Land Girls Read online

  Ag turned away, clasping her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Well done, you’re over half way,’ she heard Joe say.

  Ag turned to look again. She saw Prue more clearly now, creeping along the crossbeam, arms stiffly outstretched, awkward, determined, brave. Her thin white legs were lit by the torch. Far below, Ag caught sight of thick regulation socks and heavy brown shoes cast into the hay.

  She saw Prue pause, flutter, not daring to look down. Her left foot wavered, suddenly unsure where to land. The toes panicked. She was nearly at the end, where a ladder waited. But she could not make it.

  She saw Prue fall into the darkness, heard her scream.

  No one in the house could have heard because at the same moment a distant siren began to wail. Its mournful voice and the ragged shriek coiled together, then were split by a sound even closer to Ag as a terrified bantam ran squawking from the barn across the yard. To save? Or to protect? Ag found herself running towards the house before she had time to make a decision. She saw the door open, the figure of Mrs Lawrence holding a candle.

  ‘I was looking for a bantam,’ she cried.

  ‘Never mind the bantam: straight down into the cellar.’ Mrs Lawrence slammed the door behind Ag. ‘You didn’t see Joe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He must be at The Bells. Either there or on his way back.’

  The siren was fading. Ag followed Mrs Lawrence down the cellar steps. Stella was already there, sitting on the floor beside a small rack of ginger wine, a pad of writing paper and a pen on her knee – scarcely interrupted, it seemed.

  ‘You didn’t see Prue?’ Mrs Lawrence was brusque in her anxiety.

  ‘She might have gone to The Bells, too. She was upset about that tractor business,’ said Ag.

  Mrs Lawrence gave a sharp sigh. ‘Little fool,’ she said.

  Ag sat on the cold stone floor beside Stella.

  ‘You all right?’ Stella asked, smiling, still half-entangled by the thought of her letter.

  Ag nodded. She wrapped her arms round her bent knees, pressing them against her body, trying to extract the various feelings: the fear of bombs, the guilt at lying, the worry of the Lawrences’ scorn at her inefficiency about the bantams. But far more disquieting than these was the horribly familiar feeling, experienced all too often in Cambridge when she had caught sight of Desmond in the distance – on the Backs, or passing through a quad – with another girl. That, at least, was understandable, loving him as she did.

  But with Desmond miles away, unaware of her love, hope of anything ever bringing them together almost dead … why had jealousy followed her to Hallows Farm? And what, when the horror of the night was over, would it mean?

  To Prue, falling into darkness, the siren was part of her own scream. How could such a huge and terrifying sound emerge from her own small throat? In the immeasurable moments as she plummeted down into the hay, that was her only thought.

  Part of her thumped against another body. There were arms supporting her, though her legs seemed to be far away, detached from her body, one knee spinning in agony. Then the arms encased her more firmly. She was lying on her back. Hay spiked through the fragile crochet of her jersey. The knee had become a gold disc in her mind, spitting fire. The scream petered out, a horrible sound skulking into the distance. So it was a siren, not her …

  ‘I caught you. I’ve got you.’ A man’s voice from somewhere, alarmed.

  Who caught her? Ah, that was it! Bloody hell: Joe caught her. She’d wanted to be caught by Joe for a whole week, hadn’t she? Hadn’t imagined it would happen this way. But here he was, waterproof crackling against her bare arm. Not exactly on top of her, but she could feel his heaviness at her side.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Her head was full of sparks from an invisible anvil. They danced confusingly in front of an accumulation of shadows that was Joe’s face, low over her own. One of his eyeballs was ignited with a small shard of white, then the flash of moonlight outside was gone and all was dark again.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Think so. Bit dizzy. My knee …’ Prue tried to shift. Joe ran a hand along a corduroy thigh, stopped at the knee. ‘Think I may have twisted it. But it’s my heart I’m worried about, banging away overtime.’ She gave a faint giggle.

  Joe’s hand slipped back up the thigh, over the stomach, ribs, found its place on her heart.

  ‘It’ll calm down,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. It was a stupid challenge. You could have—’

  ‘I could’ve said no. Don’t worry. It was fun.’ Prue let his hand continue to cover her breast, calming the flurry of heartbeats. It was huge, warm, heavy as a flat-iron. ‘What about the siren?’ she asked.

