The Wooden Shepherdess

  Then headlong down to the flint-built village of Mellton. There he stopped the car by the church: “Let’s leave the car here, and walk—no, don’t bother about your case, Young Trivett will drive it round.” He paused, and grimaced: “Thank heaven that after his second stroke Old Trivett retired at last, and passed the job on to his son!”

  Crossing the park together on foot she found herself almost forgetting how unlike he was to anyone else she knew; and that in spite of his BBC accent, and some of the words he used which made you keep on your toes all the time to make out what he meant. Then they passed through a gate, and entered a twilit tunnel of ancient yews. Here two children suddenly dropped from a branch overhead, shrieking and jumping all over the man like puppies. “They seem ter like ’im,” she thought as the pair of them clambered up, one of his shoulders and one on his back.

  “Susan and Gillie,” he told her: “And there goes my sister!”

  Norah gasped with surprise as something crossed a distant lawn at speed with the pop-pop-pop of a two-stroke engine, then vanished behind some trees: for surely cripples were kept indoors wrapped up in rugs, not left running wild in the garden like jumping-crackers on Guy Fawkes night!

  “She didn’t see us; but never mind, you’ll meet her tomorrow.”

  Decanting the children he led her into the house and down lots of passages: “Now let’s find Mrs. Winter.”

  At last they found that majestic person—a monument in black silk. He attempted an introduction: “Ah Mrs. Winter, this is Miss.... Gosh, do you know I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name?”

  “How like a man!” said the queenly presence, already lit up by a welcoming smile: “Anyway—here you are my dear, safe and sound! We all thought he might have killed you, driving the pace he does.” She took Norah’s arm in a motherly way: “Well, come to my room for a nice cup of tea: you’ll be glad of it after your journey. And tell me all the news,” she went on, leading Norah away: “How’s my Nellie? And dear little Syl?”

  4

  Next morning when Norah woke to a tap-tap-tap on her window she couldn’t believe at first she was really in bed at all: for the sun shone straight in her eyes! No window she’d known in the past looked out on anything better than somebody’s wall; you had to go right outside for even a glimpse of the sky.

  Yet indoors and even in bed she most certainly was, as she found when she wriggled her toes; and this tapping against the glass was not that old knocker-up any more but just an inquisitive bird. From her bed she could see the gardens, just waking up too; and the misty trees of the park. Beyond that again rose the high bald downs, with hanging woods on their sides....

  Norah heaved a luxurious sigh, surprised at beginning to feel that in time she might even come to like living somewhere like this. “Seein’ the sky through yer winder’s what done it,” the slum-child decided.

  Then, after breakfast with Mrs. Winter and somebody called Mr. Wantage who seemed to know Coventry well (he’d been born just outside at Binlay, he said), she had to be taken to see the loom. This was the queerest contraption, designed for not using your feet, and had had to be specially made. As she studied its workings, “You won’t find teaching the Mistress too easy, you know,” Mrs. Winter warned her: “She’s got back the use of her hands, fair enough—and they’re strong as a blacksmith’s, but clumsier than she thinks.”

  Norah mused for a moment. “What she can’t do, how she take bein’ ’elped?”

  “Ah, that needs a bit of doing....”

  Upstairs in her room, she made her bed under Mrs. Winter’s watchful (but tactful) eye. While talking of something else Mrs. Winter still managed to teach her the front from the back and the head from the tail of a sheet, and how to fold in “hospital corners.” Norah took it all in good-as-gold because Mrs. Winter was kind and because there was manifest sense in it—if you’d got time. It was just as they finished the bed that they heard a high-pitched hysterical hubbub which rose from the garden below; and Norah crossed to the window to look.

  The morning was bright for the time of year but colder: hoar-frost lay on a lawn where two Red Indians—fully tricked out with small bows-and-arrows and feathered head-dresses—chased an unfortunate Paleface she recognized as yesterday’s driver; that “Mr. Augustine” (everyone here called him this, and she couldn’t remember the rest of his name). They pursued with blood-curdling yells as he leapt over bushes and flower-beds, vainly crying for mercy. Then one of them shot an arrow: it went pretty wide, but the archer shouted “You’re dead!”—and at once the obedient Paleface died, falling flat on his face on the frosty grass.

