Unspoken: A story of secrets, love and revenge T. Belshaw (good books to read for beginners txt) 📖

time work in the local factories. There were some older ones who knocked on the door of the farm, cap in hand.

‘Do you have any work, Missus?’

Some of them were so worn out after a lifetime of heavy labour that they looked as though they had used up all their strength getting out of bed, but Barney, the foreman, never refused any of them. I had to rubber stamp the decision of course but I didn’t have it in my heart to refuse any of them either.

One eighty-year-old, called Thomas, was employed carrying enamel buckets, filled with tea, out to the fields to keep the reapers hydrated. The weather was exceptionally warm for the first six weeks of autumn. We took full advantage of it, although I excused myself from the early part of the day, as my stomach tended to rid itself of the breakfast I had burdened it with.

I found myself spending more and more time hanging around the pig pens. They were close to the farmhouse, therefore close to the outside lavatory we had at the time. If things were really bad, I could just lean over the wall of a nearby sty and throw up into that. The pigs never complained.  As Dad said, they would eat anything.

Apart from meal times, and when Miriam called into the front room to empty his chamber pot, my father remained alone, brooding and drunk. We set up a camp bed for him so that he didn’t spend twenty-four hours a day in his chair but he seldom used it.

At Christmas, we had the usual party for the farm workers’ families but no one’s heart was really in it. Things had changed. My mother was gone and my father was well on his way. I tried to keep the atmosphere light but I had my own worries. The weather remained kind and we lit torches around the farmyard. John Postlethwaite fired up his accordion and there was dancing, singing and, as usual, plenty of drinking.

Christmas Day was, as customary, a day off for all the workers but two or three came in early to milk the cows and pick up their own pails of milk.

I wasn’t well in the morning and with no company, I didn’t celebrate. In the afternoon, I walked up to Amy’s house but they had gone to a relative for Christmas lunch. The pub was open but I doubted my stomach could take a port and lemon, so I went for a walk up to the station and from there around the old part of the village. I got home just before dark to find Amy waiting in the kitchen.

‘Merry Christmas,’ she said, handing me a piece of fruitcake wrapped in a flowery paper napkin.

I hugged her and a sudden rush of tears ran down my face onto her neck. I had kept my problems from her although I usually shared everything.

‘Alice, whatever is the matter?’ Amy was full of concern.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ I lied. ‘I’m just a bit emotional, you know how it is? It’s the wrong time of the month and I’ve been on my own most of the day. I’ve missed out on all the family fun and frolics.’

‘I did invite you to ours,’ Amy reminded me.

‘I know you did; I didn’t think it was right to impose myself on someone else’s Christmas lunch,’ I replied.

‘Alice, you’re almost family. You know that. Dad asked where you were. I told them you’d have second thoughts about it.’

I opened a bottle of gin, amazingly left over from the workers’ party, and we sat in the kitchen and talked about the year just gone and our hopes and dreams for the one to come.

Even as the effects of the gin took hold, I still kept my guilty secret. In normal circumstances the losing of my virginity would have been something I’d have been eager to tell Amy all about. It should have been a time for much mirth, feigned shock and sharing of intimate details and feelings. We had a pact, made years before, that the first one of us to do the deed would confess as soon as possible so that the other would know exactly what to expect when her turn came. I felt guilty about breaking our covenant but I was embarrassed by the way it had happened. There was no true love, no sweeping me off my feet. The act had been a humiliating moment that I wished I could forget.

Although I wasn’t yet willing to admit to my pregnancy, I was fast beginning to realise that stress, emotional turmoil, caused by my father’s increasing dependence, and my continuing morning sickness (I had convinced myself that it was caused by the unpasteurised milk that I still drank every day), were not to blame for the missing periods. I was also finding it increasingly difficult to squeeze my breasts into my brassiere.

Amy went home at eight-thirty. I had one more gin as a nightcap, then I went upstairs and fell into a dreamless sleep.

By January, my denial had morphed into the terrible realisation that I had a child inside me and it was beginning to show.

I had to let out the seams of my weatherproof work trousers and I took to wearing baggy, woollen jumpers, even inside the house. I couldn’t talk to my father about it, I’d get no reaction anyway and I couldn’t let Miriam into the secret either, although I began to suspect that she had guessed anyway. Women who have been though a pregnancy always seem to be able to tell.

The farmworkers were now employed maintaining machinery, fixing gaps in barns, disinfecting the pig pens and keeping their eyes out for foxes that were increasingly desperate for food over the freezing winter months. There was snow in the second week of January and that put a stop to a lot of the work. I sent the lads home at ten, most days, and I looked after the pigs myself.