Land Girls Read online

  ‘This is it,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll hand you over to my wife, Faith.’

  God, how he longed to hand them over.

  The girls clambered out of the car. Mr Lawrence saw them scanning the ground, each one silently planning her route through seams of mud that had spilt through the frost. While he unloaded their cases from the boot, he watched them skitter from patch to patch of hard, silvered gravel, protecting their fine little shoes from the spewing mud. The tallest one, the dark one, seemed to be the most skilful on her feet. The pink skirt was hesitant, delicate; the film star teetered and giggled and almost fell. They looked like an unrehearsed chorus line, Mr Lawrence thought: bright banners of colour – pink, green, pale blue, so odd against the dour stone façade of the house. They reminded him of flowers.

  One of Faith’s neurotic birds came squawking round the corner.

  ‘Look! Have you ever seen such a small chicken?’ squealed the film star in a broad northern accent.

  The tall dark girl bent down over the bird, as if to stroke its frantic head. ‘I think you’ll find it’s a bantam,’ she said.

  Faith appeared in the doorway of the porch. Her eyes met her husband’s, then sped from pink to green to blue, uncritical.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘You must be ravenous and tired. Come in, come in.’

  Mr Lawrence watched the coloured banners march through the dark doorway to begin their invasion.

  The girls followed Mrs Lawrence into the kitchen. Prue was last in the line, silently smarting at the snub by the snooty dark girl. How was she supposed to know a bloody bantam from a hen? There had been no instruction on the subject of poultry at the training course, and the only birds she saw in Manchester were hanging upside down and naked at the butcher’s.

  The kitchen was large, dim, steamy, billowing with a warm mushy smell of cooking, a smell Prue could not quite place. The pale flagstone floor was worn into dimples in front of the enamel sink. On the huge spaces of the dun-coloured walls, scarred with flaking paint, the only decoration was a calendar, dated 1914. Its faded picture was of a young soldier kissing a girl in front of a pretty cottage. Farewell was the caption, in copperplate of ghostly sepia. Prue felt her eyes scorch with tears. She longed for the small box of a kitchen at home, the shining white walls and smell of Jeyes Fluid, and the shelf of brightly coloured biscuit tins her mother had collected from seaside towns. This place was so horribly old-fashioned, gloomy, dingy. And the two collies lying on a rag rug in front of the stove looked dangerous. Prue hated dogs. She turned to look out of the window so that the others should not see her tears. But the view was smeared with condensation. All she could see was the indistinct hulk of a barn or outbuilding, and the slash of darkening sky.

  The characteristics of a hard-working farm kitchen that so distressed Prue left Stella unmoved. In her dreamy state, having left Philip only twenty-four hours ago (Philip whom she loved with her whole being, Philip for whom she trembled and sighed and longed with a pain like hot wire that strangled her gizzards – the simile had come to her in the train), she was indifferent to all external things. She knew that in automatic response to her disciplined childhood, and the four weeks’ training course she had enjoyed, a sense of duty would ensure she worked efficiently. She would not let her mother down, and would willingly do whatever was required. On the other hand, she would not be there. Her soul would be with Philip as he boarded ship at Plymouth, so meltingly beautiful in his uniform that the very thought of that stiff collar cutting into his neck filled her with glorious weakness. And in the impatient weeks waiting for his first letter her mind would feed on the memories she had of him, rerunning the pictures over and over again. She would never tire of them. The best, of course, was Philip at her birthday party, removing his jacket, despite her father’s disapproving look. It was too hot to waltz in comfort, he had said. That waltz! Their skill at dancing had been hampered by their mutual need to be joined at the hip bones. Exactly the same height, they had found the need increased – breast bones, chins, a scraping of cheeks, a clash of racing hearts becoming clamped together. By the time the music had slowed they weren’t dancing at all, merely rocking gently, oblivious to everything but their extraordinary desire.

  ‘Jellies are now served in the dining-room,’ her mother had shrieked, ‘and there’s plenty more fruit cup.’