  The whooping Red Indians fell on him, savagely tugging his hair and almost tearing it out as they fought for his scalp. “Mother of God!” murmured Norah, vaguely shocked at the violent scene although she didn’t exactly know why.

  Mrs. Winter forbore to refer to the children as “highly strung” (which is what their governess would have). All she said was: “That’s how our Mr. Augustine is.”

  This “Mr. Augustine”: an uncle only, yet somehow he seemed like the only man in the family, Norah thought: not once had anyone mentioned the children’s Dad. “This Mrs Wadamy: is there a Mr?” she asked on the way downstairs.

  “Yes.”

  That was that! Norah thought she sensed a warning it wasn’t her place to ask too many questions. But presently Mrs. Winter went on: “The Master can’t get home very often these days, not since the time of the General Strike when he went back to Parliament. Now, he’s a Minister.”

  Mary herself had made of the General Strike a crisis-excuse to insist on Gilbert’s return to the Parliamentary stage, rather than letting his life be wasted dancing attendance on someone as good as dead. There he had soldiered on in the Liberal ranks till Labour’s disastrous second tenure of office had led to the stirring events of 1931: to Financial Crisis, an all-party National Government formed, new elections called.

  In those crucial days, with the Liberal Party split wide-open again (and this time, for good), he had simply followed his conscience. Gilbert had long distrusted Lloyd George (who was it said Lloyd George had been “born with a silver tongue in his cheek?”); and Herbert Samuel only “led” under L.G.’s orders, while L.G. was ill. Moreover Gilbert suspected dear Herbert himself of failing to understand that the country’s paramount need today was for National Unity, not any outworn King Charles’s Head (or in other words, that Samuel’s stubbornness over Free Trade must soon force him out of the “National” Cabinet). Clearly then Conscience called him to throw in his lot with his old friend Simon among the faction leaders, and fight that autumn election of 1931 on the Simonite “Liberal-National” ticket....

  This meant that the Tory opponent to whom he’d so nearly lost his seat in the Liberal shambles of 1924 had been forced to stand down; and not only had Gilbert romped home on the “National” landslide but found himself given (at last, after all these frustrating back-bencher years) a small ministerial post.

  *

  Norah was not someone easily scared; but this Friday morning when first she saw Mrs. Wadamy close she was scared like you feel when you walk in a graveyard at night. That corpse-like body, on top of which was a head never moving except for the lips and eyes; and too like a head popping up at you out of a grave for comfort—like somebody starting to resurrect but got stuck.... It shows how badly she wanted to look away that she glued her eyes to Mrs. Wadamy’s face and stared.

  Mary guessed that this rudely staring girl was in fact ill-at-ease and why. Had it been anyone else she’d have inwardly laid back her ears, for she hated reminders that her way of life was not quite the normal one; but now resentment was drowned in pity: “How lost the poor creature must feel, plonked down in somewhere so strange and faced with an apparition like me!”

  “I hope you’ll be happy here,” said the apparition.

  “Yes Ma’am.... And the same to you!” Norah burbled on, too addled to know what to say (and it’s hard to know what you can
say when talking to only a face). But Mrs. Wadamy stretched out her hand, and took hold of hers in what felt like a friendly prize-fighter’s grip.

  “Parliament ’usband’s a right pig!” thought Norah, “Leaving ’er all on ’er own like this!”

  5

  Even when Parliament goes in recess the Whitehall Departments don’t. Moreover when Cabinet Ministers leave their desks (summoned to Chequers or Number Ten, or to shoot with a Duke, or merely to sort things out with difficult wives or go on the razzle), this doubles a Junior Minister’s work; for you can’t let your Civil Servants go taking decisions which ought to be left to their Masters—or not if you’re conscientious, like Gilbert.

