At the Break of Day (9 page)

What were they talking about? Rosie served another customer, smiling, giving change, settling back against the counter. She couldn’t remember, but she smiled again at the thought of the pushchair coming through the gate, the child wide-eyed and unsure. Then Maisie, her red hair brown at the roots, her earrings jangling and her face bright with a smile.

Rosie had stood her mug in the earth of a rose bush and run to Maisie, flinging her arms round her, smelling the older woman’s lavender scent. She had looked at Maisie, taking in the circles beneath her eyes and the lines from her nose to her mouth. But the smile was the same and the voice too.

‘You took your time coming home. We’ve missed you,’ Maisie said, pulling her close again. ‘We’ve really missed you.’ Rosie hadn’t spoken. She knew she would have cried, for these arms were Nancy’s too and she could hardly bear the pain.

She squeezed Maisie, then turned, her head lowered, to Lee. He was squirming round, his eyes watching her; his smile was Jack’s but his skin was pale, freckled. Not like any of the others.

He reached up his hand and gripped her finger and she said how cute he was, and lifted him from the pushchair, taking him to Grandpa, sitting with him on her knee. Maisie poured tea from the pot for herself, fetched Rosie’s from the rosebed, dusted the earth off the bottom with her hand, and called Rosie the same mucky devil she’d always been. They laughed together, as they used to do, and then just looked at one another.

‘You look tired,’ Rosie said, rubbing her cheek against Lee’s head. He pulled away and looked at her, his smile there, his eyes watching hers.

‘Don’t fret at what you hear,’ Maisie said, her face drawn. ‘It sounds worse than it is.’

Would she come again tonight? Rosie wondered. She’d said she would.

Maisie did come, with Lee again, while Rosie washed clothes in the sink. ‘Sit with Grandpa,’ she called through to the yard. ‘I’ll bring the tea out in a minute.’

Norah slammed through from the hall. ‘I’m going out, especially now that kid’s here. There’s no bloody peace.’

‘Why don’t you stay?’ Rosie said as she wrung out the blouse and dress. ‘We should try to get on.’

She had decided to be pleasant again, to try and build some sort of a bridge between them this summer because they needed one another. Couldn’t Norah see that? Families were important, but then it seemed that Norah preferred her friends.

Norah pulled her cardigan over her shoulders and checked her make-up in the mirror, tucking the lipstick she had melted down last night into her bag.

‘I’ve got better things to do,’ she said. ‘We’re going dancing. Not at the crummy Palais but up West.’

Rosie smiled, wanting to wring her neck instead of the blouse. She shook her hands over the sink, dried them, then picked up the tea tray. Norah’s dress didn’t fit. It was too tight over the hips.

‘Have a good time,’ was all Rosie said.

Lee put out his arms to Rosie as she sat down between Maisie and Grandpa.

‘Go on, pick him up then,’ Maisie said. ‘He gets nothing but spoiling from Jack too.’

She was smiling as she pulled out the Camel cigarettes from her bag. ‘Thanks for these, Rosie. I should have been in sooner to say thanks – and to say hello. Here you are, Albert.’ She leaned past Rosie, handing him one. ‘Got your own matches, have you?’

He nodded.

Rosie let Lee walk up her legs and body, holding on to his hands while he arched away, and then she put him down, watching his unsteady walk. He reached into the raised beds, picking up soil, looking at it, dropping it.

Grandpa laughed. ‘It’s good to have you here, Maisie. A bit like old times. Can’t believe this little nipper is one and a half. Seems only yesterday it was Jack and Rosie digging up me roses.’

They flicked their ash into their hands and Rosie leaned back, her face to the sun, watching the smoke spiralling, disappearing. She didn’t like the smell and moved to the upturned pail, hugging her knees, laughing as Lee tottered towards her.

‘Yes,’ Maisie said. ‘Just like old times.’

There was silence except for the grunts from Lee.

‘Can you put back the clock then, Albert?’ Maisie said.

‘Yes, can you, Grandpa?’ Rosie echoed.

That night Rosie replied to the letters she had received from the previous week. She was glad the lake was so warm, and the swimming good, that the Club tennis court was already being built. But, she wanted to say, how can it all continue as though I’ve never existed? How can all these things go on when I hurt so much inside?

