Miss Turner laid a sheet over the face of her dead mother and waited hour after hour for morning. She dared not plunge into the water outside because it was so dark that she could not judge its depth, and there was no house near enough for her to call anyone to help her with the last offices. Thus they stayed till morning —the living woman watching beside the dead.
When dawn began to break, Miss Turner went down stairs into the flooded room. She could not open the door for the weight of water against it, but she managed to get through the window and she plunged into the flood outside. The water was above her waist and it was cruelly cold. Physically, she had hardly the strength to battle with it, but her resolution enabled her to struggle to the nearest house. That ‘little mother’, of whose delicate beauty she had been so proud, must be decently laid out for the grave, and she had not the skill to do this herself. Each hour that passed would make the task more difficult, so she would not wait till morning had really come before she went for help.
That day it was not possible to bring a coffin to the house, and when night came no persuasion could prevail upon Miss Turner to leave her mother’s body there alone. The dead woman lay uncoffined on her bed and her daughter watched beside her. From time to time she made herself a cup of tea, boiling the water on the fire in that one room. Friends fought through the flood to sit with her and to beg her to come away with them. She welcomed their sympathy, but she would not leave the house. Calm with the dignity of love and of grief, she waited alone through the hours; for ‘many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it’.
Chapter Fourteen
WAR
When King George V was crowned in 1911, Sidney, my sailor brother, brought a contingent of bluejackets to London for the Coronation. They acted as Guard of Honour to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. During that week, Sidney said to one of my other brothers:
‘I really ought to kill this man, not to guard him.
‘Why?’
‘Because, according to the Great Pyramid, he is going to start the Great War of 1914.’
It seems to me quite impossible reasonably to believe in the prophecies of the Great Pyramid, and yet it is equally impossible for me to deny that Sidney was always right about it. He believed in it implicitly, though he did not always agree with other people’s readings of its meaning. He preferred to work out his own calculations from the complicated measurements of those galleries and chambers and tunnels; and he came to very precise conclusions.
In September 1914, when this first prophecy of his had been so direfully fulfilled, and my brother Harold had already been killed on the Aisne, I asked Sidney what he could foretell as to the length of the war.
‘I can’t say exactly,’ he said. ‘ But it won’t be over by Christmas as you all imagine. It can’t possibly last beyond December 31st, 1918, but the end won’t be more than a month or two before that.’
We could not then believe him.
War is now like a wolf at the door, and we for ever hear it growling. It is to-day the world’s obsession, and before 1914 it was seldom in the mind of an ordinary person as an actual possibility. The word war conjured up pictures of the Battle of Waterloo, of Florence Nightingale, or perhaps of South Africa. We could most of us remember that last war, but it seemed to have been a very hole-and-corner affair, affecting our daily lives very little. It did not seem then so remarkable that Jane Austen should have lived through the Napoleonic Era without so much as mentioning the war in her novels.
Yet Wiltshire was probably looked upon, at the beginning of the twentieth century, as an especially military area. The Southern Command Headquarters was at Salisbury, and there were always troops training on the Plain. When we sat in the garden on hot summer mornings, we often heard the distant boom of big guns. It did not seem a warlike sound. It came associated with gardening and with the scent of flowers; and that long soft sustained rumble was in itself drowsy and peaceful. It belonged to happy summer days.
For most English people living in the first fourteen years of the century, the prospect of war was thus remote and unrealizable. It did not seem a thing which could ever actually enter into our lives. We laughed at my brother Harold for the sulky expression on his face in a newspaper picture which showed him at Tilbury, seeing off the German Emperor after his last visit to England.
Harold said: ‘ Of course I look sulky. He’ll kill me someday.’
This was a joke at the time, but those words came true in the very first month of the war.
Then Henry Newbolt wrote to me.
‘This war is going to change the world for us all. Nothing will ever be the same again.’
Once again I could not believe him. In those first months of the war, it seemed that the only people for whom the world must be for ever changed, were those who had
