The Christmas Mouse (2 page)

The wedding was as modest as befitted the circumstances, and the pair were married at Caxley registry office, spent their brief honeymoon at Torquay, and returned to share the cottage with old Mrs Berry. It was October 1963 and the autumn was one of the most golden and serene that anyone could recall.

Their first child was due to arrive the following September. Mary gave up her job at the post office in June.

The summer was full of promise. The cottage garden
flowered as never before, and Mary, resting in a deck chair, gazed dreamily at the madonna lilies and golden roses, and dwelt on the happy lot of the future baby. They had all set their hearts on a boy, and Mary was convinced that it would be a son. Blue predominated in the layette that she and Mrs Berry so lovingly prepared.

When her time came she was taken to the maternity wing of the local cottage hospital, and gave birth to a boy, fair and blue eyed like his father. She held him in her arms for a moment before returning him to the nurse’s care. In her joy she did not notice the anxious looks the doctor and nurse exchanged. Nor did she realize that her child had been taken from her bed straight to an oxygen tent.

In the morning, they broke the news to her that the boy had died. Mary never forgot the utter desolation that gripped her for weeks after this terrible loss. Her husband and mother together nursed her back to health, but always, throughout her whole life, Mary remembered that longed-for boy with the blue gaze, and mourned in secret.

A daughter, Jane, was born in the spring of 1966, and another, Frances, in 1968. The two little girls were a lively pair, and when the younger one was beginning to toddle, Bertie and Mary set about finding a cottage of their own. Until that time, Mrs Berry had been glad to have them with her. Mary’s illness, then her second pregnancy, made her husband and mother particularly anxious. Now, it seemed, the time had come for the young family to look for their own home. Mrs Berry’s cottage was becoming overcrowded.

The search was difficult. They wanted to rent a house
to begin with, but this proved to be almost impossible. The search was still on when the annual printing-house outing, called the wayzgoose, took place. Two buses set off for Weymouth carrying the workers and their wives. Mary decided not to go on the day’s outing. Frances had a summer cold and was restless, and her mother had promised to go to a Women’s Institute meeting in the afternoon. So Bertie went alone.

It was a cloudless July day, warm from the sun’s rising until its setting. Mary, pushing the pram along a leafy lane, thought enviously of Bertie and his companions sitting on a beach or swimming in the freshness of the sea. She knew Weymouth from earlier outings and loved its great curved bay. Today it would be looking its finest.

The evening dragged after the children had gone to bed. Usually, the adults retired at ten, for all rose early. On this evening, however, Mrs Berry went upstairs alone, leaving Mary to await Bertie’s coming. Eleven o’clock struck, then twelve. Yawning, bemused with the long day’s heat, Mary began to lock up.

She was about to lock the front door when she heard a car draw up. Someone rapped upon the door, and when Mary opened it, to her surprise she saw Mr Partridge, the vicar, standing there. His kind old face was drawn with anxiety.

‘I’m sorry to appear so late, my dear Mrs Fuller, but a telephone message has just come to the vicarage.’

‘Yes?’ questioned Mary.

The vicar looked about him in agitation. ‘Do you think we might sit down for a moment?’

Mary remembered her manners. ‘Of course; I’m so sorry. Come in.’

She led the way into the sitting room, still bewildered.

‘It’s about Bertie,’ began the vicar. ‘There’s been an accident, I fear. Somewhere south of Caxley. When things were sorted out, someone asked me to let you know that Bertie wouldn’t be home tonight.’

‘What’s happened? Is he badly hurt? Is he dead? Where is he?’

Mary sprang to her feet, her eyes wild.

The vicar spoke soothingly. ‘He’s in Caxley hospital, and being cared for. I know no more, my dear, but I thought you would like to go there straight away and see him.’

Without a word Mary lifted an old coat from the back of the kitchen door.

The vicar eyed her anxiously. ‘Would it not be best to tell Mrs Berry?’ he suggested.

She shook her head. ‘I’ll leave a note.’

He waited while she scribbled briefly upon a piece of paper, and watched her put it in the middle of the kitchen table.

‘No point in waking her,’ she said, closing the front door softly behind her.

The two set off in silence, too worried to make conversation. The air was heavy with the scent of honeysuckle. Moths glimmered in the beams of the headlights, and fell to their death.

How easily, Mary thought – fear clutching her heart – death comes to living things. The memory of her little son filled her mind as they drove through the night to meet what might be another tragedy.

At the hospital they were taken to a small waiting room. Within a minute, a doctor came to them. There was no need for him to speak. His face told Mary all. Bertie had gone.

The wayzgoose, begun so gaily, had ended in tragedy. The two buses had drawn up a few miles from Caxley to allow the passengers to have a last drink before closing time. They had to cross a busy road to enter the old coaching inn, famed for its hospitality. Returning to the bus, Bertie and a friend waited some time for a lull in the traffic. It was a busy road, leading to the coast, and despite the late hour the traffic was heavy. At last they made a dash for it, not realizing that a second car was overtaking the one they could see. The latter slowed down to let the two men cross, but the second car could not stop in time. Both men were hurled to the
ground, Bertie being dragged some yards before the car stopped.

Despite appalling injuries, he was alive when admitted to hospital, but died within the hour. The organizer of the outing, knowing that Mary was not on the telephone, decided to let the local vicar break the news of the accident.

