All the dear faces Read Free

much as it was a healthy one, only with the smooth, oval-shaped harvest which grew at their root. He and the girl had planted them in late March. They had been well fertilised with the manure from his farmyard, the child's job again since it was within her capabilities and now they were to be lifted and those not needed for the family's winter requirements would go to market .
    She was back within five minutes and behind her, carrying a basket which was so heavy it caused her to shuffle lop-sidedly, was Lizzie Abbott. She was obviously pregnant. Though both she and the child who staggered beneath the weight of the swill basket and its stinking, steaming contents were making heavy weather of their loads Joshua Abbott made no effort to help them. He was digging. Glancing round as they approached he threw down his spade, took off his battered and stained felt hat, wiped his sweating face with his forearm, replaced his hat and sat down, his back to the drystone wall which surrounded the field.
    “ An' about time too," was all he said, his tone peevish.
    “ I'm sorry, Joshua. I got took badly." Lizzie Abbott put her hand to her distended belly. Her thin, worn face was vastly apologetic just as though she had been caught junketing about the yard with Natty Varty who sometimes gave Joshua a hand at harvest or lambing. "I can't seem ter get over this sickness . . ."
    “ Aye, well, set basket down, woman." Joshua was not in the least concerned with his wife's pregnancy, nor with the details of its progress, only with its outcome. Married eighteen years and nothing to show for it but this one girl, though by God, he'd done his best. A bairn every year he'd given her and a few times she'd gone full term but always it seemed, again as though the blame was hers, contrary madam that she was, bringing forth some sickly infant, three of them boys, who had not lasted a month. One girl! A fine girl, strong and biddable, cheerful too, and if only she'd been a boy which was all he asked for, one boy, Joshua would have been content. It wasn't too much to expect, was it, out of eighteen pregnancies? But no, soon as it was in her belly where surely it was not too difficult to hang on to, she'd let it go, time after time, except for the girl. Other men had sons. Look at Jem Mounsey from Upfell Farm. Two daughters certainly but a fine lad going on twelve years now and so big and strapping, like Jem, he could do the work of a grown man. Upfell was small, like his own farm, not in the class of Alistair Macauley's place up at Long Beck, but between them Jem and Davy Mounsey managed it nicely with no need of paid help like Natty Varty, or at least only in the most dire of emergencies. Of course at ploughing or harvesting, lambing or clipping time, every farmer and his family helped every other. A 'boon' clip, or 'boon' ploughing, when a day would be set aside and neighbours would come with a plough or a horse or their shears when there were sheep to be sheared and at the end of it there would be a tatie-pot supper, with dancing in the barn, the fiddle played by Dobby Hawkins who was odd-job man at Long Beck. A 'merry-fleet' right enough but what had Joshua Abbott to be merry about with no son to take over when he himself was six feet under? If only the girl had .. . well, brightening a little as he studied his wife's thickening figure . . . 'appen it wasn't too late. He was only thirty-nine himself and had many good years in him to pass on to a lad all that he himself had learned from his father .
    The farmhouse and its surrounding acres had been in his family for generations, he was not awfully sure how many. Unlike many small farmers who had been forced off the common land with the Enclosure movement, his grandfather, or was it his great-grandfather, had managed by dint of great hardship to himself and his family to buy the land which had been freely held by the Abbotts, or so they had imagined, from time immemorial. Not a great deal by the standards