The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson
“How many?” asked Farmer Bowen in consternation.
“We thought to fetch perhaps ten or twelve suitable refugees to begin with?” said Mrs. Fothergill. “Our illustrious neighbors, in the town of Bexhill-on-Sea, already claim to have twenty-six,” she added. “Not that one wishes to accuse them of broadcasting their own generosity.”
“My wife, as you can see, has already devoted some time to the study of this issue,” said the Mayor.
“Oh no you do not,” whispered Agatha Kent, rising to her feet and waving.
“Mrs. Kent?” said the Mayor.
“If I may beg the indulgence of the room to hear a word from the concerned ladies of Rye, I would just like to applaud dear Mrs. Fothergill, on behalf of all of us, for her leadership in this area.” She paused for a hearty round of applause.
“Thank you, dear Mrs. Kent,” said Mrs. Fothergill, simpering.
“Mrs. Fothergill and I are eager to work on this issue together,” continued Agatha, “and I believe we ladies have the opportunity to do so under the guidance of a gentleman who not only has been working on this matter locally but has been asked to take a lead on the national stage.”
“Who is she talking about?” said the Mayor in a loud whisper to his wife, who could not answer him through her clamped lips. Her face turned as pale as her dress.
“For the sake of the Belgians and for the opportunity to associate our town with a national spokesman on this issue, I know dear Mrs. Fothergill and I will join Colonel Wheaton and Dr. Lawton in asking the room to nominate Mr. Tillingham by acclamation.”
“I think Mrs. Fothergill is quite capable…” But the Mayor’s voice was drowned out by an enthusiastic round of cheering and clapping, which grew louder as Mr. Tillingham stood up from his seat at the front of the room, waving his hat to all sides and bowing modestly under the applause.
“We have our full committee heads, I think,” said Colonel Wheaton. If he had been primed by his wife to act in concert with Agatha Kent, he gave no sign. The Mayor glared, and his wife sat down abruptly, but the room was decidedly in favor of Mr. Tillingham, who made some show of reluctance before mounting to the podium to speak to the room.
“This small corner of immutable England has been a home and a refuge for this poor wandering scribe, and so I cannot express my gratitude that you would entrust me to represent you in this important cause,” said Mr. Tillingham. He held his hat over his heart and looked to the heavens as if asking for divine inspiration. “In a time of great peril, one cannot but look around this ancient town, filled with generations of stouthearted, generous English men and women, and know that our Belgian neighbors could not ask a kinder, more welcoming sanctuary.”
“Actually the good people of our town are as frugal and suspicious a group as I have ever met, and they actively dislike all foreigners,” whispered Agatha to Beatrice. “But we will hope for the best.”
As the meeting concluded, Beatrice looked around to see how she might escape the ladies, such as Bettina Fothergill, who now measured all women by whether one was at leisure to work full-time on the war effort. Agatha, rising to move swiftly to the aisle, took the time to stop and pat her hand.
“If anyone should ask, you are pledged to Belgian Relief full-time, my dear,” she said. “Direct all further questions to me.”
“Thank you,” said Beatrice, grateful again for Agatha’s sharp understanding. As she slipped from the room, she grinned to see Agatha shake hands with Miss Finch and her companion and direct them, deliberately, towards the tea table, where, Beatrice assumed, Agatha intended their enthusiasm to be the final straw in Mrs. Fothergill’s bad day.
—
Snout was after rabbits. He had thin wire snares set below two of the many holes in the bank, a small pile of apple skin left a few inches away. He knew the sweet, clean smell was all in the warren, filling the dark tunnels and causing rabbits to flick sleepy ears and snuffle their noses. As he crouched against the high bank of the dirt lane, his back buried as much as possible into a patch of tall, furry nettles, he could smell the bitter, milky sap of the crushed stalks. The flowers of a tall pink mallow trembled over his head, and he smelled his own warm sweat and the sharpness of fallen apples in the orchard above the bank.
While he waited, he pulled from his bag a dog-eared translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. He had borrowed the book for the summer, slipping in when the school library was empty and dropping the book out of the window into a yew bush to avoid Miss Devon, who seemed to think her job as English teacher included defending the school’s books against dirty boys. His fellow pupils would have pilloried any boy for reading a single page more than required, but he had whiled away many a detention in the library breathlessly following the Trojan Aeneas on his quest to found the Roman Empire. At year’s end, and halfway through his third rereading, he could not bear to leave Aeneas outside the stench-filled cave to the Underworld, with the hell dogs baying at the dreadful Sibyl’s approach. He had resisted the urge to show Miss Nash the book. Teachers enjoyed their godlike powers to toy with him and punish as they pleased, and he had already let slip too much enthusiasm for Virgil. But he had a strange feeling she would have understood.
As he waited and read, he kept one eye on his snares and one ear cocked for any sound of the farmer. Any nailed boots, any cart wheel or snorting of ewes being herded in a mass of hot, oily wool, a collie nipping at their heels. It was not the farmer’s time to be in this lane, he was likely harvesting corn in his upper fields, but it was always wise to listen. The farmer had no respect for the track being a public way and would box the ears of rabbiting boys and threaten them with the constable for poaching. Snout could still feel a blow he had once had from the farmer and being held almost to choking, by the collar, until the constable was called, and the constable asking for his full name with which he was christened, and the farmer shouting that he was a dirty Gypsy and not deserving of the benefits of Church.
