‘Monday week,’ Margery said. ‘At the farmhouse. As early as possible.’
A thin girl, dressed in a long dark coat, thick stockings, lace-up shoes and with her felt hat in her hand, approached Margery’s desk and stood uncertainly, her eyes on Margery’s face, as though awaiting a command. Her face looked scrubbed, the skin stretched and almost transparent. She wore no make-up. Her pale auburn hair was drawn back into a bun on the nape of her neck. Alice, as she moved away, heard Margery say ‘Next!’ and saw the girl creep forward.
‘Name?’ demanded Margery.
‘Tucker, Miss,’ whispered the girl. ‘Hester Tucker.’
Roger Bayliss sent a man in a truck to fetch Alice and her belongings. The man, Ferdinand Vallance, was a labourer who, in his late teens, had been injured in an accident on the farm. One leg, so badly crushed that it was barely saved, remained twisted. This gave Ferdie a weird, gyrating gait and prevented him from working as fast or as efficiently as he had done before the injury. It also made him unfit for active service. All this information was imparted to Alice when, after delivering Edward-John and his luggage to the preparatory school where he was to spend weekday nights, Ferdie drove the truck out through the suburbs of Exeter and onto a minor road which wound over the hills to Ledburton.
‘Baint that I doan wanna do me bit in the forces like any other fella,’ he had told Alice, almost unintelligibly. ‘Mean, no one ud choose to ’obble ’bout the place like I ’as to do!’
Her leave-taking from Edward-John had been easier than Alice had expected, due in part to its rushed and peculiar circumstances. They had hugged. On Friday night he was to be put on a bus to Ledburton where he would be met. She promised him two whole days on the farm and left him smiling at the prospect.
Her few pieces of furniture were unloaded from the truck and installed in her room. Two threadbare Persian carpets had been spread, one in each of the floor areas and, as well as her mother’s desk and the two armchairs, there was a low rosewood table and a bookcase, presumably contributed by her employer. A fire was burning in the grate and another roared up the wide chimney of the recreation room.
‘Mr Bayliss says as we’re to keep ’em in day and night till the place dries out,’ Rose informed her. ‘These walls has got a dozen years of cold stored in ’em! Once they’m warm ’twill feel better, he says but ’twill take weeks, I reckon!’
In the kitchen the range had smoked sulkily, refusing to draw until Roger himself climbed to the chimney and removed the generations of jackdaw nests that were blocking it. After that the kitchen too began to heat up, steaming as the damp was drawn out of the walls, condensation misting the slate floor.
Rose was working at speed. Unlike Alice, she knew where everything was, which of the deliveries of furniture had already been made and when others were expected. She had decided where the pots and pans would be stored and which drawers would contain the cutlery and which the ladles, kitchen knives, potato peelers and sieves. This, she was well aware, gave her advantages over Alice. She could show off her efficiency and her energy to Mr Bayliss and did so, literally running rings round Alice as the cold of the house seeped through the thin soles of Alice’s shoes from stone floors still barely above freezing point.
They had less than three days before the first intake of girls was due and, as Rose eagerly pointed out, still had no chairs, no saucepans, no mattresses and only half the required linen.
‘And this is a list of their next of kin,’ Margery had begun, sitting beside Alice on one of two packing cases and spreading her paperwork on the kitchen table. ‘Put it in your file and don’t lose it whatever you do. There’ll be eight to start with; another couple later in the season.’ She produced a second sheaf of papers. ‘Ah…here are the travelling arrangements. One copy for me and one for you… Winnie Spriggs and Marion what’s-her-name will be fetched from their billet after work. One girl…Tucker, Hester Tucker, is coming over by bus from Bideford. She’ll need meeting at Ledburton at three-thirty. There’ll be a couple – a Mabel Hodges and an HM something or other – on the London train and two more coming via Bristol. This one…Georgina Webster…is being driven over by her parents. So we can cross her off our lists of worries.’
