1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (25 page)

And flew above them.

They all turned and watched him continue the few hundred yards till he was above the granite works, they saw the cluster of tiny bombs like sheep’s pellets drop, they saw the earth ripped apart, and they felt dust raining down upon them, and across the surface of the quarry pool.

§

Few men from the village went off to fight; of those who did two died from their wounds the year after they came home, which is why our memorial commemorates those who gave their lives in the war of 1939—1946, according to the pattern set at the end of the Great War of 1914—1919.

There was never any question of grandfather going, the only man in the family, with nine dependants on top of his farmer’s exemption. He just worked harder than ever, though never on a Sunday.

While grandfather indulged his daughters, it was grandmother who brought them up. Her mother-in-law passed away soon after the granite works was bombed, and grandmother plundered her wardrobe to make clothes for the girls, while instead of throwing potato peelings into the pigs’ trough she made soup out of them, although in truth that was less out of necessity than a gesture of solidarity with women in the cities, who were the ones that really suffered.

§

It was one summer soon after the war that electricity came to the village. A row of pylons advanced along an avenue cut through Haldon Forest: two were planted, one at either end, in the Westcotts’ water-meadow, and one day when it rained, shortly after the supply was connected, grandmother came across their cows dancing in the meadow that ran down to the stream.

§

Grandmother had a photograph of herself at that time, taken by the new Rector, standing behind the cake stall at the church fete. When I was little I confused the photograph with her description of the distorting mirrors on the pier on her one and only trip to Teignmouth, because I only knew grandmother as a bony old woman, her body angular and uninviting, except for her enormous hands, as big as grandfather’s and almost as tough, the hands of a hard-working country woman.

Back then during the electric summer, though, when grandfather dismantled the generator and left it behind the house to rust, grandmother was large enough for all her daughters, none of them so small any more, to squeeze against her on the sofa when she read them a story. She was glad her childbearing days were over. She took no notice of the heaviness in her legs or her fluctuating appetite, and when it occurred to her that her period had not come on time, in fact was really, now she thought about it, long overdue, she accepted without regret the arrival of middle age.

But when, some weeks later, she suffered a particularly persistent attack of hiccups that arose not from her lungs but from somewhere beneath them she realized, suddenly, that it was not she who had them but someone else inside her.

She couldn’t believe it. She was forty years old, her eldest daughter was sixteen and old enough to bear children herself, and besides, she’d not taken any precautions since the birth of their fifth girl, when they were still trying to have a son. Grandfather had gradually overcome his suspicion that a woman’s cycle was less regular than those of the animals he husbanded, that she only made love during what only she knew to be her infertile days. They’d come to accept that her body had decided of its own accord that it had had enough of its most punishing duties, and would need no assistance to prevent them being imposed again.

Perhaps, she thought, it was an illusion created by electricity, the current was interfering with her insides, and she told herself that the little bumps and thuds that echoed from deep inside her ample body were no more than a mild case of indigestion. That night, though, when she went to join grandfather waiting patiently for her in their wide bed, and lay there with his head against her, stroking his hair, she confessed to herself that that itself was an illusion. She took grandfather’s hand in hers and pressed it into the fleshy folds of her belly, to where she felt the baby kicking.

He was startled. “What the ‘eck’s is goin’ on in there?” he asked her, and she told him.

To her surprise he was immediately glad. “Why not? Us ‘ave got five daughters, and each one of them’s my favourite. I don’t mind a sixth.”

At that welcome response from her husband, grandmother let out a cry. He raised himself up on his elbow. “Don’t worry, lover,” he assured her, “‘tidn’t that many; one more won’t make no difference.”

She gripped his arm. “‘Tis comin’.”

“When?”

“Now!” she gasped, as she felt her abdomen squeeze itself and then let go, and her breath desert her.

“But no one knows,” he exclaimed, “not Granny Sims nor no one. Us idn’t ready.”

“
She
’s ready,” grandmother muttered, as sweat broke out on her forehead. “Get me some ‘ot water and towels.”

Grandfather ran downstairs, and as he gathered up things in the kitchen he reflected that at least the birth would be an easy one, like all the others.

When he returned upstairs she was breathing deeply, her eyes closed, the first spasms receding. He put the bowl and jug on the floor beside her, and said: “I’ll go drag out Granny Sims.”

