She had just finished the ironing when Tom Flowers tramped into the kitchen for his midday meal, followed by Colonel Max. Neither man was married and they were the best of friends. The same age, thirty-nine, they had played together as children. Tom’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him, had tended the gardens of The Limes since the middle of the last century.
The colonel was delighted to see her. ‘I swear this young lady grows prettier by the day,’ he exclaimed. ‘What do you say, Tom?’
Tom glanced at her briefly. ‘Aye,’ he muttered. He was a taciturn man, though always polite. Rose found it strange that the gardener, with his tall, strong frame and square shoulders, looked far more the military man than
Colonel Max, who was small, almost bald, and rather endearingly ugly.
‘One of the pleasures of coming home on leave is having my morning tea brought by the best-looking girl in Ailsham,’ the colonel enthused.
‘I was just saying, she’ll make someone a fine wife one of these days,’ Mrs Denning put in.
‘If I were twenty years younger, the someone would be me.’
Mrs Denning grinned. She knew, they all knew, including the colonel himself, that Mrs Corbett would sooner be dead than allow her son to marry a servant.
Rose’s cheeks were already burning and they burnt even more when she noticed Tom Flowers was looking at her again, not so briefly this time. There was an expression on his face almost of surprise, as if he’d never seen her properly before. She caught his eye and he quickly turned away.
‘Lunch will be ready in ten minutes, Colonel,’ Mrs Denning sang. ‘C’mon, Tom, sit down and take the weight off your feet.’ She and Tom were also friends, having gone to the village school together, though Mrs Denning had been in a lower class. In fact, everyone in Ailsham seemed to be connected in one way or another. Rose felt as if she was living in a foreign country and would never belong.
‘I suppose I’d better get changed.’ The colonel left the room with a sigh, from which she assumed he would much prefer to eat in the kitchen with the servants than with his autocratic mother, but that would have been almost as terrible a crime as wanting to marry one.
Was she really all that pretty? Rose examined her reflection in the mirror behind the wardrobe door before
setting out on her afternoon walk. She had brown hair, very thick and wavy, a bit wild, framing her face like a halo. It seemed a very common or garden face, she thought, with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. She smiled at herself to see if it made any difference and several dimples appeared in her cheeks, still pink as a result of the colonel’s comments. She shrugged and supposed she wasn’t so bad.
The shrug reminded her that her brassiere was too tight and she needed a bigger one, size thirty-six. The black frock that had been too big when she first arrived would soon fit perfectly.
The countryside surrounding Ailsham was too lonely to wander around on her own and a bit dull. Rose had got into the habit of walking as far as the village where she usually treated herself to a bar of toffee or chocolate, or a quarter of dolly mixtures.
Ailsham was pleasantly ordinary, not the sort of village that often featured in the books Rose so avidly read. There wasn’t a thatched cottage to be seen, nor an ancient stone church with a steeple. She had yet to find a gurgling stream, a hump-backed bridge, or a pretty copse. There were no gently sloping hills, this part of Lancashire being very flat. There was a brook somewhere off Holly Lane, but to get there meant walking along the edge of two ploughed fields and perhaps getting lost.
The village was served by a tiny station, from which trains ran hourly to Liverpool, fifteen miles away, and Ormskirk, only four. The Ribble bus ran twice a day to the same places, early morning and late afternoon, though not on Sundays.
The shops were still closed for lunch when Rose
arrived on this particular day; the butchers, where one of Mrs Denning’s sons, Luke, worked, the bakers, Dorothy’s Hairdressers and Beryl’s Fashions where Rose bought all her clothes, including the pink and white gingham frock she had on now and the blue silky one she wore on Sundays. Beryl also sold ladies’ underwear, wool, and sewing things. The biggest shop was Harker’s, which was actually five shops in one; a general store, a greengrocers, newsagents, tobacconists, and post office.
She sat on a bench at the edge of the green and waited for the shops to open. The pub, the Oak Tree, which got its name from the huge tree on the green directly opposite, was busy and customers, all men, were sitting at the tables outside. The pub, the shops, and most of the houses that she’d passed had posters in the windows advertising the Midsummer Fête to be held on the village green a week on Saturday. It was being organised by the Women’s Institute of which Mrs Corbett was a founding member and chairman of the committee. For weeks now, groups of women had been meeting in the drawing room of The Limes to make final arrangements for the fête. There was a perfectly good Women’s Institute hall between the school and the Oak Tree that would have been far more convenient, but the chairman preferred the committee came to her house. Rose wasn’t the only person Mrs Corbett bossed around.
