‘I know.’ Mary took Bobby’s dad’s vacant chair and put an arm around her. ‘Seems like there’s a lot of future to fear right at the moment. But love doesn’t just stop, does it? Not even for war.’
‘It isn’t only the war.’ Bobby looked up at her. ‘Did Reg want you to stop painting after you married?’
‘He never said so, but I’d less time for it then, especially after Nancy was born and Reg lost the use of his leg. And then there was Charlie – he needed a mother badly after he lost his own, and even before that. Violet was a flighty sort, not much taken with motherhood or homemaking, so as a little lad he naturally looked to me. I didn’t have a lot of time for myself.’
‘Did you mind giving it up?’
‘I missed it, and I made time for it when I could, but it felt like a fair trade all in all. I’d rather have my Reg than a gallery’s worth of watercolours.’ Mary examined Bobby’s face. ‘Happen you don’t feel the same way about our Charlie.’
‘No, I… I care about him. I love him, even. But the work I do on the magazine isn’t just a hobby for me, it’s… I don’t know how to describe it. I need it. I need it for my life to be mine – so I’m not just someone who exists for other people but a person in my own right.’ Bobby gave a bashful laugh. ‘I suppose that sounds like foolishness to you, doesn’t it? What sort of woman wants a job over a husband?’
‘No, I can see the sense in what you say. It isn’t only about the work; it’s about you. Your independence.’
Bobby smiled gratefully to find her friend so understanding. ‘Yes. That’s exactly it.’
‘Women are asked to give up a lot for their men,’ Mary observed. ‘And sad to say, I’ve met plenty of husbands who were never worth the price. I was one of the lucky ones.’
‘The thing is, I know Charlie’s a good man in his heart. I know that if it isn’t him I marry then it probably won’t be anyone. I suppose I just haven’t decided if any man’s worth the price, for me.’
Mary looked a little concerned. ‘Independence is a fine thing when you’re young, Bobby, but it’s cold company as you grow older. Are you not at all afraid to be alone? To be an old maid?’
‘Not so afraid as I am of losing myself. If I could just be with Charlie the way we were last night, sitting on the bridge…’ She sighed. ‘But life doesn’t work that way, does it? Children come along, there are chores to be done, homes to keep. Once life is filled with domestic cares, ideas like romance and love probably become rather silly.’
Mary looked away. ‘For some folk, perhaps. Not for all.’
Bobby reached for her hand and pressed it. ‘I’m sorry, Mary,’ she said softly. ‘I should have thought before I talked about children. I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘Well, bairns change things; there’s no getting away from that. But love’s never silly, even if it feels different after thirty years together than it did when we were nobbut twenty. I don’t suppose what Reg and I have looks like much to a young thing like you, but it’s love all the same. Aye, it changed through having a child, and even more through losing one, but it weathered and was all the stronger for it.’
‘Charlie isn’t Reg though.’
‘No, but he’s not as different from his brother as he likes to think he is, in spite of the twenty years between them. You watch and see. One day our Charlie will grow up and stop laiking about, and then I reckon he’ll surprise us all.’
Bobby smiled. ‘I fell in love with him the way he is though – rather against my better judgement, I have to say.’
‘I was surprised by that, I must confess,’ Mary said. ‘You always seem such a sensible body, and Charlie’s… well, Charlie.’
‘Perhaps that’s why I fell for him – because we are so different,’ Bobby said. ‘My sister always says that it isn’t good for me to be sensible all the time and what I really need is to let my hair down with the wrong sort of boy. I doubt she pictured me falling in love with him at the same time though.’
‘Is Charlie the wrong sort of boy?’
‘I might have thought so when I first knew him, but… no. No he isn’t. Still, I can’t picture him as a father. He’s far too fond of enjoying himself for that sort of responsibility.’ Bobby pushed her fingers up into her hair. ‘I wish I knew the best thing to do. I can’t expect Charlie to hang around forever, waiting for me to make up my mind. I was awake most of the night fretting about it.’
‘That’s something for you to puzzle out yourself, Bobby. No one knows your heart but you, and you’ll have plenty of time to delve around in there when Charlie’s gone. But if you need to talk about it with someone then you know where I am.’
‘Yes. Thanks, Mary.’
After breakfast, Bobby joined Reg in the parlour for another day’s work onThe Tyke.
The first two hours of her day involved filling envelopes with past numbers of the magazine to be sent out to names and addresses copied from the telephone directory. It was the one part of Bobby’s job that never changed. Reg had observed to her that he wouldn’t be happy until there were copies of the little magazine in every home, public library, doctor’s waiting room and dentist’s surgery in the county. If Bobby hadn’t known him as well as she did, she might have believed he was joking, but when it came to his ambitions forThe Tyke, Reg was always deadly serious. His biggest enemy now was the wartime paper rationing, which meant they were struggling to accommodate even their current rate of growth. Reg seemed confident that the war would be over before too long, however, and doggedly pursued his plans for world – or at least, Yorkshire – domination despite the shortages, building a list of potential subscribers for the days when paper would once again be plentiful.
Once the envelopes had been filled and taken to the post office, the actual reporter part of Bobby’s job began. Since returning to work atThe Tyke, she had written ten articles and helped with the research for many others. Pieces as diverse as ‘The Terrible Knitters of Dent’, ‘Door Knockers in an Old Yorkshire Village’, ‘Memories of “Sandstone Jack”’ and ‘The Habits of Dales Foxes’ would all proudly bear her byline when they appeared in the magazine.
Her job for this afternoon was to select, correct and type up the readers’ letters that would be suitable for inclusion in the next number. A couple of elderly shepherds were having a lively debate on the letters page as to the correct method of counting sheep in the Dales, with one swearing the counting system began ‘yan, tan, tether, pathas, pimp’, while the other claimed the only correct way was the one that began ‘yan, tan, tethera, pethera, pip’. Bobby had asked Reg which was correct, and he’d laughed and said that depended on whether you were counting your sheep in Borrowdale or Wharfedale. But it was the sort of thing their readers liked, so he was willing to let the two old gents fight it out.
There were letters that made Bobby smile while she sorted through them, and even some that brought a tear to her eye. A woman in Hull wrote asking to purchase repeat copies of every number of the magazine to date, as her collection had been destroyed along with most of her possessions when her home had been bombed out in a heavy blitz. A soldier serving overseas contacted them to thank the little magazine for giving him a link to the Yorkshire countryside he loved and missed so dearly, telling them that he and his Yorkshire comrades read and reread their copies until the ink faded and the pages fell out. The monthly taste of home reminded him exactly what they were out there fighting for, he said. A pair of young lovers wrote a joint letter requesting that their two subscriptions be merged into one, ‘as a wedding was soon to take place’. Bobby could sometimes feel that her work onThe Tykewas trivial or foolish when she was traipsing around Dales villages making sketches of door knockers or reading about the mating habits of foxes, but working on the letters always gave her mood a boost. The stories she wrote might seem small in the general scheme of things, but they brought a lot of pleasure and comfort to people at a time when pleasure and comfort, like the meagre butter ration, were spread very thin indeed.
Reg still seemed reluctant to send his young reporter out into the thick of things, however. Most frequently, he assigned Bobby pieces that she could research from the farmhouse, or at least without interacting with too many of the Dalesfolk. If there was an important event to write about or an interview to conduct, Reg almost always sent a freelance writer out or covered it himself. He’d deny it if she were ever to suggest it, Bobby knew, but she could tell he was still embarrassed about the girl from the city he’d been forced to employ in the absence of suitable males. She muffled a sigh as she carefully copied a rough sketch of an ornate brass door knocker into ‘best’ for one of her features.
