The Emerald Valley Read online

  A few yards and the lane became a slope, curving up towards the main Frome Road. Briefly Amy felt a qualm of fear as she faced the decision: which way to turn? Undoubtedly it would be easier to swing round to the right and go down the hill past Starvault Pit. But that way would lead her inevitably into the centre of Hillsbridge, and for all her natural bubbling confidence Amy did not think she was quite ready for that. Besides, the two colliery horses were pulling a load of trucks on the lines that ran across the road from the pit to the sidings – more waste to be taken to the black ‘batches’and tipped – and she was not quite sure she would be able to stop.

  ‘It would be awful if I were to run into them,’ she thought, and choosing the lesser of the two evils she put her foot hard down on the ‘go’pedal and pulled the wheel round to make the sharp left turn that would take her on up the hill.

  For a few moments the lorry juddered and protested and Amy thought it was going to stop altogether. Then somehow it pulled itself together. Going uphill might be slow, noisy and bone-shaking, she thought, but at least there was less chance of hitting something at this speed. Up, up, she crept – the hill seemed to go on for ever. Up, up … with houses on one side of the road and allotments and fields falling away on the other – those same fields that bounded the valley where she had been just a few moments ago. With the road clear and empty ahead of her, Amy risked a quick peep. Yes, there was the depot yard – and that minuscule man-figure in cap and blue overalls would be Herbie, still there, still pacing, probably wondering what on earth to do next. Amy giggled. It was easy to imagine the kind of things he would be muttering through the Woodbine he would have lit the moment he had failed to catch her going through the gates. Llew thought she was ignorant of the language the men used when they were out of hearing of ladies, and she let him go on thinking it. But she knew, all right, and it amused her now to think of Herbie swearing away with colourful adjectives peppering his every remark.

  From the centre of Hillsbridge to the point where it first began to flatten out, Frome Hill was a good mile long; three-quarters of the way up, Amy decided that maybe she had gone far enough for her first trip out. She was approaching the yard and squat grey-stone buildings of the Iron Foundry – just beyond it was a lane that led back down into the valley, and Amy swung left into it.

  At its neck the lane was cobbled, but as it dropped away from the main road it became steadily more uneven. Potholes broke the surface and as the front wheels of the lorry dropped into them the shock ran up the steering column and into Amy’s hands. She hung on tightly, keeping as straight a course as she could between the grassy banks and the hedges, heavy with spring growth. This was not as easy as going uphill, especially as she had to stretch all the time now in order to keep her foot on the brake. Half-way down she felt her toes going into cramp. She eased off a little and the lorry surged forward. There was a bend coming up – past that she would have to be careful because she knew it was the steepest and narrowest part, around a triangle of grass where the moon-daisies grew thickly during the summer months, then a sharp turn to take her back onto the lower road – unless she wanted to run away and crash into the river! Gritting her teeth in extreme concentration, she pressed her foot down onto the brake again. Hold it – hold it …

  As she came around the bend she saw it – a red Morgan three-wheeler sports car coming up fast and right in the middle of the lane. There was time for just a moment’s cold panic as she stepped on the brake and pulled the wheel hard into the left. But her aching foot slid, not getting the pressure she needed, and the lorry jerked forward. Again she stabbed for the brake, but it was too late. The sports car had taken avoiding action too, but as she lurched to a stop she caught the mudguard a glancing blow, spinning the Morgan away from her. Her own wheel turned and, unable to hold it, she ran into the bank, jolting up briefly so that for a moment she was afraid the lorry was going to overturn. Then it subsided again, coming to rest in the lane some yards below the sports car she had hit.

  ‘Oh, my Lord!’ said Amy, pulling on the hand-brake with trembling hands and closing her eyes against acceptance of what had happened.

  The hiatus was short-lived. Moments later the door of the lorry cab was wrenched open and she found herself looking down at one of the angriest men she had ever had to face in her life.

