Alice's Girls (2 page)

And so it was that Mabel Hodges, a week after giving birth to her twins, walked down the aisle of Ledburton church on the arm of Mr Jack, one of Roger Bayliss’s two elderly yard hands, and made her promises to an almost unrecognisable Ferdie Vallance, who was wearing a suit cast off by his employer, and with Christopher Bayliss as his best man.

Afterwards everyone gathered in the recreation room at the hostel and ate slices of a sponge cake which Rose had baked using all the butter and sugar ration for an entire fortnight, filling it lavishly with clotted cream and the contents of the only remaining jar of last season’s raspberry
jam. Christopher Bayliss made a speech about how brave Ferdie had been when, at the age of fifteen, he had been trapped under a rolling tractor.

‘Yeah,’ Ferdie interrupted him, ‘and youse crawled underneath, you did, Mr Christopher! In short trousers you was! And you brung me your dad’s hip flask of brandy for to deaden me pain!’ Everyone cheered and drank to the health of the bride and groom. Later, as the guests thinned, Mabel noticed damp patches on the bodice of her borrowed dress.

‘Whoops!’ she said. ‘It’s me milk for me babies! I’d best go feed the little beasts ’fore I ruins me frock!’

Roger Bayliss, as soon as Mabel was back on her feet after the arrival of the twins, had called their parents into his office and told them his plan for the suddenly expanded Vallance household. He sat them down in the chill space which was known as the Farm Office, smiled what he hoped was reassuringly at their two concerned faces, cleared his throat and began to speak. ‘You’ll have the cottage of course, and your wage, Ferdie, will be raised to three pounds. I shall put you on the farm payroll, Mabel, as you can no longer be employed by the Ministry of Agriculture, and I’m proposing to make you responsible for the running of the dairy.’ Mabel’s eyes widened. ‘You will supervise the milking parlour, manage the roster and arrange cover where necessary.’

‘And not do no milking meself, sir?’ Mabel asked, incredulously.

‘No, Mabel. I’m putting you in overall charge. You’ll be responsible for the hygiene, the hosing out, the scouring of the equipment, the condition of the drinking troughs and so on. You know the routine.’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘You’ll ensure that the dung doesn’t accumulate in the yard and that the churns are ready at the collection point, and it will be your responsibility to inform me if the milk lorry is delayed, right?’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir!’ Mabel practically curtsied with pride. She regarded this change of responsibility as a promotion and was as pleased by the status it involved as her employer had intended her to be. Alice Todd had been the first to draw his attention to this girl who, she had noticed, despite her lack of education and other disadvantages which could only be guessed at, showed intelligence, and in a modest and as yet undeveloped way, ambition. Ferdie, Roger understood, had no such potential. He worked as well as he could with his maimed leg and would continue to do so until he dropped. But he had no aspirations and no more will to improve his lot than his father had, or his father, whom Roger could only dimly remember, before him. He turned back to Mabel, whose bright, brown eyes had not left his. She was not a pretty girl but her two years on the land, and even the recent bearing of the twins, had had their effect on her physique, just as it had developed her personality. She looked solid, confident and robust.

‘Do you think you can arrange those duties to fit in with
your responsibilities for your children?’ he asked her.

‘Oh, yes, sir. Mrs Jack’ll always keep an eye on ’em, and when they grows, Ferdie’ll make ’em a nice, safe playpen!’

‘I shall pay you two pounds and ten shillings per week to begin with, and when we get the milking machine …’

Mabel’s eyes widened.

‘Milking machine!’ she echoed. ‘Will it be like the one over at Mr Lucas’s place? I told Ferdie about it, didn’t I, Ferdie? Lovely it is! All pipes and shiny machinery and it gets ’em milked that quick!’ Roger had been impressed by Mabel’s speedy grasp of the mechanics of the milking machine which his neighbour had recently demonstrated to him, proving its basic simplicity by successfully teaching Mabel how to operate it.

‘Yes,’ he told her, ‘it’ll be just like that one. If you can manage it, and I think you can, I shall put you in charge of it and your wage will be correspondingly increased. How does that sound? Both happy?’

They smiled and nodded. Mabel had always steadfastly believed that when it came down to it, Mrs Todd, Mr Bayliss and Mrs Brewster would, between them, somehow manage to sort out the lives of the Vallance family.

