Haweswater (10 page)

Had Janet Lightburn been present at the meeting instead of in the town of Penrith that afternoon with Hazel Bowman, there might have been a considerable amount more verbal upset expressed. Some dense and violent shades of anger would have been present in her face and, though this was the most significant news to hit the valley during her lifetime, she would not have had the same degree of astonishment and disbelief as some of the other members of the village. While not exactly anticipating such a thing, she might have considered herself ready for the blow, her whole life preparing for such an event. At the age of eighteen she had both the intellectual dexterity of an adult and the reckless tongue of any youth running to catch up with their own life as it matures, moves forward. A volatile combination.

She would return home three hours after the man’s departure, only to be told by her father that she had missed a rite good show. Her mother would be muttering about the Devil’s workings and it would take a little while to get the whole affair straightened out.

– Long and short of it, Jan, fella reckons to build a dam and
flood valley. Sez leases are up come six month. Niver worry, mind, lass. ‘Tsall a loada shite, you’ll see.

– Sam! Language!

Ella sent her husband a bold look from the kitchen sink and continued with her washing, but had a blunt comment to throw across the room to him.

– You might have sed more an’ all, mister. Put up a better match.

– What did you tell him, Dad?

– Nowt he didn’t already ken. That it’s a waste of time cummin’ ower here afore Lordie’s fest up t’deal, if there is yan at all. But he was a smart lookin’ fella, I’ll give him that, all weshed up and in slacks, like.

Janet narrowed her eyes.

– Who does he represent? What company? Was there any mention?

– Oh, Manchester summet or uther. City watter.

– Is he coming back, did he say?

– Shouldn’t think so, lass. Shouldn’t think we’ll be seein’ hide n’ hair of t’bugger agin.

– Sam!

Janet left the room as her mother began to warn her father that she wouldn’t stand for his foul-mouthed cursing. As she passed Ella she could see that there was true agitation in her, dampness along her upper lip, and she had a sense that the situation was not as light as her father would have it. It was too late tonight, but the following morning she would go to Measand Hall to use the telephone facilities and put in a call to the Lowther Estate. After that was done she would know what other calls to make, if any.

The next evening Whelter Farm Cottage was quiet and supper was late, the meeting in the village the previous day seeming to have thrown everything out of kilter. The oil lamps flickered and sent dim shafts of light across the walls. Ella Lightburn stood at the large kitchen sink and was scraping the back of some withered carrots with a paring knife. She focused upon the task as though nothing existed outside of it. A pot of stew was bubbling gently on the broad iron surface of the range and she dropped the carrots into it, one at a time, as she had sliced them.

By the hearth, Janet was reading and her brother Isaac was chalking on a piece of flat slate, with his tongue caught to one side of his mouth and held by his teeth. He was a strange, briny-looking child, with a broad face, very pale, and with the full straw head of his father but almost white-blond, the colour of a newborn’s hair. Though he had the makings of a handsome lad, for now he had not grown into his face. There was but a smudge of watery grey to his eyes. He was wearing, as he often did, the wrinkled expression of an old man, concentrating on a memory or the last line of a joke, giving the impression that he was substantially older than his six years. His mother had often commented that he came out of the womb an old man already, the age of thirty if a day.

Isaac sat in a pair of long underwear with his slim bare chest glowing white in the room’s half-light. Even against the heat of the fire there seemed to be an air of dampness about him. His feet were positioned on the hearth shelf, toes curling now and again next to the warmth of the flames. Above him, in the alcove of the fire, a dripping shirt and some socks were
hanging, they gave off a slight reedy smell as the pond water was driven out. It was not an uncommon scenario. He had lately been sulking after a few curt words from his mother about getting chilblains on his feet from the icy river, but had soon become engrossed by his craft. Janet looked up as the scratching sound of the chalk stopped.

– Finished? Let’s see it.

Isaac held up the slate. There was a picture of a dog on it. Janet smiled.

– Show it Mam.

Her brother hopped up and patted over the flagstone floor to his mother. She wiped her hands on her apron, took the slate from her son, nodding, and spoke to him quietly. She handed it back to him and he returned to the fire.

– Mam sez it’s just like Chase.

– And so it is. Cum here, little lad.

