***chapter 30***
***The Years Pass By***
What's past is past, and though the world stops on the loss of a loved one, life can and must go on. As broken-hearted as Beth had been by Davey's death, she was still only young.
When American Harry Jackson, an ex-GI who'd spent some time in England during World War II, came back on a six month vacation, he visited the same hospital in which he'd once been a patient, to take a bouquet of flowers and large tin of biscuits as a thank you to the staff. He was pleasantly surprised to bump into the same pretty young nurse who'd first treated him when he'd been so badly burned during an Army training exercise.
A friendly chat and, upon discovering they both loved the movie, an agreement to catch the re-showing of The Wizard of Oz, became the regular meetings of friends. Even before the vacation was over, they had fallen in love and Beth set sail to America as Harry's wife. To begin with, her letters home were newsy and full of photographs, as were the Turner family's letters in return. But, as time went by, she became the mother of twins, moved house two or three times, and had Harry's increasingly frail elderly mother, no longer able to care for herself, come to live with them. As so often happens when our lives move busily on, the letters dwindled and then stopped.
Rose and Johnjo, too, are no longer part of our Follyfoot story, their fate being a much sadder one. Some of you may recall having heard from much older relatives about the terrible outbreak of tuberculosis that affected the rural areas of Yorkshire in the hot summer of 1948, spreading like wildfire in an alarmingly short space of time. The source was eventually found to be an itinerant farm labourer, who had no outward symptoms and was unaware he carried the deadly disease. He readily agreed to be quarantined, but by then several lives had been claimed, Rose's and Johnjo's among them.
Soon afterwards, the Maddocks announced their move to Kensington was to be a permanent one and offered Jimmy and Peggy a cottage in the vast grounds of their luxurious home. To be away from Whistledown for a while seemed the perfect solution - especially as Peggy's teenage sweetheart Tom Stokes, now her fiancé, had gone back to his home city, in a less affluent part of London, to continue with his plumbing apprenticeship.
The young couple returned to Whistledown two years later, to marry in the ancient village church where Rose and Jimmy had been married, and where lies, close to the church door, that famous seventeenth-century grave of the original owner of Follyfoot, Sir Richard Maddocks, bearing the Maddocks' family crest of horse, lion and eagle enclosed in a shield and the Latin motto vires per licentia (strength through freedom).
There never was a prouder father than Jimmy on Peggy's wedding day, with the bells ringing so loud it was as though they would burst for very joy and the sun peeping in through the stained glass windows to dance golden beams of light in silent song.
And as he walked his daughter down the aisle, with the Wedding March playing on the church organ, and the day so perfect with its cloudless blue skies and kindly summer breezes, two brightly coloured butterflies fluttered inside too, further enchanting the packed congregation, many of whom, even Prudence, dabbing her eyes, and her hat and dress too showy for a tiny village church, and Arthur, standing ramrod straight, in full military uniform decked with medals, gasped in awe at the beauty of the bride. The superstitious said later, although they did not explain how butterflies can know such things, that it surely forecast a long, happy marriage blessed with children and nary a cross word between them.
After a honeymoon paid for by Lord and Lady Maddocks as a wedding present, the newlyweds settled in Whistledown, in the very same cottage that Peggy had grown up in, and that Prudence and Arthur had long ago bought for Jimmy and his family. But it could never be the home it had once been.
Many times Peggy would push open the cottage door, and for half a second think her mother or brother to be there, even drawing breath to speak with them. And then, remembering, she would feel her heart snap in two all over again and would sit on the rickety kitchen stool that Johnjo had made in school, to "weep a little weep", as Rose would have said, drying her eyes on the apron her mother had sewn. For the reminders of those happy yesterdays were everywhere: the musical jewellery box with a dancing ballerina (a gift to Rose from Beth) on the sideboard; the drawing of a neighbour's cat that Johnjo, when four or five, had scribbled on the coal cupboard door; Rose's half finished rag rug and her handwriting on the herb jar labels; the tulips that Johnjo had planted and his "lucky" penny that he always kept on the mantelshelf…Oh, sometimes it was all poor Peggy could do not to break down and sob forever and, save that Tom seemed very happy to be back in Whistledown, she surely would have done.
At last, she confessed to her husband, who hugged her close and admitted that, being born and bred a "townie", and, much as he still loved the country and had loved Whistledown when a boy, he found the small village far too slow and quiet now he was a man. But, he added, with a wry smile, he hadn't wanted to upset Peggy by telling her so. They laughed and cried together then, promising they would never again keep secrets from each other.