In her warm and sunny bedroom, Georgina was, at that moment, trying on her Land Army uniform. The corduroy breeches fitted well and did not displease her. The fawn aertex shirt was very like the white ones she wore for tennis and although the green jumper was thick enough to flatten her breasts, her figure was too lithe, athletic and, where appropriate, rounded for any garment to significantly diminish its charm. She looked, in fact, very much like the girl on the posters advertising the Land Army, which were, that year, widely displayed up and down the country. Georgina’s hair was straight, thick, dark and silky. She wore it in an almost 1920s bob, which not only accentuated her good bones and compelling, grey eyes but was easy to dry after swimming in the summers and after riding in the rain during the winters. She laced up the heavy shoes. The khaki socks felt rough against her skin but were thick and would keep her warm. She reeled under the weight of the greatcoat with its ugly, wide lapels and buttoned it, barely able to breathe, across her chest. But the hat! The hat she could not, would not, tolerate. She went noisily down the polished wooden stairs and into the dining room where her parents and her brother were finishing breakfast. They stared, laughed as she clowned with the hat, then fell silent, their smiles fixed. Her mother rose from the table and began gathering the dishes.
‘It rather suits you, darling!’ she said gamely. ‘I feel as though I’m packing you off to boarding school again! Uniform and all!’ She was not happy about her daughter’s virtual conscription into the Land Army but there was a war on and people were having to make sacrifices. Hers, she knew, were less irksome than most. Her husband got to his feet, tucked his folded newspaper under one arm, held his daughter at arm’s length and told her, not for the first time, that she was a good girl and that he was proud of her. Both mother and father left the room while the brother and sister remained, looking at one another, she, smiling, he, increasingly downcast.
‘What’s the matter, little brother?’ Georgina asked. ‘Come on. Tell.’
‘I’m embarrassed, Georgie,’ he said. ‘I don’t like what’s happening.’
She laughed, removing the hat and sending it skimming through the air to land on the window-seat.
‘Well, neither do I but who cares!’ she said breezily. But Lionel was not to be cheered.
‘I don’t mean the bloody hat,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be going.’
As a condition of war, exemption from military service was permitted to one son in each farming family. Second and successive siblings, male or female, were required to do war work of some description. Georgina, at twenty and able to avoid combat by enlisting in the Women’s Land Army, had done so willingly, not only to protect her nineteen-year-old brother but because she herself, influenced by the convictions of her parents, was a pacifist. While not enthusiastic about the prospect of the Land Army, she found it tolerable and was pleased that she would be allowed to continue with a correspondence course, run by the Ministry of Agriculture, which would, if she was successful, give her recognised qualifications and develop the skills she might one day need in order to farm either her own land, or someone else’s. Lionel, whose interests lay elsewhere, would replace one of his father’s men until the war ended and then go to university. Although logical, the plan left Lionel with a nagging conscience, which neither his sister nor his parents could ease.
‘It’ll be ghastly, George,’ he announced flatly. ‘You’ll be homesick and as lonely as all get-out! If your lot are anything like the land girls on the Marshalls’ farm they’ll be moronic!’
‘Shut up, Li!’ She was gentle. Persuasive. ‘It has to be done. We both know it. I’ve spent enough time helping out here for the work to be familiar. I shan’t be far away! I’ll get home! And I daresay I’ll be so exhausted that all I’ll want to do
with my spare time is sleep!’ Her brother still looked unconvinced. ‘It’ll soon be over and we’ll forget about it in no time. Think how much worse it would be if we were both boys and one of us was going to have to fight!’ He smiled, slightly soothed.
‘I could come over on the bike and take you for a spin?’ he offered.
The breeches that had been allocated to Georgina had been manufactured in a small factory off the East India Dock Road. Its proprietor, Frederic Sorokova, together with large numbers of his close relatives, had emigrated from their native Poland soon after the end of the First World War. One of his current employees was his niece, Hannah-Maria who, at eighteen, like several of her cousins before her, was learning the business from the bottom up. Unlike them, she detested it. She hated the smell of fabric and of the oily machines. She hated their rattling clamour and the power they appeared to exert over the operators who spent their days bent over them as though attached by their flying fingers and strained eyes to the plunging needles.