“No,” she told him. “Stay with me.” She opened her eyes, and he saw something he’d never seen in them before. “I’m afraid, father.”

He had to swallow before he could speak. “Don’t be silly, lover, what’s there to be afeared of? You knows each one’s easier than the last. And the first was easy enough.”

She closed her eyes, as if the better to regulate her breathing, the old patterns Granny Sims had taught her long before slowly coming back to her, and then she opened them again.

“I know,” she said, “‘tis silly. But don’t leave me.” And she felt the contractions coming back again, as if rising through water in a cavern inside her; she squeezed her eyes shut, and when they broke on the surface she screamed through clenched teeth.

§

Time refused to pass: when you’re happy it slips through your fingers, the bastard, but with pain it stops still. Cranks up on a ratchet and stops. If she only let go of my hand time would start up again, and this would all be soon over, grandfather thought, as her mounting pain transmitted itself to him through his numb fingers. She’d soon lost the last remnants of her self-control, and her every scream sent a cold shiver through his innards. At one point he heard, as she took a deep breath between screams, a quiet whimpering behind him, and he turned round to see his five daughters standing pressed against each other in the doorway, all of them petrified by the sight, and even more the sound, of their mother being tortured to death.

He pulled his hand from hers, and shooed them like geese along the corridor to the room his sisters still shared at the far end. He jerked the door open, nicked on the light, and without a word closed the door behind him and rushed back to the bedroom.

§

“What’s happening?” she cried. “What’s the matter?”

“You’re ready all right, lover, you’s all ready. I reckon I can see ‘er feet.”

“What do you mean, her feet?” she gasped.

“Keep pushin’, lover. Don’t stop.”

She no longer had any control over her breathing, inhaling and exhaling in sharp little breaths. “I can’t no more.” she whispered.

“One more time,” he urged her, “one more time, woman.”

The waves of pain came back at her, but they didn’t reach the surface any more. Instead of withstanding their force, of holding on for dear life as they grabbed and then tossed her without mercy, now she had to help them, to summon up willpower she no longer possessed and strength that had dissolved from the muscles of her body in order to urge her diaphragm downwards and push the child out of her uterus.

But that child, having gestated so unobtrusively in a dark corner of her womb, was reluctant to make its entry into the world. Every time she pushed, with all the dissipating energy she had left, so she felt it holding back inside her, matching its own minute strength against hers. And it was winning. She felt the latest wave of contractions once more recede and lay back on her pillow, exhausted, panting weakly.

§

If there was one thing above all on which grandfather had come to pride himself as a farmer, it was in the skill he would one day pass on to Tom, as a midwife of animals: he’d already helped more tardy cows than he could remember deliver their offspring, reaching into their slippery wombs to reposition an awkward calf and sometimes, in emergencies, roping their forelegs to a hook in the barn in order to enlist the aid of gravity. Sheep, too, whose lambs crossed their limbs inside their mothers, had no safer hands to help them in the whole of the parish. He accepted a stillborn calf or lamb not as a regular, inevitable occurrence but as a personal indictment of his methods, brooding over it for days, and he’d only ever lost one ewe.

He knew more about birth than anything else that came later in life. But as grandmother, her face drawn and ashen, lay back against the pillows, her breathing faint, he felt all his knowledge disintegrate and his authority fall apart, because he realized that the woman who’d made his life worthwhile was dying before his very eyes.

“Hold on, lover,” he told her, trying to suppress the panic that had erupted in his guts, “I’m goin’ to get ‘elp.”

He took the stairs four at a time and ran outside. The light shocked him: the world had woken up as usual, with no regard for the terrible event being enacted during that night; the cockerel was strutting in his awkward, imperious manner amongst the brood of hens pecking in the yard, in the field sloping upwards from the lane dew glistened, and the songs of invisible birds greeted the dawn.

Grandfather ran across the yard and looked left and right along the lane. He couldn’t think straight, his mind flustered beyond the power of reason. The lane was empty, and he could hear no sound of human presence in the deserted landscape. His blood pulsed through his veins and his brain was a froth of indecision. His knees were trembling: an irresistible urge to sink to the ground, weeping, came over him, and he was on the verge of succumbing to it when there was a bark beside him. It was his sheepdog, Tinker, who’d followed him out of the yard. Her ears were pricked up, and she was peering along the lane into the village. Grandfather followed her gaze, and saw an unmistakable silhouette come into view down Broad Lane.