Neither wanted to live in a big city however and so, to compromise, they put a deposit down on a house in the busy little Yorkshire town of Ashtree and had then the best of both worlds, being close to the glorious Yorkshire countryside and close to a train station with a direct route to London. Visits between Jimmy and his family were frequent and even more so when, as was becoming fashionable among the working classes, Tom and Peggy bought a motor car. And, just to make their happiness complete, Peggy gave birth to a daughter, Susan Rose, the apple of her doting grandfather's eye.
And what of Follyfoot?Ah, Follyfoot Farm had not been forgotten! How could it ever be? In all who ever knew a dream, there is a stirring of the soul, a plucking of the heartstrings, that would lure the dreamer, with sighs and sweet memories, to an earlier place, a slower time. But in this world there are bonds that tie us, responsibilities, finance, everyday matters, always more pressing, trapping us in the frantic, hurried business of living.
Colonel Geoffrey Maddocks, though he longed to pursue his boyhood ambition of caring for animals (and sometimes his mind would wander while meeting with heads of state as he daydreamed another life at Follyfoot Farm where he did just that) was committed to his work in France, treading a fine line smoothing over diplomatic relations between France, America and Britain (General de Gaulle, though considered a war hero of the French resistance to Nazi occupation, was as disliked and distrusted by Winston Churchill as he had been by Roosevelt).
His batman Slugger Jones would also often find himself ruminating on the short, but very happy time he spent at Follyfoot and yearning to return.
One night, one strange, memorable night, when the exceptionally hot weather broke with a fierce thunderstorm, Slugger, unable to sleep in such oppressive heat, got out of bed, sat by the window, unscrewed the top off a bottle of warm beer with his teeth, and lit a cigarette. He had just told the silver-framed photograph of his wife Betty exactly how long it would be, in weeks, hours, minutes and seconds, to his next period of leave when a sudden lightning flash illuminated the neatly manicured gardens below and made him splutter on his beer.
For, under the saturated horse chestnut tree, in the brief second that night lit a flickering lamp in the sky, he thought he saw the long dead gypsy fortune teller Madame Zola.
But Slugger Jones was not given to flights of fancy, and so he only rubbed his eyes, saw no one when he looked again, concluded it had been a trick of the light and a lack of slumber, leaned back in his chair, took a leisurely swig of beer and concentrated on blowing smoke rings at the ceiling.
The storm had finally passed by, the lightning become faraway flashes, the thunder distant growls. It was barely five o'clock as Jimmy stood at the door of his London home, inhaling the fresh scent of rain on the early morning earth. Lord and Lady Maddocks slept late when they had no prior engagements and he had no need to be up from his own bed so early, but old habits died hard. Besides, he wanted to savour this moment. For almost a fortnight, much of Europe had sweltered under temperatures that soared to the high Nineties, even, on occasion, triple figures. The fresher air was a blessing and the thick mud a glorious sight. Had his little granddaughter been here, she would have immediately donned wellingtons to jump in puddles, tramp in mud and dig through the sodden soil with a twig to curiously study any insects that emerged.
He smiled as he thought of four-year-old Susie.
Like Peggy, the little girl loved animals and being outdoors, but, at the same age, Peggy had also loved to wear pretty dresses and to help Rose sew or bake. Susie had no time or patience for girlish pursuits. She had given the sales assistant a look of withering scorn last year in the toy department of a well known department store when the lady asked if she was hoping for a big doll from Father Christmas. Top of Susie's list (not counting the inevitable pony, that she begged for almost every day, Peggy and Tom, in addition to having already provided two dogs, a cat, rabbits, white mice, guinea pigs, tortoise and goldfish, thinking her as yet a little too young and reckless to ride on her own) had been a train set, cricket bat and football.
One day, when she was old enough to ride, he would take her riding in Whistledown, to feel the magic of Follyfoot and the freedom of the wind in her hair. He would tell her the stories of the people who worked there, of Beauty and Magic, of Sally the cat, of the long-necked swans that had glided majestically on the rippling lake. Storms always reminded him of the lightning tree and made him nostalgic for Follyfoot, but Arthur and Prudence were adamant they had no intention of ever returning.
And so, Follyfoot was left all alone with its memories. Except nobody knew it as Follyfoot Farm anymore. It had acquired a new name.
The Haunted Farm.