Miss Clare Remembers and Emily Davis Read online

  'Now the way's wide open,' wrote Harry exultantly. 'With Austria down in the mud, we make straight for Berlin!'

  The war news from all quarters was as cheering as Harry's. Mutiny had broken out in the German Fleet at Kiel, the Americans had cut the German eastern and western forces by taking Sedan, and the Allies were pursuing the enemy on the Meuse. The news that Foch was meeting German delegates, to arrange an armistice, sent the hopes of everyone soaring. On November 11, Harry Miller of Beech Green, with five other local men, entered Mons with the victorious British army, while the bells of that shattered town played 'Tipperary.' Early on the same morning the Armistice was signed, and fighting ended at 11 a.m.

  In Caxley the rumours flew round that Monday morning. Someone said that the news had been telephoned to the Post Office. Flags began to appear on buildings and the bell ringers hurried to the parish church. But no official confirmation was forthcoming, and it was decided to wait a little longer. The market place and High Street began to fill with excited crowds.

  At half past twelve official confirmation of the Armistice was posted in Caxley Post Office and the town's suspense was over. The bells pealed out, the Union Jack was hoisted on the Town Hall and flags of all nations sprouted from roofs and windows. Monday's meagre war-time ration of cold meat was ignored while Caxley rejoiced.

  At Fairacre Dolly heard the news from Mr Hope, during the afternoon. One of the children had brought a collection of French and Belgian postcards to show her. His father had sent them regularly—beautiful objects of silk with fine embroidery showing flowers and crossed flags of the Allies. Dolly was holding them in her hand when Mr Hope burst into the room.

  'It's over!' he cried, his face alight. 'The war's over!'

  The babies looked at him in amazement. They remembered no other kind of life. War had always been their background. His excitement was incomprehensible to them.

  He called the school to attention, told them the news and then gave a prayer of thanksgiving. School ended early that day, and Dolly rode home through the grey November afternoon with much to think about. Rejoicing, for her, was tempered by Arnold's loss, but she felt overwhelming relief at the ending of suffering and slaughter.

  Now the sons and lovers, the husbands and fathers, would come home again, and the village would have young men to work in the fields and to laugh in the lanes. Now the girls and wives and mothers would find happiness, glad to have someone to share the joyful responsibilities of home life.

  But not all. How many cottage homes, Dolly wondered, mourned today when all the world was gay with flags and bells?

  Over forty years later, old Miss Clare felt her eyelids pricking at the memory of that distant day. She knew now the price that the parish of Beech Green had paid.

  Twenty-six names were carved at the foot of the stone war memorial, now weathered to a gentle grey. In the neighbouring parish of Fairacre seventeen young men had died, so that over forty men had been taken from the thousand people who made up the population of the two parishes. Miss Clare had known them all, and could never be reconciled to their loss. She honoured the high ideals of sacrifice and patriotism which had illumined the path of these young men, but the tragic pity of it all overcame her other feelings.

  In the years that followed, poetry became a source of joy and comfort to Miss Clare, but the loveliest songs sung by the young war poets who were her contemporaries, moved her so swiftly to weeping that she could not bring herself to read them often. 'The heartbreak at the heart of things', as one of them wrote, was too poignant for Miss Clare's generation ever to forget.

  In the heat of the June sunshine Miss Clare's old fingers strayed to the locket. She bent her white head to look at it. It was thin and smooth with years of wear, and its glitter had mellowed to a soft golden sheen. But inside, the dear face of Arnold Fletcher was still clear and unlined, and his bright hair had no touch of grey. For Arnold and his comrades would never grow old.

  CHAPTER 18

  OUTWARDLY, Beech Green and Fairacre seemed to change little in the years after the war. Two bungalows were built on the road between the two villages, but no other new houses for some time. Most of the men returned to the villages, but some, unsettled by the last few years, took this chance of leaving the country and moving townwards.