§

Douglas Westcott was not yet fifteen years old, but he was already fully grown, with a hesitant beard black as his curly hair, built like a bull, and without any question the strongest man in the village.

His father, like most farmers, had a secondary trade, necessary in the interdependent world of the village: he was the slaughterer. Although Douglas’s older brother, George, was the one who as a matter of course was expected to learn those skills from their father, it was Douglas who’d displayed a vocation. He used to follow his father silently around the farm and accompany him to other people’s places, standing in his father’s shadow with unnoticed curiosity so that he could acquire the skills of a slaughterer without having to have them explained. By the age of ten he could wring a chicken’s neck with two fingers of one hand, and on his fourteenth birthday, the day he left school, when his mother gave him a statuette of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders, his father presented him with his own set of surgical instruments for the clinical despatch of animals’ lives, and began to pass on his minor, domestic contracts.

Now he was returning from the stationmaster’s house down in the Valley, having culled their mongrel’s unwanted litter of puppies before dawn, so as not to upset the children, and he was making his way home through the village, glad that no one would be up at that hour to invade his privacy, when he saw farmer Freemantle running towards him in his pyjamas.

Grandfather grabbed Douglas’s arm.

“Come with me, bay,” he cried, “you’s got to ‘elp me,” and despite his size Douglas felt himself being dragged, so fast it was only their momentum that kept him from stumbling, by a madman three times his age and half his size.

As soon as they came bursting through the bedroom door Douglas realized what he’d been brought into: grandmother lay naked on the bed, her enormous belly gently rising and falling with her shallow breaths.

“Twill be all right, lover, we’s got help,” grandfather spluttered, and she opened her eyes: all trace of fear had vanished from them, and although they were deeply bruised by pain and exhaustion it didn’t, somehow, appear so. Rather, it was an expression of serenity she wore, of utter peace. She smiled, and then she closed her eyes again.

Grandfather turned to Douglas: “Er child’s killin”

“er,” he said, in a low, gritty voice. “I don’t care about the baby, but save my wife, bay. Please, save ‘er.”

Douglas had never seen any woman naked before, much less one in this condition, beyond help. He was stricken with terror; his head shook itself.

“C-can’t do nothin’, Mister Freemantle,” he stammered.

“What do you mean, bay, you can’t do nothin’?” Grandfather’s eyes blazed. “You save my woman’s life, bay. Save ‘er life, or I’m tellin’ you I’ll kill you myself.”

Douglas was still an overgrown child, but he knew enough to discern that the threat was sincere. He also knew that it was already too late.

“Get some spirit, then, and something to gag ‘er,” he decided. “And find a needle and thread.”

As grandfather rushed downstairs Douglas opened his bag and picked his finest blade, a thin scalpel, and he sharpened it with a spot of oil on his stone, with a few swift strokes, until knowing the sharpness of its razor’s edge made him shudder. He approached the bed, and looked down on grandmother, who was gradually slipping into the deep sea of endless sleep, no longer conscious but with a sweet smile on her face because she was dreaming that she could swim like a seal underwater. She was lolling and rolling near the floor of a vast ocean, and when she looked up she perceived the sun shining through the water.

Douglas put his hand on her belly, and as he did so he realized that he knew, as if by magic, the complex architecture that lay beneath: he knew what he should find as his scalpel sliced through epidermis and corium, blood would spill from minute veins and arteries as the blade sliced through subcutaneous fat, into her endometrium, and beyond, into the womb itself, where, enveloped in a livid mass of placenta and amniotic fluid, he’d find the child, no doubt twisted around like calves sometimes are; perhaps strangling itself with its umbilical cord; perhaps already dead. He knew, as if the information were feeding itself through his fingers, how her bladder and kidneys would have been squashed into corners to accommodate the foetus, and how the miles of tubing that make up a person’s innards would have shaped themselves discreetly around the swollen uterus. He knew these things that he never imagined he knew because his vocation, that of a slaughterer, required the most searching understanding of anatomy. At this moment, though, he felt more like an undertaker.