The butchers threw open its doors, followed by the bakers. Soon, all five shops were open, but Rose didn’t move from the bench. She was watching two girls of about her own age, both vaguely familiar, walking along the path that encircled the green, arms linked companionably.
‘Oh, look,’ one remarked as they drew nearer. ‘The door’s open, which means I’m late. Mrs Harker will have
my guts for garters.’ She abandoned her companion and began to run. ‘See you tonight at quarter to six by the station,’ she shouted. ‘I’m really looking forward to that Clark Gable picture.’
‘Me too.’ The other girl sauntered into Beryl’s Fashions and Rose recognised her as Heather, Beryl’s assistant. Beryl mustn’t mind her being late.
Rose would have liked to work in a shop and quite fancied going to the pictures, but what she would have liked most of all was to have a friend, someone to link arms with. She rarely met anyone her own age except in the shops. If, say, she went into Beryl’s and bought the brassiere she obviously needed and Heather invited her to the pictures – a most unlikely event – she couldn’t possibly go. At quarter to six, she would be setting the table for dinner, which would be served at precisely six o’clock. It would be well past seven when her duties were finished. By then, she would be too weary to walk as far as the station. Anyway, the picture would be half over by the time she got there.
She jumped to her feet, bought a whole half pound of dolly mixtures, and ate them on the way back to The Limes.
Music was coming from the barn that Colonel Max’s father had turned into a games room for his sons – the colonel’s elder brother had been killed in the Great War. It had a billiard table, a dart board, and a badminton court. The music was jazz, which the colonel only played out of earshot of his mother, who couldn’t stand it. Rose loved any sort of music. She danced a few steps on the gravel path, but stopped immediately, embarrassed, when she saw Tom Flowers regarding her with amusement from the rose garden.
‘You look happy,’ he said.
‘Oh, I am,’ she said, but only because it seemed churlish to say that she wasn’t.
She went through the laundry room into the kitchen, which should have been empty as Mrs Denning went home as soon as lunch was over and didn’t return until half four to make dinner. Rose was surprised to find a cross Mrs Corbett waiting for her, demanding to know why she hadn’t answered the bell she’d been ringing for ages.
‘It was my time off, madam. I’ve been for a walk,’ Rose stammered.
‘Oh!’ Mrs Corbett looked slightly nonplussed. ‘Well, you’re late back. I’m having a bridge party this afternoon. I want you in uniform immediately. My guests will be arriving very soon.’
In fact, Rose was five minutes early, but Mrs Corbett would only have got crosser if she’d pointed it out.
A week later, the colonel’s leave ended and he left for France. Lots of people telephoned or called personally to wish him luck, which had never happened before.
‘Look after yourself, Max, old boy.’
‘Take care, Colonel. Keep your head down, if only for your mother’s sake.’
War between Great Britain and Germany was imminent. Once it started, the colonel’s regiment would be on the front line. Mrs Corbett, who’d lost one son in the ‘war to end all wars’, retired to her room after Colonel Max had gone, and stayed there all morning, emerging as steely-eyed as ever at lunchtime and complaining bitterly that the lamb was tough.
War, when it came, made little difference to Rose’s life. It just became busier. Mrs Corbett joined the Women’s
Voluntary Service and held coffee mornings and garden parties to raise funds. Rose was required to make gallons of coffee and tea, and carry it round to the guests. Mrs Denning had to bake mountains of sausage rolls and fairy cakes, yet was still expected to have the meals ready on time.
‘Does she think I’m a miracle worker or something?’ she asked Rose in an injured voice.
It came as an unpleasant shock when, after Christmas, Mrs Denning announced she was leaving to work in a munitions factory in Kirkby at four times her present wage. A special bus came through Ailsham to pick the workers up. Mrs Corbett would just have to find another cook.
‘But I don’t like leaving you behind, love,’ Mrs Denning said. ‘There’ll be no one for you to talk to once I’m gone. Look, why don’t you leave, get another job? There’s loads of work going, what with all the men being called up. You could earn more money and mix with young people for a change.’
‘Yes, but where would I live?’ Rose wanted to know.
‘You’d have to find digs. It shouldn’t be too difficult.’