How many Subscription Dances had gone into the court? she wondered. How many girls had danced with Joe? Had Frank leaned back in his chair and said, ‘You make sure you don’t drink when you drive that girl.’ Of course he hadn’t. He only said that about her. But not any more.

She told them of the evening classes to begin at the end of September with Miss Paul over the piano shop – shorthand, typing, book-keeping. She told them of the rationing, of the cheeses; of the roses which were still free of greenfly. She did not tell them about Woolworths, nor about Norah or Maisie. She cried all night and she thought her sobs were silent but they weren’t. Grandpa heard them and it was more than he could bear.

The next day, which was a Sunday, he held her hand and said that they would go to Herefordshire again this year. They would go hop-picking as they used to, before the war, before things changed. All of them, Maisie, Ollie, Jack and Lee, just like they used to, and perhaps there she would learn to laugh again deep down inside, and the others would too, and they would cast the war from their lives.

They did go, even Ollie. Even Norah. They took a train on 1 September and then a bus along the roads which wound round and along the rolling green hills because here no one had sliced through nature, but had fitted in with it. Or so Grandpa had always told them when he brought them here each year before the war. Rosie remembered the American street grids, slicing up the towns, and the long straight roads of Pennsylvania, thinking of Frank and Nancy returning to Lower Falls without her now that it was September.

She pushed that from her. She looked out at the fields. There were cider apple orchards. There was space, sky, air. It was green in the distance, not grey and cramped, and slowly she began to remember what had once been, so long ago.

Close by, the barley had been harvested and the ground reploughed and that was still the same. Though not each field, not yet, and now those that were left unploughed must wait until the hops were in because for those few short weeks of the harvest all else was put to one side. Would her pain be put to one side too, and everyone else’s?

Jones’s farm with its large spacious pigsties was the same too. Swept, scrubbed, white-washed, for this was where they always slept. Jack laughed as they stuffed straw into the palliasses, chasing Lee with a handful, pushing some down Maisie’s back, then Rosie’s. Maisie crept up behind him and they pushed him on to the heaped pile, sitting on him, stuffing straw up his trousers and down his shirt until he begged for mercy, and even then they stopped only when he had gone down on his knees.

Grandpa, Ollie and Jack slept in the end partition. Rosie, Norah, Maisie and Lee were in the next. The rest of the sties were taken by Black Country people and a few from Bromsgrove, and this was why Grandpa came here, and not to Kent. It was here that he heard his Bromsgrove dialect, his roots. Where were hers? Rosie thought.

‘Just you wait, he’ll be calling us “me dooks” before the day is out,’ Maisie said as she gave Lee a biscuit to chew. As they ate supper heated over the primus in the end building he did and they all laughed, even Norah, even Ollie, even Rosie, and it was from deep inside.

Jack and Rosie walked down the lane to the road, watching for the caravans that they knew would come bringing gypsies on from the plum-picking at Evesham, the cherries at Shropshire and the peas at Worcester. The gate was warm from the sun, deep cracked, chipped with the initials they had carved in 1938. Jack covered it over.

‘Your Grandpa would catch us with his stick,’ he laughed.

Rosie nodded, looking down the lane, hearing the caravans, the barking of the long dogs and lurchers, the ponies which plodded, the brasses which jingled. She felt the wind in her hair and was happy because for the four weeks they were here, this place belonged to her, just as much or as little as it belonged to the others.

The gypsies came now, the women walking at the pony’s head, one smoking a clay pipe. The men sat, the reins in their hands. The children sat too, looking ahead, not at Rosie or Jack.

‘Never changes, does it?’ Jack murmured, watching as they rolled past.

They walked then, up to the hop-fields, neither speaking, taking the path which ran along the top of the kale field. She remembered where to go, she realised. Somehow she knew where to go.

She walked ahead now, confident, hearing Jack close behind. On round the kale which looked like small trees, then further to the ragwort-spotted meadows. At the bottom of these, past clumps of purple-crested thistles, lay the stream. They used to picnic there at the end of the day. She turned.

‘Do you remember …?’ she began, but stopped for Jack was nodding.

‘Yes, I remember. Tinned salmon sandwiches.’ He was smiling and there were no shadows in his eyes today. Rosie hoped that there would be none as the four weeks went by. Would Ollie and Maisie be able to go back in time, enough for a fresh start? Would she?

