Cheerfulness Breaks In by Angela Thirkell

Author:Angela Thirkell [Thirkell, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780349007489
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2016-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX

SHERRY AT THE BIRKETTS’

THE most beautiful autumn that anyone could remember now spread its mantle over Barsetshire and the rest of England. The evacuated children, who were by now all dressed by the hand of charity in coloured woollen frocks arted up at the neck, and coloured woollen coats of no particular shape or cut, not to speak of nightgowns and dressing-gowns and underclothes, looked fatter and pinker every day. Owing to the vigorous efforts of volunteer workers there was now not a lice-infested head among them, except when one of them was taken back to London by its parents for a week, cried all the time, and was returned to start the whole thing all over again. The primitive Wessex speech of the country children was being rapidly overlaid with a fine veneer of Cockney. As far as bad words went neither side had the advantage and the grosser names of Barsetshire were bartered against the more up-to-date obscenities of the evacuated areas. In writing, however, the London children had a distinct advantage. Maturing more early than the children of the soil, quicker if shallower witted, more bad language was written on the walls of Southbridge owing to their efforts in ten weeks than had been seen since Roman soldiers inscribed facetiæ on the clay tiles of the Roman villa whose foundations had lately been excavated near Northbridge.

Various voluntary committees had by now got well into their stride. Mrs. and Miss Phelps had collected money for a cottage hospital for the London children, forced a very rich friend to let them use an empty house, furnished it by borrowing from all their not so rich friends and bullied all the girls in the neighbourhood into nursing and cooking in shifts under a professional matron; while the Admiral, who never knew when he was beaten, had so badgered the Ministry concerned both by letter and through every influential friend he possessed that the necessary permits were obtained in less than a month. Upon this all the working parties had fallen to again with zeal and provided a supply of pyjamas guaranteed not to fit any age of child, red monkey jackets, and knitted coverlets that would have kept Florence Nightingale quiet for months.

Another committee, also headed by Mrs. and Miss Phelps, had descended upon the Women’s Institute and commandeered its hall as a canteen for London parents when they came down on Sundays to see their offspring. Some of the committee had wished to supply free cups of tea, but Mrs. Phelps was adamant, and Miss Hampton, who was a liberal subscriber to all Mrs. Phelps’s activities, came to the meeting in her fiercest tailor-made and putting a monocle into her right eye had looked them all up and down, saying that as the parents, as far as she could see, need never spend another penny on their children’s clothes and general welfare as long as they left them in the country, they could afford to pay for cups of tea and buns.

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