Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings

by Julia Stoneham

  ‘He could not!’ said Rose, familiar with hostel rules.

  ‘I mean to the village!’ Alice said, sharply enough to make Rose’s eyes widen in surprise or possibly with the beginning of respect. ‘They could have spent the night together at the inn in the square…’ She paused. In the recreation room a couple of the girls had joined Annie and the three voices repeated the chorus of the song as Alice continued to speak, almost to herself. ‘If all I had to do was to feed them and keep the place clean…even that would be enough, but there’s so much more to it! Eight young women…!’

  ‘Ten! When the rest of ’em come!’

  ‘Full of themselves, their lives, their problems!’ Alice had forgotten Rose and was sliding towards desperation. ‘I don’t know who they are or what they think!’

  Rose’s manner was changing. She looked concerned. Guilty even. ‘Nothing you can’t handle!’ she said defensively. Alice laughed.

  ‘You’m doing all right, I reckon!’ Rose said staunchly.

  ‘You don’t mean that, Rose! You don’t think I can cope here. Nor does Mr Bayliss and nor does Mrs Brewster! I’m only here because there was no one else and I shan’t be here much longer so you’ll all be able to say how right you were!’

  ‘No!’ said Rose.

  ‘Yes!’ Alice felt a sense of release as she turned to look at the hard-faced, self-righteous woman with her sharp eyes and spiteful tongue. ‘Every time you look at me your face tells me exactly what you think of me, Rose. And you are right! I shouldn’t be here and very soon I won’t be! So… goodnight,’ she finished dismissively and waited for Rose to go. But Rose sat down at the table and stared at its scrubbed surface. Alice’s gaze moved to the badly situated cupboard where the saucepans were kept. She found herself considering where, in the interests of streamlining the cooking processes, it should be sited.

  ‘Lot of how you feel is my fault,’ Rose began in a low voice. To begin with Alice did not appear to be listening to her. ‘See, when I heard Mr Bayliss was gonna open up this place and board his land girls here, I thought…’ She paused, took a deep breath and plunged on. ‘I thought as he was gonna put me in charge!’ Alice, her attention caught at last, turned and looked at Rose.

  ‘Stupid, wasn’t I,’ she said, ‘to go thinkin’ that!’

  The cause of Rose’s unpleasantness suddenly plain to her, Alice hesitated, sensing that her reaction to this disclosure must be a cautious one. Concealing her surprise she said carefully that it was far from stupid, adding, ‘I wonder why on earth he didn’t?’ Rose’s eyes widened. ‘You’d have been the perfect person for the job!’ Alice continued. ‘You know the building inside out, you’re a wonderful cook, you understand the kitchen range and the plumbing and you’re awfully good at keeping the girls in order!’ Rose was confused. Was she being praised? Did Mrs Todd…Alice…mean what she was saying?

  ‘But there’s other things, i’nt there,’ Rose said. Alice shrugged and said she couldn’t think of any.

  ‘Well,’ said Rose and it was now her turn to carefully consider her words. ‘Between the two of us I reckon we make a good team, you and me, and I won’t hear another word about you quittin’ and givin’ the boss and that busybody Bewster woman the satisfaction of saying “told you so”! It’s been a rough old day, this has, what with poor little Chrissie and all…but it don’t do to make decisions on bad days!’ She got to her feet. ‘I’m going to my bed now, Alice, before I falls over with tiredness and I suggest you does the same.’ She wanted to get away by herself and think over the astonishing scene that had just taken place. ‘Now, where’s my boots?’ she said, busily making her way out into the cross-passage. ‘That yard be a quagmire this weather…’

  ‘Goodnight, Rose.’

  ‘Night Mrs Todd.’

  ‘Alice!’ Alice called after her.

  ‘Yes,’ Rose said and smiled. ‘Alice.’

  Alice followed Rose down the cross-passage and as the outer door closed she slid the bolt, feeling through her near exhaustion a small, surprising sense of satisfaction as the ancient, blackened rod of metal slipped into place. All her charges, except for the one who had chosen to defect, were safely under her roof. She stoked the range, closed it down for the night and made her way through the old parlour to her own room where Edward-John lay asleep, his book on the floor.