He moved over to Janet and crept in between her and the fireplace. She held the book she had been reading in front of them both, pointed her finger to a passage. Isaac began reading, faltering over the longer words and being gently corrected by his sister if he could not manage after a few attempts. After he had finished the poem she bent and kissed the top of his head and he sat back into the opposite armchair. Janet reached beneath her own chair and brought up a piece of embroidered cloth. She wrapped it around the book and tied the parcel with a piece of ribbon.

Ella finished the last carrot and dropped it into the pot. She heard the lift and click of the latch on the door and her husband and the dog came in. He bent his head under the small door frame. Fine beads of rainwater sparkled on his shoulders. Samuel took off his cap and laid it on a rocking chair in the corner of the kitchen. Its balance was fine and even the weight of the piece of cloth set it into motion, a fraction of a creaking rock.

He addressed his wife softly.

– Evening, Ella.

– Samuel.

Chase came over to where Ella had been cleaning the vegetables and she crept her nose into the back of Ella’s hand, which was hanging down at her side. Ella glanced at her husband.

– Dog’s spoiled.

She scolded her husband gently, but she took a small piece of raw liver from the dish next to the stove and cupped it in her palm for the dog to take in her teeth. Chase gingerly took the morsel and crept over to the fireplace, under Isaac’s chair. He lifted his feet from the grate and placed them on the sleek hair of the dog’s rump.

– Spoiled, but a grand worker, and that’s our arrangement.

– Shall we put her out when next she cum in season to git some pups?

– Bitch is past breedin’ binow, Ella.

Ella tutted. Her husband had a tendency to grow too fond of his working dogs. He lost sight of their place on the farm. In Samuel’s arms was a small wrapped bundle, damp at the corners. He set it carefully down on the flagstone floor. A soft black hoof escaped from the folds.

– Fust one. Too early, eh? Niver a chance fer it. Bad day fer it an’ all. Could give a man a funny turn if he were inclined towards such things.

Samuel sat at the scrubbed wooden table, a little dejectedly. Janet stood up and came over to her father. She kissed him on the cheek and wished him a happy birthday and went over to the still bundle in the shadows on the kitchen floor. She unwrapped the rag covering the lamb. Then she opened the stout door of the range and threw two logs into the ashes. Sparks flew inside and the wood began to crackle. She took the lamb by its fore and hind legs and pushed it into the furnace to incinerate, closed the range door and came to sit with her father to discuss the condition of the bred ewes.

– The others? Any signs yet?

– Yan or two. A week, mebbi less. Best git yer breeches out, lass.

Ella brought over the pot of tea and set it down on the table, pouring a cup for her husband. She herself sat and untied her brown hair, letting it fall on to her shoulders and about her handsome face for a moment, then she re-tied it.

– There’s bread in t’pantry, Janet. Put some out fer us and a shirt on yer brother before he catches his death. Yer father and I have a word or two to come. Isaac, go with Janet. Go on, now. With yer sista.

Their mother was matter-of-fact and without social niceties. She had an intensity to her square gaze, a curt manner, which her family was used to and found inoffensive, though others often thought of her as abrasive, and a little too direct. Ella was a straightforward woman and had never been anything but. Her ways were a set pattern, daily, a series of restricted moves, and there was nothing indecisive either about those larger projects which she undertook. She had always been so, since a young girl under her grandmother’s care. There had been no room for polite discourse and subtle gestures on the farm during that time of depression, nor through the old woman’s illness and eventual death. Ella had been made aware very early on that life does not pull its punches, when she lost both parents to an influenza epidemic; neither, then, would she tiptoe around it waiting for her turn. There were two main influences in her life. God and family. Both were sacred, both were to be honoured and defended with fire if necessary. Her nature remained unchanged over the years. She was a constant.

With this unalterable character, Ella Graham, as she had once been, had convinced many men to re-enter their lives in the quiet hospital in Penrith after the Great War. Men with ruined bodies and lost identities. Men brought back to the north after the fighting was over, still fighting within themselves, unable to leave the war behind and not yet
knowing peace. The damage of the conflict was vast, and though she had not been witness to the front-line action, hers was a position purely at the receiving end of all its ravages. She knew it for what it really was, random and unconscionable slaughter. Many soldiers died in the months following the ceasefire, unlucky enough to suffer expansive and slow deaths rather than the quick, gasping murder of the battlefields. Many died within their living bodies, painfully aware of their fate.

