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CHAPTER 1
A finger of sunlight, wavering across the white counterpane, woke Miss Clare from a light sleep.
The old lady lay for a while, without moving, watching it tremble like water across the bed and down the uneven bulging wall of her cottage bedroom.
She knew the time without troubling to turn her head to consult the china clock which ticked busily on her bedside table. Her own easy waking, and the strength and direction of the sunbeam, told her that it was a little before six o'clock on this June morning.
And there was no need to get up, thought Miss Clare, with a little shock of pleasure. Each morning, since her retirement from school teaching, this tremor of elation had stirred her waking moments. To be freed from the tyranny of the clock, after so many years of discipline, was wholly delightful. Almost every day of her working life Dolly Clare had resolutely thrust the bedclothes from her as the clock struck six. The habit of years dies hard, and still she woke at the same time, and rose very soon after, but with the blessed relief of knowing that, at long last, her time was her own.
She lay now, frail as a bird and very still, beneath the light covers, listening to the early morning sounds. Above her a starling chattered on the chimney pot. To thwart just such nest builders she had prudently had wire netting stretched across the mouths of the chimneys, and now she could hear the starling's claws and beak plucking the wire and making metallic music. Far away a cow lowed, and farther still a train hooted imperiously as it rushed towards London. Miss Clare could have slipped back easily into slumber again.
But suddenly there came the roaring of a motor-bike kicked into life. The clock vibrated in sympathy, and Miss Clare sat upright.
'That's Jim off to work,' she said aloud. 'Time I was up.' The motor-bike thundered by, shaking the old lady into wakefulness.
'And this is the day that Emily comes! Plenty to do today!'
She put back the bed clothes and thrust her bony legs towards a patch of warm sunlight on the rug. Miss Clare's day had begun.
It was strange, thought Miss Clare, half an hour later, moving methodically about her small kitchen, how little Emily Davis knew of the important part she had played in her own life. For almost seventy years now she and Emily had been friends. For several years they had taught side by side as pupil teachers, and when their ways had parted, weekly letters, lengthy and beautifully penned, had sustained their affection. No matter how long their partings, on meeting they fell together as sweetly as two halves of an apple. Now, in old age, the warm friendship had an added quality, for the knowledge that it must end before long quickened their love for each other.
They had first met under the steep slated roof of Beech Green school, when Emily Davis was seven years old and Dolly Clare a forlorn newcomer of six. Standing now in the kitchen, her brown breakfast egg poised in a spoon above the saucepan of bubbling water, Miss Clare looked back across the years and saw the scene as sharply as if it had all happened that morning.
*
It was the same kitchen that she and her mother had left to make their way to the nearby school. It was a wet Monday morning in March and the Clare family had moved into their new home on the Friday before. Two hours earlier Francis Clare, Dolly's father, who was a thatcher by trade, had set off to work, pushing before him a little handcart containing his tools. Upstairs lay Dolly's sister Ada, two years her senior, and smitten this morning with a timely cold and a violent cough which meant that school was out of the question for her. Envying her from the bottom of her heart, Dolly set out for the unknown, clutching her mother's hand.
'Don't you stir till I'm back, Ada,' called Mary Clare, her face tilted up to the bedroom window. 'I shan't be ten minutes.'
She hurried off so briskly that Dolly was forced to run to keep up with her. Her mother's hand was hot and comforting through the cotton glove. The child had need of comfort. New black boots pinched her toes and rubbed her heels. Her long tartan frock, decently covered with a white pinafore, bundled itself between her legs as she ran along. Her straight yellow hair had been strained to the top of her head and tied there so tightly with a black ribbon by her over-anxious mother that she could feel the skin over her temples drawn upwards in sympathy.
But her physical pain was as nothing to the ache in her heart. Fear of the ordeal before her, the entry alone into a strange and possibly hostile world was bad enough, but even this was less than the misery which had gripped her since the move from their old home at Caxley. This was the third day of grief for young Dolly Clare, the third day of mourning for her lifelong companion, her other half. Emily, her rag doll, had disappeared during the chaos of moving day, and for her young mistress the world was in ruins.
The road to the school was muddy and rutted deeply where the cart wheels made their way. This morning rain lay in long bright bands on each side of the rough flints in the centre of the lane. Other children were making their way to school, shabby satchels or plaited rush bags containing their dinner bumping on their backs. They looked curiously at breathless Dolly, scuttling at the heels of her mother, and nudged each other and whispered as they passed. Dolly was glad when they clanked over the door scraper and entered the high schoolroom.
Mr Finch, the headmaster, was a solemn figure in black with a silver watch-chain drawn across his waistcoat just on a level with Dolly's throbbing temples. The room was very quiet, and a number of children were already in their desks sitting very prim and upright, but with their eyes fixed un winkingly upon their new schoolfellow. Dolly was too overcome to return their gaze, and looked at her new boots already splashed with chalky water from the lane.
