by unemployment, and Barbara volunteered her services to an organisation set up in Melsham to help unemployed men and their families. Alison was at school and Elizabeth was happy to look after Nick.
Mrs Gregory, who was its driving force, was a woman of enormous proportions, very efficient but with a heart of gold, who put Barbara to work making soup in a kitchen set up in an empty shop. By the time the soup was ready, there was a long queue of ragged, half-starved applicants. Barbara had known there were poor people, struggling to get by, but she was appalled to think that in a comparatively affluent place like Melsham, there were men in rags and children without shoes.
Later she took her turn manning a clothes store, sorting and ironing donated garments, sewing on buttons, ranging shoes in pairs, and putting clothing too worn and dirty to be passed on into bags for the rag-and-bone man. From not having enough to do, she now didn’t have a moment to spare. She found herself with a new circle of friends: colleagues in the charity including Lady Quarenton who worked as tirelessly as anyone. She ceased to worry what George was up to every minute of the day, and because there was always something going on, some humorous or sad tale to tell, she became a more interesting person in herself. It didn’t happen overnight: she had her difficult days when nothing seemed to go right, days when she wished she had time to have her hair done, when it was an awful rush to get to the school by four. But on the whole she began to enjoy life again.
George viewed this new Barbara with tolerant amusement. It kept her off his back and let him get on with his work without having her forever peering over his shoulder, trying to catch him out oiling wheels, not to mention being able to see Virginia whenever he liked. Virginia had moved into their old house and the farmhouse was let to an American colonel who had come over during the war and liked England so much he had married an English girl and stayed. Things were on the up and George intended to stand for Melsham Town Council in the forthcoming local elections. It was easier to control what was happening in the town from the inside, instead of having to lobby for everything he wanted.
Barbara was busy on the picture she was calling Girl on a Rock the evening he was elected with a majority of a hundred and fifty. It was Virginia who was photographed standing behind him on the rostrum, though in his acceptance speech, he was at pains to say his wife had supported him throughout and would have been with them that night but their small daughter had a tummy bug and needed her mummy, which left Barbara fielding solicitous enquiries for several days afterwards.
It meant he had another excuse for not being at home in the evenings. Council meetings were notorious for going on and on and he was duty-bound to stay to the end. ‘Most of it’s waffle,’ he told Barbara. ‘Some of them have no idea how to come to the point, but I have to listen. In the middle of the dross, there might be something worth listening to. And of course, I have a contribution to make. Quite an important one, as it happens.’
‘I’m sure, you have,’ she murmured, folding the ironing which had been airing on the clothes horse. He had been a great deal more cheerful of late, possibly because he had got his own way – or most of it – over the sale of the land and his election, but was he being unfaithful? The signs were still there, though she tried not to think of it, tried not to wonder who it might be. His secretary? Someone he had met at work? When these soul-destroying thoughts invaded her mind, she deliberately pushed them from her, refused to listen to herself, kept herself busy painting in the long, lonely evenings when the children slept soundly and the house was quiet.
Because of the children she couldn’t go with George when he went on a business visit to Paris with a combined delegation from county council and Melsham Town Council, though she knew some wives were going, paid for by their husbands. She helped him pack in a flurry of last-minute instructions, watched as he kissed the children goodbye and