”

He also surprised himself, even more, by the pleasure he began to take from the company of his daughters, limited as it was to Sundays, the day of rest. He watched his mother, his two sisters, his wife and their five daughters process across the yard in their best dresses, turn left along the lane, disappear behind the farm buildings, reappear beyond and turn right into the footpath up to the church. He read his Sunday newspaper while they were singing and praying to a God he himself found less believable every week, as the dictators spread their malign influence across Europe—a God, moreover, who’d inflicted upon each of his daughters in turn the needless agony of teething—smoking his pipe as he read the football reports and the political columns, and stirring himself to baste the joint slowly crackling in the oven.

When they returned, the women set to preparing dinner, and grandfather put on his bowler hat and led his daughters on a weekly constitutional around the village. Other men, equally uncomfortable in starched shirts and ill-fitting suits, most of whom, though, had accompanied their wives to church, were also strolling along the lanes. They would meet and cluster in small groups, and converse with each other about the pesky caterpillars chewing holes in their cabbages or the cut-throat traders who were banding together to keep down the price of mutton. And they would congratulate grandfather on his brood of little girls, making banal jokes about the troubles in store for the father of so many daughters.

That stroll around the village of a Sunday morning became grandfather’s favourite moment of the week. It was the only time in his life that he overcame his shyness, raised above it by the pride he felt being out in public with his daughters; he greeted familiar faces over their garden gates and chatted with those he hardly knew without blushing, while tiny fingers insinuated themselves into his own callused hands and tugged at his trousers.

In the afternoon they followed him to his workbench in one of the sheds across the yard, where he made wooden toys for each of them in strict rotation: a car in the shape of a Bugatti for aunt Dorothy, the eldest; a doll’s house for aunt Marjorie; a pram for her doll for aunt Susan. As their characters emerged distinctly from each other he was amazed at how different members of the same family could be from each other, more like animals than human beings, because he’d never been so close to other people. And he wondered why on earth he’d ever wanted a son.

§

The years passed. War raged across the Channel, while in this country whole cities were reduced to rubble by the Blitz, but it only impinged once upon the Valley, when a Heinkel appeared out of nowhere and unloaded its bombs on the granite works, doing a month’s worth of blasting in an instant and killing three people. Grandmother was one of the few witnesses to that incident: her two eldest daughters had gone to play with some friends in the quarry pool, and she went to the beech tree to check up on them. She’d just taken the telescope from its place in the sawn-off branch when she heard the whine of an aeroplane’s engine, but she didn’t think anything of it because there was an airfield in Exeter and planes going to and coming from the west often passed overhead. It came into view, flying low through the Valley, at the same height as where she stood, and she made to wave to the pilot. She already had her arm raised when she saw, with disbelief, the markings of the enemy, and as the plane passed before her she stood, frozen, with her hand outstretched, and she thought she saw the pilot smile.

Some of the kids heard her scream, but only faintly; it’s hard to make out what someone’s saying, said aunt Marjorie, when you’re seeing how long you can hold your breath underwater. Those that did looked up to see their large and ungainly mother scrambling down the slippery bed of the stream. Half-way down she stopped and waved her arms about, as if she’d gone loopy and was playing charades at a distance, pretending to be pushing someone away from her. Then she started shouting again and this time they could make out what she was saying: “Run! Hide!” but that was all they heard, because her voice was drowned by the harsh whine of the aeroplane as it returned along the Valley, even lower than before. They stood still in the water at the edge of the pool as the plane bore down upon them, while grandmother up the bank was gesticulating wildly and yelling, but without making a sound, until she stopped, knowing it was too late now, forced to watch, helplessly, as the children stood naked in the water up to their thighs, and the pilot grinned.