Alice's Girls (7 page)

But Dave was remembering Boxing Day when, Reuben having returned to his barracks, he had taken Hester tobogganing. He had settled her between his thighs and kept her safe while they flew downhill and she shrieked with the thrill of it, the cold air making her cheeks glow, snow crystals catching in her pale lashes, and he had loved her so much it seemed impossible that she couldn’t feel it. And perhaps she did feel it. And perhaps it had disturbed her. But Reuben had slipped his grandma’s ruby ring onto her finger only twelve hours previously and there it was, like a drop of blood, the tiny diamonds surrounding the central stone, glittering in the winter sunlight, reminding her of Reuben’s whispered promises. And the next day Dave too was gone, back to his unit with the catering corps.

By May, Hester, three months married, was pregnant. With Reuben soon to be deployed in the Allied invasion of northern France, the American military authorities decided to ship Hester, along with a few hundred other GI brides, out to the States as soon as was feasible. Her pregnancy meant that she could no longer be employed as a land girl and her parents had disowned her, so light domestic work had been found for her at the two farmhouses while she awaited embarkation.

Three weeks after the D-Day landings, news of Reuben’s death reached Hester and she had withdrawn into a private world of grief, into which her father had briefly and cruelly intruded, telling her that because she had defied him she
was cursed and that her sins would bring the wrath of God down onto the heads of all whose lives touched hers.

While Alice was shocked by the effect Jonas Tucker’s visit had on his daughter, and concerned by the distress it caused her, Rose wrestled with more complicated concerns. Hester’s widowhood made it likely that, after a while, Dave would approach her. Rose’s feelings about this were confused. While she was fond of Hester and, in other circumstances, would have welcomed her as a
daughter-in
-law, and although Reuben had been a fine, upstanding lad, she was not entirely happy with the prospect of her son raising another man’s child, having, understandably enough, expected her grandchildren to have been sired by her own son, rather than by someone else’s. This, however, was not her main concern, which lay with Hester’s mental state. Her subservience to her father and to his fanatical religious beliefs seemed, to Rose, to have affected her sanity.

Rose had watched, from her cottage window, when Dave, on a twenty-four-hour pass, approached Hester in the cider apple orchard. She guessed, correctly, that he was asking her to be his wife and promising to raise Reuben’s child as his own, and she knew, by the droop of his shoulders as Hester left him, that she had refused him.

‘I don’t know what to think an’ that’s a fact!’ she confided miserably to Alice. ‘It bain’t so much the babe, ’cos Reuben were a nice enough lad an’ died for his country an’ all.’

‘And for ours, Rose,’ Alice added, quietly.

‘Yes, and for ours. I knows that, Alice … But you can see what I mean, I’m sure. A woman would rather have her own son’s flesh and blood for a grandchild … But, no. It bain’t just that, see, ’tis Hester herself, poor child! She’s … well … a bit … odd, bain’t she, Alice? Which be understandable, what with losing poor Reuben and the way her father do go on! I never heard of a religion so full of evil! ’Ow would my Dave cope with all that? I don’t reckon ’twas Reuben’s death as drove Hester half out of ’er mind, neither! T’was more likely her father and what he said to ’er that day he come ’ere! You ’eard ’im! Wicked it were! Poor child. I don’t know … And now she’s sayin’ she don’t want to go to Reuben’s folks over in America! When that would surely be the best thing all round!’ Rose paused, hoping for Alice’s approval of this solution to Hester’s problems. ‘Don’t you reckon it would be?’ Alice kept to herself her honest opinion, which was that for Rose, Hester’s immediate departure for Bismarck, North Dakota, might have been the ‘best thing’, but for Hester herself, for her unborn child and possibly for Dave, too, it might not be. The warden’s silence on the subject did not escape Rose.

The land girls, who were keenly following every twist and turn of Hester’s story, were more outspoken.

‘I reckon you’d be ’appy to see the back of her, Mrs Crocker,’ was Gwennan’s opinion. ‘Pack her off with the other GI brides, eh? Then p’raps your Dave would settle
for some nice local girl with a dad who’s not a ravin’ loony like that Jonas Tucker!’

‘I just want what’s best for Hester,’ Rose declared emphatically, but the other girls were clearly sceptical and the discussion would have continued had Alice not put a stop to it.

