The woods are full of foxgloves at the moment. The Latin name—given to this humble native flower by sixteenth-century German botanist Leonhart Fuchs—is digitalis, which translates as “of the finger,” and indeed here in Yorkshire they are sometimes referred to as “Witches’ fingers.” (It is perhaps an odd coincidence that “Fuchs” is the German for “fox.”) The foxglove goes by many other names—fairy gloves, fairy bells, fox bells, tod-tails—but most of us are most familiar with “foxglove.” The word most likely comes from the Anglo-Saxon Foxes glófa.
“I never thought about where the word came from before,” Nancy said. She stood behind him, resting her hands on his shoulders while she read.
It is a flower without pretension and was used for centuries as folk medicine to cure a multitude of ailments before its efficacy in treating heart problems was discovered. During the war some of you may remember or have been a member of one of the County Herb Committees, tasked with picking foxgloves for the manufacturing of the medical digitalis when we were unable to import from our usual source.
“You got that from my mother,” Nancy said.
“I did. She was the chairwoman of the County Herb Committee.”
“Your mother thinks my mother’s a witch,” Nancy said. “She would have had her ducked and drowned three hundred years ago.” Their own garden, Ayswick’s garden, was full of foxgloves and little else. They made a rough lawn by borrowing a pair of scythes from the farmer and left the rest to nature. There seemed little point in creating a garden to have it dwarfed by the magnificence of the landscape. Teddy was surprised when they moved to York to discover how much enjoyment there was to be had from a suburban quarter-acre.
Nancy kissed the top of his head and said, “I have marking to do.” She no longer taught her keen grammar-school girls, eventually drawn by conscience to go where she was “really needed.” She drove every day to Leeds, where she was head of maths in a grateful secondary modern. Nancy went by her married name now, having left “Miss Shawcross” behind at the grammar school. The new school, full of “disadvantaged” pupils, was not so ambivalent about married women. They would not have minded, Nancy said, if she had been a headless horse as long as she could rescue their maths department.
Teddy himself had slowly become the de facto editor of the Recorder as Bill Morrison had taken more and more of “a back seat.” Teddy employed a school leaver to do some of the more tedious leg-work but still found himself writing most of the contents.
At weekends, as reported to Mrs. Taylor-Scott, they went on long tramps over hill and dale, observing nature “in all her different raiments,” as Agrestis put it, and gaining inspiration for the Nature Notes. They had a dog, Moss, a very good black-and-white collie who went to work every day with Teddy. In the evenings they did the crossword or read out snippets from the Manchester Guardian to each other. There was the wireless and they liked to play cribbage and listen to the gramophone that had been a wedding present from Ursula.
“And friends?” the woman from the adoption agency asked. “Not much time, really,” Nancy said. “We have our jobs and each other.”
“It was like an awful oral exam,” Nancy said afterwards to Teddy. “When I said we liked to listen to opera records I swear she winced. And when I said we both came from quite large families you could see her wondering if we were constitutionally inclined towards incontinent lust or—worse—Catholicism. And I couldn’t work out whether it was good to have a large social circle or just one or two friends. I faltered on that one, I think. We probably shouldn’t have mentioned Moss, she wasn’t a dog-lover. And the Guardian was a mistake, you could tell she was a Mirror reader.”
“Church?” Mrs. Taylor-Scott had asked, staring at Teddy as if trying to force a guilty secret out of him.
“Every Sunday, C of E,” Nancy said briskly. Another quick squeeze of the hand.
“And your vicar will write a reference?”
“Of course.” (“I didn’t fudge that one.” No, just an outright lie, Teddy thought.)
“We could become Methodists, join our local chapel,” Nancy said afterwards. “I’m sure Wesley would appeal to Mrs. Taylor-Scott, he was so very intent on exemplary behaviour. ‘God grant that I may never live to be useless!’ ” Teddy quoted those words at Ursula’s funeral and then regretted doing so because it made his sister sound awfully po-faced, especially in 1966 when usefulness was out of fashion. Ursula hadn’t been religiously inclined at all, the war knocked that out of her, but she admired the way that Non-Conformism forged both reticence and endeavour.