A Family's Duty by Maggie Bennett Page A

a slice of Mrs Kennard’s fruit cake, Valerie felt unable to face the ladies again, but Isabel Neville did not want her to go home alone.
    ‘Just wait here until we finish, Valerie, and then somebody will walk with you. I know, I’ll ask Philip to see you home – he’s going your way, and he’d be glad to.’
    ‘Oh, no, I don’t want to put Mr Saville to any trouble,’ protested Valerie, but she was overruled. Mr Saville readily agreed, because it was Isabel Neville who asked him, and he could refuse her nothing. Even so, he felt sorry for the quiet girl who walked at his side, and having witnessed the sceneat the Rectory, he could not help comparing her life with his; due to different circumstances, they shared the same inner emptiness, he concluded bleakly.

    ‘Thank God it’s nearly spring again,’ Dora Goddard said to the pigs, her Wellington boots ankle-deep in the pig manure she was raking out of the sties and shovelling onto a wheelbarrow. Her charges were busy at the trough of swill, made up from kitchen waste and cooked mangolds and turnips mixed with oats. The newly delivered sow and her twelve new piglets needed special attention, and were kept in a separate pen where she was fed on offal cooked in milk and water. Dora yawned, having been up for two hours in the night, summoned by Billy who was having trouble with delivering a calf. The cow had lain for several hours, lowing with painful contractions; only the calf’s forelegs were visible, but after some strategic traction, the head at last emerged, followed by the rest of the body.
    ‘Bugger it!’ said Billy. ‘After all that effort, it’s a bloody bull calf, when we need milkers. Should be ready for slaughtering come September. Anyway, let’s get it sucking.’
    ‘Can’t the poor old girl have a rest for an hour or two?’ asked Dora, patting the sweating animal, now lying exhausted on her bed of straw in the lantern-lit byre.
    ‘’Course not, the sooner it sucks the better – it’s just thin, watery stuff at first, but get it sucking, and the proper milk’ll come in. Come on, let’s get cleared up – I need to get back to my bed. Sidney can deliver the next one.’
    Dora did not reply, but seethed inwardly. Billy had taken advantage of her as a member of the family, and while her father and mother worked as hard as they had always done,Billy lorded it over them since his elevation to husband and father, and reminded them of his ownership of the farm and their secondary place in the scheme of things. They got no help from Pam whose time was all taken up with baby Samuel, now a year old and toddling all over the farmhouse.
    ‘I’ve had enough of it, Mum,’ declared Dora when she came in for breakfast on this misty March morning. She pulled off her boots in the scullery, and washed her hands under cold water at the sink. ‘I’m sick and tired of the way he treats us, and as for that silly little giggling Pam who never does a hand’s turn in the house, I could slap her!’
    Her mother sighed in sympathy, and could not disagree, but Dora had made up her mind. ‘He’s nothing but a slave-driver, and I’m getting out of this place,’ she said.
    ‘Oh,
no
!’ Mary protested. ‘Your dad and I would miss you so much – you’re our one comfort now. And where on earth would you go?’
    ‘Don’t know yet, but somewhere I can work for Britain rather than Billy,’ her daughter replied. ‘I’ll go to the Labour Exchange in Everham, and offer my services.’
    ‘Do think about it, dear, and have a word with your dad,’ said Mary with a sigh, but Dora had nothing more to say. A thought had crossed her mind, and not for the first time, that Howard Allingham was somewhere in France, a soldier fighting in defence of his country. Poor Howard – she could not return his love, but now wondered if she should have pretended a little, and given him some consolation as he went out to face danger and possible death. She could not forget his