  ‘Raid somewhere. Or could be a false alarm.’

  ‘Hadn’t we better …?’

  ‘No. They’ll be in the cellar. They’ll think I’m at The Bells.’

  ‘Won’t they wonder where I am?’

  ‘Let them wonder. We’ll think of some explanation.’

  At this nefarious suggestion, all Prue’s anxiety about the raid and her own disappearance fled. She wanted to lie in the hay with Joe for ever, not caring about anything. She put a hand on top of his, feeling the enormous rough fingers.

  ‘Anyway, I couldn’t possibly walk across the yard with this knee, could I?’

  In truth it was no more than a small stab of pain now, nothing that a brisk rub and a measure of determination could not deal with – though none but a fool would assure Joe of the unserious nature of her injury just at this moment.

  ‘I don’t suppose you could, you little minx.’

  The word fired her, just as it had in the cowshed. No one had ever called her a minx before. It meant pert, a flirt, a hussy – she’d looked it up, once. It was a compliment, in her book. The mass of Joe’s head seemed nearer. She could feel his breath on her face. He smelt of melted chocolate.

  ‘Are you really all right?’

  ‘I’m really all right. Did I fall far?’

  ‘Twenty feet or so. You’ll see when I find the torch. I dropped it, struggling to catch you.’

  ‘So much for my circus act.’

  Joe withdrew slightly, moved his hand. Prue quickly retrieved it, returned it to its place.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t go.’

  They listened to the black silence. After a while it was stirred by the churring of a rafter pigeon. They heard the distant squealing of a small plane.

  ‘Bombs?’ asked Prue. ‘It’ll be my first raid. Crikey: I’m terrified, Joe.’ She kneaded his hand.

  Then his mouth was on hers, plundering the worry. He whipped up the cobweb wool of her jersey, tugged at the stout cotton stuff of her brassiere, pulled forth a wild breast. Acting like a man in a hurry, he grabbed at the waist of her breeches. Prue wriggled to help, wires of hay burning her back with each impatient movement.

  ‘I thought … you’d never get around to this.’ Prue’s legs, now bare, were scratched by the hay, too.

  ‘Had to give it a week, didn’t I? Little temptress, you …’ Joe smudged the words with kisses. ‘Batting your pretty green eyes at me over the udders your very first morning …’

  ‘With a war on, there’s no time to be lost. That’s what I think.’

  Prue was in a state of total deliquescence now, pliant, quivering, flaming cheeks, icy impatient limbs.

  ‘I knew the moment you arrived exactly what you thought …’

  Joe’s mouth clamped on to Prue’s again. He made a pillow under her head with one arm. His free hand worked miracles wherever it brushed, spinning her skin into whirlpools of such intense pleasure she found herself cooing in tune with the pigeons. The wondrous hand, firm as a piece of farm machinery, parted her legs. The cooing turned to whimpering as the vastness and the weight of Joe crushed the breath out of her and he, too, began to chortle and pant like a powerful engine on a cold morning. In some small independent corner of her mind, despite the state
of desire to which Joe had brought her, Prue thought of the tractor and wanted to laugh.

  Had bombs fallen, the lovers in the barn would have been too preoccupied to be concerned. As it was, the all clear merged with their own cries, joined the dying fall that faded into eventual silence.

  ‘Crikey!’ said Prue, at last, shifting under Joe’s full dead weight.

  ‘Your first raid. Plenty more to come.’

  ‘Should hope so. There’s a war on, isn’t there? Where’ve you put my breeches?’

  ‘Lost in the dark.’

  ‘Come on, Joe. We’ll be in trouble. I’ll be sent away. Not having it off with the farmer’s son is the land girl’s number one unspoken rule.’

  ‘If you don’t tell the others, no one’ll ever know.’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘Tomorrow night, when they’re asleep, you can creep back out here again.’

  ‘And how’ll I ever get up at five, night after night at it in the barn with you, tell me that?’

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ said Joe, stroking her hair, kissing her eyes. ‘Keep still. I’m not letting you go just yet. We’ve only just begun.’

  Some hours later, when the first light scratchings of dawn appeared in the sky, they gathered up their clothes, dressed, and crept through the mists in the yard. Only Ratty saw them. Disturbed by the sirens, he had risen earlier than usual, and was making his way to the barn for an early pipe before breakfast.