‘I’ll think about it.’ She was too scared. She felt safe in The Limes, just as she’d done in the orphanage. There was a saying, something about sticking with the devil you know. Mrs Corbett was the devil, and Rose would stick with her, for the foreseeable future at least.
Mrs Corbett had found it impossible to hire another cook. She wasn’t alone. Her friends were having the same problem. Not only cooks, but housemaids, nursemaids, parlourmaids, even charwomen, were abandoning their employers to take up war work. Mrs Conway’s maid had become a WREN. Some women regarded it as
unpatriotic. How could they be expected to run their own households without servants?
‘Of course it’s not unpatriotic,’ Mrs Corbett said sternly. ‘We’ve all got to do our bit.’ But she hadn’t been near the kitchen except to give orders since her own cook had left. A stunned Rose had discovered she was expected to do the cooking in Mrs Denning’s place.
‘But I can’t,’ she gasped when the additional duties were explained to her. ‘Can’t cook, that is.’
‘Did you learn nothing from Mrs Denning in all the time you’ve been here?’ Mrs Corbett asked cuttingly.
‘No, madam.’ There’d been too many other things to do to watch the meals being made. She could fry things, boil things, but when it came to roasting meat, baking bread, making cakes, she was lost. The Aga had four ovens that each did different things, she had no idea what.
She coped for a week. Mrs Corbett was invited out to dine several times, but when she ate at home, the complaints increased with every meal. The chops were burnt, the potatoes soggy, the jelly hadn’t properly set. She was a foolish girl for not realising it should have been made the day before.
On Sunday, two old school friends arrived to stay, the Misses Dolly and Daisy Clayburn, who lived in Poplar and were convinced Hitler was about to bomb the place out of existence. On their first morning, Rose found the laundry basket in the bathroom overflowing with dirty clothes they’d brought with them. She took them downstairs and was putting them to soak in the sink in the laundry room, when Luke Denning arrived on his bike bringing a huge piece of meat. It was a horrible morning, very stormy, and the rain ran in rivulets from
the brim of his sou’wester and the hem of his oilskin cape.
‘We’re lucky, living in the country while there’s a war on,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Town folk’d give their eye teeth for a leg of lamb that size.’
‘Lucky!’ Rose said weakly.
‘Well, I’ll be off.’ Luke got back on his bike. ‘Oh, by the way. You’ll have to collect your own meat as from next week. I’m leaving Friday. Ma’s got me a job in her factory. ’Bye, Rose.’
‘’Bye.’
Rose carried the meat inside and put it on the draining board. It looked much too big to be part of the little woolly lambs she’d seen frolicking over the fields. What was she supposed to do with it? Should it go in the oven covered with greaseproof paper? If so, for how long? Did it have to be cut into bits and stewed – or was that steak, the cheap sort? Maybe it had to be boiled?
She made the morning tea and took Mrs Corbett’s up first, then returned for the Misses Clayburns’. They were both sitting up in the double bed when she went into their room.
‘We heard the rattle of dishes and were expecting you,’ said one. ‘Oh, this is nice, isn’t it, Dolly? Just listen to that rain! Could we have marmalade with our bread and butter, dear?’
Rose raced downstairs for the marmalade. She was hurrying down a second time, the marmalade delivered, when Mrs Corbett called.
‘Was that Luke with the lamb I heard earlier?’ she asked. When Rose confirmed that was the case, she said, ‘I’d like it roasted for lunch, the potatoes too, served with cauliflower and peas. And don’t forget the gravy. For afters, we’ll have suet pudding and custard. And
kindly stop running everywhere, Rose. There’s no need for it. It sounded as if a cart horse was galloping up and down the stairs.’
There was a tight, panicky feeling in her chest as Rose ran through the rain to the coalhouse with the scuttles, filled them, and brought them back one at a time. She was already way behind this morning. The fires had refused to light, the strong wind had whistled down the chimneys and blown the paper out before the flames had caught. She’d had to reset them twice. She wound the clocks, cut the rind off the bacon, and prayed she wouldn’t break the yolks when she fried the eggs, something Mrs Corbett found extremely irritating. Then she remembered she’d used the last of the bread to take upstairs, there was none left for toast and the baker hadn’t yet arrived with a fresh supply – even Mrs Corbett accepted she couldn’t expect her to make home-baked bread.