Alice's Girls (8 page)

‘But how on earth will he find her?’ Alice wondered, as she and Roger stood on the platform at Ledburton Halt and waved goodbye to Ferdie whose face, as he was borne away, wore the look of a man delivered neck and crop to
the will of God. ‘He’s never been to London before!’

Ferdie found a seat in the smoky compartment in which four dishevelled soldiers were already sprawled, two asleep and two playing cards for matchsticks.

‘Got wounded, did yer?’ one asked, having noticed Ferdie’s limp as he lurched into the carriage.

‘In a manner of speakin’,’ Ferdie told him, ‘but not in the war. A rollin’ tractor did for me. I works on the land, see.’ The soldier inhaled the last fumes from his roll-up and narrowed his eyes against the smoke.

‘So where’re you off to now, then?’ he asked, and Ferdie paused before replying that he was going to London to fetch home his wife and kids who were visiting her family. He produced the scrap of paper on which the warden had printed the address of Mabel’s grandmother.

‘Over to some place called Deptford, she be,’ he added, vaguely. The soldier ground his fag end into the littered floor.

‘That’s where our Charlie’s headin’, innit, mate!’ he said, nudging his companion’s shin with the toe of his boot.

This chance encounter with Corporal Charlie Arnold proved to be a blessing to Ferdie, who otherwise might never have found his way out of Paddington station, let alone across London to the distant neighbourhood where Mabel had arrived some hours previously. He limped after Charlie as they crossed the city on an underground train, rode on one bus and then on another. Then, with Charlie’s instructions ringing in his confused ears, Ferdie
had negotiated a final maze of grimy streets, checked the address against the scrap of paper Alice Todd had given him and knocked on a door which had been opened by Mabel. His Mabel.

Within three hours, his wife trotting beside him and towing Arthur by the hand, Ferdie Vallance, with a twin under each of his arms, had recrossed London and installed himself and his family in the overcrowded carriage of a train that was due to arrive at Ledburton Halt late that evening.

Ferdie was never quite the same after that. What he had undertaken and what he had achieved amazed him. He had followed Charlie down tunnels, ridden in strange trains that turned day into night, climbed on and off buses that had seats upstairs as well as down, the like of which he had seen only in cinema newsreels. He had made his way along streets where the brickwork was as black as the inside of a country chimney. He had found Mabel and his twins and fetched them home. It was true that he had been made to agree to give young Arthur his name and raise him as his own but that, he assured himself, had always been his intention. He just hadn’t got round to it as fast as Mabel had expected, that was all. He was a family man now. A man with responsibilities. He had even been to London. The thin, limping man, who, when Mabel first arrived at the Post Stone farms, had been living in a filthy hovel, his clothes unwashed and his cupboard, more often than not, bare, was now a husband and a father of three, with food in his pantry and a fire warming his kitchen.

Three weeks later and with Roger Bayliss’s solicitor handling the legal side of Arthur’s adoption, the little boy was christened, together with his infant half-brother and -sister. From that day on he became known as Arthur George (after the King) Vallance.

‘Lunnon?’ Ferdie would brag at every opportunity. ‘Bin to Lunnon? ’Course I ’as! Wouldn’t give ’e tuppence for it, though! Bain’t no place for my family! Fetched ’em home quick smart, I did!’

A mild, moist spring, followed in mid-April by warm sunshine, meant that an early crop of hay was almost ready for mowing by the first week in May, by which time the war in Europe was dragging through its final days. Although the news had not yet been made public, Adolf Hitler had already perished in his bunker. The land girls had pored over newspapers displaying gruesome and grainy photographs of Mussolini, his bullet-riddled body swinging by his heels above a crowd of jeering Italians.

‘I s’pose they’ll be sendin’ the Eyetie POWs ’ome now, won’t they, Mrs Todd?’ Evie asked, and Alice said yes, she supposed they would be.

The world seemed to hold its breath until, at one minute after midnight on Tuesday May the eighth, the end of the war with Germany was officially declared.

That day church bells rang. Special prayers were said in schools from which the children poured, allowed home early, to celebrate. The horns of vehicles blared through
towns and villages. Trains roared across the countryside, the drivers sounding their whistles in a continuous, triumphant screech and waving out of their cabs at everyone – and everyone waved back.

