The Lynmara Legacy

by Catherine Gaskin

  Andrew and Wilks joined the Local Defence Volunteers which afterwards they came to call the Home Guard. They were gone three nights a week, drilling and making plans, or accepting them, about what they should do in the event of an invasion. Andrew taught Wilks how to use a gun, and handed out the two that had belonged to Allan to other members of his group. They were lucky that, being country people, they actually had guns. Most men in the towns, they learned, were still drilling with broom handles. ‘It all seems so useless,’ Andrew said wearily to Margaret one night as they sat late over cocoa in the kitchen when he returned from a meeting. ‘We’re all running round bumping into each other in the dark. There’s not enough ammunition to hold up a German troop for three minutes. There isn’t a one of us there under sixty, except that Turner boy who’s so short-sighted he can’t see his hand in front of him. Oh ‒ we got a new recruit. About forty. He’s head of some business firm near London. Making parachutes, I think. The heads of businesses usually don’t get called up. Oh, hell, I’d better go to bed. The damn milking time comes around so quickly. You know, I still wonder at myself ‒ I used to think what a good thing it was to be a farmer. A good, useful, healthy, outdoor life. And now that I have to do half the bloody chores myself, I’m already wondering how I’ll be able to drag myself through this war. And I don’t think it’ll be short. The Ministry of Labour says I might be able to have the Harkins chap next week. He’s been turned down by the Medical Board. It’d be a great help.’ He gulped down the rest of his cocoa; it had become cold, but one didn’t waste anything any more. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, as he pushed back his chair and got to his feet, ‘what I’d do without Judy and Joan and Nicole. Well, Judy and Joan we might have expected to pitch in ‒ after all, they’ve been around a farm all of their lives. But Nicole ‒ now she really surprised me … Good night, dear. Don’t be too late up …’ He was yawning as he went off.

  Nicole knew that she continued to surprise everyone, but she didn’t surprise herself. They had expected her to be useless, and she had determined that she would not be. She had also determined that they would not know what an effort it was. She got up for the early milking, and pretended, as she gulped down the cup of hot tea in the kitchen, that it was like the early rising at Madame Graneau’s, when she would go then to the piano, and Judy to the stables. But now she went to what to her was a smelly barn, overheated by the concentration of the animal bodies. She washed the udders of each cow as Andrew prepared to milk them, and when each in the line was done, she took her own place at a milking stool. It seemed to her a stupid way to do this job, but milking machines were things only dimly heard of from America, so she would just sit there and gently squeeze with infinite patience, with the chance of getting a good kick if she somehow got out of rhythm, or did the wrong thing. ‘Wouldn’t have expected you to be so good at it,’ the young hired boy, Ben, said. Nicole knew she would be good at it; that was why she had volunteered for the task. Musicians were supposed to know what to do with their hands. It meant that, morning and evening, seven days a week, she was chained to the dairy herd. After the milking there was breakfast. After that she mucked out the stables of the three horses they had left ‒ heavy plough horses, held over from a former era, and now expected to be put back to service when there was no petrol for the tractors. Andrew had kept them as a hobby, to display them at shows. Now they were a substantial asset. The riding horses had gone. Nicole had seen Judy’s face in the days after the stables had suddenly emptied, and did not dare ask where they had gone.

  After mucking out the stables and spreading clean hay, she boiled up the pig swill and took it to the pens. She was dismayed to find that she became fond of the large, intelligent beasts who came eagerly at the sight of her carrying the buckets. She often stayed a few minutes after they had emptied the troughs to scratch the backs of a few of her favourites with a long stick. She liked the grunts and snorts of pleasure. ‘Just don’t ask me to be around the day they’re slaughtered,’ she said to Andrew.

