by Anne Bennett
‘You thinking of the others?’
‘Don’t tell me it hasn’t crossed your mind?’
‘’Course it has.’
‘Point is, I know the threats that man Flatterly made so that she wouldn’t go to the police, but I think he was bluffing.’
‘What if he wasn’t, though?’
‘We can tell the police about his threats,’ Will said. ‘I talked it over with Stephen earlier. He said that something must be done as well. He thinks it’s monstrous that three children have just disappeared and that it’s small wonder Meg is in a state. She is troubled; you can see it in her eyes though she is working as well as ever. I think our lad cares a great deal for that young lady.’
‘I know he does,’ Enid said. ‘They are both young, but we are at war and Stephen is in the army so they haven’t time to hang about …’
‘You think there is some understanding between them?’
‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.’
‘And how would you feel about that?’
‘Couldn’t be more pleased.’ Enid said. ‘I would really get the daughter I’ve always wanted. But just now I want to help her find her family.’
‘And me,’ Will said. ‘I have been fretting about it all afternoon and evening even before Stephen spoke to me.’
‘And he thinks we should go to the police?’
‘He thinks it’s the only thing to do.’ Will said. ‘He would go himself but he is off the day after tomorrow. The point is if we do nothing I’ll feel we are abandoning these young children, and anyway Stephen said we might be in trouble with the police ourselves if we don’t tell them.’ Enid looked at Will with fear-filled eyes. She’d never been in the slightest trouble with the police and didn’t want to be now. Yet she said, ‘Meg has just been coming to terms with this herself. Wait till Stephen has gone back and she has settled back on the farm – where she seems at her happiest anyway – and we will talk to her.’
The next day when Meg woke she told herself that there was to be no sadness that day for it was Stephen’s last for some time and she pushed all her concerns to the back of her mind, determined that he should leave with happy memories. They had agreed the night before to milk the cows together to get that job out of the way, so the first time they met was in the cowshed and when Stephen smiled over at Meg she felt her stomach give a lurch. She blushed as he smiled back and had she but known it, that flush to her face made her look prettier than ever,
Will looked from one to the other and then glanced over to Joy with a grin and a slight shrug. Meg was unaware of this for she had eyes only for Stephen until Joy said. ‘Come on you two love birds there are cows to milk.’
Seeing how it was between Stephen and Meg and knowing the limited time they would have together, Will directed them both to take the cows back to the field while he and Joy cleaned out the byre. As they walked down the lane hand in hand behind the lumbering cows, Meg said, ‘I’d like to stop time. You know, just this one day, because when this day is gone I may not see you for ages.’
‘I know,’ Stephen said. ‘Some of the chaps say it’s mad to get involved with girls when there is a war on. That it’s best to love them and leave them.’
‘Oh, that’s a horrid way to think and treat people.’
‘Oh, I agree and you need have no worries about me,’ Stephen said. ‘I am a one-woman-bloke and that woman is you and I think I knew that really the first day I saw you.’
‘Is that why you asked me to write to you?’
‘Yes,’ Stephen admitted. ‘I knew you weren’t ready to see me as any other than a friend.’
‘I’m ready now. Stephen,’ Meg said. ‘I love you and in a way wish I didn’t because I will worry about you even more.’
They had reached the cow’s field and Stephen didn’t speak until every cow was in the field and the gate secured, then he said to Meg, ‘I’m sorry I know I am laying another burden of worry on your shoulders and I can do nothing to lessen it but I would like to leave you something to remember me by.’
He held out his arms and she went into them willingly and he kissed her again. This time however it was a proper kiss that sent the blood pulsating in Meg’s veins and engendered strange sensations to rise in her body and when they eventually broke apart she was breathless and her cheeks were pinker than usual. ‘Oh, Stephen.’
‘Oh Meg,’ Stephen said. ‘How I wish I could spirit you off for the day.’
‘Me too,’ Meg said with a rueful smile. ‘But we have the apples to pick.’