In the distance rooks clawed up into the sky from the copse planted on Trafalgar Day. She turned further up the hill and they were on to the worn top path and into the hop-fields where the bines swung fifteen feet above them in the wind and Rosie stood still, looking about her, remembering.

Her mother had come every year before she died. They had picked all September and her mother had said it made her feel safe, standing here, as Rosie was doing now. Safe from the world. She had died though, her father too. They hadn’t been safe. Was there such a thing as safety? Everything changed. It always changed.

‘It’s like being under the sea,’ Jack said, standing close to her, looking up.

It seemed so quiet, no dogs barking, no cyclists whistling, no children playing. She loved this first evening before the picking began and the hops were stripped.

‘I love this first evening,’ Jack said.

When they returned to the sties the Welsh had arrived and were in the barn, singing, shouting, laughing. One child was crying but Lee was sound asleep and Maisie too. Norah lay on the straw mattress. It always itched the first night, Rosie thought as she settled on hers, but she could see the sky through the window, the clouds scudding over the moon, and then she slept and dreamed of nothing.

In the morning she was up early, walking along the lane again. The mist lay still over the land and there were blackberries on the bushes as she passed. She picked two and they stained her fingers. They were sweet and cool.

The oasts were shrouded by the mist, the farm buildings too. A cockerel crowed. She was at the kale now and there was dew on the leaves. She reached down, rolling the drops off into her hand. There were ferns at the edge of the field and everywhere the earth was red and smelt of a long warm summer.

There were partridges flying up before her, and a lurcher dog over from the caravans was leaping and bounding in the kale, making more birds rise. There was smoke from the gypsy caravans and washing strung across the bushes. The hedges nearby were stripped of branches for their fires. Rosie turned now, back to the farm, to the white-washed, partitioned sties, because the sun was breaking through, the mist was rising and soon the picking would begin.

As they left for the hop-fields, the sun was casting sharp shadows from the two oasts and the distant Welsh hills were black. Rosie tightened the hessian sacking around her waist and took Maisie’s bag from her, passing it on to Jack when he nodded. It left both Maisie’s hands free for the pushchair.

‘That’s better,’ said Maisie, pushing the chair and laughing.

The hop strands had been strung in the spring by men on stilts and now the pickers pulled at the bines, flip-flipping the hops into the wattle bins. The Welsh were ahead of them, the Black Country people with them, and Grandpa was laughing and talking, his voice soft, almost young again. The gypsies were further back, the children silent as they worked. One had a ferret and carried dock leaves in his pocket as a cure for its bites. Rosie looked at Jack and they laughed.

The hop-leaves hung down from the strings, deep etched by the sun filtering through. The sprays of hops were a delicate green, the pollen-like powder was yellow on her fingers. It made the beer bitter.

Her fingers grew sore but soon she was picking without looking, flipping the hops into the bins, smelling them on her hands as she pinned back her hair. Norah wore grips in hers.

‘Sensible,’ Maisie whispered, ‘but not going to set anyone’s heart on fire.’

They worked until lunch, then sat in the shade eating sandwiches, drinking water that was warm from the heat of the day. Grandpa went back to the sty to lie down but he returned at four looking rested and happy. Rosie lost count of the hours, measuring time by the level of hops in the bin, watching the pale green piles rise. The hoverflies were all around, humming, buzzing. Butterflies too. There were moths at night, she remembered now.

The busheller came round again and again, dipping his bushel basket into the bin, counting aloud each time as he filled it. He tipped the hops out into one of the big sacks, giving them a card with the number written on, and Ollie initialled it each time. They heard him counting as he went down the next aisle and the next.

So it went on from day to day and the sun never faltered and in the evening they sat around the fire and never raised their voices, even Ollie, even Norah.

Rosie told them of the moth as big as a wren and shrank back as smaller ones came, attracted by the kerosene lamps. She watched as Jack gently brushed them away. Joe would have crushed them.

On Sunday this hop-farm did no picking and there was a stillness in the hop-yard, but the kiln was still in use, drying off the hops picked late yesterday afternoon. She and Jack walked into the oast-house and below the hop-floor was row upon row of long white sacks waiting for collection by the brewers who would come when all the hops were in.