Alfred and Emily Read Free

John McVeagh was ill with grief, so it was said.
    And Mrs. Tayler was noisily weeping over there, near the pitch, in a position where she had to be seen by everyone. Her Alfred, equably batting while people admired and applauded – he had been offered a variety of jobs by banks as far as Luton and Ipswich, not because of his aptness with the pen or with figures, but because they wanted him for their cricket teams. And he was good at billiards too, at snooker, at bowls – this young star was being competed for, his mother was as pleased as when her other son was chosen for his cleverness, but Alfred said, no, he would rather die than be a bank clerk, he had hated every minute of his two years in an Allied Essex and Suffolk bank. He was going to work for Mr. Redway, the farmer who yearly lent his field for this festivity. Bert Redway was his good friend, they had grown up together; Alfred had in fact spent his childhood playing with the farmers’ sons, along the hedgerows and in the fields.
    â€˜He’s going to be a farmer’s boy,’ wept his mother. ‘He’s just like his father. They only care about making me miserable.’And she had gone from kitchen to kitchen among the wives, complaining.
    Alfred had only said, ‘Mother, I am not going to be stuck in a bank, and that’s the end of it.’
    That morning he had emphasized his point by collecting the cow dung from all over the field, while the stewards, the supervisors of the children’s games, the men who were making perfect the cricket pitch watched and grinned, or laughed, when the mother couldn’t see. His father, briefly detaching himself from the church organ, had said, ‘Well done, Alfred. I wish I could do the same.’
    Mrs. Lane was sorry for Alfred’s mother, but convinced her own disappointment had to be worse. Alfred had been a farmer’s boy all his life: nothing new about that. But that her little girl, Daisy…Mrs. Lane sent to London every week a large fruit cake, a box of pies, all kinds of treats. Emily and Daisy slept in a room with six other probationers, scum from the East End, so Mrs. Lane thought and said. The parcels did not have a crumb left in them ten minutes after they were opened: all the girls were hungry. The probationers had very little time off, and when Mrs. Lane did see her daughter and Emily she was as shocked and grieved as she had expected. They were so thin, so exhausted. She had not exaggerated the hardships: she did not know how these gently brought-up girls survived.
    She was expecting Emily to give in, apologize to her father, go home repentant. She did not. When Mrs. Lane delicately enquired of her daughter if this might happen, Daisy saidsimply, ‘But she couldn’t do that. It’s her pride, Mother.’ And besides, Emily had never ever indicated that she felt she had made a mistake.
    Pride, scorned Mrs. Lane. It was stubbornness, it was sheer wrong-headed silliness. The girls’ hands were rubbed red and raw, they both looked like skivvies; they were skivvies. That was all they did in their work, empty bedpans, scrub, dust, clean, wash floors, walls, ceilings, at it from dawn to dusk, and when they did get an afternoon off they fell on their beds and slept.
    Mrs. Lane told her husband she was so mortified she would die of it, but if she could have seen into the future…Her fairy child, little Daisy ended up as an examiner of nurses, and a steely glance from those spectacles dissolved many a poor examinee into tears. She was known as a strict examiner, but just of course, just, and fair.
    Mrs. Lane, who had longed for grandchildren, never did get any, for Daisy married, rather late, an eminent surgeon and was busy helping Emily with her charitable work.
    But this afternoon, while feeling her heart would break, had broken, Mrs. Lane banished any trace of tears and sat waiting for the girls, who had an afternoon off. She had checked that the food