Alice's Girls (4 page)

‘And …’ Alice was hesitant, ‘you’re going with him?’

‘Of course I am! I can’t just walk out on the ATA, of course. But as soon as I can, we’ll just … get married and go!’

‘Have you thought …
really
thought, about leaving everything – everyone – behind? Your parents, Georgie?
Christopher’s father?’ She paused, watching Georgina’s face. ‘Oh, dear! That’s what’s at the bottom of all this, isn’t it! This wretched problem between father and son.’ Georgina sighed. After a moment’s silence she admitted that it was true that Christopher now found his relationship with his father impossible and felt the only solution was to get away from it.

‘He’s always been a bit weird, apparently, but since Chris was chucked out of the RAF his father can’t even look him in the eye, Alice! You saw what he was like when it happened. It’s no better now. Chris has had enough of being treated as though he was a coward when he was
not
a coward! Of feeling a failure when he never failed! It’s just … intolerable! His father has virtually driven him away, Alice! Chris loves this place! Post Stone valley is his home! He would probably have taken on the farms when his father wanted him to. But now he says he simply cannot bear to spend the rest of his life facing that look! The accusation, Alice! The reproach! So he’s going. And I’m going with him. Only you must promise not to breathe a word just yet.’

It was at this point that Rose, having finished sweeping the bedrooms, entered the kitchen.

‘All right, Georgina?’ she enquired, curtly.

‘Yes, thanks, Mrs Crocker.’

‘Well that’s good then, isn’t it?’ Rose continued, making an irritable clatter with dustpan and brush as she returned them to their cupboard. Whether Rose disapproved of
Georgina’s recent behaviour, or whether she was miffed because she felt excluded from the latest developments in the story, Alice was unsure. ‘Only, your father was very worried about you, the night of the storm when no one knew where you was,’ Rose continued, shooting a sharp glance at Alice who contrived to avoid it. ‘Very worried indeed, he was, poor gentleman.’

‘The track was blocked,’ Georgina said, truthfully, if lamely, ‘by a fallen tree …’ She floundered on, unsure of precisely what Alice had told Rose about the deception of that night.

‘A fallen tree, was there?’ Rose muttered, sourly. ‘Well, that’s as maybe, I daresay.’ She had replaced her plimsolls with the rubber boots she wore in the yard and was moving towards the kitchen door. ‘I’d best go see if them ’ens ’as got round to layin’ again. Proper tardy they be, lately …’ Her voice trailed into silence and she closed the yard door, more firmly than was necessary, behind her.

It was a Friday night. Edward John Todd normally left his weekly boarding school early enough to catch the four o’clock bus from Exeter to Ledburton village where, although it meant making a slight detour, Mr Jack, his lorry laden with tired, muddy land girls, would pick him up and deliver him to his mother, where he would spend the weekend with her at the farm. Today there had been a telephone call from the school matron. Several of the small boys who shared a dormitory with Edward John had developed chickenpox. Although he was not one of them, the matron, who knew about the girls in Alice’s care, suggested that until it was certain that Edward John was not infected it might be sensible for him to remain at the school. Alice had agreed.

‘Has anyone ever had chickenpox?’ she asked her girls as they devoured the steak and kidney pie – which, because the butcher had been able to supply only a very small piece of stringy meat and one kidney, consisted mainly of onion, swede and carrot.

‘I have,’ Gwennan murmured with her mouth full. ‘You gets spots.’

‘And you itch,’ Winnie told them. ‘I ’ad it when I was a nipper. You did too, Marion.’ The two of them had known each other for as long as they could remember, living
next-door
- but-one in the same grimy street.

‘I never!’

‘You did too! And your brother Herbert.’

‘That were mumps!’

‘Mumps too! We all ’ad everything, we did! Mumps, measles, croup and the chickenpox!’

At ten o’clock Alice, assuming that all of the girls who had gone out that evening had returned together, was surprised, when she went to lock the outer door, to find a latecomer hurrying up the path.

‘You only just made it, Evie!’ she laughed. ‘I thought you came in with the others!’ Evie seemed disconcerted and apologised, stammering out some complicated explanation for her separation from the other land girls until Alice interrupted her, assuring her, as she turned the lock in the door, that there was no harm done. She had called goodnight as the girl went quickly up the stairs, after which she thought no more about it, made herself a cup of
cocoa and carried it through the quiet recreation room and into the bed-sitting room which, when he was home from boarding school, she shared with her son. Alice’s room was on the ground floor of the farmhouse and ran the width of the squat, old building. There was a window at each end of it and a small fireplace broke one wall, its breast intruding into the oddly shaped space and suggesting two areas. A pair of threadbare armchairs faced the fireplace and there were divan beds, disguised with rugs and cushions, under each of the windows. Usually, at this time on a Friday night, Edward John would be in his bed, often still reading, sometimes already asleep. Alice had grown to accept his absence from Sunday evenings until late Friday afternoons, but treasured the two nights in each seven when he was with her. Tonight his absence depressed her.

