Henrietta Sees It Through (9 page)

M
Y
D
EAR
R
OBERT

There was a time when I preferred summer to winter. Feeling the cold as I do, the approach of January, February and March used to fill me with dread; and soon after Christmas, when the east winds began to blow, I would get what Charles calls my ‘sick monkey look', and, wrapped in misery and shawls, remain, like the hibernating toad, in a state of suspended animation until the first really warm spring day recalled me to life.

But all that is changed now. Since I took to gardening, winter has become my favourite season. You may well ask why, Robert, and the answer is easy to give. It is because in winter there are no weeds. Even my enemy, the bindweed, withers off at the top into thin, dead strings, and, though it is still lurking underground in all its coiling horror, a little concentrated wishful thinking easily persuades me that it is gone for ever. This excites in me a frenzy of enthusiastic tidying, and the edges of the grass are cut, the gravel paths raked and, if a dead leaf dares to lie for one instant upon the lawn, it is whisked away and plunged into a large pit dug for the purpose, where it lies rotting with its fellows, and is transformed in course of time, we hope, into rich leaf mould.

When I persuaded Charles, who hates the garden and looks at it as seldom as possible, to inspect what I had done, he said it was so neat it reminded him of an operating theatre. Charles has often been heard to remark that it would save his money and my time if the whole thing were laid down in concrete.

‘What would we do with such a great expanse of concrete?' I said to him on one occasion, when he had made this shattering assertion.

But Charles always has an answer. ‘We would invite our friends to roller skate on it,' he said.

With no weeds rearing their ugly heads, and the autumn leaves safely tucked away in their pit, I am hard put to it to find employment in the garden just now. To rest from my labours I do not dare, for muscles must be kept strong and lumbar regions supple against the Spring Offensive. Just lately I have been making a brick path. This is fascinating work, up to a point, the point being where a whole brick has to be made into a half-brick. When proper bricklayers do this it looks easy. They just take the little trowel-thing that they spread mortar with, and give the brick a tap, and it falls neatly into two pieces. I tried tapping my brick with an ordinary gardening trowel, and nothing happened at all. Then our gardener came along. Our gardener and I, like King James of the great Sir Walter, think but Rawley of each other, and never ask each other's advice if we can possibly avoid it. The gardener, with a pitying smile, stood and watched me stagger with bricks from one end of the terrace to the other. Watching me garden is one of our gardener's favourite pastimes. He never seems to tire of it, and spends hours out of the two days he is supposed to work for us engaged in this happy pursuit.

The gardener, with a pitying smile, stood and watched me

‘Layin' bricks?' he said kindly, after about ten minutes.

‘Yes.'

‘Yu knows as how you mustn't never lay one whole brick 'long side 'nother whole brick, don't ee?'

‘Of course.'

‘Do ee know the way to split bricks?'

‘Er - yes, I think so.'

‘I'll show ee!' cried the gardener, delighted at my hesitation; and, dropping the hoe which he carries about with him as a sort of badge of office, he seized my brick, gave it a sharp tap with the trowel, and it fell in half.

‘That's how 'tis done,' he said conceitedly.

I was very much annoyed by this sudden display of efficiency, and as soon as he had gone, I took the trowel and gave my brick a tremendous whack with it. Nothing happened, so I turned it over and tried the other side. Again nothing happened, except that a small piece chipped off and flew into my eye. By this time my blood was up, and I went and got the axe out of the tool shed. Laying the brick down, I raised the axe above my head with both hands, and delivered a stunning blow, which might have been effective if it had not missed its mark and buried itself deeply in the ground.

‘What
are
you doing, Henrietta?' said Lady B, who often walks into our garden in the afternoons to give me a word of cheer.

‘Breaking bricks in half,' I said breathlessly.

‘But, my dear, that's quite the wrong way to do it,' said Lady B. ‘All you have to do is just to tap it with a trowel, like this.'

‘Exactly,' I said, after she had made several abortive attempts, and I returned to my brick with redoubled fury. I whacked and banged and scored several directs hits, as well as some near misses, while Lady B uttered little cries of encouragement, but apart from the fact that we both got
little chips in our eyes, and the brick soon ceased to look like a brick, nothing happened. Then the axe broke, and we went indoors and had tea.

Next day I got a professional bricklayer to come and finish the job for me. It took him about ten minutes.

When the gardener came again, he inspected the new path. I could see he was disgusted to find the job so neatly done. ‘Woman's work,' he said scornfully, trying to raise a brick with the toe of his boot.

‘Looks nice, doesn't it?' I said smugly.

‘Where be axe gone to?' said the gardener suspiciously.

‘Gone to be sharpened,' I said.

Always your affectionate Childhood's Friend,

H
ENRIETTA

 

 

 

14 April, 1943

M
Y
D
EAR
R
OBERT

Now the evenings are longer, Lady B often comes up to our house for a chat after dinner. She is the only person Charles doesn't mind coming to the house at that time, because he knows he can go on reading the paper and she won't mind if he grunts. Indeed, Lady B has remarked more than once that she likes Charles's grunts, as they remind her of her own happy married life. She even goes so far as to say that she understands what they mean, but I think that is just vain boasting on her part.

