Free Cherry by Sara Wheeler Page A

men who worked on the estate met at the house and walked down to the village in front of the bearer party sent by his regiment. The pall covering the coffin was a Union Jack, and on it lay the old soldier’s plumed helmet and sword; his medals were carried in front of the coffin. When the procession reached the station, the tenants joined the front of the group. The High Street was lined with people, shops were closed and blinds drawn. The bells of St Helen’s rang half muffled, and hundreds attended the service. On Apsley’s wreath, the message read simply, ‘From Laddie’.
    By this time, dead Garrards had moved out of the church and into the churchyard. The General was buried under a granite cross in the shadow of the slender broach spire. After the coffin was lowered, the girls stood on the lip of the grave in the glaucous twilight, and each dropped in a posy of lilies of the valley. Edith was six years old.
    The obituary in the
St Albans Times
said, ‘As a proof of his dislike for self-prominence it may be stated that the people of Wheathampstead were practically unaware of his brilliant military career, and some of his intimate friends knew little of the distinguished service rendered to his country in the Indian Mutiny and the several wars which followed.’ He passed this endearing modesty down to his only son, along with a large fortune.
    Loss flooded through the old house like water through a hole in a ship’s hull. The remaining Cherry-Garrards had to get away, so they spent some weeks in that first awful winter without him in Brighton, the retirement home of Evelyn’s father, Henry Sharpin, who had remarried after his first wife died. But on Good Friday 1908 they experienced another tragedy when Dr Sharpin died of a heart attack. They buried him in Bedford.
    Apsley spent the winter and spring shuttling between Lamer, Brighton and Oxford. It was a desperate period for him, with Finals looming horribly and a cold, empty space where the central presence of his life had been. He struggled to balance the demands of the estate with the requirements of his degree course: he was frequently obliged to abandon his books to attend to some pressing matter on one of the properties. Besides Lamer and Denford, he was responsible for Little Wittenham, a large Cherry estate in north Berkshire. 9 In February he had to dash over there to inspect the school, which was in need of repair. Rowing was a bright spot. In Eights’ Week he finally rowed in the 1st VIII, and Christ Church again triumphed. Following that, his crew won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta, beating off Eton by a length-and-a-half in a dramatic final. It was the first time the House had won the Grand.
    In June, dressed in academic gown and mortarboard, he sloped along the High Street to Schools, the late-Victorian building that has struck terror into so many trembling students. He had spent much of his final year sorting out the General’s affairs and running the estates, and he had buried his father and grandfather in the space of five months. The tension between competing demands and responsibilities, combined with a highly-strung disposition, was a heavy burden for a young man. No wonder he got a third-class degree.
    He was back at Lamer when the news came through. It was not a surprise, and anyway thirds were more common then than they are now. In the year Apsley graduated, a third of students got one; in Modern History it was the biggest overall category, with nineteen men achieving a fourth. Given the cult of the amateur that still persisted, in some quarters thirds were a source of pride.

3
    Untrodden Fields
    Apsley came down from Oxford in the summer of 1908 at a loose end, perplexed by the bewildering speed at which the world around him was changing. On the road, the battle between the horse and the internal combustion engine was edging towards its inexorable conclusion. Motorised taxis, motorised buses, Ford’s announcement of the