‘Ah yes. We have the apples to pick,’ Stephen repeated and they went back to the farmhouse hand in hand.
They picked apples all day and yet it didn’t seem such an onerous task for though the day was cold there was no wind. It did Enid’s heart good to see how easy Stephen and Meg were with each other as she saw them laughing together and teasing one another and she sent a silent prayer that they were going to have some sort of future together some day when this dreadful war was at an end.
Stephen was leaving the next day, but the girls were up anyway, helping Will with the cows. Stephen had arranged for an army truck to pick him up at the head of the lane and Meg felt her stomach give a lurch as she heard the rumble of it on the road. Stephen put his arms around Joy and his mother, who was trying not to weep, and his father clapped him on the shoulder, his voice was very gruff as he bid him farewell. Then he hoisted his kitbag on his shoulder and caught up Meg’s hand and together they walked up the lane. Before he got into the truck he took Meg in his arms and gently kissed her on the lips. ‘Goodbye my dearest Meg’
Meg’s stomach felt as if it had a lead weight inside it and tears sprang to her eyes but she wouldn’t let them fall as she said, ‘Oh please take care, Stephen. Don’t try to be a hero. I love you and I want you to come home to me.’
‘I love you too,’ Stephen said. ‘And I promise that I will take no more risks than I have to as a serving soldier. ‘Write to me often and let me know that I’m not forgotten.’
‘As if,’ Meg with a watery smile.
‘Are you getting in this truck or not?’ the driver called out.
‘I’m coming.’ Stephen said. ‘But you can’t expect me to rush when I am leaving someone precious behind.’
And with that he kissed Meg on the cheek and swung himself up in the truck with the other returning soldiers who began ribbing him about keeping them waiting. Meg shed tears as she walked back down the lane, but by the time she reached the farmhouse she had rubbed all signs of tears from her face, though she knew like his parents she would miss and worry about Stephen every minute of the day.
It took another full day for the apples all to be collected and the following day they were sorted. Some went to make jam; a lot of cooking apples were to be dried and put into jars in the larder – ‘So they are there and handy if I want to make a pie or a crumble,’ Enid told the girls.
Other cooking apples were peeled and sliced into rings – the cores as well – because Enid said the apples dried better that way, and then each slice was dipped into a solution of water and coarse salt to stop them going brown before they were threaded through with string and hung from the rafters in the barn.
The girls helped Enid with this and then, as they returned to the kitchen, Joy said, ‘There’s still a fair few left.’
‘They are stored in special dimpled trays,’ Enid said, fetching them from a large cupboard in the kitchen. ‘Every apple has to be checked – one bad apple will send the whole lot bad in short order – and straw must be laid between each line of apples so no apple will touch another. When we are done they will be stored in the hay loft.’
‘It’s a different world, isn’t it?’ Joy said, as she and Meg prepared for bed that night. ‘All this work provides cider, jam, the makings of pies and apples to eat, whereas in Birmingham we would just buy things from the shops.’
‘I know,’ Meg said. ‘I think it makes you appreciate the food more, somehow.’
‘Well, that’s the apple picking all over for us,’ Meg said. ‘You heard what Will said at dinner. He wants us in the fields tomorrow, picking the root veg before the frost comes and destroys it all and the ground’s too hard to plough.’
‘Yes,’ Joy said. ‘And I’d say we have to go quick because the autumn has come in with a vengeance. There is a definite nip in the air in the morning.’
‘And at night,’ Meg added. ‘Just at the moment I am perishing, so are you going to get into bed or what?’
‘What?’ said Joy, and lobbed a pillow at Meg and a giggle escaped from her.
Joy caught sight of her face and she said, ‘It isn’t a crime to laugh, Meg.’ Joy said
‘How will it help if you are miserable?. Come on, you’re right, it’s more than just cold. Let’s go to bed.’
Meg was glad enough to snuggle down but was almost afraid to go to sleep, and when she eventually did, her sleep was threaded through with nightmares.
