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

Feeding was the first problem. We ended up giving it creamy, raw cow’s milk, filtered through a rubber teat on my old baby feeding bottles.

The practice of giving cats cows’ milk is frowned on today, but Jemima thrived on it and soon moved on to the daily minced beef or pork that my mother used in her award-winning pies.

Jemima was half feral. No one could get close to her but me without almost losing an arm. She was a wonderful mouser and could have been a champion ratter if such a title had existed. She was never quite part of the family but I loved her. She lived until the end of the war and was still catching vermin up until the day she died.

In nineteen twenty-six, the country was riven by the General Strike. Though the majority of strikers worked in the mines and docks, some farm workers were encouraged by activists in the Communist party to hold sympathy wild cat strikes.

The issue never surfaced on our farm, even though the agitators tried to persuade some of our workers at The Old Bull in the village. My father never forgot their loyalty. Our workers didn’t need to hold wild cat strikes anyway. Jemima performed wild cat strikes every day of her life.

Nothing much happened over the next few years and our farm life went on just as it always had. Then, in nineteen twenty-nine, Wall Street in America suffered a catastrophic crash and the economies of the entire world went into meltdown. What followed was known as the Great Depression. Millions of workers lost their jobs, wages were cut across the board and most working-class families suffered immensely.

My father did his best to help our workers. He never forgot the loyalty they showed to us a few years earlier and now he repaid that debt. He kept their wages at the same level but all had to work an extra hour a day, especially at ploughing, sowing and during the harvest. We still kept the rituals of mother’s birthday and Christmas where, as an added bonus, my father produced a couple of giant turkeys.

Old Joshua Cohen, who had worked well past his retirement date and who my father had put on light duties some years before, had finally thrown in the towel at the age of seventy-one, his arthritic hands not able to hold a cup, let alone a scythe. He was left with only a pittance of a pension and no way to pay the rent on the cottage he had lived in with his daughter and three grandchildren.

My father, in his usual way, quietly sorted things out. He bought the cottage from the landlord for one hundred and ninety-five pounds and gave Old Joshua a rent-free contract for the rest of his life. His daughter was given a job at the farm helping my increasingly fragile mother perform her tasks.

So, the farm survived the Great Depression though my father did have to sell off ten acres from the top fields to the owner of the neighbouring farm to get us all through a bad patch in the winter of nineteen thirty-three.

In the winter of nineteen thirty-seven, my mother’s strength finally ran out and she died in my father’s arms whilst the doctor was hurrying towards us. She had been bedbound since the previous autumn. My father and I, along with Old Joshua’s daughter, Miriam, used to spend hours reading to her. She’d drift in and out of consciousness but my father insisted we read on. Amazingly, when she woke up, she’d be in the same place of the story as the reader.

My father bore her death badly and he took to drink. I was seventeen at the time and I found myself running more and more of the farm’s affairs. It wasn’t a problem as I helped my father with so many things over the years. I could start a cold engine on the old truck that was parked up in the barn to protect it from frost. I had already learned to do the books (my father checked them religiously every week and seldom found an error). I had worked in the fields with the farm hands, I could talk to the foreman without him getting uppity about things. I actually think he respected my knowledge. He called me The Corn Dolly, as they all did, because of my habit of hiding in the cornfields when I was dodging some task I didn’t fancy performing.

So, although my father’s absence didn’t make the running of the farm any easier – we were one man down after all – we did manage to get by. For the first few weeks after my mother’s funeral, he spent most of his time at The Old Bull, drinking pint after pint of dark beer. I used to drive up in the truck to find him if it ever got too far past closing time. I found him in hedges, in a field and even propped up, fast asleep against an iron lamppost.

Soon though, he became a home drinker. He sat in the armchair in the living room looking out over the distant hills, a bottle of whisky on the table at his side, another bottle on the floor.

The landlord of The Old Bull dropped them off on a daily basis. I got the bill once a month. Dad hardly uttered a word. I did my best to try to coax him off the spirit but I was wasting my time. He wanted to be with my mother again, nothing else mattered.

By autumn nineteen thirty-seven I had my own, life-changing, problems to worry about. I was pregnant and the father wasn’t around.

Chapter 5

Alice

‘Oh, my goodness!’ exclaimed Jess, one hand over her mouth. ‘You really got dragged through the mill, Nana. I don’t know how you coped.’

‘I didn’t really,’ replied Alice, that’s how I ended up pregnant. I was still mourning