Free Cherry by Sara Wheeler

Denford days, had a heart attack. The young master wrote to him from Oxford:
    I was very sorry to hear a few days ago that you are not to work . . . I very much hope that this will find you feeling pretty fit, it’s always pretty feeble work strolling about and not being allowed to do anything.
    I am having a great time, I am not allowed to go into training yet, and so there is no chance of any very serious rowing for me yet, but I am going to row in some sculling races and also in a Four against a London Four on Whit Monday. I bathe every morning at seven, do very little work, play cricket and fence – so you see I am having a merry time . . . I am glad to hear Harebell is very fit and fresh; I only wish I had her here for a ride. I hope this good sun will do you and Father lots of good.
    Hobbs was obliged to retire. When Apsley heard, he wrote again. ‘I am very very sorry. You have been with us so many years, as long as, and longer than, I can remember – that we shall all miss you very much.’
    On 15 June Apsley brought a cricket eleven over from Oxford to play a local team on Nomansland Common. It was a high point of a summer otherwise dominated by the General’s painful illness. A doctor was now in almost permanent attendance. That summer, to celebrate the forthcoming Jubilee of the Relief of Lucknow, Lord Roberts led the survivors in a ceremony at the King’s Levee, but the General was too ill to attend. He was invited to a Mutiny veterans’ banquet, hosted by the
Daily Telegraph
, to take place in December, and, in a touching display of hope, the family spoke of their wish that he would be well enough to attend. In some dark place in their hearts, they must have known that he would not. In the autumn, after a tense summer at home, Apsley began his last year at Oxford. He moved into 19 Pembroke Street, sharing his modest lodgings with a postgraduate mathematical scholar. It was a narrow, higgledypiggledy street two or three minutes’ walk from the main entrance of the college, and 19 was one of the medieval houses on the left-hand side going up. It was a bad time. Telegrams arrived at the porter’s lodge summoning Apsley home and he would dash off a note to his tutor and run to the station in the fog to catch the next train to London, arriving at Wheathampstead as the lampman propped his short ladder against the wall of the station house. Reporters called at Lamer for news and bulletins were issued in
The Times
as well as local papers. ‘The seeds of his illness,’ one report stated authoritatively in a pleasing example of journalistic imagination triumphing over evidence, ‘were sown during the Indian Mutiny, probably at the Relief of Lucknow, where the General had a trying time.’
    Apsley Cherry-Garrard senior died on 8 November 1907, shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon. He was seventy-five. The family were all there. The next day his coffin was brought into the drawing room. One of the wreaths was from Hobbs, and the message ran, ‘In ever loving memory of a kind master, from his old coachman.’ In her note thanking him, Evelyn, convulsed with grief and loss, wrote that she was feeling ‘as if it cannot all be real, but that we must be in some awful dream, from which we shall wake presently’.
    The funeral was to take place on Friday 15 November. The day before, Apsley wrote to Hobbs, ‘I had thought of asking you to walk with the men in the procession tomorrow, but I thought of your heart and decided that perhaps it was better not. However as it is your wish to come we shall be most glad. Please tell Mr Owen [the local builder] or whoever is arranging the front part of the procession that I wish you to walk in front of the bier. I am sure Father would have liked you to do this.’ As a postscript he added, ‘You will have to regulate your pace according to the slow marches of the soldiers behind you.’
    The General was buried on a grey November day in an eddy of fast-falling leaves. The