Chapter Text
Easter 1950
“Couldn’t you pop down to Karen’s with those clothes for Rose?” Mrs Marlow asked Rowan at lunchtime. Nicola was all-too-conspicuously with the Merricks for lunch and Peter was not home from school yet.
“I’d love to.” Rowan answered drily, discovering to her own surprise that it was indeed so, even if there was a plague of infant Dodds underfoot. She wanted to do anything that didn’t involve lambing. Anything that would make her feel as if she belonged in her own family again. “Unfortunately, while you’d think that nature could arrange it so that ewes could lamb themselves without assistance, that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
“Oh,” said Mother turning her eyes towards Ann, “well perhaps…”
“I’ll do it.” said Ginty. She didn’t much like the infant Dodds but suddenly anything seemed better than an afternoon spent at home whilst Nicola and Patrick did hawk and horse things together.
Rowan would never been afraid of hard work and she wasn’t about to start now – but oh how much she’d give to have Peter or her sisters or her mother help her sometimes! True enough, Nicola had her moments of being helpful with livestock, and Peter did a certain amount of wood chopping and coal heaving and shoe cleaning and so on. It was, as Ma said, their holidays. And when, Rowan thought, will it ever be my holidays. And what happened to a change being as good as a rest for them? Still, she had set her hand to the plough (almost literally) and here she was with the best part of a score of ewes ready to lamb. Three of the four that had lambed so far had had twins. The dates had been nothing like she’d been told when she bought them. She’d be wary of buying ewes in lamb again.
“Rowan.” Here was Ann in her very oldest clothes. In fact the jersey looked as if it might be Giles’ oldest surviving piece of clothing.
“I know I don’t know much, but if you tell something straight forward that I can do? Something needs scrubbing?”
Rowan handed over bucket and disinfectant readily and pointed to the row of pens she had made up with hurdles.
“It’s not too bad a job.” Rowan said as reassuringly as she could. Ann who often irritated her sisters with her eagerness to do the right thing, had been subdued since the Ginty affair, but Rowan wasn’t about to turn down a willing helper. Ann was very unlikely to drop the job half way through because Patrick Merrick turned up either.
“Clear the straw out of the pens, put it there,” Rowan pointed, “shift the hurdles about if you have to, as long as they go back in approximately the right place, that’ll do. Slosh on a bit of this disinfectant and give it a good scrub – use this broom, not a scrubbing brush.” Rowan added hastily, knowing how Ann, with her determination to Do The Right Thing could so easily have interpreted the instruction. “Swoosh it down towards the drain a bit with the broom, that brick paving isn’t as even as it was on eighteen-o-something and I’d like it to dry as quickly as possible. That bit of roof and the back and end walls do take the wind off, although it doesn’t feel like it on a windy night. Once it’s dried - dried enough anyway, put some fresh straw down.”
Ann set to work while Rowan went to judge which of her charges was likely to be soonest in need of the shelter while she lambed, and then went to the field to check on the new mothers and their offspring. She should regard the twins as double profits, but had been concerned at first that they would end up losing both lambs. The twin lambs had been born smaller and slow to stand and suckle, but seemed to be thriving well enough now.
“Just don’t go forgetting that you’ve got two.” Rowan said firmly to one of the ewes, before returning to the other pens, set up under the other shelter at ninety degrees to the one where Ann was working away steady and efficiently. Ann had dealt with all the straw first and was scrubbing out the third pen. Rowan turned her attention to what Lawrie insisted in calling “patients” in the other pens. One had produced a single lamb with the minimum of fuss. The other was struggling with what Rowan suspected were more twins. Rowan fetched the other bucket, soap and the nail-brush she kept for that particular job.
She didn’t need them. The first and most awkward lamb had made its appearance in the by the time she returned to the pen and the second followed quickly. Another pair who would need a feed and maybe two before they would stand and suckle properly. Rowan filled the Robinson’s squash bottle she used for the purpose with the milk-and-glucose mixture, fastened the rubber teat on it and was about to settle herself on a upturned bucket when she paused. She had not even said please-or-thank-you to Ann, that she could recall.
She glanced up at her sister, just finishing the fourth pen.
“Ann,” she called, “Would you like to feed these lambs? I can finish that.”
Ann straightened up and smiled. “If you’re sure. What do I have to do?”
“It’s pretty much the same as feeding a Marlow twin, but with less regurgitation.” Rowan smiled herself, very briefly at her nearly forgotten memory. Giles had claimed the right to give Nicola her bottle whenever he chose, but had sometimes relinquished the task to Rowan when better ploys offered themselves. Rowan could not remember if Karen had sometimes handed over Lawrie-feeding rights to Ann. Probably, by the way Ann picked up both bottle and lamb and settled herself on the bucket.