While Meg and Joy might think apple picking one of the nicest jobs on the farm, harvesting the autumn root vegetables had to be one of the worst. It was back-breaking work, and cold following behind the reaper pulled by the horse and scrabbling in the dank, moist earth for the beetroot, which had to be lifted first before any frost could get to it.
No one returned to the farmhouse till milking time, but Enid would come out mid-morning with flasks of hot tea and jam spread liberally on slices of her lovely bread. Dinner could be hot baked potatoes, slices of cheese or ham or hard-boiled eggs and some sort of pudding, and before they stopped to get the cows she would come out again with tea. Meg was immensely grateful, as was Joy, for they knew from talking to other Land Army girls that many employers weren’t as considerate as theirs.
However, the only time that Meg’s hands were warm was when they were clasped around the warm cups. This wasn’t a job you could do so well in gloves, and each night when she went into the farmhouse, her hands and stockinged feet would throb as the feeling came back into them.
Day after day it went on, each morning colder than the one that went before, and yet each morning they knew how important the work was, Britain was losing merchant ships on a daily or sometimes twice-daily basis; for each one sunk, as well as the tragedy of sailors losing their lives, there was the loss of vital food stuffs and important materials . . Twelve merchant ships had been lost by the time the HMS Royal Oak was torpedoed on 14 October.
They were all upset but it galvanised the girls to work even harder, knowing that with all the stuff not getting through, what they were doing was vital work. They were struggling with the field of sugar beet then carrots, turnips, swede, onions and potatoes to be gathered in. They never complained about their aches and pains to Will as it would have done no good, but they moaned a bit when they were in bed at night.
‘I mean, I don’t think human beings are meant to bend and straighten as often as we’re expected to,’ Joy said. ‘We’re not made that way.’
‘I do sometimes feel that I am going to snap in the middle,’ Meg confessed.
‘I know my back is aching so much that sometimes I think I won’t be able to straighten it at the end of the row,’ Joy complained.
‘Or if we manage to straighten up, we won’t be able to bend again to do the next one,’ Meg agreed.
The weather didn’t help. The biting wind alone was bad enough, but when that wind drove rain from leaden grey skies to lash into the girls like stair rods and they were forced to hunt in slurried mud for the vegetables, then it was sheer misery. In a way, though, Meg was glad of the gruelling schedule. The days were busy enough to keep the thoughts of the missing children and worries about Stephen at bay and at night she was tired enough to fall into a deep and often dreamless sleep.
Will’s respect for the girls strengthened as October came to a close and November began, which was initially even wetter than October. As he said to Enid, ‘That relentless rain and cold would sap the heart out of anyone, and yet they toil on regardless.’
‘Not for much longer, though, surely?’
‘No,’ Will said. ‘They’re on the last furrows. Another couple of days should do it.’
‘When Meg’s finished the harvest, you must tell her what you did.’
‘There’s nothing to tell, is there, though?’ Will said. ‘Don’t see the point of upsetting her for nothing.’
Although Will and Enid had had no business with the police, they knew Fred Pearce, the village bobby in Penkridge, very well. He had been at school with Will, and his eldest son, Luke, had been one of the farm hands who had been called up with Stephen. So without a word to Meg, on their weekly trip to Penkridge to charge up the accumulator, the first Saturday after the girls’ return home, he’d left them to their own devices and had called in to see Fred unofficially. He told him as much as he thought he needed to know.
‘It’s the safety of the children I am concerned about, and this man Flatterly.’
As soon as he mentioned the name, he saw Fred stiffen. ‘What is it?’
‘You mean Richard Flatterly?’
‘Yes. Do you know him?’
‘I know of him. Some bigwig in the council,’ Fred said. ‘Be difficult to find anything about him without him knowing, and if he was to make a complaint about me,’ Fred drew a finger across his neck, ‘I’d be for the high jump all right.’
‘Look, Fred, that’s all very well,’ said Will. ‘But no one should be above the law, and these are young children we are talking about.’