  Stella and Philip had not wanted jellies: they’d wanted each other. They’d slid from the room and raced upstairs towards the old nursery. It housed a large and comfortable sofa, useful to Stella on several passionate occasions in the past. She had shut the door behind them. Blackout was nailed to the window frames, the darkness unchipped by any glimmer of light. Stella had taken Philip’s hand and guided him past the rocking horse, giving it a wide berth: one of her suitors had bruised his leg so badly that kisses had been interrupted by howls of passion-quelling pain. They reached the sofa. Blindness added to the excitement. She had felt him sit next to her and wondered impatiently why he was fiddling with his sleeve.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Taking out my cufflinks.’

  ‘Why are you taking out your cufflinks?’

  ‘I want to roll up my sleeves.’

  ‘Why do you want to roll up your sleeves?’

  ‘I always roll up my sleeves, that’s why.’

  ‘Rather as if you were getting down to gardening, or something?’ Stella giggled.

  ‘That sort of thing.’ It didn’t sound as if he was smiling.

  Philip had pushed her back on to the sofa. As his mouth splodged down on to hers (in the blackness she suddenly forgot what it looked like, but tasted sausage roll and beer) she felt him expertly flick up the skirt of the sophisticated dress that old Mrs Martin had made from a Vogue pattern. As Philip’s finger had run up the back of her leg, following the line of her stocking seam till he reached the stocking top, Stella realized Mrs Martin was the only person she actually knew who had been killed by a bomb. The finger continued its journey over the small bumps of suspender – not to object to a man’s acquaintance with her suspenders was surely a sign of real love, she thought – and by the time he had reached the leg of her knickers, all sympathy for Mrs Martin had fled. Stella had heard herself moaning, and felt herself squirming in a way which could have been embarrassing had she been visible, but in such utter darkness anything seemed permissible. Then, as Philip employed a second efficient finger to part the way, the warning siren had wailed through the room. They disentangled themselves, made their way back through the blackness, whispers lost in the siren’s moan. The music had stopped. Shouts of instruction came from downstairs. Stella remembered feeling very cold.

  If it hadn’t been for the siren, what might they have done?

  Crowded into the wine cellar with the other guests, Stella had watched Philip roll down his shirtsleeves and put back his cufflinks. He’d whispered to her that it had been a damn shame, the interruption.

  ‘But my first shore leave, I promise …’

  ‘Promise what?’

  ‘You know what. We must be patient.’

  Stella had felt the tremor of his impatient sigh. They’d held hot hands.

  ‘How can we be patient?’

  ‘We can’t. But I love you. What a place to have to tell a girl.’ He looked terribly sad. Stella took his other hand.

  ‘Say it again and again and again so I believe it.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Well, I love you too. Listen: that’s the all clear.’

  ‘That was quick. Thank God no bombs.’

  The guests had shuffled back upstairs, but the party was clearly over. Philip had kissed Stella goodbye at the front door. Then he’d left her in such a deliquescent state of love that today’s journey had brushed past her like ribbons. She’d had the sensation of not moving, though finding herself in trains, in cars, landscape flowing by her.

  But she was standing still at last. Things had stopped rocking and swaying. Reality impo
sed itself more sharply. She could focus again, focus on the large expanse of scratched but clean blue oilcloth that covered the kitchen table, the four white mugs fit for a giant’s kitchen, a mahogany-coloured teapot big enough to house several Mad Hatters, the matching jug filled with creamy milk that frothed like cow parsley.

  Stella raised her eyes to her new employer’s wife and wondered if Mrs Lawrence could see the state of her tangible love. Mrs Lawrence gave the slightest nod, and bent to wipe the immaculate oilcloth with a clump of grey rag. This small acknowledgement was enough for Stella. She was instantly drawn to the gaunt, bony woman with her cross-over apron, sinewy forearms, ugly hands, and grey hair rolled so high round the back of her neck the vulnerable hollows between the tendons were cruelly revealed. Stella liked her flint-head face, its slightly protruding jaw, sharp nose, wrinkled lids over dark brown eyes. She admired the beige flesh scored by years of hard physical labour. She looked down at her own unsullied hands, nails buffed to a luminescence that was apparent even in the dusk-grained light of the room. She felt a sense of guilt at her own easy life.