As the wedding guests left the lower farm, the girls, now wearing dungarees, heavy jackets and boots, piled into the lorry that would return them to their work at the higher farm.

Christopher Bayliss, carrying a pile of plates and teacups,
followed Alice through the kitchen and into the scullery where Rose was noisily washing up. Alice was smiling as they returned to the quieter kitchen.

‘You look happy, Mrs Todd,’ he said.

‘It’s one of those days, Christopher,’ she said, ‘when everything seems very positive. A wedding. Babies.’

‘Even if not in the correct order?’

‘In quite the wrong order, in fact! But there’s no harm done!’

‘No harm at all!’ He watched her as, with a heavy teapot in one hand, she used the other to return a handful of knives and teaspoons to a drawer which she then closed by pressing her thigh against it. She moved gracefully and was, Christopher noticed, a very charming woman. No wonder his father was so taken with her.

‘And you!’ she said suddenly, surprising him by cutting across his train of thought. ‘It’s good to see you looking so well and happy!’

Christopher Bayliss was, in fact, hugely changed from the exhausted pilot she had first encountered two years previously, during his brief days of leave, and who, by then, had been perilously close to the breakdown that would see him ignominiously discharged from the RAF.

‘You are unrecognisable, you know!’ she told him. He was, in fact, almost fully restored to the robust and healthy young man he had been when he had reported for duty with his first squadron. His regained physical fitness was obvious and the nightmares and flashbacks that
had tormented him after his breakdown now only rarely broke his sleep. ‘There is only one thing that bothers me,’ Alice said, offering him tea from the pot in her hand. He accepted, sitting down at the table and watching her as she filled his cup and added milk, his dark eyes and sensitive face reminding her, as they often did, of his father.

‘So what is it, Mrs Todd?’ he asked her, slightly indulgently. ‘This thing that bothers you?’

‘It’s really none of my business,’ Alice laughed, suddenly embarrassed. She had, she knew, developed the habit, since she had become warden, of studying the small community of which, for the time being at any rate, her world consisted. She did this, she guessed, partly as a diversion from her own problems – one of which was the enduring bruise caused by her husband’s cold withdrawal from their marriage which had resulted, a few months previously, in divorce. Another was the prospect of the future as a lone mother and the effect of all this on the little boy for whom she must, somehow, properly provide. So, as she worked her way through the duties that filled her days and dealt, as best she could, with the diverse routine problems that arose in the hostel, she had pondered on the lives of the girls in her care, watched them react to the various crises they had to face and, increasingly, found her opinion sought on a whole range of subjects. Their boyfriends, their marriages, debts, illnesses, fears and grievances. When disaster struck and the war took the lives of a brother, sister, mother, father or husband, it
was Alice who had helped them through their grief.

Christopher was smiling, waiting for her to continue. She sat down at the table, her own cup of tea in her hands.

‘It’s this estrangement,’ she began, her voice too low for Rose to overhear it from the scullery, ‘between you and your father. It’s you … living, all this time, by yourself in the woodman’s cottage.’ Christopher lowered his gaze. ‘I could understand it last year when you needed to be alone to sort of …’ she hesitated.

‘Pull myself together?’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘And that was, to some extent, logical. And it has done you good. The exercise. The peace and quiet after what you went through when you were flying. But there was more to your withdrawal into the forest than that, wasn’t there.’ Her words were a statement, not a question. ‘I’m not prying or intruding, but the fact was that all of us – the land girls and the people here who had known you all your life – were bewildered by the way your father treated you.’

‘Not visiting me in the nuthouse, you mean?’

‘Not only that, Christopher. He’d known for weeks that you had … had …’

‘I had deserted, Mrs Todd,’ he said, firmly. ‘Don’t let’s beat about the bush. I had gone AWOL.’

‘And he never told us, Christopher! Never said a word! Kept it to himself! All that time! Then, when the military police found you and arrested you, he turned his back on you! He did! Literally. Everyone saw it and we were
shocked by it. It was as if … as if he was ashamed of you.’

‘He was!’

‘But why? Your record in the RAF was impeccable! You had flown more missions than anyone in your squadron! Too many more! You were exhausted! You were as much a casualty as you would have been if your plane had been blown out of the sky! So why was he ashamed?’ Christopher shrugged.

‘Pa just has a problem with it, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I was a big disappointment to him.’

