Fathers and Sons by Richard Madeley Read Free Book Online

responsibilities, with Sarah attending to her brothers and Kittyto Geoffrey, but if so they were not a success. The atmosphere became charged and volatile. Kitty–spirited, feisty, with a strong sense of her own self-worth–decided she’d had enough.
    One morning, after a spectacular row with her husband over some household matter, a heavily pregnant Kitty walked out. My grandfather’s marriage seemed over before it had barely begun.
    Kitty’s journey home passed into family legend. I have an image of her as I write this now. She is striding across pastures and meadows, tearful but determined. I can see her as she clambers over stiles and fences, clutching her swollen belly, startling the cows grazing on the lush Shropshire grass. They lift their heads to stare at the young woman as she passes through them like a weeping apparition.
    At last, an exhausted Kitty reaches the familiar fields of her parents’ farm and sweeps into her mother’s kitchen, telling her tale through heaving sobs.
    ‘I’ve left him, mother! I’ve left him! I cannot bear it any longer…I have left Geoffrey and I am never going back.’
    But if Kitty had expected a sympathetic welcome, she was in for a shock. Her mother heard her out, and then delivered an iron verdict to her sniffling daughter. This merciless lecture on the facts of life was, my grandmother wryly recalled, like having a bucket of cold water poured over her head. She told me the whole story one summer’s evening as she and I moved a huge pile of logs from the farmyard into a barn.
    Firstly, Kitty was crisply informed, there was the minor matter of her wedding vows–promises made before God.
    Eighty years ago, Christian doctrine was the powerful glue that bonded society tightly together. Covenants made with the Almighty were taken with the utmost seriousness. My great-grandmother would have been appalled at her daughter’s defiance before God, and perhaps even a little frightened by it. This argument stood by itself, but she had other arrows to shoot, more prosaic but just as pointed.
    Kitty was pregnant. Had she forgotten that? This was the worst possible time to cast aside the protection of a husband. And even if she did insist on divorce–which was out of the question, by the way–what man would want a woman with another man’s child? These were bleak enough times for women. Villages had seen whole generations of their young men virtually wiped out, and the survivors could take their pick of women desperate to find a husband.
    No, Kitty was told, with a firmness bordering on the ruthless. You must go back and make your peace with Geoffrey. It’s your duty–to him and to God.
    So she went.
    What was it about Kiln Farm? I know this is fanciful, but sometimes it seems to me that the place had a mysterious way of holding on to those who most wished to escape it, gently but implacably drawing them back against their will. Today, when I hear the Eagles song ‘Hotel California’, I think about Kiln Farm as the haunting final line is sung.
    ‘You can check out any time you like–but you can never leave…’
    Marriages displaying early cracks can be split apart by the birth of a baby. But in my grandparents’ case the arrival oftheir first son, James, in 1924, seems to have brought them close again, for the time being at least. Theirs would always be a somewhat volatile marriage. My father once said it mirrored the seasons, sometimes sunny, sometimes icy.
    Certainly Kitty now had a clearly defined role, as the first new mother Kiln Farm had seen in many years.
    The focus of daily life must have shifted seismically. The dynamic had changed overnight; William’s appointed heir now had an heir himself. The farmhouse had long felt a sterile place–strange, considering it was the hub of a cycle of life that revolved with its fields and cowsheds and stables. But now it had become a nursery. The place had a purpose and a point beyond mere business.
    Geoffrey, staring at