  Harold Miller was now in charge of the farm at Springbourne, as his old father had died during the war. He found himself so short of men that he decided to sell several of his outlying cottages, including the Clares'. Francis was given the first chance to buy it for the sum of two hundred pounds. The family spent several evenings in earnest discussion, and finally decided to purchase it with the savings of a lifetime.

  'Well, I never thought to live in a house of my own,' declared Mary proudly. 'Now we don't need to fret about paying the rent every week.'

  'It's to be yours when we're gone,' said Francis to Dolly. 'Ada's well provided for, and this place don't mean much to her, and never did.'

  He looked through the leaded panes at the trim garden, and Dolly saw the pride of possession light up his face.

  'And if you was hard pressed,' he continued, 'you could always sell it. Or say you got married,' he added, somewhat doubtfully.

  'We don't need to think about that for a good few years,' replied Dolly. 'You'll enjoy it for another twenty or thirty.'

  Ada and Harry bought a house about the same time. Living over the shop, Ada said, was downright common, and if they didn't have a place on the hill on the south side of Caxley, like all the other people who had done well, their two children would never be able to hold up their heads. Harry, delighted to be back and to find a flourishing business and money in the bank, agreed readily. Within a year they were installed in a brand new house with harada in curly chrome letters on the oak-type front door.

  Entity too had moved. She had been acting head teacher during the headmaster's absence on war service, and was appointed head when he moved to a larger school. A little house went with the post, and as her father had died, Emily persuaded her mother to leave the cottage where she had reared her thriving family and live at Springbourne with her. Mary Clare missed her good neighbour sadly, but sometimes made the long walk over the hill to spend an hour or two with her.

  Fairacre school had its changes, too. Private warnings to Mr Hope had been of no avail. The man was now a physical wreck and the work of the school suffered badly.

  One spring morning he came into Dolly's room looking vaguely bewildered.

  'I'm leaving Fairacre,' he said abruptly. 'I had my notice this morning.'

  Dolly was not surprised, but she was sorry that he was going. There were many things about the man that she liked, and change was always distasteful to her.

  'The managers suggest that I have a holiday for a month or two,' went on the headmaster, 'and there will probably be a vacancy for me in Leicestershire.'

  Dolly guessed that this opening must have been suggested by Miss Parr, one of the managers of Fairacre school, who had relatives in Leicester. Privately, Dolly thought Mr Hope was lucky to get anything. She suspected that he would have an assistant's post in the new school, and in this she was right.

  He left at the end of May, and. Dolly wondered who would be the next occupant of the school house. Fairacre school was very much bigger than Springbourne so that a man would be appointed. For the last few weeks of term Dolly and a woman supply teacher from Caxley coped with the school between them, and in September Mr Benson arrived.

  The first tiling that Fairacre noticed about the new headmaster was that he had a car and a wireless set. The car was a Ford T model with a beautiful brass radiator and brass headlamps, and the wireless set was the latest type with a superior gadget to hold the cat's whisker above the crystal.

  'Go ahead sort of fellow,' commented Mr Willet to Dolly Clare. Young Mr Willet had been badly wounded during the war, and was making a modest living as caretaker to the school and by growing vegetables and plants for sale in his own flourishing garden.
He was clearly impressed by the new man, and so were all the other males from six to sixty, Dolly observed, for such is the power of things mechanical.

  He had other interests besides the car and the wireless set. He had served with distinction in the RNAS and had travelled widely. In the few years he was at Fairacre he reminded Dolly of Mr Hope in his younger days, for he had the power to fire his listeners with his own enthusiasm. He was a great supporter of the League of Nations, and tried to explain its world-wide task to the children who only knew the small world of Fairacre.

  'There will never be another war,' he promised them, many and many a time. 'This war was the war to end all wars. Now we shall use reason to settle arguments between nations.'