'Yes, sir, she's already been to school at Caxley,' her mother was saying. 'She can read and reckon, and is a good hand with a needle.'
'Date of birth?' asked Mr Finch sombrely.
'Tenth of October, sir, eighteen eighty-eight.'
'And her full name?'
'Dorothy Annie Clare, but she's called Dolly, sir.'
'I will tell my wife. She will start with her.'
'I've another girl to come. Ada, sir, she's eight, but in bed poorly this morning.'
'Very well,' said Mr Finch with a note of dismissal in his voice. Taking the hint, Dolly's mother gave her daughter's cheek a swift peck and disappeared homewards, leaving her younger child as lonely as she was ever to be.
She stood on the bare boards of the schoolroom trembling from her tight black boots to the top knot on her head, fighting against tears and longing for the comfort of Emily's hard stuffed body in her arm. But Emily had gone, even as her mother had gone, and though in an eternity of time, when the great wall clock struck twelve, she would see her mother again, yet Emily had gone for ever.
The figures in the desks wavered and swelled as the hot tears pricked her eyes.
'You can sit by Emily for now,' said a woman's voice above her head. She found herself being led to the further end of the long room. Emily, Emily! The word beat in her head like a bewildered bird trying to get out of a closed room. In her present dream-like condition it seemed possible that she might be advancing to meet her long-lost familiar again, although the dull ache at her heart counselled otherwise.
She found herself in front of a double desk. At one side sat a grave dark child, with black hair smoothed from a centre parting to fall into two long plaits. Her eyes were grey and clear like water and her smile disclosed a gap where her two front milk teeth had gone.
'This is Emily,' said Mrs Finch.
It wasn't, of course, to Dolly Clare; but the smile was engaging and the grey eyes reassuring. Ana, amazingly, the stranger was called Emily!
Tremulously, through her tears, Dolly smiled back, and the friendship began.
Buttering a finger of toast on her breakfast plate, Miss Clare mused on that far-distant meeting with the second Emily in her life amid the misery which had engulfed her in the schoolroom. That such 'old, unhappy, far-off things' should have the power to prick her into acute feeling so many years after, made the old lady marvel. Yet, she told herself ruefully, she had difficulty in remembering the name and aspect of a friend's house she had visited only three days earlier! Memory played queer tricks as one grew old.
Emily's face at seventy was far more difficult for her to recall than that seven-year-old's which flashed so vividly upon her inward eye. As for the earlier Emily, who had shared the first six years of her life, why, Miss Clare could see her more clearly still. She could see the brown painted curls, the wide painted eyes and the dented nose which had suffered much banging on floors and chairs. She could smell the stout calico of which she was made, and see the quilted bodice and green-striped long-legged drawers painted upon it; and she could feel even now the delicious scrunch of the hard-packed wood shavings with which she had been stuffed. The sharply indented waist could be spanned by little Dolly's two joined hands, and the legs and arms were prickly at the ends where the calico had worn thin. There was something infinitely reassuring about the smell and weight of Emily as she leant drunkenly against her. No possible harm could befall anyone, thought young Dolly, if Emily were there.
For Emily was the good spirit of the home and, young Dolly felt sure, her blessing embraced Father, Mother, Ada and every living thing in the little house at Caxley where it had all begun so long ago.
CHAPTER 2
In 1888, the year of Dolly Clare's birth, Caxley was a compact, thriving market town. Its broad main thoroughfare was lined with lime trees and behind these stood shops and private houses built mainly of good rosy brick and weathered tiles.
Here and there, a Georgian front was decorated with grizzled grey bricks known locally as 'vuzz-fired' or 'gorsefired'. There were several handsome doorways, some hooded, some with elegant fanlights above the well-kept paintwork, and the general impression was one of solid prosperity. Travellers from London, journeying westwards, had paused at Caxley to change horses, or to eat or to sleep, for countless generations and had gone on their way refreshed. There was warmth and beauty in the rose-red aspect of the town and a bustling hospitality among its prosperous trades people which won the affection of many a stranger.
The broad High Street narrowed to a stone-built bridge at its western end and crossed a river which wound its placid way to join the Thames. Beyond that, on rising ground to the north, a few cottages constituted the outskirts of the market town, and among these was the four-roomed house belonging to Francis Clare and his young wife.
