4
They came to Amersham in the afternoon. The signs of misery and starvation were here less marked. They were approaching the outer edge of this ring of compression, having passed through the node at Rickmansworth. The faint relief of pressure was evidenced to some extent in the attitude of the people they addressed. It is true that no immediate hope of food and employment were held out to them, but on the one hand Blanche’s inquiries were answered with less acerbity and on the other they were less besieged by importunate demands for charity. Blanche gave an egg to one precocious girl of thirteen or so, who insisted on helping them to push the truck uphill, and she and Millie watched the deft way in which the child broke the shell at one end and sucked out the contents. Their own methods had been both unclean and wasteful.
They turned off the Aylesbury Road, towards High Wycombe late in the afternoon and about a mile from Amersham came to a farm where they made their last inquiry that day.
Blanche saw signs of life in the outbuildings and went to investigate, leaving Millie and her mother to guard the truck. She found three women and a girl of fourteen or so milking. For some minutes she stood watching them, the women, after one glance at her, proceeding with their work without paying her any further attention. But, at last, the eldest of the three rose from her stool with a sigh of relief, picked up her wooden bucket of milk, gave the cow a resounding slap on the side, and then, turning to Blanche, said, “Well, my gal, what’s for you?”
“Will you change two pints of milk for a small tin of tongue?” asked Blanche. It was the first time she had offered any of their precious tinned meats in exchange for other food, but she wanted milk for her mother, who had hardly eaten anything that day.
The two other women and the girl looked round and regarded Blanche with the first signs of interest they had shown.
“Tongue, eh?” said the older woman. “Where from did you get tongue, my gal?”
“London,” replied Blanche tersely.
“When did you leave there?” asked the woman, and then Blanche was engaged in a series of searching questions respecting the country she had passed through.
“You can have the milk if you’ve anything to put it in,” said the woman at last, and Blanche went to fetch the tongue and the two bottles that they had had from Aunt May.
The bottles had to be scalded, a precaution that had not occurred to Blanche, and one of the other women was sent to carry out the operation.
“Well, your tale don’t tell us much,” said the woman of the farm, “but we always pass the news here, now. Where are you going to sleep to-night?”
Blanche shrugged her shoulders.
“You can sleep here in the outhouses, if you’ve a mind to,” said the woman, “but I warn you we get a crowd. Silly Londoners like yourself for the most part, but we find a use for ’em somehow, though I’d give the lot for three labourers.”
She paused and twisted her mouth on one side reflectively. “Ah! well,” she went on with a sigh, “no use grieving over them that’s gone; all I was goin’ to say was, if you sleep here you’d better keep an eye on what food you’ve got with you. My lot’ll have it before you can say knife, if they get half a chance.”
“It isn’t us girls, me and my sister,” explained Blanche. “It’s my mother. She’s bad, I’m afraid. If she could sleep in your kitchen...? She wouldn’t steal anything.”
After a short hesitation the woman consented.
Yet neither the glory of being once more within the four walls of a house, nor the refreshment of the milk which she drank readily enough, seemed appreciably to rouse Mrs Gosling’s spirits.
The woman of the farm, a kindly enough creature, plied the old lady with questions, but received few and confused answers in reply. Mrs Gosling seemed dazed and stupid. “A touch of the sun,” the farmer’s widow thought.
“The sun’s been cruel strong the past week,” she said, “but she’ll be all right in a day or two, get her to shelter.”
“Ah! that’s the trouble,” said Blanche.
That night the farmer’s widow said no more on that subject. She allowed the three Goslings to sleep in an upstair room, in which there was one small bed for the mother, and the two girls slept on the floor. Exchanging confidence for confidence, they brought their truck into the kitchen; and then the farmer’s widow proceeded to lock up for the night, an elaborate business, which included the fastening of all ground-floor windows and shutters.
“It’s a thievin’ crowd we’ve got about here,” she explained, “and you can’t blame them or anyone when there ain’t enough food to go round. But we have to be careful for ’em. Let ’em go their own way and they’d eat up everything in a week and then starve. It looks like you’re being hard on ’em, but it’s for their own good. There’s some, of course,” she went on, “as you have got to get shut of. Only yesterday I had to send one of ’em packing. A Jew woman she was, called ’erself Mrs Isaacson or something. She was a caution.”
Blanche wondered idly if this were the same Mrs Isaacson who had stayed too long with Aunt May.
The woman of the farm roused the Goslings at sunrise, and she, like Aunt May, had a brisk, practical, morning manner.
She gave the travellers no more food, but when they were nearly ready to take the road again she gave them one valuable piece of information.
“If I was you,” she said, “I’d make through Wycombe straight along the road here, and go up over the hill to Marlow. Mind you, they won’t let every one stop there. But you look two healthy gals enough and it’s getting on towards harvest when there’ll be work as you can do.”
“Marlow?” repeated Blanche, fixing the name in her memory.
The farmer’s widow nodded. “There’s a man there,” she said. “A queer sort, by all accounts. Not like Sam Evans, the butcher at Wycombe, he ain’t. Seems as this Marlow chap don’t have no truck with gals, except setting ’em to work. However, time’ll show. He may change his mind yet.”
They had some difficulty with Mrs Gosling. She refused feebly to leave the house. “I ain’t fit to go out,” she complained, and when they insisted she asked if they were going home.
“Best say ‘yes,’” whispered the woman of the farm. “The sun’s got to her head a bit. She’ll be all right when you get her to Marlow.”
Blanche accepted the suggestion, and by this subterfuge Mrs Gosling was persuaded into the truck. The girl found the ruins of an umbrella, which they rigged up to protect her from the sun.
Blanche and Millie were quite convinced now that their mother was suffering from a slight attack of sunstroke.
Both the girls were still footsore, and one of Millie’s boots had worn into a hole, but they had a definite objective at last, and only some ten or twelve miles to travel before reaching it.
“We shall be there by midday,” said Blanche, hopefully.