“Richard Edmund Sidley,” he had said, the name almost unfamiliar in his ears. Everyone called him Snout, except his mother, who called him Dickie darling (which was worse than Snout if there were other boys about to hear), and his father, who called him Son.
“Fancy name for a low poacher,” the farmer replied, and the constable arrested him and hauled him away in his dog cart, taking along one of the two dead rabbits. Near town, the constable gave him a halfhearted box on the ear, not half as hard as his sister or mother could deliver, and told him to run home.
“Lucky for you we don’t hang poachers no more,” he said.
“Can I have my rabbit?” Snout asked.
“Course, I could send you to the reformatory,” the constable said. Snout took off running and heard the constable calling after him, “Tell your mother Arnie Sprigs sends his best regards.” His mother had been a beauty in her day, and many a man in Rye still shook his head in disbelief that she had chosen to marry his father instead.
A leaf twitched at the nearest hole. A soft gray nose wriggled and sniffed. Snout held his breath and did his best to quiet the beat of his heart. A bird sang a clear note in the treetops, the leaves of the hedges shivered, and a gray-brown rabbit dashed headlong into the wire noose to fall, writhing in the dirty lane, blood spurting from its neck. Snout wrapped the body as best he could in big dock leaves and put it in his bag. He put the Virgil on top and hoped the rabbit wouldn’t bleed all over it.
War broke: and now the Winter of the world
With perishing great darkness closes in.
…
For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece,
And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome,
An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home,
A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.
But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need
Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.
WILFRED OWEN, “1914”
It was a late August evening when the refugees came. The sun was lying in a
The small group, led by Dr. Lawton and the Mayor, came slowly up the cobbles. Despite the doctor’s age and the Mayor’s girth, they seemed regally upright and hearty compared to the refugees, who climbed with great fatigue, heads down and shoulders hunched under shawls or gray donated blankets. Instead of the apple-cheeked children expected by the ladies waiting at the Town Hall, these were mostly families, the parents and grandparents leaning in one to the other, a hand reaching, or a shoulder offered. Three old nuns made a small family of their own in the rear, habits creased and grimy, hands counting their rosary beads. All carried only small, shapeless bundles, as if there had been no time to gather belongings, or as if they had been forced to shed them along the way.
Beatrice had not expected the silence. She heard only the scrape of wooden clogs and the wheezing of breath, the strike of the doctor’s cane and a low cough somewhere in the rear. It was the same pressing sense of solemnity as a funeral procession, and Beatrice felt her heart clench. A sob broke the silence, a low and plaintive sob as a young woman carrying a small child raised her face to the brightness above the rooftops. Her shawl fell from her head, revealing a tumble of pale blond hair and a face as white as bone save for the blue hollows beneath her eyes. Her dress was dirty and torn about the hem, and yet Beatrice saw it was paneled in thick lace down the front, and her boots, now ruined with mud, were of soft leather with an elegant curved heel. The child she carried wore a rough peasant’s smock and clogs. His ruddy cheeks announced that he belonged not to the girl but to the large family just ahead of her, the mother already clutching a baby and the father keeping his arm around the back of an old woman, bent low under the weight of her years and suffering. Hugh Grange brought up the rear, supporting the shuffling steps of an older man who kept a hand over his eyes, as if he had seen too much and could no longer bear to look about him.
As they passed, the neighbors seemed to grow conscious of their own staring and called out welcomes in softened voices. But the tired and stumbling refugees only shrank further into their blankets and quickened away up the hill. Hugh glanced at Beatrice as he passed, and his face seemed to brighten as if he were glad to see her. He gave her a small nod.
Beatrice had decided to keep away from the Town Hall. Though she was determined to give such free time as she had to Agatha Kent’s committee, there were many more ladies than needed to meet the arrivals, and she did not wish to be among the curious with their pressing enthusiasm. Now, however, she felt an urgent need to follow the refugees and assist as she might in their safe billeting.
—
The council room was in some state of uproar when she arrived. Urgent discussions bordering on argument seemed to be going on in many corners while the seated refugees were attacked from all sides by ladies swinging hot teapots in reckless arcs and pressing huge trays of sandwiches on people who were already holding sandwiches. The lady pounding spirited music-hall favorites on the piano was blithely unaware that she was merely adding to the general din. Meanwhile a small girl, dressed in Sunday best, much beribboned about the head, and carrying a basket of shortbread, offered her treats to the refugees with the trembling timidity of one asked to pass raw meat through the bars of a lion cage.
Beatrice saw Hugh standing apart, eating two ham sandwiches at once.
“Sorry to be so rude but I’m famished,” he said by way of greeting. He sounded exhausted. “A very long day and no lunch.”
“What’s happening?” asked Beatrice. “I see some anxious discussions.”
