When she came to, she was being supported by Ida and Mrs B either side of her. Her head was down between her knees and she let out a groan that came from deep within her. She slowly sat upright, her head was pounding. She tried to speak but the dryness in her mouth made speech impossible.
‘Get her some water, Ida,’ Mrs B said.
Kate sipped the water and gradually the room came back into focus.
‘You almost fainted,’ Ida said.
‘Feeling a bit better now, love?’ Mrs B asked.
Kate nodded.
‘You went as white as a sheet. It was a good thing Ida held onto you or you would have ended up on the floor,’ Mrs B said. ‘Was it bad news? In the letter?’
Kate looked up at her unable to respond for the choking sensation in her throat.
‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,’ Mrs B said reaching for Kate’s hand.
A silent flow of salt tears trickled down into her mouth. ‘My brother’s dead,’ Kate said. Three stark words. The painful truth. ‘I must go home.’
Mrs Winton understood, of course she understood. She had a son serving in the army, a son that could be taken from her any day. The news that no parent wanted to hear could be hers and the master’s at any moment. Kate felt the flow of deep sympathy pass from Mrs Winton when she said that Kate must go immediately. ‘Without delay, Kate. Your family needs you.’
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ Kate replied.
Chapter Twenty-Six
April 1916
The woman who walked beside the brook in early April 1916 had forgotten the girl who had left Micklewell three years ago. Where had she gone? As Kate entered the village, she expected to see through the same eyes, feel with the same heart but it felt as if she was walking through treacle. So much had changed since she was last here and she herself had changed too. How could she not? She had experienced the effects of the war first hand, seen the suffering. She was pushing against a force that was sucking her down.
She listened, but the brook did not talk to her, she looked but her vision was blurred. The street was quiet and there was a solemnity in the air. It was the day before Palm Sunday and on a Saturday afternoon the children would usually be celebrating their freedom, playing leapfrog in the field, throwing balls against the wall of the Queens Head, being chased off by the landlord. The quietness unsettled Kate.
As she passed Addison Farm, where she used to work lifting and bagging potatoes, she paused, trying to recapture what that younger Kate thought about then, her nails clogged with earth. Her hands were busy but where would her mind have been? Certainly not preoccupied with the thoughts that tormented her now. Her heart was divided. Her loyalties strong. The comfort she could give to her family would be short-lived. She would only be here for a short time and then she would be going back to her new life in Forest Hill. She couldn’t stay with them. A wave of uncertainty swept over her. How could she help them? The pain of the loss of their dear Fred was raw, it cut through to the bone and, as much as she ached with it, her mother and father’s suffering would be so much worse. And what of Dot and littleHenry? He was too young to fully grasp the meaning of it all but once she had gone back to London, Dot would be left to cope with the emptiness of their grieving parents alone.
She looked past the farmhouse to the fields beyond. In the scoured patterns of the ploughed land, patches of green were emerging. New beginnings. Which crop were they growing in the fields this year, she wondered? How many young men of the village would be here to eat it come harvest time?
She stopped at the five-bar gate and looked for the horses that were usually grazing there. She needed a few minutes to prepare herself for what, she knew, would be such a painfully sad greeting. There should have been such joy in her homecoming. She hadn’t been back for many months and now there would be no laughter, only tears.
She noticed a mare in the far corner of the field and, beside her, the wobbly form of a newborn foal. A smile crept across Kate’s lips as she watched the rubbery stilts fold and reform under the foal’s chestnut body. He staggered about around his mother, her gentle nuzzling encouraging him, as he tried to find his feet.
She was reminded of Fred teaching her to ride a bicycle. How he ran along behind her and held onto the saddle. How she had shouted, ‘Don’t let go, Fred.’ And he’d not replied. So, she’d looked over her shoulder and promptly fell off. As he ran and picked her and the bike up, he’d said, ‘See what happens when you doubt yourself, Kate? You were doing it before you thought I wasn’t there to catch you. So, you can do it without me then, can’t you?’
‘I can do it, Fred. I can do it,’ she said to herself now.
The backyard was quiet. No Ma hanging out the washing. No sign of Dot or Henry. Pa’s bicycle leaned against the back wall of the house, waiting. Kate opened the kitchen door. Her parents sat either side of the kitchen range, staring into blankness. AsKate entered the room, her mother looked up, her eyes red and her mouth trembling. She opened her lips to speak but what came out sounded more like an animal caught by the jaws of a trap. Her mother tried several times to find words that would not form, the sobs of a child struggling for breath, distraught and inconsolable. Her strong, capable mother crushed and bleeding inside with a flow of grief so powerful it overwhelmed her. Kate went to her and knelt in front of her, resting her head on her mother’s knees and holding onto her skirts like she used to do as a child. They both let their grief engulf them. Kate felt her mother’s hand touch her hair and her back in slow, even strokes until their sobs subsided.
Kate eventually pulled away and turned to her father who stood and wrapped Kate in his arms, his hold so tight she thought her back would break and her lungs be emptied. She felt his huge shoulders heave with the weight of what he carried. They stood together wrapped in a shroud of sorrow until the strength seemed to go out of him and evaporate into the air. He wiped his face on his sleeve and sat back down in his chair, his broken body limp and his broad chest heaving.
They did not need to speak. Kate’s mother pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and held it to her chest. She grasped the printed message that every mother fears, as if it could bring her dear son back. Fred was gone. Her sweet brother would never hold her hand or run with her through fields of buttercups again, would never weave a daisy chain in her hair or tease her about her admirers at the May Fair. He would not be there when the other boys came home. A hole opened up in her chest that ached. She sat down and joined her parents in a silent prayer that faded on her lips.
After what seemed like an age, her mother handed her the telegram. The typed words swam through her tears.Deeply regret to inform you . . . Fred Truscott died in action.Therewas a date and a place, his regiment, rank and number, but none of this was significant to Kate. She’d seen the wounds that men received from battle, she’d listened while men suffered in body and mind, she’d tried to make sense of it all. But all she could see now was Fred’s face and then Philip’s and Archie’s and Carnforth’s, until they all mingled into one. Is that all they were in the end, a number amongst hundreds and thousands of others? Fred was gone and he would never return. How could that be?
* * *
After sitting in silence for quite some time, Kate asked where Dot and Henry were.
‘At the church,’ Kate’s father said. ‘She’s taken him to help decorate the church for Palm Sunday. They’ll be a while because they’re calling at the farm, for eggs, on their way back.’
Kate suggested that her mother went to lie down for a while and that she would get on with preparing the dinner. Once she had gone out of the room, Kate asked her father, ‘How’s Dot taken the news? Have you told Henry?’