“Rowan,” Ann asked tentatively, “do you regret it? Giving up school, I mean? Or had you rather I unasked that?”
“Not. On the whole.” said Rowan, thoughtful wiggling the brush round the wooden support for the front of the low thatched roof, under which farm equipment lived for most of the year and lambing ewes in Spring . “Some of the things seem very much storm in a teacup-ish now, and I think there’s only so much you can care about them.”
She glanced across at Ann, who nodded and arranged the lamb over her shoulder.
“What are you doing with that lamb?” Rowan asked, curiously.
“Winding her.”
“They don’t seem to need it.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“No need to be. It won’t harm her.”
“There are things that I mind more than I expected.” Rowan continued thoughtfully, after a pause.
“Such as?” Ann still sounded tentative.
“Oh, not belonging anymore.” Rowan attacked the uneven brick floor with suddenly savage fierceness.
“But you belong here more than anyone, now.” said Ann.
“It doesn’t feel like that in the holidays. They aren’t my holidays. Everyone comes home and does holiday things and there’s a grand killing of the fatted calf and I’m just there and it’s their holidays and I’m just someone to help provide the setting for it, like Mrs Bertie and I’m slightly in the way – oh, I’m just maudlin-self-pitying. Short on sleep. Ignore me.”
“And the more you do for people the more they expect you to do for them, but they mind, because then they’ve got to be grateful to you or feel themselves a bit of a heel if they’re not. And then they blame you for making them feel bad, but it seems a bit late to try to be different.”
“You, could give it a go, I suppose.” Rowan said thoughtfully. Better late than never, Ann. “Anyway, I’m grateful for your help today. Help and company both. Do you think Jon ever felt like this – sort of invisible only not, when we here in the holidays?”
Ann frowned. “I don’t know.” she said, “I wonder what happened to that friend of his?”
“Roger Walker.” said Rowan as casually as she could, as she started spreading fresh straw in the first pen, now more or less dry in the brisk wind. “Pretty rotten for him, turning up and actually seeing Jon die and bringing Peter home and having to explain it all to Ma and Pa and Mrs Bertie and then having everyone make it quietly clear that even if he had been expecting to stay the night they would really rather not. And he probably knew Jon better than any of us. Maybe better than Patrick did. I wonder where he did take himself off to?” she glanced across at Ann, now feeding the second lamb. Ann had walked with Roger Walker to the station, she remembered. At the time Rowan had resented that as a silent reprimand to the rest of them.
“His younger sister. He said she’d known Jon a bit – that they’d written a few times to each other. She was at Agricultural College, I think. She must have finished by now, I suppose.”
Rowan moved on to the next pen and nodded, although she wasn’t sure Ann was looking.
“A friend with Agricultural training would be very handy.” said Rowan. “Lucky Jon – in that at least.”
“I wondered if perhaps she was a bit more than just a friend?” Ann hazarded.
Rowan opened her mouth to voice her surprise at this idea and then decided to do so might be pushing this slightly new version of Ann a little far. Although that might depend exactly what interpretation Ann would put on not the marrying kind. And after all, it was only Rowan’s own impression.
“Rotten for her if that was the case.” Rowan said, “Losing him like that and seeing the place they might have lived together overrun by hordes of Jon’s cousins who don’t even know she exists.”
“But happier for Jon – I don’t mean right at the very end, but before that, with everything to look forward to.” Ann suggested.
The spreading the straw was a quick job and the second lamb was finished.
“Coming to see which patients need the maternity ward next?” Rowan asked. “It’s easier with two people, but I don’t want to flog a willing horse to death, as it were.”
“No, I’ll come and…Ro?”
“Ann?”
“Please don’t think I’m doing this because I want you to be grateful or anything like that. I’ve been thinking a bit, and actually feeling a bit of a heel. If you hadn’t taken on Trennels, I suppose Pa would have had to leave the Navy and I’d be at Colebridge Grammar instead of Kingscote and I do realise how lucky I am to be head-girl but you well you could have been, too, or games captain…. Well you were right about some of what you said before. I do take it too much for granted and don’t do enough to help.”
“Don’t worry about that. You came and helped me before I said any of that.” said Rowan, suddenly not sure that gratitude was better than ingratitude. “ And Keith never could abide me really, so I’d never have been head girl. And Ann, you’d have been last on the list to leave Kingscote. It was Nicola who would have ended up at the Grammar if Lawrie hadn’t won the Prosser.” She grinned. “At least then Rose wouldn’t be pestering Kay and Edwin to send her to Kingscote because Nicola is there.”