Ella came to realize the technology of the war was defective enough that it failed to do its job properly. In her more pessimistic moments, she could not help but feel that the instruments of brutality were perhaps deliberately abortive, increasing their cruelty by not disposing efficiently of the victims.

The call for nurses during the war was nationally desperate and training was swift. She spent two months at the hospital in Carlisle, and though she applied for posted duty she was transferred to Penrith. She roomed in the row of hospital bungalows alongside the main building and with the other nurses took fourteen-hour shifts, changing dressings, emptying pans, injecting solutions. There were those patients who were simply waiting to die, whose bodies would never be able to repair themselves enough to sustain life. They rotted away, watching a limb dissolve or coughing up pieces of lung, eyes streaming like broken egg-white. She read them the Bible daily, and as they pleaded with her to kill what was left of them, she assured them of the Lord’s open arms, in time. They pleaded mercy with some of the most eloquent lines she had ever heard, some of the most desperate and persuasive. The Lord is thy shepherd, she said, He leadeth thee to green pastures. There would be no mercy killings on her shift.

Others had missing sections of themselves, would live but only as half-men. They had to be held up to urinate or wash, strange imbalanced humans, who were unable to look at the
telling space between the floor and their torso. She rubbed the stumps of limbs with peroxide solution to toughen them for the prosthetic they would eventually have strapped to them. These were tasks she did not find upsetting. She knew that they must be done. There was no call for personal distaste. Nor would she lie about the length of a life, to soften a blow. Her predictions erred on the side of pessimism.

– You have hours now. Yer mother will not mek it here on time. Steadman, tek my hand.

At the beginning of the ragged third quarter of the conflict she spent nine weeks at the Dover Memorial Hospital, the first time she had ventured south of Manchester. From the front lines the bodies poured in, pouring with liquid and bound with makeshift bandages. She was twenty-five years old and able to carry out her duties without loathing or discomfort or pliant tears. She placed a succinct finger into the rectum of a man unable to defecate, who was being filled with poison from the blockage, holding the fractured back down as he jolted up on the bed. She held amputated sections of the human body, threw away bone and thinking matter. Her hands were never oblique, her voice did not waver as she sliced into an infected wound, pulled out the hidden infestations, telling the patient exactly what was being done. Because he was being eaten. She spoke in plain tones. She investigated the worst anatomies, called by the others nurses when the doctors, few and eternally tired, were not available. After the stint she was sent back home, exhausted and saturated with images of the deceased, but she was glad to get back to the lake country, to the fresh water and the proximity of mountain ranges. Again, she began to meet the medical train at the Penrith railway station, transferring patients on stretchers, and driving them to the hospital in an ambulance van. She gave them little welcome. Changed their dressings, folded down the clean sheets of the bed and handed bibles to the ones who still had arms and eyes with which to read.

Those with torn souls screamed in another ward at the back of the hospital. Ella talked them back horizontal. She held chewed wrists closed, stitched vascular flesh quickly and without anaesthetic, scolding the attempted suicide as if it was a child that had tried to steal butterscotch from a market place. It went against God, she said, it was a high sin. They must trust in the Lord’s destiny. The nightmares of the soldiers unravelled through the corridors. Each night men howled at the ceiling and spoke of eating the hearts of children, they sobbed or dissolved within themselves, their faces set in an expression of terror, of horror, arms rigid in the air. Their screams were those of madmen and villains, trying to drag her into the insanity of their continuing war. Instead, she gathered spilled fluids from their mouths and stomachs. It was a brutal landscape of the mind. In their silent moments the men watched her concentrating above them. Her face contorted with patience.

Samuel Lightburn returned from France in February 1917, with feet that were digesting themselves after living in mud and water constantly for half a year. His calves contained over a quarter of a pound of shrapnel. His vision was damaged, but he would slowly be able to see again over the coming months. At first his head was lost under the gauze bandages, she could not find his face to clean it. She cut away the long blond locks that were not held within the bindings, thinking it was coarse, like a dog’s. There were lice crawling in the hair. That first night she opened the dressing from his eyes. They were swollen almost closed and leaking furiously, blood and yellow saline. She removed the rest of his hair with a razor and washed his face. Inside the purple lids were pale, blue-grey eyes, moving uselessly as she touched his face.