The Willow Pool. Elizabeth Elgin

her rooms. Yet there must still be some semblance of reason in her head, because I think she’s unwilling to come downstairs in case the present catches up with her! She knows that Mark has joined the Army. She just wants to pretend she has children in the nursery still, and the war hasn’t happened. My husband was severely wounded in the last one – his abdomen and chest. He died when Polly was four. Nanny never forgave the Kaiser!’

      ‘So when this war started she decided to ignore it?’

      ‘She was already getting a little vague; when she found we were at war again it seemed to be the last straw. And when Mark left, that was it! She just lapsed into her long-ago world. She’s eighty, you know. Best we go along with her little moods, I suppose. She was so good to me when John died. I don’t know how I’d have pulled myself together if it hadn’t been for Nanny.’

      ‘But she rings her bell to call you like a servant, Mrs John – surely, that can’t be right?’

      ‘No, but understandable. She’s back in the days when we had a staff to run the house – we never called them servants, Meg – and she still thinks she’s only got to ring.’

      ‘Well, she won’t be ringing till she finds her bell,’ Polly grinned from the kitchen doorway. ‘I’ve hidden it behind the curtain. I’ll take you to meet her after lunch, Meg. You’ll learn to humour her. She’s no trouble really. If she gets a bit bossy you just walk away!’

      ‘But why do you have to put up with such a carry-on? I mean, she isn’t family.’

      ‘No, but she’s Nanny,’ Mary Kenworthy smiled gently, ‘which is pretty much the same thing. And she stayed with us through good times and bad. Almost family, Meg.’

      ‘Ar. I see,’ Meg nodded, though she didn’t see at all! That Nanny seemed a right old faggot! In the photograph she’d had a mouth on her like a steel trap! Nanny Boag and Master Mark her mother had written on the back of the picture of Polly’s brother in his christening gown.

      But no one here knew about the photographs of Candlefold and no one would get to know until she was good and ready to tell them. Good-hearted though they were, and decent to a servant who’d got into trouble, Meg wanted to find out for herself how it had really been, and not be told kindly and gently about it by an embarrassed Mrs John. Because that was how it would be if ever she admitted being Dorothy Blundell’s daughter, and herself born at Candlefold!

      ‘By the way,’ Polly giggled, ‘Nanny is busy at the moment sticking pins into a newspaper picture of Mrs Simpson. I’ll leave her to it and take you up there, Meg, when she’s back to more normal, sort of. Seeing a strange face in her present mood might be a bit too much for her!’

      ‘Oooh! She isn’t a witch, is she? Sticking pins, I mean!’ Meg gasped.

      ‘Don’t worry, my dear. Nanny, even at her most troublesome, is no worse than a child having a fit of the sulks. I’m sure she doesn’t know the first thing about witchcraft, even though it’s supposed to be witch country around these parts! Now, shall Polly take you to your room, then show you round the house and what is left to us of the gardens and outbuildings? And the kitchen garden, of course. And when you do, Polly, can you ask Mr Potter if we can have a couple of spring cabbages?’

      ‘Potter? That’s the name of the lady at the post office, isn’t it?’

      ‘That’s right. Our gardener is her husband. We are such a tiny community that everyone seems connected in some way or another. It’s Mrs Potter’s sister and her husband – Armitage – who rent Home Farm from us. Everybody knows everybody. And by the time you’ve had two weeks with us, Meg, you’ll know if you want to be a part of it or not. There are no picture houses or dance halls in Nether Barton. Only hops, sometimes, in the parish hall. Will you miss things like that?’

      She said it anxiously, Meg thought, as if to think that her home help might leave at the end of the fortnight troubled her.

      ‘I might, Mrs John, but I don’t think I will. After that bombing it’s safer here! And anyway, Ma and me always wanted to live in the country, so I hope I suit.’

      ‘I think you will. And by the way,’ Polly smiled at her mother, ‘is it omelettes for lunch? I can get some saladings from Potter if it is.’

      ‘Omelettes!’ Meg gasped. ‘You need eggs for them, don’t you?’

      ‘Yes, but we have our own hens, you see, and we’re very lucky to have our own cow too. A little Jersey. We keep her at Home Farm with the herd there, and Armitage milks her for us. So you can have plenty of milk on your porridge at breakfast, and an egg as well.

      ‘At night we have a big mug of Ovaltine – if we’ve been able to get any in the shops, that is – or milky cocoa. We sit round the table here, and call it our quiet time; think of the day ahead. We Kenworthys are optimists. Tomorrow is a day to look forward to, not the day that never comes! Are you an optimist, Meg Blundell?’

      ‘Yes, I am,’ she said firmly, because who in her right mind wouldn’t be an optimist in a house like this, with all the milk she could drink, and a fresh egg for breakfast?

      The afternoon sun warmed the stones of the old house to honey, and bees buzzed around roses and clematis that climbed the walls and peeped into upstairs windows.

      ‘I like this bit of Candlefold best.’ Polly waved an embracing hand. ‘Oh, the newer, red-brick part of the house is very elegant, but this old greystone bit is solid and safe, somehow. The walls are two feet thick, which makes it cooler in summer and warmer in winter. The very first Kenworthy built this in 1320; look over the door, you can still make out the date. It was chiselled there when a yeoman farmer brought his bride here and fathered eight children on her, though only two lived.

      ‘Children died in medieval times. I suppose my early ancestors thought themselves lucky to rear two sons to manhood. The elder took the farm, as it was then; the younger went to London to seek his fortune, so maybe there is another line of Kenworthys running parallel to ours. Fortunately, the one who lived here was taught to read and write by the monks at the abbey, so he could count his money, and read his Bible – in Latin, of course!’

      ‘And I bet he gave plenty to the Church, an’ all!’ Meg remembered from history lessons at school how large the Church had loomed in long-ago England.

      ‘Yes. Mummy says they gave their tithe, always – a tenth of all the crops they grew and a fair bit of the cash in hand, so to speak. I don’t know when our lot stopped being Catholics. A lot of the families around this part of Lancashire never gave up the old religion – held secret Masses. But it seems the sixteenth-century Kenworthys thought it politic to be Anglo-Catholic. It’s common knowledge they sat on the fence during the Civil War too, paying lip service to Cromwell, yet all the time helping royalists or hiding them if they were on the run from Roundhead soldiers! I suppose we got very good at surviving; that’s why we’re still here!’

      There had been a Kenworthy at Waterloo and one fought in the Crimea. ‘Our lot have lived here for six hundred years, Meg. No one else but a direct-line Kenworthy. God, wouldn’t it be awful if something happened and the line ended? Hell! I hate wars!’

      Tears filled her eyes and Meg was in no doubt she was thinking of Davie, and thought herself lucky she wasn’t in love – not properly in love – with Kip Lewis. Loving someone so desperately took over your whole life; she knew that already from the way Polly went from smiles to tears in seconds. Mind, Polly Kenworthy was lucky knowing who she was, Meg had to admit; knew all about her ancestors way back to 1320, whilst Margaret Mary Blundell didn’t even know her grandparents, nor even who had fathered her. Polly was twice lucky because she had background and a pedigree.

      It was all because of Candlefold, which wasn’t just a very old house, but a way of life. Candlefold had become Ma’s happy place because before she had come here to work, the life she’d led hadn’t been worth mentioning. Where Ma was born and reared Meg would never know now; sufficient only to accept that Ma’s life began here, as a fourteen-year-old girl sent into domestic service.