Wide Country, by Joyce Arnfield

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

From the train, Nebraska had looked like the sea, and Peggy, who had grown up in Bolton within sight of four mill chimneys, had been frightened by it before she knew why. There was nothing to stop the eye. When Earl met her at the halt in a truck the colour of dried mud, she had been travelling for nineteen days and had changed her blouse in the train lavatory so that she would look like the girl in the photograph he kept. He looked nothing like the soldier in the photograph she kept. He wore overalls, and a hat that shaded his face, and he shook her hand before he remembered to kiss her.

The farm was eleven miles from the halt and four miles from the nearest neighbour. His mother, Mrs Lindqvist, met them on the porch, looked at Peggy’s shoes, and said, ‘Well. You’ll learn.’

She did not learn quickly. She did not know how to light the range, or wring a chicken’s neck, or make the thin, sour bread that Mrs Lindqvist made, and when she asked for tea there was only a tin of something that tasted of hay. The wind never stopped. It came across the fields and rattled the screen door all night, and lying awake beside Earl, who slept the moment his head touched the pillow, she found herself counting the chimneys of Bolton in her head, one, two, three, four, and starting again.

Earl was kind. That was almost the worst of it. He was kind in the way he was kind to the horses, patient and quiet and without much to say. In Lancashire he had talked all the time, about baseball and film stars and the big sky at home. Here, under the big sky, he hardly talked at all.

She wrote to her sister Winnie every week. She wrote that the house was lovely and that she had a porch, and that Earl’s mother was teaching her to bake. She did not write about the wind.

In February, in the middle of a night so cold that the water froze in the jug by the bed, Earl shook her awake. One of the heifers was calving early and the calf was coming wrong, and his mother had a bad chest and could not go out. Peggy pulled on his old army greatcoat over her nightdress and followed the lantern across the yard.

She never could say afterwards exactly what she did in the barn, except that she held the lantern, and then held the heifer’s head, and then, when Earl told her to, knelt in the straw and did something with her own hands that she had not known hands could do. At a quarter to four the calf was lying in the straw, wet and furious and alive.

Earl sat back on his heels and looked at her. Then he began to laugh, and so did she, helplessly, both of them filthy and shaking, and for the first time since the train she heard him talk the way he had talked in Lancashire, as if words were something he had too many of.

Mrs Lindqvist was at the kitchen window with a candle when they came back across the yard. She did not say anything. In the morning there was a pot of real tea on the table, and nobody mentioned where it had come from.

That Sunday Peggy wrote to Winnie as usual. She wrote that the wind had not stopped and that she still could not make the bread. She wrote that it was nothing like the pictures. Then she sat for a long time with the pen in her hand, and added: ‘I don’t know yet if I love it here. I think I might love him.’

“Peggy is presented as a woman who has made a terrible mistake.”

To what extent do you agree with this view?

You should write about:

• your thoughts and feelings about how Peggy is presented in the extract
• how the writer has created these thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.