Thrush Green Read online

  She took her cup of black tea to the doorway and settled down on the steps of the caravan. The air blew deliciously cool upon her face and the warm tea soothed her pain. The camp was astir. Water was being emptied onto the grass, young mothers pegged baby clothes on improvised lines and over by the village school Mrs. Curdle could see her favorite grandson, Ben, George's only child, a boy of twenty, buying milk from the van which delivered daily on Thrush Green.

  Her old heart warmed toward him. He was just like his father, just as tall, just as dark, just as quick and handsome. The old pang gripped her as she thought of George, as she always did when she came to Thrush Green, virtually his birthplace. His photograph, in uniform, stood in the very center of the tiny mantelshelf. He smiled at her from it as he had smiled so often, and would never smile again. For George, her dearest, had been killed in France three weeks before the second world war ended, and his timid little wife and young Ben had been left in Mrs. Curdle's care.

  She had turned all her fierce maternal love upon this child who returned her affection, and when his mother had been offered a second marriage by a grocer in one of the small towns which the fair had visited, old Mrs. Curdle had insisted that Ben remain with her. This suited both the grocer and the colorless little woman who had once made George so happy, and thus it was that Ben was brought up by his grandmother.

  She looked at him now as he brought back two bottles of milk across the dewy grass, and the pleasure which the sight of him gave her turned suddenly to unhappiness as a spasm of pain and sad remembrances gripped her.

  Ben might look like George, but he'd never be the man his father was if he carried on as he had done during the last few months! Mooning about, sulking, answering back! Mrs. Curdle didn't know what had come over him lately. Where was the fun they used to have together? Never heard him sing these days or crack a joke or laugh hearty.

  Mrs. Curdle sighed and watched him pass beyond one of the caravans. She struggled to her feet and swayed against the door as the pain stabbed her.

  Ah well! Another day to get through. Another day nearer the end of the poor old fair, she told herself, looking at the bustle around her. A pity for it to go. If young Ben were more like his dear father and had the life and go he used to have, why, she'd be glad to hand the reins over to him—but there, it was no good thinking of that these days.

  She looked at the table in the dusky corner of the caravan. There lay the largest bouquet of wood-shaving flowers she had ever made. It might well be the last, she knew.

  Tonight, after surgery hours, she would call, an annual pilgrim, on old Dr. Bailey and tell him all her troubles. And from that kind old friend she would, at last, learn her fate.

  3. Ben Curdle Meets His Fate

  BEN CURDLE walked back from the milk van, across the wet grass, a bottle dangling from each hand. He was conscious of his grandmother's morose eye upon him, and averted his own gaze. His dark young face looked surly, but his heart was bounding joyfully about in his breast like a clockwork toy.

  He knew where she was! He knew where she was! he sang to himself. For two pins he would have turned cartwheels down the length of Thrush Green and back. This was the finest day in his life, the finest day the world had ever known. He had found his girl.

  He had met her exactly a year ago, when the fair had visited Thrush Green. It had been a cold, blustery day, but lit with such warm radiance for young Ben Curdle that he would never forget it. He had seen Molly Piggott, first, very early in the morning. She had emerged from the cottage next to "The Two Pheasants" armed with a bucket and scrubbing brush, and had plumped herself down to scrub the red-brick doorstep. She wore a frock with blue flowers on it, Ben remembered, and a red woolen jacket. Her pretty legs were bare and she wore white sandals. She had a mop of curly hair as dark as his own, and when he had called "Good morning" to her from the doorway of his caravan she had flashed such a smile at him that his heart turned over. The sleeves of the red jacket were thrust up above her elbows and the water from the scrubbing brush ran down her milky arm and trickled to the ground.

  For a year now Ben had remembered her like that at will. They had spent three or four hours of that enchanted day in each other's company, and though Ben remembered it all and hugged the memories to him desperately, it was that first glimpse of her that stayed most clearly in his mind and had given him mingled comfort and torment for so many barren months.

