The Telling

weekday world. I made to slip through them, but Jack Gorst stopped me, and said, ‘You’d best know we’ve called a strike.’
    I’d thought things were as bad as they could be. I’d been wrong. ‘A what?’
    ‘A strike,’ Richard Moss said. ‘No one’s to have any dealings with the gentry or the clergy.’
    ‘Who says so?’
    ‘We took a vote. We’re all agreed on it.’
    ‘No one asked me,’ I said. Jack Gorst and Richard Moss just looked at me blankly a moment. ‘To what end?’ I asked. ‘What are you striking for?’
    ‘The land. We want the land back.’
    ‘Do you think this’ll help?’
    ‘See how they get along without us.’
    ‘Does Mr Moore know?’
    Jack shrugged. I shouldered past them. They fell into conversation with Thomas. He asked how they were getting on; the strike was not news to him. And yet he had been at the vicarage, delivering, as he put it. It puzzled me how he could be on such easy and familiar terms with both sides in the dispute. I wondered if the strikers knew where he had been.
    There was a new book on the dresser. It was a play about a man called Hamlet who found it hard to screw up his courage to the point where he must kill his uncle, which seemed quite reasonable to me. Mam came home and found me reading. Although the house was spotless, it sealed her bad mood for the evening.
    She’d been stopped in the street and told about the strike: there seemed no need to tell her about my dismissal; at least not yet, since nobody would be working. She couldn’t be still; she was fretting that her cows would suffer unmilked, and she went out to talk to the men, and a crowd of them went up and did the evening milking. I stayed at home, and waited for Mr Moore, but he did not come back. I finished the play, but at every sound from the street, at the faintest voice in the distance, I was up and at the window, or peering around the edge of the open front door, into the evening street.
    The men brought pails back down from the Oversbys’, slopping with milk. They went around all the houses with them. Mam filled a quart pot. She looked grim.
    ‘They said I had to take it. They said everybody had to have some.’
    The boys had a mug of milk apiece, and Mam made a custard, and we sat and ate custard, my mam and me and the boys, and though it was sweet and good and the boys slobbered it down like puppies, when I caught Mam’s worried expression, things felt very far from good. She told me that there had been a fight up at Oversbys’. The women of the family had already fled to town, Mr Oversby had stayed, they believed, but nobody had seen him. He’d left Sammy Tate to guard the dairy. Mam wouldn’t have minded leaving the milk behind; it was only the cows she was concerned about; but the men were saying that the village was to have it, because the village needed it, and why should they pay for it, and Sammy had tried to stop them, and had got his head broken, and the milk was stolen, and that was why we all had to have some, so that everyone shared in that guilt. If someone gets hurt , Mr Moore had said. If someone gets killed, then – with my reputation –
    ‘Was Mr Moore there?’ I asked.
    She shook her head. ‘I don’t know where he’s got to; or your dad.’
    They were out till after I fell asleep, and I didn’t hear them come in. I don’t know if they came separately or together, or if Mr Moore had paused to look at me sleeping there on the kitchen floor. I remember thinking that despite everything, despite the danger and the trouble, and the worry, Mr Moore had thought to leave a book for me. It made me strangely happy, even in all that confusion.
    *
     
    The next day stretched out ahead of me like a flooded field, calm and flat, with the usual paths across it hidden. Little to do but the chores of the house, which got done in no time at all, by my mam and me together. We started to consider daft ideas; that we would take down the curtains for cleaning; that we might drag bedding outside to let it air. In the end we didn’t accomplish any of it. Mam remembered my half-finished dress, and set me to sewing, and set herself to help me with it.
    ‘We’ll hardly have the dance now,’ I said, ‘with all this going on.’
    ‘I don’t see why not. And there’s no good in leaving a thing half done.’
    The day started chilly, and then grew overcast. The boys were out of the house, though whether they’d actually gone to their work, I didn’t know. Neither