  After the pigs she saw her children for the first time in the day. She washed their clothes while they played about her. That there were four of them bothered her; there were too many for her to give much attention to her own two. But Henson had to have some relief, some time to sit in the kitchen over a strong mug of tea. The rest of the day passed in a muddle of haphazard chores. She filled in wherever she was needed. Weeding the vegetable garden, or peeling potatoes. Then it was time for the evening milking. It came early in the short winter days. After that there were the children again, all to be bathed and put to bed. For convenience they had put all four of them in the same room. Henson slept next door, with the door open to hear the least whimper. Nicole doubted that she would have wakened at such a slight sound. She fell into the big double bed in the room Margaret had allotted to her and Lloyd on all their visits, and while its emptiness was like a void, she was too tired to remain awake long to ponder it. The worst times were the very early hours of the morning. With her first fatigue gone, she would wake with a sense that something was happening. She thought she heard the sound of aircraft, but there were no aircraft. Then the emptiness of the bed assailed her, and sleep was hard to come by. The harsh clatter of the alarm clock seemed to wake her just when sleep had come again. It was a winter of hard days, bright and sharp with frost, of aching bones, and exhausted, yet fitful sleep. Lloyd had leave too seldom to make the emptiness less empty.

  Margaret, noting the hollows of her cheeks had said, ‘Nicole, don’t you think perhaps you’re overdoing it? I mean, surely there’s someone we can get to help. You’re such a little thing. Not terribly strong.’

  ‘Nonsense, Aunt Margaret. I’m strong as a horse. Don’t you know musicians have to be strong? How do you think I managed to thump that piano so hard?’ She shrugged to dismiss the suggestion. ‘And besides, what else would I do? I can’t cook. I’d ruin the food, and we can’t afford that. I’m not very good at organizing things ‒ not like you in the WVS and the Red Cross. Judy’s great on a tractor, and she can make a soup out of two bare bones and a carrot. I’ve only got a little brute labour to offer. And besides ‒ the cows and the pigs seem to like me … That’s something …’

  ‘I’ve noticed,’ Margaret said, ‘that the hens are all laying very well. I suppose it’s all nonsense, but the old country people used to say that getting them to lay was mostly to do with the person who was looking after them. I wonder …’

  ‘Well,’ Nicole said ruefully, ‘I do admit to singing to them. I get desperate when the eggs start to fall off, and so I sing all the time I’m feeding them, and when I’m hunting for the eggs. Silly creatures … they seem to like it.’

  ‘I believe they do. Not even Judy is better with the horses. Mr Carbury was saying the other day he never saw anyone take to medicating animals so well so quickly.’

  Carbury was the elderly, overworked vet who, once he had diagnosed a complaint, often had to leave it to the farmer to follow through on the treatment, since he was the only vet in the district. Nicole made a point of being there whenever he came, watching how he ran his hands over a beast, learning his techniques of patience with the restless, fretful animal. ‘I only do what he tells me ‒ and if he knew how frightened I am … But I bribe the horses, you know … those lumps of sugar you’ve been saving. I must say I never imagined myself taking a horse’s temperature or pouring some stuff down a cow’s throat …’

  ‘I wouldn’t have believed it,’ Andrew said to Margaret once as the dawn was striking the kitchen window, and Nicole had gone off to bed to get an hour’s sleep before the milking. ‘She’s been out there half the night heaving and hauling with me to get that calf born. Carbury couldn’t come … I’ve always thought she was pretty, but just a little spoiled, and definitely soft. The way Lloyd shielded her from everything, you’d have thought she’d be utterly useless. You have to respect someone who turns to and learns the way she has. You’d almost think she liked it, but I suspect it’s quite the ot
her way. All I am sure of ‒ she’s damn useful.’

  Nicole did, in fact, hate it all. She hated the cold of the mornings when she left her bed, she hated the sight of the string of cows waiting to be washed. She often felt sick at the smell and sight of the pig swill she boiled up, the endless task of cleaning out the stables. It was true that she did sing to the hens, but from a sense of desperation; they were getting good feed, feed that often had to come by ships that were being hunted by German U-boats, and it would be her fault if they didn’t give a return of eggs. She hated the whole endless, grinding routine of it, the sense that she was no longer a woman but a machine which produced labour. She hardly looked in a mirror these days, not wanting to see her too-thin face, the hair that was often lank and falling in wisps about her face. It was enough to look at her hands, chapped and rough. It seemed an unbelievable span of time since she had lain and soaked in a hot bath, used perfume, had the energy and leisure to brush her hair. She seemed only vaguely to remember an impossible, fairytale time when Henson had drawn her bath, added bath salts, laid out her clothes, Henson who had folded silk stockings and lace-trimmed underwear. The Henson she knew now darned children’s socks, and dried their sweaters and underwear before the kitchen stove. To herself, Nicole always seemed to smell of cow dung.

