Mr Kingdon was an Oxford man for whom learning was as important as food and drink. His sons were all sent away to school and although he did not consider school essential for a girl, he devoted much care to teaching Bridie, and he found that she paid more attention to her lessons when she had a companion. I was a quick study, quicker than Bridie if the truth be told, and he took pleasure in my quickness. Reading, writing, elementary arithmetic, the kings and queens of England, the principal rivers of the world in alphabetical order. Latin, but only enough to learn the Kingdon motto under the Kingdon coat of arms: Regis donum gratum bonum.
Mr Kingdon was pleased with my progress, but when he took me aside into his study one afternoon, and showed me a list of words and asked me to read them one by one, I felt I should go carefully. How did I know? What did I know?
I could not have told you then, cannot tell you now, only that I decided not to display quite how well I could read. The first words he showed me were easy, easy, easy. Bridie would read those words as well as I did. Then they became harder. I read on, but more slowly. From Mr Kingdon I felt some complicated thing: curiosity, pleasure, satisfaction, but something else too. So that when I got to the word colonel, a strange word now that I write it here, I baulked.
– I cannot read it, I said, although I knew the word as perfectly as the easy ones before it.
I felt a kind of relaxation in Mr Kingdon, as if he were relieved. I was disappointed, he should not have accepted so easily. I nearly said, Oh, now I see it is colonel! But even as a child I already knew, without anyone having told me, that it would be best for me not to be too clever.
BUYING A RAM
Then John Leach came to buy a ram from Grandfather and, if the rain had not started to pelt, he’d have bought the ram and gone. But it did, so Grandfather brought him into the house to eat dinner with us and wait out the storm. Turned out, John Leach knew Mother’s cousin over in Taunton, had met Father once at Holsworthy, and even a child of eleven could see Mother perk up at his attention to her.
That child did not warm to him, did not like the way he set out to charm her mother, was sullen and sulky at his cajolings, his jocular enquiries after her pup and her needlework, and what did it matter—this big red-faced person was come to buy a ram, and would put it in his cart and go off—that a girl behaved scarcely this side of discourtesy?
Until John Leach began to visit without wanting to buy a ram.
So John Leach, widower, wanting I suppose someone to keep house and be in the bed with him, got his eye on Grace Veale, widow. I remember no discussion about my place in the arrangement, perhaps mercifully no sugared explanation for the fact that I was not invited to be part of the new marriage.
Mother told me that she and Mr Leach would go to his place at Stoke Climsland, but I would stay on with Grandfather.
– What a wonderful opening for you, pet, she cried. What a lucky girl you are! To keep on with your lessons!
I knew this was no more than a pretext for leaving me behind. Mr Leach and I were like two dogs bristling. I wanted to keep my mother to myself, of course. And Mr Leach had no desire to share his life with a girl too big for her boots from all the learning the parson was giving her, a girl he considered indulged and indolent, with too many vicarage airs and graces, who would not take kindly to being told to get out at dawn and milk the cows.
It was true, I had no wish to live with Mr Leach and have him watch every mouthful of his food as I ate, have him tell my mother that I needed to get my nose out of that book and do a hand’s turn. But a great emptiness opened up in me when I realised my mother had made a choice, and the choice did not include me. That wilful girl was not wanted.
I held a bouquet at the wedding and stood alongside Grandfather and the other guests, all of us throwing rice at my mother. A handful struck her on the cheek—from my own hand, as it happened—and she flinched and for a moment looked at me square-on, as I seldom remember her doing. I knew then what I had always guessed: my mother did not much like me. She might believe she loved me, because what mother did not love her daughter? But there it was in that unguarded look: she did not like me.
And that afternoon John Leach and Grace Leach rattled off in his gig, a spoke split on one wheel, I noticed. I remember it now, that split stave, and the way I was thinking hard about it as I smiled and waved. It was so as not to be too aware that I was bidding farewell to my mother. Stoke Climsland was not terribly far, not as far as Bath or Plymouth, but from that day on she might as well have been at the end of the earth.
Soon she was mother to another daughter besides myself. Isabella Leach. Isabella was the final bit of dovetailing, wedging the new shape into place once and for all.
But I had Grandfather, who loved me, and stood smiling as I tackled my first sheep with the shears, clipping away as he had shown me, until the creature was in two separate parts: bald bony shrunken animal in one place, a heap of fleece in another.
FOLDED UP SMALL
In some way, without it exactly being announced, it came about that I was to live at the Kingdons’.
– Your grandfather is old, Mr Kingdon said.
It was the nearest anyone came to explaining. But Grandfather has always been old, I wanted to say, but one did not answer back to Mr Kingdon, his holy face in stern iron folds.
– We welcome you, Elizabeth, Mrs Kingdon said. We are glad to have you as family with us.
At the Kingdons’ it was not done to walk about in the mud and shit of the farmyard in your old pinny, learning how to get hold of a ram without it butting you. Living there was different from visiting. A young lady of the vicarage did not get her hands dirty, but looked on while others dirtied theirs. Her life was not the sheep and the chooks, but drawn-thread work, French seams, run and fell.
Things shifted, too, between myself and Bridie. Being Bridie’s almost-sister at the vicarage was my life now, and I had better make sure that she and I did not fall out, because what would happen then to a girl without looks, without money, and as good as without a family? Where would a girl go who had been abandoned, as it felt, first by her father, then by her mother, and at last by her grandfather?
I had to be careful, and I became timid of a mis-step. In fact my new situation seemed nothing but the possibility of mis-steps. I put a guard on my tongue, not to speak out boldly with something that might make them turn to me with the thought, oh, perhaps she will not do after all.
Wariness became a habit, and brought with it a new irresoluteness. The brave girl Grandfather had smiled on cowered from thunder now, and was thrown into confusion by unimportant decisions. I became someone not totally removed from herself, but not quite herself either. Someone more obliging, more agreeable. Someone who had folded herself up small and put herself carefully away, where no one could see her.
GOD’S ARRANGEMENTS
I was twelve when I moved to the Kingdons’, Bridie a few months older. Mrs Kingdon took us both aside and told us that we would soon be experiencing what she called our time of the month. Her embarrassment made her sound cross as she tried to find a better word than blood. Told us how to manage the rags.
It silenced us, cheeky girls that we were. Not to be believed, that stuff would come out—blood!—from between our legs, and have to be staunched under our skirts with these cloths, which then must be smuggled out to where Mary would take them, without John or Amos seeing, and wash them, and return them to our chest of drawers ready for the next month.