‘And he was a disappointment to me – to us, I mean,’ she added, quickly. ‘To all of us here.’ Christopher looked baffled. ‘When someone you respect does something that shocks you,’ Alice continued, ‘something that seems out of character, you try to find a reason for it. Or to justify it. To excuse that person so that you can begin to respect them again. So … please forgive me if you feel I have no right to … to pursue this … but I found myself struggling to find a reason for his treatment of you.’ When Christopher made no response she went on. ‘I thought at first his loss of your mother might have had something to do with it.’

‘Could be,’ Christopher said, vaguely. ‘Pa always keeps things very much to himself. Stiff upper lip and all that.’

‘And now you’re sounding just like him!’ Alice smiled briefly and then became serious again. ‘But it is unusual, Chris, to allow one grief to roll on and cause another. You needed him when you were ill. He should have been there
with you. He should have brought you home. Nursed you back to health!’

‘He couldn’t,’ his son said. ‘He just … couldn’t.’

‘No!’ Alice agreed, emphatically. ‘He couldn’t. What interests me is
why
he couldn’t. Why, when it should have been all about you, it seemed to be all about him!’

‘I don’t know, Mrs Todd,’ Christopher said, smiling and shrugging. ‘I honestly don’t! And actually, right at this moment, I don’t much care!’ He was laughing now. Despite the warden’s outburst, Roger Bayliss’s son was laughing and rosy with happiness.

‘You’re blushing!’ Alice exclaimed, peering at him. ‘What has happened to make you so pleased with yourself?’ He got to his feet, rounded the table, and taking her by the shoulders, kissed her on each cheek.

‘Can’t tell you!’ he said happily. ‘Sworn to secrecy!’ He was making for the door. ‘Lovely talking to you, Mrs Todd! Got to go!’ As he left the kitchen Rose Crocker, her hands pink from the washing-up, entered it from the scullery.

‘And what was all that about?’ she demanded.

‘I don’t know, Rose. I honestly don’t. But whatever it is, Christopher Bayliss is happier than I’ve ever seen him!’

‘It’ll be Georgina, then.’ Rose announced as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, which, Alice instantly realised, it was.

Georgina Webster, when, in 1943, she had arrived at Lower Post Stone farm as one of the first intake of girls to be billeted there, had looked, her fellows had thought, very
like the girl on the Ministry of Agriculture posters which were displayed that year, up and down the country, seeking volunteers for the Women’s Land Army.

Georgina was sleek and healthy. The stylish cut of her dark hair suggested the Thirties rather than the Forties when most girls were favouring frizzy curls, created by ‘perms’ and maintained by curlers. Her skin and eyes were clear. Somehow she contrived to make the much despised Land Army uniform look almost elegant.

‘You’ve took in them breeches!’ Marion had accused her.

‘No I haven’t! Honestly!’

‘Well, you’ve lengthened the sleeves of that overcoat! Mine ends above me wrists!’

‘I think it’s just that your arms are longer than mine.’ Even in the dungarees, rubber boots, heavy sweaters and waterproofs which the girls wore day in and day out, Georgina Webster had a style about her that most of the other girls were always aware of and which some of them either resented or envied.

Young women who were well educated, when faced with the necessity of doing ‘war work’, had tended to choose the more glamorous of the armed services, joining the WRENS, the WRAFS or the ATS, rather than working in munition factories or on the land. Consequently, and as a result of schooling that had been brief and often unheeded, the majority of land girls came from families regarded as working class and the Women’s Land Army became
patronisingly referred to as the ‘Cinderella Service’.

Georgina’s choice had not been forced on her by the level of her education, which was high, but by two other factors. The first was that as the elder of two children of a wealthy, East Devon farmer, her brother, two years her junior, could only avoid conscription if she herself volunteered for some form of war work. The second factor was that the Webster family were pacifists and the prospect of any of them being involved in combat was abhorrent to them. Georgina’s farming background made the Land Army an obvious choice and she arrived at the hostel prepared for the disapproval of her fellows.

‘I’m not sharing a room with no “conchie”!’ had been the uncompromising reaction of Marion and Winnie, a couple of outspoken, north-country girls, and Georgina had, at her own request, moved her monogrammed suitcases out of their room and into one of two tiny, drafty spaces above the porch, which were hardly large enough to be described as bedrooms.