  He bought many magazines and papers for the children from his own meagre salary. He found that they read these far more easily than books. Arthur Mee's monthly My Magazine was a great favourite, and Dolly remembered the frontispiece to one of the issues very clearly. It showed a little girl, barefoot and in a pink tunic, opening the golden gates to a new world where all was peace. It was typical of the ardent hope of a war-shattered world. 'Never again!' was the cry, uttered in all sincerity.

  The new world certainly seemed a happy place in the years that followed. Fairacre did not boast any bright young things of its own, but its inhabitants were pleasurably shocked to read about those who painted the big cities red. The Caxley Chronicle reported the dancing of the Charleston at the Civic Ball in the Corn Exchange, and some of the older generation felt that the age of decadence had arrived.

  'There was certainly an air of gaiety about which reached even to such leafy retreats as Beech Green and Fairacre. It was a daily wonder to wake to a world at peace, to know that one's menfolk were home again, that the guns thundered no more, and that life could be relished for the good thing it was.

  An enterprising firm in Caxley started a bus service during the twenties and this made a world of difference to those living in remote villages. Twice a week, on Thursday and Saturday, it was possible to ride from Fairacre through Beech Green to Caxley by bus, and there to shop or meet one's friends, or even catch another bus to the giddy pleasures of the county town fifteen miles away. The older people, whose cycling and walking days were over, were enraptured by this new wonder, and Mary Clare became a regular passenger on Thursday mornings.

  'Proper old gad-about you're getting these days!' teased Francis, but he was glad to see Mary with this new interest. Now she could go to see Ada and the children much more often, and though she sometimes wondered if she were a nuisance to her daughter, the rapturous welcome she received from her two grandchildren consoled her. It was true that Ada looked with mixed feelings upon the small shabby figure, in her old-fashioned button boots and jet-trimmed bonnet, which ambled up the gravel path, always, it seemed, when she had a party of genteel Caxley friends whom she was trying to impress.

  Emily and Dolly found the Saturday morning buses very useful too. They frequently met in Caxley to shop and exchange news over coffee. Edgar was never mentioned, but Dolly knew that the marriage was successful and that he had two small children. How Emily felt about it she could only guess. They were both in their thirties now, and often spoke good-humouredly of 'being on the shelf. Chances of marriage were very small, they knew, for their generation, and Dolly counted herself lucky in having Ada's children in the family and all the young fry of Fairacre to work among. Nevertheless, her sense of loss was great, for other people's children are a very poor substitute for one's own, and there were occasions when, at that sad time of day between sunset and twilight, Dolly could not bear to think of the long lonely years ahead.

  It was during Mr Benson's period of headship that Mrs Pringle was engaged as school cleaner. This dour individual, who was 'never so happy as when she was miserable', as the villagers said, had lived in Fairacre since her marriage and worked for Mrs Hope at the school house. The shortcomings of Mr Hope and the decline of his wife had furnished Mrs Pringle with ghoulish interest. She had wanted to take over the school cleaning for several years, for the two great black tortoise stoves which warmed the building exercised a strong fascination over her, and she longed to apply blacklead and elbow grease to their neglected surfaces.

  'Fair makes my blood boil to see the state that Alice got 'em in,' she grumbled to Dolly on her first day in office. Alice was the poor toothless old crone who had been taken from an orphanage at ten, set to work as kitchen maid for fifty years, first here, then there, until she drifted to a hovel in Fairacre and earned a few shillings by scrubbing the school floors and lighting the stoves. In all the years that Dolly had known her she had only heard her speak about a dozen times. She bobbed and nodded when addressed, a skinny hand fluttering to her mouth.

  She had been found dead in her little broken cottage, rolled up in a thin grey blanket before an empty grate, a week or two earlier, and the neighbour who had lifted her said that she was lighter than his own two-year-old.

  Mrs Pringle would have made six of her. A squat, square figure clad in a thick skirt and jumper covered with a vivid flowered overall, she stumped morosely about the premises grumbling at the mess made by the children and the amount of coke consumed by the stoves. She was to be part and parcel of the Fairacre scene for many years and Dolly Clare found it best to turn a deaf ear to most of the lady's complaints.