‘From what you told me, your land girl didn’t think he had anything to do with them at first.’
‘No,’ Will had to admit. ‘He arrived after it was all over and all the children ticked off and sent to their foster homes, but then he claimed he would tell her more if she was “nice” to him.’
‘She rebuffed him, I presume?’
‘Of course she did,’ Will snapped. ‘I told you: she isn’t that kind of girl at all.’
‘Well, I would guess he knows nothing and just has a fancy for your girl.’
‘According to Meg, it’s the schoolteacher he has a fancy for.’
Fred shrugged. ‘Some men are like that. As long as he doesn’t try and marry the two, I can’t arrest him for that.’
‘There’s still three children missing.’
‘Yes, I grant you that is worrying. But these evacuees, you know, a right headache they are giving us, taking off for home at the slightest provocation.’
‘Meg is recently back from Birmingham and they’re not back there.’
‘Fair enough, Will, I will pass the word around, especially to the police in Rugeley, seeing as that is where they went missing from,’ Fred promised. ‘And to put your mind at rest, I will make discreet enquiries about Flatterly – but they will have to be very discreet – and see if I come up with anything. But don’t hold your breath.’
So far Fred had come up with precisely nothing, no sign of the children, and he had found out nothing nefarious about Flatterly either. As one wet day followed another, Will couldn’t help feeling that if it was bad for his land girls, it could be far worse for three missing children.
It was hard, too, for the British Expeditionary Force, which set off for France in the biting wind and the icy rain. The Royal Staffordshire Fusiliers and the Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers were part of that force.
TWENTY-THREE
With the harvest safely gathered, and much of the surplus sold off in the markets, along with the excess eggs and butter, the work on the farm got a little easier, though not necessarily so pleasant: one of the first jobs was muck-spreading. That involved transferring manure from the pile behind the farmhouse to the fields via Dobbin and a muck cart, and then after it was laid all along the rows, it had to be dug in through the soil so that it would be ready for planting in the spring. It took some time and it didn’t help that the ground was rock solid, for now frost often gilded the hedges and trees,
reminding them all that winter was not far away.
There were still the cows to milk twice a day and feed with hay, since the grass was sparse and frost-rimed. Now that the piglets were no longer feeding from the mother, Will moved them to an enclosure at the side of the farmhouse, where the bracken was too dense to plant anything. ‘Pigs will love it,’ Will assured Meg, and they did seem to; the girls watched the powerful snout of the mother grubbing up the soil.
‘What’s she doing?’
‘Searching for roots and bulbs and insects,’ Will said. ‘She will feed them to the babies but in a few days they will be digging their own.’
‘So don’t you have to feed them when they are in there?’ Joy asked.
‘Oh, yes, they’ll still have their pigswill. After all, have you ever seen a thin pig?’
‘Honestly, Will,’ Joy said, ‘till I came here I’d never seen a pig, not close up, like. It isn’t something we have a great deal of in the streets of Birmingham.’
Will let out a bellow of laughter. ‘I suppose not,’ he said. ‘Well, this little lady still gets her pigswill.’
So there were still the pigs to feed, and the dogs, and the corn to scatter for the hens and the eggs to collect. And this was the time of year when all the fences had to be inspected and repaired if necessary, and the well had to be cleaned because it usually got partially blocked with leaves in the autumn.
One day Will came in to breakfast, after leaving the churns at the head of the lane, carrying a pile of post. He distributed the post as he said, ‘How do you two feel about creosoting the barn and byre today?’
‘All right, I suppose,’ Joy said. ‘If you trust us.’
‘You’ve never let me down yet,’ Will said. ‘Anyway, it’s a case of needs must. The postman was telling me that they are lopping trees in Cannock Chase, so I fancy taking the horse and cart and getting a few logs for the winter. You be all right with that?’
‘’Course,’ Meg and Joy said together.
With a little thrill of excitement, Meg noted one of the letters was from Stephen and she put it with the others and slipped them into her dungarees pocket for reading later.