The night before last she arrived with her knitting. ‘If you get up, Charles, I'll never come here again,' she said, and Charles, with a thankful sigh, abandoned the half-hearted
attempt he was making to struggle out of his chair, and disappeared behind
The Times.

‘There's your chair,' I said.

Lady B hitched up her skirt at the back and sat down carefully. ‘One of the major troubles of my life just now,' she said earnestly, ‘is trying to keep my two good skirts from bulging at the back.'

‘I always wear a very, very old one in the house.'

‘So I see,' said Lady B. ‘What has made you so tired tonight, Henrietta?', for I was playing patience, and Lady B knows that I only do that when I am too exhausted to do anything else.

‘Bindweed.'

‘Ah! I hope you admired me in the “Wings for Victory” procession?'

‘I thought you looked very fine, and I was glad to see that you had the courage to carry an umbrella.'

‘People were rather unkind about it at first, but they were glad to shelter under it when that shower began. Henrietta, I don't want to interfere with your patience, but if you don't put that Knave on the Queen I shall go raving mad.'

I put the Knave on the Queen. ‘The people they really ought to have in processions, and when the great Peace Procession comes I hope they will, are the Shoppers.'

There was a grunt from Charles and
The Times
quivered slightly. ‘Charles and I couldn't agree with you more,' said Lady B. ‘Shopping Baskets in one hand and Ration Books in the other they would walk right at the end of the procession, in single file, like a queue and they'd get a rousing cheer if nobody else did.'

There was another grunt from Charles who had spent last Saturday morning shopping with me in our Cathedral City. Charles wanted to order a tweed jacket before they went all
comic, and I wanted a paint brush. We found our city very much changed. The streets are crowded as they always have been, but now, instead of strolling in the road and holding up the traffic, the people hurry along the pavements with set expressions on their faces, while the motors whizz up and down at such a rate that Charles and I clung to each other on the kerb and feared to launch away. There was hardly a Devon voice to be heard. Even in Charles's tailors we detected an irreverent note, and the Dignitary who used to serve us was no longer there.

‘Where is Mr Clement?' we asked.

‘Gone,' said the New Man, with a grin. ‘He was seventy-eight, you know.'

Charles was so annoyed at this levity that he refused the only cheerful check tweed left in the shop and chose a dull, countryish cloth into which little flecks of red and yellow were woven without enlivening its appearance in any way.

‘Better take your measurements again,' said the New Man. ‘Most people have lost a bit round the tummy.'

The tape passed around his waist

‘Tummy,' indeed! The very walls shuddered, while Charles, pale with disgust, suffered his waistcoat to be pulled up and the tape passed around his waist.

‘We haven't any No. 4 paint brushes left,' said the Girl in Artists' Materials, who was also new and obviously considered herself Queen of the May. ‘See for yourself.' And yawning
a little she pulled open the paint brush drawer. Inside were two paint brushes.

One could have been used for painting a house and the other for a very small miniature.

Charles and I greeted our old friend the waiter with tears of recognition, but there wasn't any lunch. Yesterday had been market day and there wasn't anything left. Sadly we stepped into the street and threaded our patient way to a More Expensive House. ‘Could we have lunch?' we asked meekly, standing on the mat. Authority looked us up and down. Yes, it thought it might manage something.

Joyfully and effusively we expressed our thanks and fought our way to the bar, which was full of people we didn't know. There, over drinks which called themselves Gin and French, we cheered up a little. ‘I think it is probably what is called Hooch,' said Charles, ‘and will make us blind.' When I asked him which sort of blind he said, ‘Both sorts.'

Then we saw Geoffrey. Of course, it isn't fair to judge
anybody's
figure in battle dress. Otherwise he looked just the same.

‘I suppose you are drunk with power now you are a Second Lieutenant,' I said. Then Charles kicked me under the table, and I noticed that it wasn't a pip on Geoffrey's shoulder but a crown.

This created such an Atmosphere that I would have been glad to leave but Charles said No, we had ordered our grill and we would wait for it. And wait for it we did.

When it arrived at last it was quite good. ‘So it ought to be,' said Charles. ‘At that price.' Then I threw discretion to the winds and had some rice pudding, but it tasted of fish, and we came away.

‘Who are all these people?' said Charles plaintively, after he had been pushed off the pavement and into the gutter for
the third time. But we reached the garage at last, and scrambled into our car like shipwrecked mariners into a lifeboat. ‘It used to be fun,' said Charles sadly, and we drove away.

In the Cathedral Close there was a poster announcing music for that afternoon. I told Charles I would find my own way home, and joined the queue. Queueing is such a habit now that it holds no terrors and it didn't seem long till we were all inside and the music began.

Here was something which had not changed. Beauty, and peace, and comfort, and the grey walls of our beloved cathedral taking up the sound as they had taken up the prayers and songs of centuries to give them back to bewildered worshippers in kindly blessing. Many people were in tears.

I dropped in at Lady B's on the way home to tell her about the music. While I was there a very small girl arrived at the front door. ‘Please,' she said, ‘will you buy a ticket for our Fashion Play?'