  Mrs Lawrence was pouring thick noisy tea into the first mug.

  ‘I must get you straight,’ she was saying. ‘Which of you is …?’ She glanced at Stella, who felt the honour of being chosen first to reveal herself.

  ‘I’m Stella Sherwood.’ The breathiness of her voice was a private message to Mrs Lawrence.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Prue Lumley.’

  ‘Prue. So you must be Agatha?’

  ‘Yes, but please call me Ag. Everybody does. Nobody calls me Agatha.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think they would, would they?’ said Prue, still smarting from the incident of the bantam.

  Mrs Lawrence handed the girls the mugs of dark tea, told them to help themselves to bread and butter: she had arranged thick slices on a plate. Prue, suffering withdrawal symptoms on her first day for years without a chocolate biscuit, scanned the dresser. All she could see was a rusty old bread bin. She thought Mrs Lawrence was pretty odd, not offering them biscuits after their long journeys.

  ‘When we eat this evening my husband will explain the plan of duties,’ Mrs Lawrence said. ‘We eat at six thirty. I’ll take you upstairs, let you unpack, settle in.’ She paused, gathered herself to break difficult news. ‘I hope you don’t mind all sharing a room. We only have two small spare rooms, so one of you would have had to board in the village. I thought you’d rather be together … so I set to work on our attic, a lot of unused space. It’s nothing very luxurious, but it’s clean and comfortable. In the evening you’re at liberty to sit in the front room with us, of course. We have the wireless on, and the wood fire. It can get quite snug in there.’ She paused again, braced herself for another difficult announcement. ‘All I would ask is that you don’t try to engage my husband in conversation in the evening. He’s exhausted after his day. He likes to listen to the news with his eyes shut … You could always bring down your darning, the light’s better than in the attic.’

  Darning? Stella and Ag looked from Prue’s appalled face to one another.

  Their mugs of tea finished – in Stella’s case only half finished – the girls followed Mrs Lawrence. The stairs were covered in antique linoleum, and led to a single passage with walls of stained wood. Its old floorboards, spongy beneath their feet, hollowed as if they had been carved, were covered by a strip of carpet worn to its ribs of fibre. The passage led to a bathroom similar to Prue’s in Manchester only in its small size. As she gazed at cracked tiles, the tail of rust from taps to plug in the bath, the scant mat on the linoleum floor, Prue was overwhelmed by the memory of fluffy pink bath towels and the crocheted hat which covered the lavatory paper at home. She felt tears rising again.

  ‘We all have to share this,’ said Mrs Lawrence, ‘but it can be done. Two baths a week, evening if you don’t mind, and easy on the water. Three inches, my husband says. Four if you cut it down to one a week. And please remember to clean the bath before you leave, and keep your towels upstairs. We’ll be through by four forty-five, so you can fight to wash your faces after that.’

  Four forty-five a.m.? In her astonishment, the comforting thought of the pinks of home faded from Prue’s mind. Mrs Lawrence, sinewy arms folded under a flat chest, led them up a steeper, narrower staircase to the low door of the attic room.

  It stretched the length of the house, a sloping roof on one side, with three dormer windows. The exposed beams had recently been limewashed: there were spots of white on the scrubbed floorboards and the few old rugs. Ag, with her observing eye, immediately appreciated how hard Mrs Lawrence must have worked to achieve such sparkling cleanness. As one who had spent five years in spartan boarding schools, it was all wonderfully familiar to her: the narrow iron bedsteads with their concave mattresses and cotton bed-spreads – these, Ag guessed, must have begun their days as dustsheets. She took in the marble-topped washstand with its severe white china bowl and jug, the two battered chests of drawers, the lights with their pleated paper shades. Each bed had a wooden chair at its side – at school there was an inspection of these bedside chairs every night. If clothes were not folded neatly upon them, there would be a black mark. Ag wondered how neat her companions would be. The room did not dispirit her. She liked it already. By the time each one of them had arranged her things, stamped her own corner with ornaments and books, and arranged photographs, it would be very agreeable as dormitories go.

