It’s late when she boards the night train – dark when she leaves her lodgings and arrives at Euston Square and enters her compartment and nods to her fellow passengers. By six the next morning she is a world away, in Leeds, and by eight in Keighley again where, unable to face the prospect of being collected in the Haworth gig, she begins at once the long walk home, keeping her eyes down to avoid her reflection in shop fronts and the windows of houses. It has been raining though, here in the north. There are puddles everywhere, and she is in all of them: a small, plain, obscure-looking woman in a black travelling outfit, on her head a large funnel-shaped bonnet, also black, with a dark grey lining.

First Journeyman

First Journeyman

(Responsible for fruits, plants and legumes)

WHAT CAN I tell you?

That he was seventeen years old; that in the morning he top-dressed the Melon Pit with a compost of turf, lime rubble, charcoal, wood ash, clay and bone dust. That he rolled the drive and cleaned out the pond, and put a small stake to the Chrysanthemums to prevent the wind from breaking them; that after that he watered the Trees in the Peach Case and dusted the berries with sulphur to keep the mildew down.

That Jenny came out then, asking for something sweet and tasty for Master B who had a summer cold and was keeping to his room with books and a hot water bottle and was after something to tempt his appetite.

That he went off and came back with a leaf of mint and a pound of First Peas, Sutton’s Bountiful, in a white dish, and sent them in for Master B, and that all through our dinner he was very quiet and hardly touched his food; that in the afternoon he mowed the tennis court and made up the vases for Thursday’s party and tied up the kidney beans and cleaned the glass in the Rose House and shifted a few Gloire de Lorraine out of 3” into 5½” pots. And in the evening, on our way home when we called in at the back door for a cup of water, he asked Jenny if Master B had enjoyed the Peas and Jenny, pushing back her hair and wiping her old hands on her apron, said, What Peas? and he, kicking the toe of his boot against the doorstep and looking down at it, said, The Sutton’s Bountiful, from this morning, and Jenny frowned as if she couldn’t think what he was on about and then she smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead and said, Oh them Peas! Oh no – hadn’t we heard? Master B’s cold was better now and his American friend Mr. Slade had come and fetched him back off to London again before the Peas was eaten.

Oh, he said.