  It seemed to Amy in that frightened moment that everything about him was dark. Dark hair, springing thickly, dark eyes blazing with fury, dark lines contorting his face around a dark moustache. And he was tall enough not to be dwarfed even though he was standing in the road while she was perched high in the cab. In his leather jacket and flying boots he cut a figure that was both awesome and unavoidable.

  Amy knew who he was. She had recognised him the moment she saw him, had recognised the car too, though she had never before come into such close or uncomfortable contact with him. Everyone in Hillsbridge knew Ralph Porter. His timber merchants’ business was the biggest in the district, with a virtual monopoly for the supply of pit-props to the collieries, and many said he was the richest man in Hillsbridge next to the colliery owners themselves. More than once as he had struggled for a share of business Amy had heard Llew, her husband, curse Ralph Porter, saying he was ‘in with the nobs’and had it ‘all sewn up’.

  But it was not only his money and his thriving business which made Ralph Porter stand out from the crowd. There was the fact that although he was in his early thirties and a most eligible man, he had never married, but lived all alone with his housekeeper and an invalid sister for whom he provided a home in his rambling house at the bottom of the lane down which Amy had been driving – Porter’s Hill. There were also the motors he drove – the sporty three-wheeled Morgans that were winning all the races in their class at Montlhery Track in France, but which were seldom seen in the quiet roads around Hillsbridge – and there was the list of decorations he was reputed to have gained during the Great War. Put all together, Ralph Porter was a colourful character admired, even if in secret, by the young men, dreamed about as a romantic figure by the young women and the children, and described as ‘a card’by those old enough to feel indulgent towards him.

  Facing him now, however, after being the cause of damage to his precious Morgan motor car, Amy felt none of these things. She experienced only an odd blend of acute embarrassment and pure terror – both unusual emotions for her.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re up to? Look what you’ve done to my car!’

  The moment’s silence when they had glared at one another was shattered by his voice. It was as dark as the rest of him – a bark, almost – and it made Amy tremble all the more.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said weakly. ‘I couldn’t stop.’

  ‘That’s bally obvious!’ he bellowed. ‘You came down there like a steam engine – and right in the middle of the road, too. This hill’s not suitable for lorries; you ought to know that.’

  ‘I thought it would be all right,’ Amy said helplessly. She wished her teeth would stop chattering.

  ‘You’ve no business here anyway. Don’t you know it’s private?’

  ‘I didn’t think …’

  ‘I don’t suppose you did. And now …’ He broke off, his eyes narrowing as if he was only just seeing her clearly enough to register her sex. ‘What’s a woman doing driving a lorry anyway?’ he demanded. ‘You ought to stay where you belong – in the kitchen!’

  The remark struck at a raw chord in Amy’s make-up and the first tongue of annoyance rippled razor-sharp through the minefield of embarrassment and shock.

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Why should you? I would have thought it was damned clear enough why you should. You’re not capable of handling a motor vehicle, are you?’

  His tone combined with the scorn and derision in his face to twist Amy’s own anger a notch tighter. Why was she taking all the blame just because she was a woman?

  ‘It was your fault as well, you know!’ she flared, ‘I couldn’t help being in the middle of the road with a lorry. You weren’t exactly in the side yourself!’

  She saw a muscle work furiously at the side of his mouth and in spite of her anger felt another moment of sharp fear.

  ‘Dammit, woman, it’s my hill! I shall drive up it any way I like!’

  ‘Then you must expect somebody to run into you,’ Amy went on, determined not to be bullied. ‘I know you say it’s private and if you own it I suppose you must be right. But people do use it, and if you don’t want them to you ought to put up a notice saying so!’

  ‘Now there’s so much traffic on the roads I probably will,’ he snarled. ‘In the meantime, what do you intend to do about this?’

  Amy’s anger died as quickly as it had risen and she began to tremble again. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean my car. You caused this accident and you’re going to have to pay for it. Who are you insured with?’

  Through the rising tide of panic Amy tried desperately to think, but her thoughts were curdled like thick stale cream.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ll have to find out then, won’t you? Who owns it?’