Although the room was still warm, her fire was almost out. It would have rekindled easily enough if she had thrown a handful of twigs onto the embers, but she did not and sat, sipping the cocoa. She wondered why she was missing Edward John so keenly and realised suddenly that this was not what was lowering her spirits. The ramifications of the news Georgina had confided were, she realised, more serious and more complex than she had at first thought and, worryingly, indirectly involved Alice herself.

It was not simply that Georgina had sworn her to secrecy but that Christopher’s plan to emigrate was the direct result of his father’s treatment of him, which, although the father might not realise it, was about to drive the son
from his home as surely as if he had been banished from it. It was possible, too, that Georgina’s assumption of the basic qualities of care and sympathy which Roger Bayliss had failed to deliver at the time of his son’s breakdown, had made Christopher more aware of that failure than he might otherwise have been. His girl had provided concern and support when his father had failed to do so. As a result, Christopher had cast Georgina in a role that had been at odds with a more conventional boy-girl relationship. This had proved too challenging for her and she had, for a while at least, withdrawn from it. Eventually, with Christopher recovered and Georgina recognising the strength of her feelings for him, they had rediscovered each other. Alice’s concern now was for Roger Bayliss who, if he could not be persuaded to address the difficulty between himself and his son, was going to lose him, possibly for ever. Yet Alice’s promise to Georgina made it impossible for her to warn Roger of Christopher’s decision or to disclose the reason for it.

As she sat, her cup of cocoa growing cold between her palms, turning the problem over and over in her mind and finding no solution to it, the rain began. There was no wind behind it. It fell in a steady and increasingly noisy torrent. Its impact on the farmhouse itself was muffled by the thatch, but it hammered, deafeningly, on the iron roof of the lean-to where logs for the fires were stored. Downpipes spluttered and water barrels overflowed, flooding the patch of sodden grass between
the porch and the low wall which separated it from the lane.

As dawn broke behind a leaden sky, and the girls, whose waterproofs would be no match for this downpour, ran, heads bowed, out to the truck that would take them up to the higher farm, Alice could see that the whole of the floor of Post Stone valley, barely visible through the solid wall of rain, was already inundated by a sheen of shallow water.

Rose, stumbling under her warped umbrella, crossed the flooded yard, the puddles almost overtopping her rubber boots, and announced that she’d never seen such rain.

‘And it’ll not stop, Alice, not with cloud like that it won’t! And no wind to shift it! You mark my words!’ And she was right.

Mostly, the Post Stone girls laboured as a team, working in uneven lines, hoeing their way down the long rows of brassicas, lifting the potato crop, filling hessian bags with sprouts, turning the hay, or stooking the barley and the oats at harvest time. Sometimes, when the work required it, the girls would be split up into smaller groups of four, three or even two. When it was two, Marion and Winnie usually contrived to work together on whatever task was assigned to them, and so it was, that on the first day of the flooding, the pair of them were in one of the lower meadows where the ewes were huddled miserably, their fleeces, despite their resistance to water, already heavy with it.

Marion and Winnie had been instructed to open the
small gate that gave onto a field where the land rose steeply towards the area of the Post Stone farms known as ‘The Tops’ – where the sheep would be safe from the rising water levels in the lower meadows – to drive them through the gate and fasten it behind them.

The girls, rain running off their waterproof coats and dripping from the wide brims of felt hats – which, dusty, warped and dating from the First World War, they had bought for sixpence each from an army surplus store in Exeter – could barely see through the downpour. Their rubber-booted feet slithered dangerously on the muddy riverbank.

‘Watch out, Win!’ Marion shouted above the roar of the flooded stream as Winnie struggled to keep her balance. ‘Don’t think I’m comin’ after you if you fall in!’ In fact, if either Winnie or Marion ever did need rescuing, then Marion or Winnie would instantly have volunteered. Closer than many sisters, the two girls had grown up together, walking to school along the bleak streets of the north-country suburb in which they, like their parents, had been born and bred and where, had it not been for the outbreak of Second World War, they would probably have seen out their days: working in a nearby factory, marrying a local likely – or possibly unlikely – lad and raising a clutch of undernourished and undereducated kids whose fate would have been similar to their own. But these two small girls had soon grown to be different from their peers. Whether it was the effect of one upon the other, or whether
each possessed similar characteristics which would have emerged independently, no one would ever know, but the fact was that these children both began, at an early age, to develop a strong sense of ambition. They had aspirations. There were things for which, even when they were very young, they longed.

Marion, always a plain child, understood, when she first viewed her reflection in her mother’s dressing table mirror, that to look the way she wanted to look was going to be a challenge.

By their early teens the girls were in love with the cinema and the glamorous creatures they stared at,
round-eyed
with admiration, whenever they could raise the ninepence each which it cost them to gain entry to their local picture palace. They would sit through the cartoons, tolerate the Pathé News and squirm with impatience while the organist, posed in front of silky curtains and bathed in a familiar sequence of changing lights, worked his way through a repertoire which seemed, to the two impatient children, interminable. Then, at last, bolt upright in their velvet seats, Marion and Winnie would revel in the feature films.