Two days later Hester vanished. Although officially, having left the Land Army, her welfare was no longer its responsibility, Margery Brewster, as local village registrar, assuming that Hester had returned to her parents’ smallholding in north Devon, had persuaded the Ministry of Agriculture to allocate to her enough petrol for her to drive over the moor to confirm Hester’s safe arrival there.

While Margery’s description of what she found – the near derelict cottage, Hester tremulous and silent under the sharp eyes of her hostile parents – had depressed everyone at the hostel, it was Rose who was most lastingly affected by it. She knew that Dave’s feelings for Hester were unlikely to change and was unsurprised when, months later, when the time had passed when the baby’s birth was due, Dave rode his bicycle north-westwards, over the moor.

The baby girl, he told his mother when he arrived home, soaked to the skin by icy, November rain, was to be called Thurza. Hester seemed well enough, although her father was now bedridden, cursed, Hester insisted, by the same evil that her sins had brought down on all her family.

‘First Reuben,’ she had told Dave, ‘then my father, getting the fallin’ down sickness, and if I don’t repent,
t’will soon be my baby! Stay away from me, Dave, or it could be you who’s next to suffer for my sins!’

‘So she be just the same, then?’ Rose asked Dave while he sat, his clothes steaming, sipping hot tea by her fire. ‘About the religion and that?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, dully, ‘she be just the same. But I can’t let go of her, Mum. I won’t never let go of Hester.’

Rose bought a rag doll for Thurza’s first Christmas and Dave wrote a message to go with it and posted it in mid December at Ledburton post office. They did not hear from Hester and did not know that her mother, on her father’s instructions, had burnt the doll in the grate on the day it arrived. Hester had read Dave’s message before her mother threw it, too, into the flames. In it he promised to fetch her whenever she would come to him and told her he would love her for ever.

With her son now serving in northern France, Rose found herself consumed with anxiety not only for him but, because he loved her, for Hester herself and for the child whom she had begun, almost without realising it, to regard as her granddaughter. ‘Matinee jackets is all very well, Thurza,’ she murmured to herself, knitting needles clicking as she cast on the required number of stitches, ‘but what a little girl needs this time of year is leggin’s! Nice, warm, woolly leggin’s!’ So she knitted leggings and the land girls, asking who the baby clothes were for, were amazed when she told them.

‘How on earth did you get there, Rose?’ Alice asked, one late afternoon a few weeks later, when Rose arrived back from her trek across the moor to the Tucker smallholding.

‘Got the early bus from Exeter to Bideford and started walkin’,’ she said. ‘Then a fellow in a milk truck give me a lift! Right to the Tuckers’ gate! And ’e said as ’e’d give a toot on his horn on his way back!’

‘And did you see Hester?’

‘I did,’ said Rose, crisply. ‘She come out the cottage and we stood in the yard with her ma peepin’ through the curtains at us! I give her the leggin’s and she were that pleased! She said to tell Dave she got his message at Christmas and thanked him for the doll, but when I asked her if Thurza liked it she looked away. She said her father can’t walk no more and Zeke was called up some time ago. Down the mines, they’ve sent ’im. In Wales. Bevin Boys, they’re called … I don’t know how they Tuckers live, Alice! Their place be that run-down! Then Hester said she must go back inside, but she come to the window with Thurza in her arms, so I could ’ave a look at ’er. She’s a bonny child. Golden curls, she’s got, just like her mother’s. And the same blue eyes! But she shouldn’t be there, Alice. Not in that house. Not with that man. Neither of ’em should be.’

With the twins thriving, their parents respectably married, Mabel now in charge of the dairy and the proud mistress of the newly installed milking machine, all should have
been well in the Vallance household. But it was not so. Despite the fact that Germany was facing inevitable defeat, the V2 rocket assaults on the south-east of England continued, as, in consequence, did Mabel’s concern for her firstborn who, since his inappropriate birth, when she had been barely sixteen, had been virtually adopted by Mabel’s grandmother, a woman now in her early eighties and in declining health. Encouraged by the news that her granddaughter was now a married woman with not only a husband and a home of her own but also now with twin babies, Ada Hodges had written, in her laboured, cursive hand, to ask when she might expect to be relieved of the responsibility of raising her great-grandchild.