  Her jaw felt unsteady now, as wobbly as her hands and legs. Almost inaudibly she whispered, ‘My husband.’

  ‘He’s Llew Roberts, the haulier, is he?’

  He made it sound menial, but Amy was too upset now to notice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. Though what he’s thinking of letting you loose on the roads, I can’t imagine.’ He opened his jacket, feeling in one of the inside pockets and drawing out a card, gold-embossed on glossy white. ‘This is where he can find me. And I shall be expecting to hear from him very shortly – this evening, perhaps!’

  ‘Not this evening. He’s
away and won’t be back until late.’

  One eyebrow registered disbelief and Amy went on quickly, ‘It’s true!’

  ‘All right. Tomorrow, then. Otherwise he’ll be hearing from my solicitor.’

  Without waiting for her agreement he turned and strode back up the hill, leaving the door of the lorry cab swinging open. In the mirror on its long-angled arm she saw him go to his car and inspect the newly buckled mudguard, anger still showing in every taut line of his shoulders and back. Then, not wanting to see any more, she turned away. Tears were singing inside her head now and burning her throat and although ahead of her the lane still ran its sunlit course between the burgeoning hedges, it seemed she was seeing it through a haze.

  ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ said Amy, spreading out her hands across the steering wheel and pounding in an effort to ease the tension bottled up inside her without giving way to her tears. ‘Damn!’

  But it didn’t help much. Even a word like ‘damn’which would certainly cause her mother if not her husband to raise a disapproving eyebrow if she was heard to use it, did nothing to numb the sense of shock or smooth the path back to the depot. Herbie would be the first person she would have to explain to and she was not looking forward to it.

  He’s an employee, I don’t have to answer to him! she told herself, but that didn’t help any more than saying ‘damn’. Perhaps she did not have to answer to Herbie, but that wouldn’t stop him from making a few pretty caustic remarks or alter the way he would look at her … and it was all so embarrassing. Wilful she might be – and determined to get her own way – but Amy still liked people to approve of her.

  Their good opinion mattered a great deal to her, though she would have died rather than admit it. And as for looking a fool, that was a prospect she could not abide.

  I shan’t admit to anyone that it might have been my fault! she decided. I shall tell them he came up the hill in that racing car of his so fast I had no chance to avoid him.

  Already she found herself almost believing it.

  There was still a more immediate problem, though. The lorry engine had cut out when she hit the bank and Amy was not at all sure how to start it again.

  Well, there was only one answer – walk back to the depot. It wouldn’t look good, but short of asking Ralph Porter for assistance it was the only way.

  Gathering all the shreds of her tattered self-esteem, Amy pushed open the cab door and climbed down onto the running-board. The cotton-reel shape of her heels almost unbalanced her as she landed in the road, but mercifully she managed to remain on her feet. She did not dare to look at the damage to Llew’s new lorry. For the moment, she decided she would rather not know.

  For just a second she stood holding on to the door handle, steadying herself, then she smoothed down the pleated skirt over her hips and without a backward glance at either lorry, car or Ralph Porter, she set out down over the hill.

  Greenslade Terrace – ‘the Rank’, as everyone who lived there knew it – basked sleepily in the warmth of the late April sunshine. Perched as it was across the south-facing side of the valley bowl, high above Hillsbridge, it was ideally placed to make the most of the warm weather that was so welcome after the long hard winter – the fronts of the houses saw little sunshine, it was true, but no one in Greenslade Terrace lived in the front of their houses. Front rooms were reserved for special occasions, for weddings, christenings and funerals – and for laying out the dead. The backs of the houses were where the living was done – the cooking and washing and ironing, the eating and gossiping and playing. And when the sun shone the doors and windows all along the Rank would open like the buds on the horse chestnut trees in the centre of Hillsbridge and stay open, letting fresh air into cramped sculleries and kitchens where coal fires burned winter and summer alike for cooking as well as heat.

  This afternoon, the first really warm day of the year, the doors had opened and one by one inhabitants had emerged on one pretext or another to enjoy the sunshine.