  Ratty managed to avoid direct confrontation by mere seconds. When he saw the couple emerge blurrily from the barn, he ducked down behind the dung heap. He could hear voices, but no words. Once they disappeared through the farmhouse door, he completed his journey to the barn. The first thing he saw, poised like a pale, windless flag in the gloom, was a white handkerchief hanging from a pile of hay. Ratty removed it, put it in his pocket. Idiots, he thought.

  Then, settled on one of the lower stacks, pipe lit, he turned to musing about Joe. Joe had always been quite a lad – something he, Ratty, regretfully, had never been. No land girl would be safe from Joe: Ratty had known that from the start, soon as the idea of employing girls had come up. But of course it would not have been his place to have warned the boss and Mrs L. Funny they didn’t think for themselves. Maybe they reckoned that Janet girl would keep Joe on the straight and narrow. Huh! some hope. Then when the girls arrived – well, Ratty guessed straight away it would only be a matter of time, Joe and the flirty flighty one. And good luck to them … They should fit in all they can, the young, before they’re bombed to bits, was Ratty’s opinion. So long as Joe stuck to that one … What Ratty wouldn’t fancy, come to think of it, would be if he laid his hands on the tall one, Ag, the one with the holy face. If Joe had the cheek to touch her, and Ratty got to know about it, there’d be no accounting for his reactions. He could imagine doing something terrible to Joe: something he hadn’t thought of yet, but it would come to him. It would definitely come to him … He clicked his pipe against his teeth, watched the paling of the sky over the farmhouse roof – going to be a fine day. Going to be a fine clear day for thinking. Why, already a plan was beginning to form in Ratty’s mind.

  * * *

  The girls caught the two o’clock bus from Hinton Half Moon to Blandford. It was the first half-day. Each had fourteen shillings in her purse – half of their first week’s pay: the other half went to Mrs Lawrence for board and lodging.

  The ancient bus bumped along yellow-leafed lanes, jostling the girls in their various moods. Prue’s lack of sleep was well disguised: in honour of the shopping trip she wore an emerald skirt and matching bow, and flamingo lipstick – on the grounds, she had explained to the others while they were changing, that you should be prepared for any eventuality. The eventuality she had in mind in Blandford was a chance encounter with an off-duty soldier or airman from a nearby camp.

  ‘And what would you do, exactly, if this mythical man ran into us in the street?’ Stella asked, intrigued.

  ‘Get to know him before the bus back, of course,’ giggled Prue, jabbing her eyelashes with thick mascara.

  Ag was in unaccountably low spirits. As they chuntered through showers of falling leaves (Yellow and black and pale and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes came automatically to mind) she could not extinguish the picture of Prue falling from the crossbeam into the darkness, her terrified scream curdling with the siren. She could not understand why she had lied to Mrs Lawrence before there had been time to think. Nor could she understand why she had lain awake hours after the all clear, and then found the sight of Prue creeping in at dawn, dishevelled, ravished, scintillating, so disturbing. Perhaps it was envy of Prue’s ability to make the whole business of men seem so easy: if a man is your target, go for him, get him. Ag could never behave like that. On further reflection, she put her melancholy down to disillusion. How could Joe, a man whom she was coming to respect, be so easily misled by a shameless young hussy like Prue? It was not as if he was a free man, after all: he was engaged to Janet. Did Janet not come into his considerations as he gave vent to his lust in the barn?

  Ag smiled to herself, knowing her weakness for the schoolmistressy phraseology that came to her in moments of disapproval: gave vent to his lust, indeed. They probably had a wonderful time. And was that, perhaps, the trouble? The thought of Joe and Prue achieving something she and Desmond would never have? Or was it – and here surfaced the question Ag hated to contemplate even as she saw it coming – was it because, despite her love for Desmond, she would like to know she had at least the power to attract Joe: to feel they were soulmates, intellectual equals, friends? Somehow his skirmish with Prue managed to scatter the normal calm of her mind. It both repelled and excited her. It also alarmed her on Janet’s behalf. What would happen to Janet? Ag’s mind was a whirl of questions and unsatisfactory answers. Thus preoccupied, she kept her silence, barely nodding when Prue squealed about some new item she remembered for her shopping list.