At the higher farm, Roger Bayliss, defying regulations, had a pig slaughtered and set to roast above a fire supervised by Ferdie Vallance, Mr Jack and Mr Fred, whose wives, together with Eileen, Mabel and Rose, set about turning any food they could lay their hands on into buns and puddings and pies. Land girls from some of the other, smaller hostels in the neighbourhood were to join the Post Stone girls and bring with them their own contributions to the festivities, and by six o’clock, having rushed through their evening ablutions in record time, curled their hair, applied their make-up and put on their prettiest frocks, Alice’s girls had arrived at the higher farm, where they were joined by Margery Brewster and her groups of land girls from nearby hostels and where they had all been greeted by the intoxicating smell of pork, perfectly roasted over a fire which was now reduced to a shimmering pile of powdery, white-hot ashes, and were clustering round the barrel from which Mr Jack was filling glass after glass with cider.

Trestle tables covered in white sheets ran the length of the yard and would be lit, as the light faded, by a row of oil lamps and candles placed down the centre of each. Every chair, bench, milking stool and garden seat at Higher Post Stone and from the labourers’ cottages had been commandeered. Roger Bayliss presided at one end of the
table, with Alice on his right and Margery Brewster on his left, Gordon, her beaming husband, beside her. Then came the farm workers and their wives and then the Post Stone land girls and their visitors.

Two hours later, when everyone had eaten all the food, drunk all the cider and sung all the songs, Roger Bayliss got to his feet, and followed by Margery Brewster, spoke solemnly about the ending of the war with Germany and of the land girls’ contribution to the victory. Then they all charged their glasses, rose to their feet and drank two toasts, one to the King and one to Winston Churchill.

‘’Ere’s to Winnie!’ the girls roared. ‘Good ol’ Winnie!’ This was followed by ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ and the national anthem.

Edward John, who had been fetched home from boarding school, was given the honour of putting a taper to the towering bonfire which had been assembled that afternoon and stood in an adjacent field, safely downwind of the farmhouse. He could only dimly remember the
pre-war
firework parties, the last of which he had been taken to at the age of six. He stood back from the growing heat of the fire, watching, round-eyed, as the flames took hold, curling towards a pale sky. The bells in Ledburton church tower were ringing again but their sound was soon drowned by the roar of the bonfire and the shouts of laughter as everyone joined hands, and with glowing faces and shining eyes, moved round it in a wide, noisy circle.

That day Christopher had caught, borne on the wind and from various distances, the sound of church bells pealing in the belfries of the steeples scattered across the valley his woodland overlooked. For five years the ringing of bells would have announced an invasion by the German army, something which, during the early years of the war, had seemed inevitable. Today, with that army routed and its leaders captured or dead, the bells confirmed that the news everyone had been waiting for had finally broken. Hoping that Georgina might have snatched a few hours leave in order to join her parents to celebrate it, Christopher drove the truck, cross-country, to their farm.

‘She telephoned,’ her mother told him and was touched by the disappointment in his face. ‘But there was some official celebration at the base at White Waltham which she had to attend. She hopes to be home in a day or so and I’m sure she’ll come and see you then. I believe she has some news for you,’ she added, smiling. ‘Don’t ask me what. I’m sure she wants to tell you herself.’

Christopher was struck, forcefully but not for the first time, by how closely Isabel Webster resembled her daughter. She was regarding him now with the same direct eyes and the same quizzical expression that Georgina often wore. She caught his look.

‘What?’ she asked, smiling.

‘Nothing! I mean … I hadn’t noticed before how incredibly alike you and Georgie are.’

‘That is because,’ Georgina’s father said, his pipe
clenched between his teeth, ‘when my daughter is here your eyes are on her and not on her mother! Which is, of course, just as it should be!’

Two days later the sound of Lionel’s motorbike broke the silence of the woodland and Georgina was dismounting, unwinding her scarf and welcoming Christopher’s kiss.

‘You are looking at a person who has just resigned their commission!’ she announced, stepping back from him and executing a neat RAF salute. ‘In four weeks’ time I’ll be in Civvy Street!’