  At No. 19, Colwyn Yelling, wounded and shell-shocked in the Great War and now carrying on his new trade as a bootmaker in what had once been his mother’s washhouse, sat on the back step to cut a piece of leather to shape. At No. 10, Charlie Durrant, henpecked husband of the temperate chapel-bumper Martha, scourge of the rank, made the excuse that he had to see to his seed potatoes in order to escape into the sunshine for a quiet half-hour away from his wife’s constant nagging. And next door but one at No. 12, Molly Clements hung out yet another line of washing to billow in the breeze above the gardens which sloped away into the valley beyond the blocks of privies and washhouses.

  The woman who stood in the doorway of No. 11, however, needed no excuse for being there. Her grandchildren were with her for the afternoon – two of them, at any rate – and when they were there it was reason enough to stop work for a few hours, sun or no sun.

  Charlotte Hall hitched eleven-month-old Maureen higher on her hip and pointed across the yard to where a golden-haired, blue-eyed toddler was busily arranging a doll in a doll’s pram, home-made from an orange box and a set of wheels.

  ‘Look, my love, what’s Barbara doing? She’s going to take her baby for a walk, is she? Going to shop for a pound of bacon and a ha’porth of suet.’

  ‘Da,’ said Maureen loudly, pulling a strand of her grandmother’s hair loose from her bun. ‘Da-da-da!’

  Charlotte Hall let her do it and smiled. Why was it, she wondered, that it was so much easier to have patience with your grandchildren than with your own children? Because you knew at the end of the day you could hand them back, perhaps; because in the end all the problems of bringing them up, the discipline and the decisions, were someone else’s responsibility.

  Seven children of her own she had raised and she never remembered feeling about any of them in quite the way she felt about her grandchildren – except perhaps little Florrie who had caught the whooping-cough and died when she was not much older than Maureen was now. Death had enshrined her in a special place in Charlotte’s heart, preserved her for ever as a sweet-natured toddler who had not lived long enough to display human failings. Yes, if anything, Florrie was the only one she could equate with her grandchildren. And occasionally in the dead of night when James, her husband, was snoring chestily beside her, Charlotte would lie awake and pray that none of them would be taken as Florrie had been.

  This afternoon, however, with the sun warming the grey stones of the houses and splintering into myriads of the spectrum wherever it collided with wide-open bedroom windows, death and its attendant griefs seemed very far away. Instead there was an expectancy in the air, the expectancy given off by the whole of nature as it bursts into new life. And Charlotte, with Maureen’s plump little body warm in her arms, thought not of the past but relished the present.

  Footsteps on the cobbled path that served the Rank made her look up and she saw a plump, faired-haired woman approaching with a shopping basket over her arm. It was Peggy Yelling, mother of Colwyn and Charlotte’s best friend, who had brought almost every baby in the Rank into the world and laid out ‘the old ones’ when they passed away.

  ‘Hello, Peg,’ Charlotte greeted her. ‘Going off down to shop, are you?’

  ‘Yes, there’s one or two things I want. And I hear they’ve got some more of that nice tasty cheese in down at the Co-op. Trouble is,’ Peggy pulled a face, ‘it doesn’t last five minutes in our house.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose it does. You’ve still got your boys to feed,’ Charlotte said ruefully. She could remember the time when a pound of cheese hadn’t lasted any time in her larder, either, when all the family were at home. But now it was only herself, James and Harry, the youngest boy – except of course when Ted, scallywag of the family, took it into his head to come home for a bit and settle down from his wanderings …

  ‘You’ve got Amy’s two girls again, I see,’ Peggy went on, smiling indulgently at Barbara and poking Maureen’s plump cheek with a teasing finger. ‘Where’s their Mam today?’

  In spite of her friendship with Peggy, Charlotte sensed the unspoken criticism of Amy and bristled slightly. It was not for Peggy to judge and find wanting.

  ‘She had to go to Llew’s yard. He’s away on a long trip,’ she said shortly.