  Stella, too, was quiet. The ragged autumn landscape, bronzed golds and flame yellows against mole-dark earth, was lost upon her. She was concentrating on God.

  ‘Please make HMS Apollo need a boiler clean soon,’ she prayed, ‘because if I don’t see Philip soon I don’t know what I’ll do …

  They straggled round the streets of Blandford, disappointed. The old film Rome Express was on at the pictures, but there was no time to see it before the bus back. Prue insisted on visiting the chemist immediately, only to be greeted by a notice on the door saying Sorry, no lipsticks or rouges.

  ‘How can a war affect lipsticks and rouges?’ she wailed, suddenly feeling her sleepless night, and almost in tears.

  Her anticipation of Revlon’s new colours shattered, she trailed dismally after the other two, uninterested in their quests. Ag could not find the book she was hoping for in the library, but bought a bunch of shaggy-headed chrysanthemums for Mrs Lawrence instead. Stella gloomily stocked up on writing materials. They all felt cold: the sun’s brightness concealed the raw edge of a rising wind. By four they were sitting in a tea-room of dark wooden tables and checked cloths, the windows running with condensation, passers-by outside flattened into pearly ghost shadows. Ag and Stella chose savoury mince with greens, and stewed apples and custard, for sixpence. Prue scorned their economy.

  ‘I’m going to lash out,’ she announced with a flutter of her incredible eyelashes. ‘I need energy.’ She ordered toad-in-the-hole, butter beans in white sauce, prunes and junket for sixpence halfpenny. They all drank orangeade. ‘What I wouldn’t give for a gin and lime,’ sighed Prue.

  The fuggy warmth of the tea-room and the steaming food revived their spirits. They threw off their cardigans, lolled back in their wheelback chairs as if, on their day off from the land, they could resume a sophisticated nonchalance. After the main course Prue offered round her Woodbines and the others, usually non-smokers, accepted. They pecked inexpertly at the wizened little cigarettes, coughing and spewing smoke in all directions. Prue, with her super
ior habit, was laughing by now, sipping her orangeade as reverently as if it were the dreamed-of gin and lime.

  ‘I’ve got news for you, anyway,’ she said, when the cigarettes were at last finished, their lipstick-printed butts squashed into the ashtray, and the stewed fruits, junkets and custards trembling in bowls before them. ‘Can you guess?’

  Ag concentrated on polishing her spoon with a clean handkerchief. Stella shook her head.

  ‘I made it! Joe. In the barn, last night. Told you I would.’ She giggled. The emerald bow bobbed in the brownish light.

  ‘Goodness,’ said Stella, in some awe.

  ‘Should you be telling us?’ asked Ag, unsurprised.

  ‘Blimey! You’re right there.’ Prue clamped her hand over her mouth. ‘Don’t suppose I should. Though he couldn’t expect me not to tell you.’

  ‘He could,’ said Ag. ‘What about Janet? I told you you should think about Janet.’

  ‘Enough of your lectures, Ag. He didn’t mention Janet.’

  ‘What did you feel about her?’ Ag heard the disapproval in her voice, sharp as it had been on the Sunday walk.

  ‘Can’t say I gave her a thought. None of my business. Think that’s very wicked, do you?’ Prue turned to Stella.

  ‘I think,’ Stella said, thinking fast, ‘you should stick very carefully to your philosophy of not upsetting apple carts. You don’t want to be thrown out by the Lawrences, and cause difficulties between Janet and Joe.’

  Prue shrugged. ‘It’s not as if they’re very engaged, is my way of seeing it. Besides, all’s fair in love and war, like I keep saying. What Janet doesn’t know won’t hurt.’

  ‘That’s not entirely the point,’ said Ag. ‘What if you got pregnant?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. I know how to take care of all that. Haven’t been caught out yet, have I?’ Prue hailed the waitress, asked for another round of orangeades. ‘Anyway, now we’re over the serious bit, d’you want to know what it was like?’ She looked from Ag, who blushed deeply, to Stella, who could not quite disguise a look of interest. ‘It all happened easy as pie. According to plan. My plan. His too, if I know anything about randy farmers’ sons. And I have to tell you—’ she drew herself up, squashed the bow with an emphatic hand – ‘Joe Lawrence is quite a man. If you’re ever feeling like it, he’d be a good start. Set a high standard to go by in the future, know what I mean?’