  What Ag would miss, she knew, was privacy. In her three years at Cambridge, her greatest delight had been in retreating into the solitude of her small, bare, cold room. Here, there would be nowhere to be alone. That, for her, would mean great deprivation. Somehow she would have to find an hour a day on her own – a walk, perhaps. She did not know the West Country but she had read her Hardy and was eager to discover it. The east coast was home. The house in which she had been brought up was almost unprotected in a plain of flat fields. She liked it best when the fields were planted with cabbages: she liked the way they clicked and chinked as you walked through the sharp frills of their stiff, silver-purple leaves. She had never understood why painters did not find cabbages as beautiful as flowers. Ag glanced out of one of the small windows. She would miss the Norfolk skies, too, and the nearness of the sea. All the same, she saw the job as an adventure, a chance she had eagerly accepted. One day, should she survive the war, she would enjoy telling her grandchildren what it was like to be part of the Women’s Land Army. ‘That first evening I wished there had been a bookshelf,’ she said to herself, as she took a pile of Penguins from her bag. Ag often found herself dictating her memoirs even as she led her life.

  When Mrs Lawrence left the room, Prue picked up her case and dumped it on one of the two beds that stood side by side. The third bed was at the far end of the room, by a window.

  ‘If you don’t mind, you two, I’d rather be next to someone,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t mind where I am,’ said Stella. Wherever she was, she would be alone with Philip, so to her it didn’t matter. In her state of all-consuming love there was no such thing as physical hardship, only the pain of waiting.

  ‘Then I’ll go over there, if that’s all right.’ Ag sounded relieved. The extra distance from the other two would be some small measure of privacy.

  Prue was pleased by this decision, too: she was not a one to bear a grudge, but it would be some time before she would get over the bantam incident. Instinctively, she didn’t fancy Agatha. Making a fool of her in public so soon: it was a mean thing to have done. She found herself sniffing again – stupid tears.

  ‘This your first time away from home?’ Stella asked.

  Prue nodded. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Oh, I was sent away to a convent at twelve,’ said Stella.

  At her far end of the room, Ag, piling up her Penguin copies of Hardy, gave a small acknowledging smile.

  ‘I never been ten miles from Manchester, myself, except for the training course.’

  �
��You get used to it.’

  ‘Hope so.’

  Prue sat in the hammock-like dip of her bed, child’s legs swinging above the ground, a photograph clutched to her chest. She was extraordinarily pretty – the beguiling looks that come from a timeless mould, recognized in any age. Nothing original, but the kind of simple juxtaposition of features that makes prettiness look so easy when it’s before you – heart shaped face, curling lips that are halfway to pouting in profile, slanting eyes, tousled ash hair. Yellow-green tears glittered in her eyes. One of them spilt on to her cheek and instantly lost its colour.

  Stella put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. ‘Show me your photograph,’ she said.

  Prue held up a picture of the façade of a small shop. Elsie’s Bond Street Salon.

  ‘My mum’s hairdressing shop,’ she said. ‘If it hadn’t been for this bloody war I’d be almost under-manageress by now. I’d done eighteen months of my apprenticeship, shampooing and perming and that. I was just about to get on to tinting.’ She giggled. ‘Perhaps I can keep my hand in here. Be of service.’ She smiled up at Stella. ‘You’ve got nice hair. I’ve brought my scissors, my peroxide, my kirby grips.’ She nodded towards Ag. ‘I could give you a new style any time, too – you only have to ask.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Ag.

  ‘Blimey: who’s the handsome fellow?’ Prue indicated the photograph Stella was holding. She handed it over: a large Polyfoto portrait of Philip. It had been taken in a studio in Guildford only a week ago – Philip the sub-lieutenant, stern in his uniform, defiant hair cowed by Brylcreem, mouth a thin line of serious intent, though Stella herself could perceive the tiniest upturn at one corner which privately indicated the other side of him.

  ‘Cor,’ said Prue, after a moment’s awed silence. ‘He’s quite something. You in love?’

  ‘Totally, hopelessly, absolutely.’ Stella laughed, pure happiness. ‘I can’t sleep for thinking of Philip, I can’t eat for thinking of him, I’ve lost half a stone.’