By their mid teens Marion was determined to look like Jean Harlow. As soon as she was allowed to she would reach for the bleach bottle, pluck her untidy brows and pencil in provocative replacements. Winnie, the prettier of the two, took Jane Russell as her role model and planned to perm her dark hair until it stood out in the same stiff
frizz as her heroine. By sixteen, both girls, still restrained by their strict, working-class parents, were labouring in a factory which manufactured small metal objects – the purpose of which they neither knew nor cared to know – and were obliged to contribute, to their respective parents, half of their weekly wage towards their keep. It was at that time that they identified their ambition and focused on a lifestyle which they decided they would enjoy and which, with luck and hard work, they believed they might be able to achieve.

‘You want to run a pub? What,
you
two?’ had been the astonished reaction of Marion’s uncle Ted when, because he seemed to them to be a man of the world, they unveiled their plan.

‘Why not?’ Marion had challenged. ‘There’s lots of women running pubs!’

‘Mostly they’re just hired to manage ’em,’ Ted told her, suppressing a persistent cough as he drew cigarette smoke into lungs already damaged by mustard gas in the trenches of the First World War. ‘They’re not your actual landlord.’

‘Maybe not, but that’s what we’re gonna be, Uncle Ted. Actual landlords. Lady landlords.’

‘With our own licence!’ Winnie had added, firmly.

‘You’ll be wanting to buy a lease, you mean?’

‘Yeah!’ Marion told him, although she was unsure what a lease was, where you got one or how much whatever it was would cost.

‘Blimey! And what are you gonna use for money, eh?’ Ted asked them, watching their expressions cloud.

‘We’ll save up,’ Marion announced. ‘We’re both earning. We’ll put money away. A bit every week til—’

‘’Til doomsday!’ Ted told her, laughing wheezily. ‘You’re talking big money for a lease on an even half-decent pub!’

‘What d’you call “big money”?’ Winnie enquired, nervously.

‘Five hundred quid, I reckon. Minimum. Then youse gotta get licensed and that’s not easy. They’re choosy who they give a licence to, specially where women’s concerned. And two young girls … I dunno … What d’you want a pub for, anyhow? Funny thing for a couple a kids like you to want!’

But it was what they wanted and what they continued to want over the years which led the country up to and into the Second World War. By then Marion and Winnie had opened a joint post office savings account. On the day war was declared it contained seventy-five pounds, three shillings and sixpence and the girls were in their early twenties.

Hopes of joining the WRENS, the WRAF or the ATS were soon dashed. Both Marion and Winnie had left the elementary school – where they had sat carving boys’ initials into their desktops, dreaming of freedom and paying very little attention to their teachers – as soon as the law allowed. They could read, write, add up, take away and divide, but that was all. The smartly uniformed women at the military
recruitment centre had been unimpressed, not only by this lack of education but by the slightly confrontational manner both girls exhibited when they were interviewed.

‘What are we supposed to do, then?’ Marion demanded when first one and then another of the armed services rejected them.

‘You’ll have to choose between a munition factory and the Women’s Land Army,’ they had been dismissively informed.

They had opted for the Land Army because, as Marion announced to her astounded family, ‘We feel like a bit of a change!’ This was partly true. The prospect of employment at the munition factory, a gloomy establishment only a few miles from their homes, seemed to offer a life unacceptably similar to their existing one. The countryside would provide not only a change of scenery but an escape from the parental discipline which, despite the fact that they were by now grown women, continued to restrict the way they dressed and behaved.

‘We seen your girl down the pub,’ a neighbour had whispered to Winnie’s mother. ‘Singin’, she was, round the piano with a load of soldiers, and that Marion were sittin’ on one of ’em’s knee!’

They had been issued with uniforms and a railway pass and had sat, all day, in a crowded train which rattled interminably southwards. In a howling gale, it lurched to a stop at Ledburton Halt, where they stepped down onto a rain-swept platform and were met by a man in a truck
that reeked of something which would soon become all too familiar to them. Dung.

‘Phoar!’ Marion exclaimed. ‘What’s that pong?’ The man, whom they later came to know as Mr Jack, shrugged and turned his attention to the twisting lane which was narrower, steeper and muddier than any roadway either Marion or Winnie had ever seen before.

Working conditions on the Post Stone farms came as a shock to both girls, who had been allocated to Roger Bayliss a year before he had decided to use the lower farmhouse as a billet. During that year, while they struggled with the hard physical labour and had survived their first wet, cold, Devonian winter, they had been housed in an attic room in Ledburton’s only pub. Here, not only were conditions more comfortable than the homes they had left, but the saloon bar was immediately beneath their bedroom floorboards, together with the social life that came with it. Here they met the few local men who had, for one reason or another, escaped conscription, and better still, the increasing numbers of American servicemen, the GIs, who were undergoing training in preparation for the Allies’ inevitable invasion of northern France.