Hope by Lesley Pearse Page B

go home, Hope. It’s a long walk from here and Mother will get worried if you’re late.’
    A few minutes later Hope was making her way home, cutting through the grounds of Hunstrete House rather than walking right up to Briargate again. Young as she was, she knew Nell wasn’t concerned about her being back late. She just didn’t want her there when Albert got home.
    A few months after Hope’s last day at Briargate, she found herself counting that day as the one when everything changed for her. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t play with Rufus any more, or that she didn’t see Nell, Ruth and James so often, but because she had to work.
    She had of course always had to pitch in and help her father on the farm when there were crops to be picked, seeds to be sown, or at haymaking time. Her older brothers and sisters had done it too; that was the way for the families of farm workers. But in the past Hope’s help had only been needed for the lightest of tasks; she went to lessons every day with the Reverend Gosling, and the rest of the time was her own.
    But her lessons had ended suddenly, with no explanation as to why. Now she was expected to work as hard as Joe and Henry did, going off with them in the morning even when it was wet and cold. Then on days she was kept at home she had to do washing, clean the cottage and help with the cooking.
    ‘If you don’t work, you can’t eat,’ her mother said sharply when she complained. ‘That’s just the way it is, Hope, and the sooner you understand that, the happier you’ll be.’
    Hope was well aware that money was tighter since Nell and Matt had got married and they didn’t tip up their wages any more. James and Ruth still gave Mother theirs, and Alice and Toby contributed what they could. But none of them earned very much, and Alice and Toby came home so infrequently that Meg had to wait weeks just for a couple of shillings.
    Hope could also see for herself that her parents were getting old and tired. Neither of them had the strength they’d once had. The Reverend Gosling had pointed out to her that her mother was forty-five now, her father a couple of years older, and a lifetime of heavy work and hardship had taken its toll. He said rather sternly that many girls of nine and even far younger had to work as hard as adults, and she should thank God that she had been allowed a real childhood and been able to attend his little school for four years.
    So she had to bear it without complaint, even when her back felt as though it was breaking from being bent over all day picking strawberries, or her arms felt as if they were being torn from the sockets as she hauled full sacks of potatoes the length of a field, just muttering a few oaths under her breath. Yet it wasn’t just the new hard labour that bothered her. It was her loss of position that really hurt.
    ‘Our baby’ was an expression she’d heard to describe her for as long as she could remember. Everyone in the family except Joe and Henry used it, a loving way of acknowledging that she had a special place in the family. They all took care that she was warm enough, had enough to eat, that she wasn’t tired. Her mother and Nell had made sure she had decent clothes and boots that fitted, her father and Matt had whittled her dolls out of wood, hung a swing for her on the apple tree. She had been quicker than any of the others to learn to read and write, and while none of them had more than two years with the Reverend Gosling, she’d had four. They asked her to read notices, or any newspapers that came their way, because she was far better than anyone else at it. Even being sent to play with Rufus made her feel that she’d been singled out, for Henry was only a year older.
    For the whole two years she was visiting Briargate she was the focus of everyone’s attention. She had to be neatly dressed to go there, in the early days she had to be taken and collected, and everyone in the family wanted to know about what