He led her through a stand of beech trees where new foliage, which would darken as the summer proceeded, was still a fragile lettuce green above drifts of bluebells. They lay down together on a rustling pile of last year’s fallen leaves. Their lovemaking had become a sequence of enchanting encounters. They treasured the privacy of the woodman’s cottage but once, on her father’s land, a thunderstorm had driven them into a barn where a pile of hay had proved irresistible. On another rainy occasion, on the way back from a farm sale where Christopher had bought some equipment, they had been suddenly so overcome that Christopher had driven the truck up a green lane and they had made love with the rain drumming on the cab roof. Days became weeks and then a month had passed and they had not told either her parents or his father their plans.

Since the day, many months previously, when Gwennan, self-diagnosed with the cancer that would surely kill her,
had spitefully deprived Marion of a letter intended for her from her GI admirer, she had frequently experienced a frisson of shame. But, she persuaded herself, what was done was done. How could she undo it, even if she wanted to? The letter lay where it had fallen when she had deliberately let it slip from the shelf of the kitchen dresser where the land girls’ mail was always propped, ready for them to claim when they arrived back from work. It had lain now for many months, undetected amongst the dusty cobwebs caught between the massive piece of furniture and the wall against which it stood. What possible reason was there to pull the dresser away from the wall? How, otherwise, would the letter ever be discovered? After six months or so had passed, Gwennan had half-hoped that Rose, while spring cleaning the kitchen, might have found it but, probably because of the weight of the dresser, she obviously had not attempted to sweep behind it.

Then, on a thundery evening, not long after the VE Day celebrations, when the girls were polishing off their rice pudding, Evie screamed shrilly and pointed at something that was crawling clumsily across the kitchen floor.

‘It’s only a bat!’ Annie said. ‘Shut up, Evie, or you’ll scare it!’ Whether it was Evie’s scream or Annie’s approach, the little creature took fright, scurried across the slate floor and inserted itself into the tiny space between the dresser and the wall.

‘Best leave ’im,’ Rose said. ‘’E’ll come out when he sees fit.’

‘But ’e might get stuck!’

‘’E could die be’ind there!’

‘And then ’e’ll stink!’

Gwennan watched as four of the girls heaved at the dresser and, struggling with its weight, managed to ease one end of it a few inches away from the wall. They craned forward, peering into the dark space.

‘Ooooh, there it is! Yuck!’

‘It’s horrible!’

‘Don’t go near it!’ Winnie shrieked. ‘It’s a vampire! They suck your blood, they do! And then you die! I saw it at the pictures!’

The bat had crawled as far as it could from the looming, shouting faces and had wedged itself tightly into the sharp angle where the dresser touched the wainscot.

‘Out the way!’ Rose ordered. She’d show them how a true country woman deals with such things. With one firm stroke of her besom she drew the little creature towards her, lifted it off the floor in the folds of her apron and shook it out of the kitchen window where it flickered away into the twilight. ‘Don’t go moving the dresser back,’ she said, ‘’til I fetch me dustpan and brush and sweep be’ind it.’ The girls watched as Rose lowered herself onto her knees, reached forward and began to raise the dust, muttering virtuously about making a proper job of it whilst she was at it. ‘There be a comb behind ’ere,’ she announced, her voice muffled in the confined space. ‘And a pencil …’ She emerged, crawling breathlessly backwards and sat on her
heels, a spider’s web caught in her greying hair, the comb and the pencil safely in her dustpan. ‘And there’s this!’ she said, brandishing a letter.

The letter was thick with dust. Something had nibbled at one corner and the ink of the address was smudged.

For one unguarded moment Gwennan’s eyes were locked onto the envelope. Then she gathered herself.

‘Who’s it for, then?’ she asked, as casually as she could. Rose peered at the scrawled address.

‘Can’t see without me specs,’ she said, handing the letter to Winnie.

‘Marion!’ Winnie read. ‘Miss Marion Grice!’ Her face was alight with excitement as she turned the letter over. The name and rank of the sender were printed on the reverse side. ‘Oh, Marion! It’s from the little sergeant! He didn’t die after all! And he’s wrote to you! I just knew he would! Oh, Marion! He’s wrote to you!’

‘Give it here, then!’ Marion said abruptly, and with her eyes lowered, took the letter and left the kitchen. They heard the creak of the stairs. The faces of the other girls were alive with curiosity and speculation. They remembered the stocky GI sergeant who had taken a shine to Marion and then vanished, as so many men had, lost, more often than not permanently, in the chaos of the war.