What the hurrying stranger did not see as he took the highway beyond the handsome bridge was the poorer part of Caxley. The river made its way round the southern part of the town in a series of wide loops. Here was an area of marshland dotted with a few ancient cottages. As the town grew during the nineteenth century, several mean streets were built also on this marshy wasteland by speculators. They were slums within ten years of their building, liable to flooding in the spring and damp from the rising mists for the rest of the year. 'That marsh lot', as the townspeople called them, were scorned, pitied or feared by their more prosperous neighbours, and children from respectable homes were warned against venturing into those narrow streets after dark.
Here lived the humblest of Caxley's citizens. From these dank dwellings, very early each morning, issued the old crones who cleaned steps or scrubbed out shops, the labourers on nearby farms, and those employed in digging a new way for a branch line of the local railway. More often than not there were children left behind in the homes to get what poor breakfast they could before setting out to school. The Education Act of 1870 meant compulsory schooling, and the pennies to pay for it were hard to come by in many a marsh home, and handed over grudgingly on a Monday morning.
But though poverty and hunger, aches and pains were common in these mean streets, conditions were not as stark as in the industrial towns further north and west. Very few children went barefoot and very few older people were callously neglected. Caxley was small enough to know its people, and a rough and ready charity did much to mitigate real need. Though little was organised officially for the relief of the poor in the town, yet shop-keepers, the local gentry and the more prosperous citizens were generous to those in their employ or who were brought to their notice as being in want. This casual and spasmodic generosity had something to commend it in a small community, for the feckless and improvident had small chance of waxing fat at others' expense, while those truly in need were given help. It would take some years before the conscience of the town as a whole was roused by the sight of 'the marsh lot' and their dwellings, but meanwhile they were accepted as 'the poor man at the gate', and an inevitable part of the social structure of any town at that time.
The marsh people themselves frequently said how lucky they were. The parents of some of them had taken part in the bitter riots earlier in the century. The marsh dwellers knew all too well true tales of the starving farm labourers who had marched to demand a wage of half a crown a day, in the winter of 1830. The fate of these unfortunates at their trial, when sentence of death was recorded against many and others were transported as convicts to Australia, was fresh in their memory. Consequently, although their own conditions were deplorable, they considered themselves more fortunate than their predecessors, sharing, to a small extent, the growing prosperity of the latter part of Queen Victoria's long reign.
Perhaps those who felt the pinch most at this time were the small tradesmen, the clerks and the shop assistants, too proud to seek charity, and keeping up an air of respectability with precious little to maintain it. There was a great company of such people in Caxley at that time, dressed in neat, dark attire, much-darned and much-pressed, whose pale faces spoke of long hours and poor nourishment, and whose main anxiety was not so much the serious difficulty of living on their small wages as concealing their difficulties from those about them.
Francis Clare and his wife were of this company. To be sure, Francis's round face was not pale, for his outdoor occupation gave him a weather beaten aspect, but Mary's wore a pinched and sallow look. It was she who bore the major part of their poverty, making each penny do the work of two, and depriving herself so that Francis and the two little girls should benefit.
She had been in good service before her marriage, employed as a general maid in a farmhouse some miles west of Caxley. The farmer and his wife were hardworking and kindly. Despite the low conditions of agriculture at that time, and the recent disastrous harvest of 1870, yet there was wholesome food for all the household produced there. Outside, the logs were stacked in hundreds, sawn up by the farm hands when the weather was too cruel for fieldwork. Coal was cheap and was bought by the truck load. The farm carts trundled to Caxley station once a year bearing sacks of corn, and brought back enough coal for the winter instead.
At Michaelmas the pigs were killed, salted and jointed and hung in clean muslin from the beams in the kitchen. Strong beer was brewed, in an enormous copper, from home-grown barley, and provided a nourishing drink for the men. There was milk in abundance, and butter was made once a week, Mary herself turning the churn more often than not. All the bread, the massive pies and puddings, were made from home-ground wheaten flour. Vegetables and fruit were picked fresh each day from the garden, and the farmhouse kitchen seemed always to be filled with the fragrance and the clatter of cooking.
Only when night came and the oil lamp glowed on the kitchen table, a round pearl of light in its milk-white globe, did the bustle die down. Then the single men, who lived on the premises, and the farmer and his wife, with Mary, quiet as a mouse in the corner, would settle round the fire or at the table, and read or talk or take out the mending basket, until the yawning and nodding began. Then the young men would say their good-nights before stamping across the cobbled yard to their bothy above the stables, and Mary would climb up the creaking stairs, candle in hand, to her windy little room under the roof. Finally, the farmer and his wife would rake through the fire, put up the massive fire guard, shoot the heavy bolts on the doors and make their way to bed. By ten o'clock on a winter's night the farmhouse would be wrapped in silent darkness, and the only sounds to be heard would be the snort and stamp of a horse beneath the bothy, or the croak of a startled pheasant from the spinney.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Miss Clare Remembers and Emily Davis"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Dora Jessie Saint.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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