Ferdie’s assumed ignorance of Arthur’s true parentage overlooked the fact that although his mind might work in the same lurching, uncertain and hesitant way as his damaged leg, he nevertheless possessed the practical, slow-burning shrewdness common to Devonians. Without descending into artful cunning, Ferdie was astute and observant enough to have come to the conclusion that Mabel’s feelings for little Arthur were stronger than is usual between a girl and her baby brother. Where Arthur was concerned Mabel was not merely fond and affectionate, she was defensive, protective and passionate. More, in fact, like a mother than a big sister. Perhaps, possibly without being conscious of it, Ferdie may have absorbed a
half-heard
piece of gossip, or caught the expressions on the faces of his wife’s fellow land girls when, on visits to the farm,
they had observed the relationship between the plump and motherly girl and the little boy who so closely resembled her. Whichever way it had happened, Ferdie, possibly by a process of osmosis, found himself in possession of the fact that Arthur was Mabel’s child. Concerning a decision about how this fact should be addressed, Ferdie had made little or no progress and had failed to respond satisfactorily to Mabel’s increasingly frequent references to it.

‘Me Gran’s poorly,’ she told him one day, after carefully rereading the old lady’s most recent letter. ‘She reckons Arthur’d be better off here with me now I’m married. So what d’you reckon, Ferdie?’ She watched her husband consider this while he forked his way through a plate of baked beans which, with a solitary sausage and a pile of mashed swede, was all Mabel had managed to produce for his supper that evening. ‘Gran says that three kids is no more work than two.’

‘Do she now!’ he mumbled, with his mouth full. ‘An’ what about the dairy? The boss be payin’ you to run ’is milkin’ machine, Mabel, not to play sadie sadie, married lady!’

‘Mrs Jack and Mrs Fred’ll keep an eye on Arthur, you knows that. And the twins is good as gold – so long as me milk holds out. And by the look of me,’ she said, glancing down confidently at her impressive breasts, ‘these’ll keep ’em quiet for a good few months yet!’

But Ferdie would not commit himself, and tension grew in the tiny cottage which always seemed to smell
of something. Washing. Tom cats. Dirty nappies. Ferdie’s pipe. Mabel’s milk …

Until, one morning, Margery Brewster, driving between hostels on her usual rounds, saw, ahead of her in the lane, a familiar figure. She was surprised to recognise Mabel Hodges or rather Mrs Ferdinand Vallance as Mabel had recently become. Mabel, striding strongly towards the railway station, had, tucked under each of her arms, a baby.

The village registrar slowed her car to walking pace beside Mabel, wound down her window and asked her what on earth she thought she was doing. Mabel kept walking.

‘If he won’t ’ave all of us, ’e’s not ’avin’ none of us!’ she announced with breathless emphasis.

Margery Brewster knew the facts of Mabel’s irregular history and that the small boy whom she had at first insisted was her brother was, in fact, her son, but it took her some time to understand that Mabel, exasperated by her husband’s prevarication, had decided to deprive him of her presence and that of their twins until he agreed to absorb little Arthur into his family. ‘It’s no good your sayin’ nothin’, Mrs Brewster! I’ve been that patient with Ferdie you wouldn’t believe! Now me mind’s made up!’ Mabel had stopped walking and was standing, breathing heavily. The weight of her two robust babies was considerable, and tired of being jolted along and clutched too tightly, both were now writhing noisily. ‘I’m off to me gran’s,’ Mabel
announced, shouting above the clamour of the twins. ‘If he wants us he’ll have to come and get us! And if I stands ’ere talkin’ I’m gonna miss me flippin’ train!’ She strode on, staggering slightly, under the weight of her wailing babies.

Margery hesitated briefly and then, almost as much to her own surprise as to Mabel’s, moved alongside her.

‘Get in the car, Mabel!’ she said. ‘Quickly!’

After depositing Mabel on the station platform, Margery drove back to the farm to find Ferdie standing in the centre of the yard, a look of total devastation on his usually placid face.

‘It’s me Mabel!’ he told her. ‘Me Mabel’s gone! And she’s took me twins wiv ’er!’

Three hours later, after a long and serious discussion with Margery Brewster, which was followed by a shorter one, involving Roger Bayliss and Alice Todd, and which focused on the needs of the farm as opposed to the drama within the Vallance household, Ferdie capitulated. He wanted his twins and his wife back, and having been encouraged to regard little Arthur as his stepson, promised to be a proper father to him. Ferdie put on his wedding suit, and with Mabel’s London address on a piece of paper in his breast pocket, boarded the next London train.