Harvest by Georgina Harding (inspirational books for women TXT) 📕

Charlie’s coats to replace that one. And the hat he wore, had that been Charlie’s too? She was no longer sure. Tweed caps long worn had a way of blurring into sameness. Sometimes it seemed that Billy shared more with her than anyone now. His face was red from the cold, a dewdrop glistening on his nose. But Billy had been to war, the first one if not the second. There were things Billy knew more of than she. No, madam, don’t reckon as that’ll be too late. And he started to wheel the barrow back.

But, Billy—

Bent to the barrow, he stopped, looked up.

As you’re here now, then you might just rake up the leaves from the lawn.

There were so many leaves. He had raked the lawn already, only a week or two before, but it was covered again. The leaves must go on falling until all of the trees were bare.

In the fields Charlie had prepared, the winter wheat was growing.

The stalks came up fine at first, like hairs from the brown tilth. When she stood close in the field she could barely see them, but only from a distance and where there was an undulation or a dip in the surface and the colour accumulated into a green sheen. As the days passed and the crop grew, it angered her. The emerging green was so sharp. Nothing in the landscape should be so sharp and bright this time of year. This was a time of grey and brown and ochre. Black, even. It angered her that the stalks germinated and came up so bold when everything else died back around them. That a man could have sown and not stayed to see his seeds grow.

It was wrong. There was cruelty in it, in planting then. He should have waited until the spring. Or if he was to do what he was to do, not planted at all.

She asked Billy if they had always put in the wheat in October. Billy was old and knew these things.

Billy shrugged. Well that’ll depend, madam. Depend on when harvesting’s done. When there was only horses doing the work, harvesting might not be finished till November. If there’s wheat still standing then you won’t be drilling, will you?

No right to it. No wrong. Only practicality.

That was what she must learn. Practicality. Put the pain aside. She must find a man to do the work that he would have done. A man to manage the farm. Talk to him like a man, walk the growing fields with heavy feet, though the green hurt her eyes.

One learned, she had said to the girl, as one went along. And when things went wrong, one wondered why and learned some more. So much she had had to learn, and so quickly. There should have been a fallow time, a long fallow time when nothing changed and nothing grew. But the world had been impatient about her, the farm, the men asking her questions, making demands even though she could see the hesitancy, the difficulty in them each time they came to the door. And the boys kept growing. Richard grew out of his clothes and Jonny grew into them; Richard’s clothes bought large for growing room but soon become too small, passed on to Jonny who was a much smaller build anyway and on whom they seemed to wear out before they ever quite came to fit.

The night was cold. She stood with her back to the tall black hedge and looked at the house in which her boys slept. They had a routine by now, the three of them, that had been made through the dark nights of that winter. She had put them to bed before seven, read them a story until they were asleep, then closed the book shut and laid it on the table between their two beds, gone out and downstairs, leaving the door open a crack despite the cold of the house, the light on in the passage so that the room would not be dark. Leave the light on, Mummy, won’t you? Jonny always said. This was new, this winter, that he wouldn’t let the house be dark. Of course I’ll leave the light on, I always do. She had bought a night light to put in their room but Richard said that it kept him awake. The light in the passage was a compromise. Night, night, see you in the morning bright, she had murmured, in case one of them was still awake behind his closed eyes. Or was she saying it for herself, to carry herself through to the morning? She had gone downstairs to the kitchen and eaten a little of what she had made for the boys earlier, and spooned what was left into a bowl and covered that with a saucer and put it in the fridge, and cleared the table, and washed up, and tidied, moving this way and that across the kitchen with the radio for company. With only the three of them living in the house the clearing didn’t take up enough time. Then she had called the dog and taken her out. This was one of the things Charlie used to do, taking the dog out before they went to bed. Out the back into the yard. She could see what a fine cold night it was. The stars were bright already. Often she would only stand on the doorstep until the dog had done her business, but this night she had taken her big tweed coat down from the hook by the door, and her hat and gloves from its pockets, and gone outside herself, closing the door on the house and the boys and the warmth. She had walked past the windows of the empty kitchen where the radio still talked, across the lawn that was already crispening with frost.

The hedge was