Mr Partridge and poor Mary returned along the dark lanes to the darker cottage, where he aroused Mrs Berry, told her the terrible story and left her trying to comfort the young widow.

If anyone can succeed, Mr Partridge thought as he drove sadly to his vicarage, she can. But oh, the waste of it all! The wicked waste!

O
ld Mrs Berry, remembering that dreadful night, shook her head sadly as she washed up her cup and saucer at the sink. The rain still fell in torrents, and a wild wind buffeted the bushes in the garden, sending the leaves tumbling across the grass.

In Caxley it would not be so rough, she hoped. Most of the time her family would be under cover in the shops, but out here, at Shepherds Cross, they always caught the full violence of the weather.

Mrs Berry’s cottage was the third one spaced along the road that led to Springbourne. All three cottages were roomy, with large gardens containing gnarled old apple and plum trees. Each cottage possessed ancient hawthorn hedges, supplying sanctuary to dozens of little birds.

An old drovers’ path ran at right angles to the cottages, crossing the road by Mrs Berry’s house. This gave the hamlet its name, although it was many years since sheep had been driven along that green lane to the great sheep fair at the downland village ten miles distant.

Some thought it a lonely spot, and declared that they ‘would go melancholy mad, that they would!’ But Mrs Berry, used to remote houses since childhood, was not affected.

She had been brought up in a gamekeeper’s cottage in a woodland ride. As a small child she rarely saw anyone strange, except on Sundays, when she attended church with her parents.

She had loved that church, relishing its loftiness, its glowing stained-glass windows and the flowers on the altar. She paid attention to the exhortations of the vicar too, a holy man who truly ministered to his neighbours. From him, as much as from the example of her parents, she learned early to appreciate modesty, courage, and generosity.

When she was old enough to read she deciphered a plaque upon the chancel floor extolling the virtues of a local benefactor, a man of modest means who nevertheless ‘
was hospitable and charitable for all his Days
’ and who, at his end, left ‘
the interest of Forty Pounds to the Poor of the parish forever
.’

It was the next line or two which the girl never forgot, and which influenced her own life. They read:

Such were the good effects of

Virtue and Oeconomy

Read, Grandeur, and Blush

Certainly, goodness and thrift, combined with a horror of ostentation and boasting, were qualities which Mrs Berry embodied all the days of her life, and her daughters profited by her example.

Mrs Berry left the kitchen and went to sit by the fire in the living room. It was already growing dark, for the sky was thick with storm clouds, and the rain showed no sign of abating.

Water bubbled in the crack of the window frame, and Mrs Berry sighed. It was at times like this one needed a man about the place. Unobtrusively, without complaint, Stanley and then Bertie had attended to such things as
draughty windows, wobbly door knobs, squeaking floor-boards and the like. Now the women had to cope as best they could, and an old house, about two hundred years of age, certainly needed constant attention to keep it in trim.

Nevertheless, it looked pretty and gay. The Christmas tree, dressed the night before by Jane and Frances – with many squeals of delight – stood on the side table, spangled with stars and tinsel, and bearing the Victorian fairy doll, three inches high, which had once adorned the Christmas trees of Mrs Berry’s own childhood. The doll’s tiny wax face was brown with age but still bore that sweet expression which the child had imagined was an angel’s.

Sprigs of holly were tucked behind the picture frames, and a spray of mistletoe hung where the oil lamp had once swung from the central beam over the dining table.

Mrs Berry leaned back in her chair and surveyed it all with satisfaction. It looked splendid and there was very little more to be done to the preparations in the kitchen. The turkey was stuffed, the potatoes peeled. The Christmas pudding had been made in November and stood ready on the shelf to be plunged into the steamer tomorrow morning. Mince pies waited in the tin, and a splendid Christmas cake, iced and decorated with robins and holly by Mrs Berry herself, would grace the tea table tomorrow.

There would also be a small Madeira cake, with a delicious sliver of green angelica tucked into its top. The old lady had made that for those who, like herself, could not tackle Christmas cake until three or four hours after Christmas pudding. It had turned out beautifully light, Mrs Berry remembered.

She closed her eyes contentedly, and before long, drifted into a light sleep.

Mrs Berry awoke as the children burst into the room. A cold breeze set the Christmas tree ornaments tinkling and rustled the paper chain, which swung above the door.

The little girls’ faces were pink and wet, their bangs stuck to their foreheads and glistened with dampness. Drops fell from the scarlet mackintoshes and their woolly gloves were soaked. But nothing could damp their spirits on this wonderful day, and Mrs Berry forbore to scold them for the mess they were making on the rug.

Mary, struggling with the shopping, called from the kitchen.

‘Come out here, you two, and get off those wet things! What a day, Gran! You’ve never seen anything like Caxley High Street. Worse than Michaelmas Fair! Traffic jams all up the road, and queues in all the shops. The Caxley traders will have a bumper Christmas, mark my words!’

Mrs Berry stirred herself and followed the children into the kitchen to help them undress. Mary was unloading her baskets and carrier bags, rescuing nuts and Brussels sprouts which burst from wet paper bags on to the floor, and trying to take off her own sodden coat and headscarf all at the same time.

‘I seem to have spent a mint of money,’ she said apologetically, ‘and dear heaven knows where it’s all gone. We’ll have a reckon-up later on, but we were that pushed and hurried about I’ll be hard put to it to remember all the prices.’