Hannah-Maria had been in the dispatch room, folding corduroy breeches commissioned by the War Agricultural Committee for use by its land girls, and packing them, a dozen to a box, in cardboard cartons, when the idea first occurred to her. She was uncertain what land girls were or what they did. Her curiosity revealed that they were being employed on farms so that male workers could be released from vital agricultural labour and sent to fight the real war. According to the posters on the advertising hoardings these young women spent their time in idyllic countryside, riding on hay-wagons, driving tractors, bottle-feeding lambs and sprawling in the sun with their backs to honeysuckle-covered hedges. Hannah-Maria did not know honeysuckle from ragwort but, once planted in her mind, the notion of wearing one of these stiff pairs of breeches, rather than packing them, had taken hold and things had developed quickly from possibility to reality. She had called at a local recruitment centre where an elderly female officer looked her up and down, pulled a fresh application form from a file and began to fill it in.
‘Name?’
‘Hannah-Maria Sorokova.’ The woman recoiled. ‘Everyone calls me Annie,’ Hannah-Maria explained. ‘Except our gran. She calls us all by our proper Polish names.’
‘Polish?’ the woman repeated foolishly. ‘I had assumed, from your accent, that you were…’
‘Local? Yeah, well, I am. Born in Duckett Street, just off the Mile End Road. Same as me mum and dad. But their folks come from Cracow.’ The woman looked at the thick dark hair, the soft eyes and the small oval face.
‘I see,’ she said.
‘I’m not a German spy or nothing!’ said Hannah-Maria defensively, her vision of the countryside fading under the woman’s stare.
‘Of course not,’ said the woman. ‘My concern is that you have a very urban background, Miss Soro…Sorok—’
‘What’s urban?’ Hannah-Maria interrupted.
‘It means…of a town or a city. You’d have to go wherever you are sent, you know. That might be a very long way indeed from your family and friends.’
‘Look,’ said Hannah-Maria urgently, ‘the day I left school I was stuck in front of a sewing machine with twenty other girls, all of us doing the same thing, thinking the same thoughts. Since the war started we’ve been making breeches. For land girls, right? Thousands of ’em! Great towering stacks of ’em! I don’t want to sew ’em, Miss! I want to wear ’em! Oh, please, Miss!’ Hannah-Maria had a fleeting impression that the woman was suppressing a smile.
‘Don’t you think the countryside would seem very strange to you?’ she asked.
‘No, Miss!’ Hannah-Maria was emphatic. ‘I’ve been to the countryside! Honest! Hop-picking! Every year since I can remember! Till the war started, that is.’
She was given the address of a local doctor, a chit from the Ministry to cover the cost of a medical examination and told to report back with her certificate. A week later she was interviewed again and informed that she had been accepted into the Women’s Land Army. She would receive one pound one shilling a week out of which ten shillings would be deducted for board and lodging. She would be trained on the job as there were no available places at the instruction centres. If she proved suitable her wage would rise to twenty-five shillings and the cost of her keep to twelve shillings and sixpence. She was given a rail ticket from Paddington to Ledburton Halt, near Exeter, told to make the journey on the following Wednesday and to inform her next of kin that her address would be care of Bayliss, Higher Stone Post Farm near Ledburton. There was a telephone number, strictly for emergencies only. Hannah-Maria ran all the way back to her uncle’s workshop. She had exceeded her lunch break by fifteen minutes.
Chapter Two
Alice was floundering. Aware that neither Roger Bayliss nor Rose Crocker had any confidence in her ability to run the hostel and that even Margery Brewster’s support was more in the interests of her own reputation than of Alice’s, she felt increasingly exhausted.
Until the girls had arrived and their ration books were in her possession, Alice was able to buy only an emergency supply of basic food to tide them all over until the shopping could be put on a regular footing. Fred, an elderly labourer, normally attached to Bayliss’s farm, was detailed to drive her into Exeter. She sat in the passenger seat of the truck that would soon be carrying the girls to and from their various sites of work. Its worn leather still reeked of a sick sheep that had recently been transported in it. Alice stocked up with scrubbing brushes, mops and as much food as was possible without the essential ration books.