  At that time, and ever since she had left school three years before, Molly Piggott had been living at home, looking after her father, that crotchety widower, cooking his midday meal, her own life largely governed by his sexton's duties. In the afternoons, after washing up at the shallow slate sink in the tiny scullery, she walked across Thrush Green to the Bassetts' house.

  Here she ironed or mended linen, mostly for young Paul, who adored her, until a quarter to three, when Paul's after-dinner rest ended. It was then her duty and pleasure to get him up and take him out for an hour or so, returning to nursery tea, followed by a game, bathtime and bed. Between six and seven she returned to her own cottage and spent most of the evening alone while her father drank gloomily in the pub next door.

  Molly had been quite content with this placid life, despite the constant grumblings of the old man. Luckily, he was out of the house for a large part of the day, pottering about the church and churchyard, occasionally digging a grave and tidying it after the sad ceremony or ringing a wedding peal and sweeping up the confetti and gay little silver horseshoes afterward. His demeanor remained exactly the same whatever the function. He hauled on his striped furry sally as each young couple emerged, starry-eyed, into the dazzling sunshine of Thrush Green, with the same gloomy expression of a disgruntled tortoise with which he wielded his mattock to lift the first sod for some boyhood friend's grave. Life was sour for old Mr. Piggott, and he made sure that everybody knew it.

  The afternoon was the happiest part of Molly's day. She did her ironing or mending in the quiet stone-flagged kitchen whose windows looked out upon the garden in which old Mr. Bassett had pottered and finally died. She loved this tranquil hour in the hushed early afternoon. Thrush Green was somnolent in its after-dinner nap, and the old house dozed around her. Paul was in his bed upstairs playing, looking at his books, or sometimes merely lying there in that blissful state between sleeping and waking, where dreams and reality merge imperceptibly and the cry of the cuckoo from the lime tree might well be the chime of the clock on the wall of the dream room into which one has just floated.

  Molly's kitchen was fragrant with the smell of freshly ironed linen and she felt her satisfaction mounting with the pile. Paul's small shirts and vests, his minute trousers and his handkerchiefs, bright with nursery rhymes, all received special care. And later, as she sat in the low wooden armchair, with the needle flashing in and out of the clean clothes, she would plan the walk that she would take him on when the time came to lift young Paul, warm and heavy, smelling faintly of Vinolia soap, from his rest.

  In the winter they kept to the roads, or, if the earth were hard with frost, they might play on Thrush Green with a bat and ball in view of Paul's home. Occasionally they walked down the steep hill to Lulling to shop for something which Joan had forgotten. But more often they took the little leafy lane which led from Thrush Green to Upper Pleshy, Nod and Nidden, the lane that threaded half a dozen or more sleepy thatched villages, like hoary old beads upon its winding string, before it emerged upon the broad highway which led to Stratford-upon-Avon.

  Sometimes their expeditions were more adventurous. Molly and Paul knew all the true joys that were within an hour's walk of Thrush Green. There was the pond that lay, dark and mysterious, along the lower road to Lulling Woods, mirroring the trees that stood around it. Sometimes in the summer Paul had taken a bright wooden boat on a string and floated it there, beating at the water's edge with a fan of leaves to make waves. In the spring vast masses of frogs' spawn floated just beneath the surface, like submerged chain mail cast there by some passing
knight. And on one day of hard frost Paul and Molly had slid back and forth across the shining ice, screaming with delight, watched by a bold robin who sat fearlessly nearby on a low bare branch preening the pale-gray feathers that edged the bronze of his breast.

  There were other places that they loved which were accessible only in the summer. There was the steep path through Lulling Woods, cool as a cathedral, even on the sultriest day. There was the field path to Nod, where the grass brushed Paul's shoulder in high summer and he looked at marguerites and red sorrel at eye level. A bower of briar roses guarded the final stile that led into Nod and, in later life, Paul never smelled that sharp breath-taking sweetness of the wild rose without remembering the languor and warm happiness of those golden afternoons with Molly Piggott.