  When any of the men were coming on leave, she noticed how they all made a greater effort. Hair was shampooed, and they helped each other set it; the last of the bath salts were carefully portioned out. Sometimes Richard and Lloyd would arrive without notice, and Nicole could see the puzzled glances at the women they had always considered so trim and smart. Nicole in heavy corduroy pants she had inherited from Ben, who had grown out of them, and the sweater bought in Scotland, streaked with dirt, was a new sight to Lloyd. Also new to him was the alarm which clattered in the morning, and as he sleepily stretched to draw her close to him, to hear her voice, ‘Not now, stupid … It’s milking time.’ And then, with her clothes on she would bend to kiss him. ‘Remember all the mornings you used to leave the house at seven because you were going to operate at eight? Well … now you’ve got a working wife …’

  And at times she would lean her head against the warm, gently-heaving side of the cow, and the tears of longing and despair would rise, and were choked back. She longed for the times of ease and pleasure and love once again. She longed for clean, warm rooms and delicately cooked food. Most of all she longed to lie in bed when Lloyd was there. But the inexorable rhythm of farm life went on, and she could not stop it, nor turn away from it. Wearily she studied the big map in the kitchen, and wondered how long it would go on.

  Only Richard, Lloyd and Gavin now came to Fenton Field on leave. Allan and Ross were in France. All winter the small British Expeditionary Force had dug themselves into their trenches, and the French Army had lived comfortably on the Maginot Line, while Hitler had been busy consolidating his position in Poland, and conquering Norway. Denmark he had taken in a day. In Britain they put up with the inconveniences of war, the shortages, the black-out, the drilling, and they grew bored and restless. They had gone into a war to help a Polish ally for whom, in the end, they had never been able to fire a shot. The months wore on and the situation seemed totally unreal. The country was arming and marching and drilling, and nothing happened. Nicole saw the green quicken in the pastures and along the hedgerows, saw the grain begin to sprout like a tender fuzz on the fields, and she began to experience an illogical hope. She wrote to her sister-in-Jaw in Boston, Liz. ‘Don’t rent the house just yet. I’ve a feeling it’s a stalemate. Perhaps there’ll be an armistice … Perhaps they’ll come to terms …’ She didn’t discuss this half-born hope with Lloyd. She nursed it to herself during those gentle days of April, and told herself that soon, soon they would go home. There would be hot water and hand cream, and she would go back to practising the piano, reading books and playing with her children. She would go back to being a wife who didn’t have to leave her husband’s bed.

  The dream ended on 10 May. The Germans attacked the Netherlands and Belgium from the sky before dawn, and by daylight had captured bridges around The Hague and Rotterdam. By the end of the day the Dutch Air Force had been destroyed. Rotterdam was razed from the air. The attack on Belgium came almost at the same time. A German general named Guderian did what the French had declared impossible; he attacked through the Ardennes, and so the Maginot Line was useless. On 13 May, Guderian crossed the Meuse near Sedan, and the Germans were on French soil.

  And almost unnoticed to Nicole, because there was so much else to think about, so much else to occupy her, at the end of the House of Commons debate on the fall of Norway, someone called Leo Amery said to Chamberlain, using the words of Cromwell, ‘Depart, I say, and let us have done. In the name of God, go.’ By the time the Germans invaded the Netherlands and Belgium, Winston Churchill was Prime Minister.

  Now the thing was real, and the fear was real. At Fenton Field they stared at the kitchen map in horror as the Netherlands and Belgium were swallowed up. From the bridgeheads across the Meuse the Germans could be seen making their obvious attempt to cut the Allied Armies in two. By 16 May the Germans were moving ahead against an ill-coordinated defence at the rate of forty miles a day. By the 20th, German tanks had reached the sea.