  As time passed Dolly sometimes thought that she knew every stick and stone of Fairacre school. The grain of her desk lid, the knots in the wooden partition, the clang of the doorscraper and the sound of the school bell above her were as familiar to her as her own face and voice. Only the children changed, and now she taught many whose parents had once sat in the same desks. Miss Clare was becoming an institution. Would she ever leave, she asked herself?

  Mr Benson left after five years, his successor left after seven, but Miss Clare remained at her post.

  'She won't never go,' the parents said to each other. 'And a good thing too. Taught us all right, she did, and teaches our kids good manners, as well as sums and reading.'

  She was looked upon with affection and with much respect. The years added dignity and authority to Dolly's upright figure. Her fair hair was beginning to grey a little, but her blue eyes were as bright and kindly as ever.

  'Pity she never married,' she overheard her headmaster say.'A bit late no w, I suppose,' he added and Dolly echoed the sentiment.

  It was not only age, but circumstances that kept Dolly at Fairacre. In the early thirties Francis collapsed one day, while he was digging in the garden. Doctor Martin surveyed him gravely. Mary and Dolly watched the doctor closely from the other side of the bed. He was an old friend, but they rarely needed to call him in professionally. This was an alarming moment.

  'I'll call again in the morning,' he said at last, leaving Francis in a heavy sleep.

  The next morning he was moved to Caxley hospital, and Mary was inconsolable. Dolly was obliged to have the week away from school to comfort her mother. They went daily to visit Francis, who lay very quiet and still, but smiled at them and occasionally spoke. He seemed very weak, and from Doctor Martin's manner Dolly guessed that this was her father's last illness.

  One May evening she went alone, cycling along the scented lane. It had changed little since the first time she had driven along it behind Bella's massive bulk, but sometimes a car passed her now, where there was none before, and the main street of Caxley had more cars and lorries than horse-drawn vehicles these days. Her dislike of Caxley had changed over the years to affection. So much had happened to her there that it now seemed as much a background to her life as Beech Green and Fairacre.

  Later, sitting beside her father's bed, holding his hand in hers peacefully, the feeling that she was part of Caxley stole upon her. How many other people had sat as she did now, or lay as her father did, gazing upon the trees outside that sheltered the nearby almshouses? Caxley was the mother town to which all the surrounding villages turned. Here they came to work, or sent their children
to school. Here they gathered when war broke out, or a queen died, or peace was celebrated. Here were the offices which dealt with rents and rates and other irksome matters which concerned them. And here was the hospital which took them into its shelter and restored them to health, or eased their going when life ebbed.

  When she left her father that evening she made her way down a quiet by-road leading from the back of the hospital to the centre of the town. She felt curiously at peace, still sustained by the feeling of being at home in the town. A motor hearse overtook her and waited to slip into the main road ahead, leading to the market place. Four men, in sober clothes, sat beside the coffin on its way to the town undertakers. There was a decent restraint about their quiet bearing which Dolly admired. A right and proper way, she thought, to make one's last journey through familiar streets, flanked by companions, slipping along unobtrusively with schoolboys on bicycles and vegetable vans, as unremarked as any other part of the moving stream. If that was what fate had in store for Francis then she felt she could face it all the more bravely from having seen the passing of that unknown one who had walked the ways of Caxley as her father had done.

  He died that same night and was buried three days later beneath a giant yew tree in Beech Green churchyard not far from little Frank. Mary was braver than Dolly had dared to hope. She went to stay for a few days with Ada, and the children's chatter and affection seemed to comfort her.

  When she returned she seemed her old self. She sighed with relief at being back again, lonely though it was without the dear presence of Francis.

  'Ada's is lovely,' she said to Dolly. 'Full of fine things, and hot water straight from the tap and that—but it don't seem homely to me. I'm happier here.'