  She was the perfect companion for a little boy, placid, good-tempered and ready to answer endless questions.

  "Why can't I fly, Molly?"

  "Would you be terribly, terribly sad if I died, Molly?"

  "Why don't all animals have horns?"

  These were a few of the simpler questions that Molly faced daily. When Paul started to attend Sunday school at Saint Andrew's and, later still, listened to Miss Watson's Scripture lessons at the village school, the queries grew more difficult.

  "Did John the Baptist always have a headache?" he asked at teatime one day.

  "Never knew he had one," said Molly equably, spreading jam for him.

  "Well, he said he wasn't fit to stoop down and tie up shoelaces," pointed out Paul reasonably, cutting the bread and butter energetically. And later on, as Molly tucked him into bed he had asked:

  "Who is the Holy Ghost, Molly?"

  Molly pushed her hair back from her forehead, screwing up her eyes in an effort to solve this teaser.

  "I don't rightly know, Paul," she answered slowly, "but he was a friend of Jesus's."

  "What I thought," answered the child, butting his head into the pillow and, satisfied, he was asleep in two minutes.

  When Paul was five and had started school Molly feared that her services might not be needed at the house on Thrush Green, but Joan Bassett had reassured her. The two had been together in the big kitchen, one December afternoon, Molly with her mending and Joan icing the Christmas cake, while Paul rested upstairs.

  "You know that Paul starts school in the New Year," Joan had said, intent on her sugar rosettes, "but we all hope you will stay with us for as long as you want to."

  Molly had kept her head bent above her sewing but her heart leaped at the news.

  "He ends school at half past three each day, so that you can have tea with us as you've always done and help with the linen and run a few errands...."

  Joan paused as she negotiated a tricky edge with her icing tool. Molly said nothing, speechless with relief. Joan wondered if the girl might have other plans and began again with some diffidence.

  "Of course I know you'll want something with more scope now that you're getting older, and we'd never stand in your way, Molly. You must feel quite free to go to any other post if you are offered one."

  "Oh no!" Molly exclaimed from a full heart, "I don't ever want to leave here!"

  And, at that moment, she really meant it.

  And so the winter months had slipped by, with Paul bursting from school at half past three and running home across the green bearing a paper mat woven erratically from bright strips, or a wallpaper bookmark still damp from the paste brush, as a souvenir of his day's labors.

  He was ecstatically happy at the little school. Both teachers he had known from babyhood. Miss Watson he saw but little, for she took the older children, and after morning prayers and a Scripture story she retired to her own classroom and was seen no more by Paul. But Miss Fogerty, the infants' teacher, he adored, and she began to share Molly's place in his heart. She had been teaching at Thrush Green school as long as the Bassett girls could remember and had not changed a scrap in all the years. Small and mousy, with very bright eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles, she darted about the classroom and playground still wearing the silver pencil on a long chain about her neck that Joan remembered from her own childhood glimpses of Miss Fogerty.

  Molly missed the companionship of the child on the afternoon walks. She often ran an errand nowadays for Joan at the time when she had formerly taken out Paul. She was a reliable shopper and Joan found that she could give her increasing responsibility in choosing food and drapery from the shops in Lulling. By Eastertime Molly was doing a large part of the catering for the household at Thrush Green, keeping an eye on the larder and making intelligent suggestions to Joan for the evening meal when Edward would be home.

  Joan began to hope that Molly would indeed stay forever, as she had so ardently promised. But on the day of Thrush Green Fair young Ben Curdle had walked into Molly Piggott's life, and by the time the harvest was being gathered, things had changed at the house on Thrush Green.

  It had been a cold, wretched day that year for the first of May. The gusts of wind shivered the young lime leaves above the caravans and the sky was as gray as the canvas tent which housed the "Marine Wonder" hard by.