  Twice he’d been moved, and though neither move really carried promotion one day promotion must come: one day he would indeed walk in the Corridors of Power, like Simon himself (whose thirty-five Liberal-National followers’ seats had earned him the Foreign Office). A dog’s life, meanwhile?—Perhaps; but a heady, responsible one. Even now he chaired committees where everyone called him “Minister,” found himself rising to speak in the House armed with a departmental brief instead of spouting whale-like out of his head; and it’s strange what a sense of power it gives you when somebody else has composed the words you speak and written the Minutes you sign. Gilbert was now forty-one, but felt at least ten years younger: Office had done for him all the advertisements tell you their Pep Pills will do (but don’t).

  Most of his women friends these days were political wives or Society hostesses. None of his London acquaintances however had half the beauty and charm of long-ago Joan, that young half-sister of Archdeacon Dibden who’d been such a friend to them both when Mary was first brought home. He hadn’t seen her for years; and the news of Joan’s unexpected return to Dorset brought Gilbert hurrying back to Mellton the first time in months. He traveled that same Friday night: for he’d heard she was only in England for two or three days, collecting some books which her brother wanted in France....

  Six weeks ago, Archdeacon Dibden (father of Jeremy, one of Augustine’s oldest friends) had been getting ready to die. He had passed Man’s allotted span. Each Tottersdown Monachorum winter bronchitis had laid him low, and each winter the bouts got worse. This year he had only been properly well at the height of summer; and now already the wheezing and hubble-bubble were starting again in his chest. When the cold weather came he would have to take to his bed, with a pile of folio volumes under the mattress to raise the upper part of his trunk: then must follow the doctor’s new-fangled injections of manganese and his housekeeper’s (old-fangled) steam-kettle filling his room with steam. How he hated the smell of her Friar’s Balsam! He hardly could hope to live to enjoy the smells of another Spring; not unless....

  Kind Lord Tottersdown (bless him!) had tried to persuade him to go to the South of France, and had offered to foot the bill. A Jew, a man of a different faith with no obligation whatever towards his Cloth: it seemed ungenerous to refuse. But frankly, was it worth while? Whether he died or not, his useful life would be over: he’d have to resign as Archdeacon, and even his Cure of Souls.

  A bronchitic’s death is seldom an easy one: unless his heart suddenly fails he slowly drowns in the fluids flooding his lungs. But if that was God’s Will, surely a priest would be better employed preparing to meet his Maker than running away from Death.... And imagine his isolation, cooped up in a Pension—say, in some suburb of Nice—if he went there alone! “If only dear Joan had been keeping house for me still—or even had married Jeremy’s friend Augustine, as once we hoped!” But no, Joan had married that nice Southern boy and gone to live in the States....

  Such had been the state of play those six weeks ago, when a letter had come from Joan in South Carolina heavily edged in black. Anthony Fairfax’s foible of building his own automobiles himself by hand had come to a sorry end: the latest one had exploded, killing him dead. The widow was coming home, “for she felt sore need of a brother’s comfort....” His poor bereaved Joan! This intimation that God still had a use for him here on Earth tipped the scales: if a warm winter climate would help, the Archdeacon made up his mind not to die after all....

  *

  This same news of Joan’s reappearance which galvanized Gilbert had greatly disturbed Augustine: fond as he’d been of her once, he had hoped he need never see her again. He felt that resentment we all tend to feel towards somebody once very close we suspect we have treated badly, and therefore had hoped to forget. Surely at least she’d have the good sense to steer clear of Mellton while he was there? But Gilbert so took it for granted his wife and everyone else were as anxious as he was to see Joan again that he broached it almost while crossing his doorstep: “Ask her to dinner tomorrow: we can’t put it off because the Archdeacon has started abroad already and Joan is to join him almost at once.”

  Gilbert was greatly astonished to find his wife most unkeen to ask the girl to the house. “Not after the way she treated Augustine,” she said; for they both believed it was she who had turned him down.

  “But surely a girl has the right to refuse a man?”

  “Not after leading him on the way Joan did.”

  “But all that was seven or eight years ago: it’s Ancient History now. Or do you insist on a blood-feud, with Dibdens and Wadamys shooting each other on sight? What about Jeremy: isn’t he still very much your brother’s friend instead of them drawing beads on each other?—Not that I care of course,” he went on, “it’s just that asking her seemed the civil thing.... And I seem to remember you used to be rather fond of her once, yourself.”

