Chapter Fifteen
FIFTEEN
WHAT HAPPENED TO little Kenneth is one of those guilts that will follow me around for ever.
It was the day after Dad had been sent packing and my blood was full boiling over it. I’d half a mind to go up to Mr Reese and tell him where he could shove it.
‘Just you leave it,’ Mam told me, catching my scowl as we walked to work.
She was always in before the crack of dawn to start breakfast for the other servants.
As an undergardener, I didn’t need to be at the house till much later in the day, but I normally went with her anyway and just waited in the kitchen, keeping her company as the morning loaves rose doughy on their trays.
When I didn’t reply to her snapped words, she grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me back to face her.
‘I mean it, Vera. At least we two still have our jobs. Let’s keep it that way. ’
I couldn’t stand that: being told to be grateful that Mr Reese had so kindly only fired one of us. But I kept my mouth shut and sat nicely at the kitchen table like an obedient dog.
The morning continued almost as normal after that.
When it was time for me to start, I took myself out to the garden and continued with the tasks that Dad had left for me the previous day.
Tried not to think about how another head gardener would be employed soon, coming here to order me around.
Might not take kindly to having a girl work under him.
That it would be a him was never a question.
After breakfast, Kenneth came out for his eleven o’clock run-about.
He tried to get me to play hide-and-seek with him as I sometimes did, but I wasn’t in the mood.
Not cross with him exactly: it wasn’t his fault that his father was a no-good, dirty, cunt-faced reptile of a man.
Still, that didn’t mean I was going to play with the boy that day.
Instead, I chatted with the nanny a bit, and she told me they were off to a tea party that afternoon at a friend’s house.
I wouldn’t learn until much later that the other child came down with the mumps at the last minute and the appointment had to be cancelled – leaving Kenneth and the nanny taking tea at home instead.
After that, I went into the store-shed to have a tidy.
There were many tools kept there that belonged to Dad, which he’d brought with him when he started at the Reeses’, so I thought I’d put them aside to take home.
It wouldn’t have been right for Mr Reese to keep enjoying the benefit of them, after what he’d done.
Moving things around, I found an old tin of rat poison that I’d purchased the previous winter, when we were having a problem in the kitchen garden.
I could tell by the weight there was hardly anything left in there, really.
I stopped for lunch in the servants’ hall with the rest of the staff.
Mam looked utterly miserable; in fact, everyone was subdued, Dad’s absence felt keenly by all.
Welcomed by some, mind, who’d never liked working with a ‘conchie’.
The footman was a particular one for that – he often left white feathers scattered round the garden for Dad to find.
The first time it happened, I’d wanted to confront the bastard and show him just where he could stick them, but Dad insisted on taking the matter to Mr Reese to sort out instead.
Of course, all he’d done was tell Dad to ignore it.
Funny how that was the advice until it was one of Mr Reese’s friends with a complaint about Dad’s conduct.
When it was coming up time for Mam to get tea for that lot upstairs, I thought I’d play a little joke.
Cheer her up, like. So I took the tin of arsenic out of the store-shed and brought it into the kitchen, and clowned about like I was going to put it in the milk jug.
But Mam didn’t see the funny side of it.
‘You put that right down this minute, my girl!’ she shouted, brandishing the rolling pin till I did as she said.
I muttered something about only having a laugh, and popped it safely on one of the shelves over the kitchen worktop.
At that moment, Dad came in. He’d never been much of a drinker, but I could tell he had a few in him when I saw him that day. His speech was slower, the syllables all jumbling together.
‘What the hell are you doing here, Gethin?’ cried Mam.
‘You two will be the death of me. You’ – me, this was – ‘get back into the gardens now, and will you leave that bloody tin alone! No, don’t take it with you.
Just stop mucking about with it. And you’ – now turning on Dad – ‘take yourself home this instant.’
Dad wove his head about – I think meaning to shake it. Frowning in anger, or perhaps just concentration to get a full sentence out. ‘I’m going to have a word with Mr Reese.’
‘No, you’re bloody not!’
‘I’m going to show him what’s what. If he thinks he can get away with this …’
And then there was a bit of arguing to and fro, but the long and short of it was that I went back outdoors, leaving the poison behind up there on that shelf.
Saw that wretched footman on my way out, who said, ‘Your daddy shouldn’t be here,’ so I stuck my tongue out at him.
Of course, he’d later be the one to come forward and say that he’d seen Dad go into the kitchen that day.
Seen the state he was in. The anger on his face.
Later, the courts speculated that there were two things that might have happened next.
Maybe I hadn’t balanced the tin properly.
It could have toppled over, and the lid, old and rusted, could have sprung open.
Sprinkled powder down on to the kitchen worktop, where the tea-tray was waiting to go upstairs. A horrible accident.
Or maybe someone emptied it intentionally into the milk.
When the family all took sick and the law came by, I knew how it looked.
I was frightened. I felt like such a grown-up at twenty-three, but I wasn’t really much more than a child, looking back on it.
The police kept asking me where I thought the poison had come from, until I was sure they thought I’d done it, that they were going to lock me up for the rest of my years.
So I panicked. Desperate to turn their attention away, I told them how, when I’d left the kitchen, Mam and Dad had both been worked up over the Reeses.
That Mam had sent me away from the argument …
and that she had told me to leave the arsenic behind.
If I hadn’t said all that to the police, the story may have turned out differently.
A terrible misfortune caused by a poorly balanced tin.
But instead, I’d been so worried about the blame falling to me that I’d pointed the finger right at my parents.
I knew that they would never have done such a thing.
I tried to speak up for them later, in court: tell the judge that it wasn’t in their natures, that it must have been an accident.
But I couldn’t change my story too much without turning suspicion back on myself and, thanks to my testimony, Mam was found guilty of administering poison with intent to murder, and Dad of conspiring to commit the same.
Those were the terms the judge used. As for me? I was just an innocent bystander.
With the benefit of hindsight, the ridiculous thing is that if the blame had fallen on me, Mam and Dad would immediately have come to my rescue, if I’d only have left the choice up to them.
But I betrayed them to save my own skin …
and for that, they still haven’t forgiven me.
It’s been nothing but stony silence from them both ever since.
Mam and Dad received their sentences in October 1923 – a little over half a year after the Reeses were poisoned.
Dad remained at HMP Cardiff, but Mam had to be sent away to a women’s prison in Aylesbury.
Since the jury decided there was evidence of intent to murder – rather than just to inflict harm – Mam was served with a life term, and Dad with the full possible penalty of ten years as her co-conspirator.
I suppose the judge felt he couldn’t afford to be lenient, given Dad’s previous history of incarceration, and for fear that angry servants all over the place would start trying to bump off their own employers if they thought they could get away with it.
In between the arrest and the trial, I was evicted from our home in Penarth.
Naturally, I’d found myself swiftly unemployed after Mam’s and Dad’s arrests, and hadn’t exactly been keeping up on the rent.
So there I was, parentless, jobless and homeless all at once.
Most of my friends had stopped speaking to me – Lou and Gladys alone were kind enough to answer the door when I came knocking.
I’d only ever meant to stay with them a short while, just until I was back on my feet.
But then I never got back on my feet. Nobody wanted to hire me and, even if I’d had money, nobody would have let me a room either.
My name had been splashed all across the local papers.
People would stop me in the street to tell me they knew I’d had a hand in it. How could you do that to a little boy?
After almost two years of this, I knew I had to leave, and the job advertisement for a new gardener at Harfold Manor had been my shining ticket out. If only I’d known then where it would take me instead.