  Molly had spoken a few words, during the morning, to the dark young man who was busy erecting the scaffolding for the coconut shies opposite her cottage. She had liked him from the first moment that she had seen him when she was scrubbing the doorstep. She liked his soft voice and his crinkly, wiry hair and the odd shape of his dark eyes. If she had been drawing his face, she thought to herself, she would have put triangles for his eyes. Molly liked drawing and Miss Watson had often pinned her sketches on the schoolroom wall for her fellow-pupils to admire.

  He had called to her when she emerged to go shopping for old Mr. Piggott's dinner with her basket on her arm. He was squatting down in the wet grass, his hair upswept in the wind, looking intently at something on the ground.

  "Come and see," he invited, giving her a crooked smile, his head on one side. Molly had crossed the road and gone to look. A young frog, speckled and yellow, crouched between Ben's shoes, its throat pulsing, its starfish front feet turned in. For a dreadful moment Molly feared that he might kill it, as she had seen other stupid country boys do when they were displaying their manly bravado before the girls, but with relief and pleasure she watched him gather it in his grimy hands. He rose in one graceful movement and crossed to the railings of the churchyard where the grass grew tallest. He deposited the reptile there and returned to Molly, wiping his hands down his black corduroy trousers.

  "Coming to the fair?" he asked.

  Molly nodded, her face alight with mischief.

  "And bringing a boy," she quipped. Ben's face clouded and Molly was unaccountably stirred.

  "Only a little one," she said, laughing. "Lives over there." She nodded across to the Bassetts' house, hitched her basket farther up her arm and set off for the butcher's shop.

  "See you later then," Ben called after her; and Molly had trotted away, conscious of his eyes upon her back.

  That afternoon Joan had asked her to collect some eggs from Dotty Harmer's and Molly had joyfully accepted the basket and the money, for the way lay close to the coconut shies.

  Dotty Harmer was an eccentric old maid who lived alone in a ramshackle cottage in one of the meadows which bordered the path to Lulling Woods. Her father had been a history master at the local grammar school and Dotty had kept house for the old man until his death, when she sold their home, bringing some of the furniture, all the books, four cats, two dogs and a collection of medicinal herbs to her new abode. The herbs flourished in her tiny garden, with roses, peonies, lilies and carnations which were the envy of all the gardeners in Lulling.

  Dotty concocted alarming potions from the herbs and these she pressed upon her unwilling neighbors and friends if they were unwary enough to admit to any slight ailment in her presence. So far, she had killed no one, but the vicar of Saint Andrew's had once had to call in Dr. Bailey as he was in agony with severe stomach pains, and had to admit that he had taken
tea and sandwiches with a peculiar and pungent filling at Dotty Harmer's a few hours before. The doctor had dismissed his troubles airily, diagnosing, "Dotty's Collywobbles," a fairly common Lulling complaint, and had warned him about accepting further hospitality at that lady's hands.

  As well as herbs and flowers Dotty reared some fine chickens and sold eggs to a few favored friends. Molly often called there and enjoyed the old lady's garrulity.

  That afternoon, as she had hoped, the dark young man was loitering by the coconut shies, as she approached.

  "You busy?" he asked.

  "Only going to get some eggs. It's not far," she replied. There was a pause. Molly did not like to stop for she felt that she might be seen from the windows of the Bassetts' house. Her father, too, might catch sight of her. He was in the churchyard, clipping the edges of the grass paths, but she was afraid that he might rise from the sack on which he knelt and shout at her if he caught her talking to this stranger.

  "Can I come?" said Ben suddenly.

  "Can't stop you, can I?" said Molly, swinging her basket and smiling at him. "Come on then. We go this way."

  Between "The Two Pheasants" and the Piggotts' house was a narrow path which led gently downhill to the meadow where Dotty Harmer lived. Ahead, to the right, could be seen the massive leafy slopes of Lulling Woods, and the rushing of the wind in the turbulent branches could be clearly heard.

  As they emerged from the passageway between the buildings and dropped down the sandy path through the field they were suddenly sheltered from the tormenting wind.