“We have a number of large families who understandably do not wish to be parted,” said Hugh. “Meanwhile many well-meaning ladies have made meticulous arrangements to take in one or two guests each. Ironic that families who cleaved together through German brutality may be forced asunder by English charity.”
Mr. Tillingham, a frown of concentration on the great forehead, walked towards them, deep in discussion with an agitated Mrs. Fothergill. “One must open one’s heart in the face of this scale of human tragedy,” he was saying, a hand patting her arm. “Would that I had more to offer than the limited scope of a bachelor establishment.”
“We had requested mostly children, but my husband said the people in charge were quite rude about it,” said Mrs. Fothergill. She spotted Hugh. “Mr. Grange, you were there. Were there no children to be had?”
“We managed one or two,” said Hugh, “but as you can see they came with parents and grandparents attached, and they were unwilling to part with them.”
“One could also have wished for more genteel folk,” said Mrs. Fothergill. She frowned at a man who was noisily drinking from a teacup held in both hands and lowered her voice. “Of course, we will succor all who need us, but it is quite impossible to ask our ladies to take absolute peasants into their own houses, however charming their wooden clogs.”
“I’m afraid it was all desperation at the docks,” said Hugh. “They just sorted us a group, like cutting out sheep at the Wednesday market, and your husband did not like to refuse. I believe the Mayor of Bexhill was there collecting a second batch.”
Agatha Kent seemed to have quieted most of the arguments and now approached bearing a sheaf of papers, pen in hand. “The farm at New Road will take one family. They have an empty cottage,” she said. “Colonel Wheaton has offered a gamekeeper’s lodge to hold another, and the Misses Porter will take in the nuns until they can receive assistance from their order. Meanwhile, we will just have to remake the lower street hostel over to accommodate families instead of boys’ and girls’ dormitories.”
“People will be so disappointed,” said Mrs. Fothergill. “They wished so much to open their hearts and homes.”
“Perhaps you could give up taking in the accountant and his wife?” asked Agatha, indicating a thin refugee couple sitting very protectively either side of a battered brown suitcase. “You already have so many obligations with the Voluntary Aid Detachment, and there are other ladies wishing desperately to be called.”
“Let me sink from exhaustion, yet still will I do my duty,” said Mrs. Fothergill. “I shall not shirk from the strife.”
“Is that everyone?” asked Hugh.
“I believe so,” said Agatha. “There may be just a small issue with the professor whom you offered to take in, Mr. Tillingham.”
“He’s not a charlatan, is he?” said Mr. Tillingham. “I picked him out as a man of great intellectual refinement.”
“It’s just that he comes with a daughter,” said Agatha, indicating the pale girl Beatrice had noticed in the street. She was still sitting among the peasant family, holding the baby while his mother drank tea. As her fingers played with a tiny hand and the baby reached for her pale hair, Beatrice saw on her white face the same faint smile as in a Bellini painting of the Madonna. It was a look of grace that Beatrice had always thought came from knowledge of events to come but which she now saw more simply as a temporary moment of quiet solace on a refugee’s journey.
“I’m not sure a bachelor household is at all suitable for a young woman,” Mr. Tillingham was saying. He seemed quite agitated at the thought, as if a young woman would be sure to leave stockings drying in the parlor and walk about in her chemise, shedding hairpins on the carpets.
“If you wish to withdraw, we have others willing to step in,” said Agatha.
“No, no, I am called to leadership on this issue on the national stage,” said Mr. Tillingham.
“Well, I’m sure your housekeeper can cope with one extra girl,” said Agatha. “And Miss Nash is just down the street. I’m sure she would be happy to be invited to entertain the young woman.”
At this suggestion Mr. Tillingham seemed to brighten up. “Perhaps a different solution is before us,” he said. “Perhaps the young lady can stay with Miss Nash and the professor with me?”
“Again, they want to stay together,” said Agatha.
“But in this case, we are the nearest of neighbors,” said Mr. Tillingham. “Why, we might view Miss Nash’s quarters as an annex to the garden, and the young ladies would of course be free to trip back and forth across the lawn as they please.” With a wave of the hand he thus disposed of the twelve-foot-high brick wall that shut all trace of his sylvan landscape from the street.
“I fear I am not the mistress of my own home,” said Beatrice, torn between wishing to chide Mr. Tillingham for his high-handed approach and the promise of the doors to his home being thrown open to her at last.
“You and the young lady would also be welcome to the full use of my small library if you so wish,” he said, as if the offer were a casual afterthought. But she knew it was a deliberate inducement, and she also knew she could not resist.
“I would be honored to do my part, of course,” she said.
“Mrs. Turber shall be compensated from my own narrow pocket if necessary,” said Mr. Tillingham. “Though I believe large amounts of funds are being raised?” he added, looking with barely disguised eagerness at Agatha.
“Your generosity will show us all the way, Mr. Tillingham,” said Agatha. “Let us go and talk to the Professor.”
“Our Mr. Tillingham does like to insist publicly on his own penury,” said Hugh. “I believe his sighing garners him three or four dinner invitations a week.”