Since her arrival at the farm she had been shaking. Whether this was caused by depression or anxiety or by the intense cold of the interior of the building she was unsure, but while she was in Exeter she spent some of her precious clothing coupons, and almost the last of her cash, on two pairs of woollen slacks, some warm socks, a thick sweater and a pair of leather boots whose inch-thick soles would distance her, that much at least, from the cold floors.
When she returned to the farm she found Rose watching Roger Bayliss, who was trying to assemble the paraffin cooker. Earlier, he had discovered Rose, absorbed in fitting its components together with the aid of the manufacturer’s instructions. Assuming that she was incapable of the task, Roger relieved her of it and now she stood, ignoring Alice and observing him. After some time, convinced that he was holding some vital part or other upside down, Rose could no longer contain herself.
‘I think you’ll find, sir,’ she ventured, her contempt thinly disguised as respect, ‘if I may say so…that this bit goes there.’ She took the piece of metal from him and inverted it, flushing with pleasure as it slid, without resistance, into place.
Rose had also contrived to tame the kitchen range, bullying it into submission and then persuading it to draw so vigorously that it now glowed almost red hot, its heat filling the room, spilling out into the cross-passage and rising through the ceiling into the rooms overhead. The tank above the bathroom was now filled with scalding hot water, which meant that the airing cupboard was warm and the linen could be unpacked and loaded into it. Alice’s respect for Rose was huge but the woman refused to accept her praise and seemed determined to avoid eye contact with her.
Sacks of potatoes and swedes, together with nets of sprouts and carrots, were delivered from the Bayliss farm, which was, Alice learnt, situated on rising ground a mile further up the valley. Three hens, past laying, were killed, plucked and prepared for the table. Too tough for roasting, they were to be stewed for the first evening meal on the following day and served with mashed potatoes and cabbage followed by prunes and custard.
By Tuesday afternoon the beds in two of the double rooms, together with the three in the largest room, were assembled. Each was equipped with a pillow, two sheets, three blankets and a coverlet. Alice, now wearing her new trousers, thick sweater and boots, at last felt warm. She was at her mother’s desk, working on menus which would utilise the limited supplies at her disposal when Roger called to check on progress and was greeted by Rose
, shrilly cataloguing a host of problems.
‘There’s two beds not yet come, sir, and the man as is fetching over the kitchen chairs has broke down. We’re still short of cutlery and there’s a funny noise in the bathroom pipes… And if you could tell Fred us’ll need another load of logs if we’re to keep the fires up ’cos these walls is going to take a lot of heating through.’ Roger Bayliss ignored Rose’s concerns and asked where he could find Mrs Todd.
‘She’ll be working on her lists, sir,’ Rose replied, her tone suggesting that her own contribution to the situation was vastly more to the point than Alice’s.
When, moments later, Margery Brewster arrived with a bunch of snowdrops for Alice’s room, Rose curtly acknowledged her arrival before trotting away on some pressing business.
‘You’ll have to watch her,’ Margery warned Alice later, arranging the flowers in an old cup. ‘Keep her in her place or she’ll undermine your authority with the girls!’ The looming prospect of the girls’ arrival made Alice start to tremble again. It was an interior shaking which, fortunately, did not seem to be apparent to others.
‘She’s extremely capable,’ Alice murmured. ‘I think she could run this hostel without me!’ If Margery gave her a quick, sharp look, Alice did not see it.
‘There’s a lot more to it than Rose Crocker is even aware of, Mrs Todd, and don’t forget, any discourtesy on your charges’ part, or failure to obey the rules may – in fact, should – be reported to me so that I can give you my unstinting support.’ Margery’s words, intended to reassure Alice, only added to her dread of possible confrontations with the eight unknown girls who were soon to invade the farmhouse.
Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings Page 3
