The Housemaid's Daughter by Barbara Mutch

Union Castle Steamship Walmer Castle, Southampton’ – it says on the label on my trunk. Train from here, boat to England, train again to Southampton and then the Walmer Castle . I’ve never been further than Bannock village.
    ‘Well, Ada,’ Madam said, blowing her nose as we closed the garden gate behind us and went back up the path to the house, ‘you’re the daughter of the house now.’
    ‘Then let me help you with Master Phil,’ I said, watching the Master’s straight back climb the step up to the stoep and go inside, ‘like a daughter should.’ Madam stopped on the path. She bent down and nipped the dead head off a rose. Afterwards, when I told Mama what I’d said, she was angry with me. But she knew and I knew – and Madam herself knew – that Miss Rose had never been helpful, never been the sort of daughter Madam needed.
    ‘Perhaps you can, Ada,’ Madam said, straightening up. Her eyes looked sore, like when you’ve been standing with your face into the wind and there’s snow on the mountains. I had still not seen that snow – it lived high up, about two hours away across the Karoo. It sent hard white frosts that fell in the night, and crunched under my bare feet at sunrise when I fetched the milk.
    And so I began to take care of Master Phil.
    * * *
    ‘Remember that night I got sick, Ada?’ Master Phil turned his thin face towards me.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’d eaten too many apricots from the garden.’
    He smiled a little and shifted in the bed. His arms weren’t brown and strong like I remembered, and long bones pressed against the skin like the washing line under a wet sheet. When he walked to the bathroom, his steps were the steps of an old man. When he bent to get back into bed, the knobs of his spine showed through his pyjama top.
    ‘Do you want to sit up, Master Phil? Shall I open the curtains? It’s a lovely day, you could watch the clouds.’
    ‘No, no.’ He subsided on the pillow. ‘The light hurts my eyes.’
    ‘That old apricot still makes fruit,’ I said, after a while. ‘Did you see apricot trees in the war?’
    Master Phil stared at me, his eyes pale as the lightest sky, like that time in the garden when he said he might be afraid. Then he began to cry, his shoulders hunching under the flannel pyjamas that Mama and I had to wash every day on account of his sweating in the night.
    ‘Sorry, sir,’ I said, trying not to cry myself. ‘Sorry for disturbing you.’
    He didn’t turn away when he cried, like he used to do as a boy when he’d fallen and hurt himself. Now he just lay there in bed facing me, the tears going down his cheeks, his shoulders shaking. He didn’t make much noise either. Maybe soldiers learn to cry quietly in a war.
    I didn’t know what to do so I took his hand. He placed his other hand on top of it.
    ‘Play for me, Ada,’ he muttered. ‘Play something gay.’
    And so I did. I left the door open and went downstairs and played something cheerful and gay to cover his crying. Maybe a waltz, like Madam used to play when there was a dinner party before the war. Or a polonaise with its lively march up and down the keyboard. And Madam would come in and say thank you with her eyes. And Master would open the door to the study and listen as well.
    I learnt about ‘Up North’. This was where Mr Churchill had sent Master Phil in the war. I wanted to learn about it, I wanted to understand what sort of place could have wounded Master Phil so deeply. Perhaps then I would understand about war.
    But I also wanted to know about it because it was a new place for me. Was this wrong? Was it wrong to have such thirst for new places even though they had caused such pain?
    All I knew was Cradock. All I could see from Master Phil’s toy box was the Karoo. What, I would ask myself as I peered over the veld, what lay beyond the brown koppies and the distant mountains with their imagined snow? Books and music could only take you so far. Words, drawn from real life,