  Mary sighed. He was so transparent.... But jealousy wasn’t a trait in herself to encourage—not someone in her condition: she’d better give in. “Very well then, ask her tomorrow night if that’s what you want.”

  Gilbert was tempted to take out a car and deliver the invitation by word of mouth; but that might be going too far, so he wrote a note on Mary’s behalf and sent it over by hand. Joan was perfectly well aware of Augustine’s presence but saw no reason in this for avoiding Mellton, since this was the very “comfort” the widow had crossed the wide Atlantic to find. So the answer Young Trivett brought back was “Yes.”

  Augustine might almost have fled to his home in Wales then-and-there, were it not for Norah. Having only just brought her here he ought at least to hang on till he saw how she settled in, and how this tapestry-work experiment shaped.... Already there’d been one row in the Servants’ Hall over someone so plainly out of the bottom drawer taking her meals in the “Room”—where she had to be waited on, eating with Mrs. Winter and Wantage. Mrs. Winter was solving this one by finding her village lodgings; but that left her even more to her own resources if he himself wasn’t there to see she got a fair deal. She was more-or-less under his wing, and he’d just have to face meeting Joan again this once....

  He had his reward when he heard that Jeremy—now taking a rare weekend from Whitehall to visit this aunt only four years older than he was himself—would be coming too. For Augustine loathed going to London, and saw his friend so seldom now that Jeremy worked in the Admiralty.

  6

  When Jeremy joined the Civil Service in 1924, post-war contraction had led to terrible overcrowding upstairs: his first promotion was bound to be slow, a minimum thirteen years—a third of his whole career before setting foot on even the second rung. If he weren’t to die of boredom before the reigning upper echelons came to retiring age and the rat-race really began, Jeremy had to opt for whichever Department of State seemed the most entertaining one for a junior marking time to explore.

  Here the Admiralty seemed unique. A living organism rather than man-made organization: an organism moreover (as Jeremy told Augustine once) which resembled such Siphonophores as the jellyfish commonly called a Portuguese Man-of-War, where what appeared to the layman’s eye a single creature consisted in fact of independent medusas and polyps clubbing together and each developing into different useful organs (say an inflatable float, or a sting or a st
omach or swimming-bell). For this symbiotic conglomerate too was largely composed of departments with independent histories (“Naval Stores” dated back at least to 1514) which had only coalesced in the last hundred years. Some still offered their own complete civilian careers, with no transmigration of even non-technical staff: some were staffed in whole or in part by Naval Officers serving short-time shore appointments. Each had its own Magna Carta, its “Board Instructions”—for here again this jellyfish was unique, in that supreme authority lay with Their Lordship’s Board and not with a Minister (vested in it by Royal Prerogative, not by Parliament: Patents of Board Appointment had to be signed by the Monarch himself). In a Constitutional sense this Board was a single “person”—the Lord High Admiral put In Commission: in token of which not even the First Lord himself might fly the Foul Anchor flag unless he’d a fellow-commissioner with him. Thus, if a First Lord ever determined to overrule the others he’d have to do it not as “First Lord” at all, but wearing his Cabinet hat and so representing the Crown—as the King overruling his Lord High Admiral ...

  No one will feel much surprise that this was the place where Jeremy’s lively inquiring mind should elect to serve: for the Secretary’s Department, to which he’d belong, had a finger in every other department’s pie—including links with the latest accretion of all, the Naval Staff (which didn’t exist until 1911). What may surprise the reader more is how well on the whole he found this strange polymorphic conglomerate seemed to work —but so, after all, does the Portuguese Man-of-War.... This jellyfish seemed well adapted to meet the incredibly diverse fields of work and skills involved in building, arming, maintaining, recruiting and fighting the largest navy on Earth. Up above, each Superintending Lord had his own allotted sphere where he ruled supreme in the name of the Board as a whole: down below, each man seemed to know his own particular job and did it. The Secretariat’s Function, apart from financial control, was chiefly providing articulate lines of communication between that Below and Above as well as links with the rest of Whitehall.