  With a kind of blank numbness Nicole went about the daily routine of the farm and hung over the radio for every news bulletin. The battle of France was fought all over again on the fields of Flanders. Not even the little coloured pins Andrew used on his map could sort out the confusion of each conflicting bulletin. ‘It’s chaos,’ Andrew said, and he did not dare to look at Margaret. They had no idea where, in this muddle of orders and counter-orders, of gallant but unrealistic orders to counter-attack, and the inability of the French to drag themselves out of the numbness of shock and the distaste for heroic endeavour, where either Allan or Ross’s division was. The commanders themselves couldn’t have said. All the Fentons could see was that the British were being pushed into a box around Dunkirk. On 26 May the British Cabinet authorized Lord Gort to evacuate it. They expected very few of the troops shut in there to reach England.

  It was called Operation Dynamo, and it was being run from Dover. Dunkirk lay twenty-four miles away across the Straits. The Navy had not the ships; others of any size, standard, capability, would have to be found. Andrew received a call at Fenton Field from a friend with whom he occasionally sailed during the summers, light-hearted expeditions, they had been then, with nothing very daring attempted, and a watchful eye for bad weather. They knew themselves to be fair-weather sailors, these two ageing men; they also knew that they had to go. Andrew asked Ben if he would make up the third member of the crew. Ben had never sailed before. He agreed. Andrew drove to Dover, met up with his friend among the armada of small boats that was gathering. They received their stores, fuel, provisions and charts. They were told where to go and what to do. The Navy would give them what help it could, and so would the Air Force. And so they sailed.

  It was a combination of weather and luck. It was not good weather for flying, and so the Luftwaffe was hampered in its attacks initially; when the weather for flying improved, the RAF was able to hold the Germans in check. The orderly lines of men waiting on the beaches of Dunkirk slowly dwindled as the Navy and the flotilla of small craft made the voyage again and again. Andrew began to think that never again would the ache leave his bones, and never would he be able to sleep for the horror of the wounds he saw. At first Ben was seasick, but by the second crossing he seemed to have lost both his sickness and his strangeness to the craft. It was he who cared for most of the wounded, applying the first-aid lessons he had thought so useless. The lad seemed to Andrew to grow up visibly in those few days. By 1 June the air attacks had become too fierce, and the journeys to Dunkirk could be made only at night. By 4 June the Germans were pressing irresistibly against the tiny space now held by the British, and the evacuation had to be called off. Over 330,000 men were evacuated across the dangerous twenty-four
miles. The Germans had believed that none could escape. They came back without weapons, but with their lives.

  Some men died on the small boat that Andrew helped to crew, and Ben was wounded. At Dover Ben went to the hospital and Andrew went back to Fenton Field. He slept for twenty-four hours, and woke to the news that Ross had been safely evacuated. None of the family then knew that he had distinguished himself for bravery on the Dunkirk beach where he had marshalled his men. There were many brave men in those days. Of Allan there was no news. Richard had been in action all during the campaign, fighting over France. He was given a few days’ leave to rest. It was expected that his squadron would be sent to France to continue the fight, and would be based there. He came back to a house that was silent with apprehension over Allan, silent with exhaustion and fear. He didn’t like it. Celia couldn’t get leave, so he went up to London. ‘Don’t worry about Allan, Mother,’ he said cheerfully as he left. ‘He’s far too sensible to get himself into any bother. See you soon …’

  He was, thought Nicole, having all the action and the speed that his nature craved, and Fenton Field must have seemed a dreary place to him.

  For Lloyd there was no leave. After an autumn and winter and spring of waiting, his medical unit had more to do than it could properly cope with. ‘I’ll get there some time,’ he promised Nicole on the phone. ‘When the serious cases are through the worst. But we’ll have the backlog for quite a while. Men have got shrapnel in the damnedest places. You’d wonder how some of them made it back alive.’ He went on, ‘You all right there, Nicky?’