  The Bayliss farmhouse was, by that time, in darkness. Father and son had eaten the meal that the housekeeper had cooked and cleared. As it was the last night of Christopher’s leave there had been stuffed capon served with roasted potatoes, buttered parsnips, carrots and Brussels sprouts. This was followed by crème brulée which had the reputation of being Christopher’s favourite pudding. Roger had opened a bottle of Chateau Neuf du Pape which, having been preceded by a couple of large glasses of sherry, had left the two men relaxed enough to be unconcerned about the several long silences that fell during the course of the evening. After a glass or two of port Christopher excused himself on the grounds of his early departure next morning. His father got to his feet while they exchanged farewells, smiling at each other, wishing each other good luck. Although acutely conscious of the fact that this might well be the last time he saw his son alive or, come to that, dead, Roger’s manner revealed nothing of his anxiety for the young man who stood before him, smiling gamely.

  Roger’s life, for as long as he was able to remember, consisted of an accumulating collection of compartmentalised feelings, many of them quite painful and which he had long ago decided were best dealt with by keeping them very much under wraps. As people had suggested at the time, he had probably been wrong to marry Frances. She was the only daughter of a neighbouring landowner, one of whose farms Roger had subsequently added to his own. He had met her when, at eighteen, she had been recovering from a bout of tuberculosis. She had told him, on their first meeting, that she thought it unlikely that she would ever marry as she wanted to be a farmer’s wife and since her illness no one would consider her healthy and strong enough for that role. Haunted, for reasons he did not analyse, by this confession, Roger found himself drawn to her and had, soon afterwards, proposed marriage and been accepted. Christopher, their only child, was in his first term at boarding school when she suddenly died of an illness quite unconnected to the tuberculosis. The boy had stood in Ledburton churchyard beside his father as the flower-laden coffin was lowered into the mud. Afterwards Roger had suggested that it might be better if, for a while at least, they did not speak of the dead woman who had been his wife and his son’s mother, as to do so was too painful for both of them. Christopher was sent back to school, returning, at the end of the term, to a house that was always to remain different from the one he had lived in when his mother was alive. To make up for this, his father indulged him, unstintingly bestowing on him the best toys, ponies, push-bikes, motorbikes and eventually sports cars, that he could afford. At the age of seventeen Christopher had expressed the wish to learn to fly so that when war was declared it seemed both logical and attractive to him to join the RAF rather than take the place at Seale-Hayne Agricultural College which his father had arranged for him.

  Alone on the upper floor of the farmhouse, Christopher had run a hot bath which, instead of relaxing him, had the opposite effect. He sat smoking in his bedroom, trying to suppress a familiar, rising anxiety, until the chill of the unheated room drove him to bed. Here, again, he ran through the events of his unfortunate encounter with Georgina and cursed himself for his stupidity.

  Shortly after he started flying fighters he had shut down his feelings. Initially the knowledge that he had on several occasions escaped death by inches or by seconds had made him nervous in a healthy and predictable way, raising the hackles on his neck and providing him with a cracking yarn to tell over a pint. But, like many of his peers, the continuous pressure of his situation had begun to damage him. To begin with he and the small group from within a larger group with whom he had done his training regarded themselves as a band of brothers. They would survive beca
use they willed it so. They were indestructible. But as the months passed and their numbers were reduced, in many cases by death, in others by horrific injury, the comradery faltered and changed. Mess banter became increasingly brittle. Relationships with wives and lovers suffered and new conquests tended to be considered only on the briefest and most shallow terms. The girls too, the FANYs, Wrens and WAAFS, found the going tough and hardened themselves in self-defence against the daily news of lost men. Men downed over enemy territory. Men ditching in the freezing Channel. Men with their skin burnt off them and their limbs shredded by shrapnel. Excesses increasingly became Christopher’s only escape from the cruel events that confronted him on a daily basis. Drinking, risk-taking and love-making became frenetic fixes, short-time diversions, while the fact of his own mortality, something with which the young should not have to deal, faced him each day.

  Christopher had no way of knowing how close to the edge he was and so he continued, taking his orders, carrying them out, coming home for spells of leave and returning to base when the leaves were over. Although he knew that he was misreading people and had lost the art of communication, mostly he behaved well, responding much as he would when returning a lob in a game of tennis or driving a cricket ball into the outfield. It was when he was faced with a situation which involved feelings beyond the superficial that he floundered into the sort of stupidity that had ruined his chances with Georgina. Yet when he asked himself ‘chances of what?’ he had no answer. Perhaps, on his next leave, he would try again, approaching her differently. But how? He concentrated on assembling her face in his mind and finally fell briefly asleep in an appreciative contemplation of her steady grey eyes, only to wake with a start. Downstairs the clock began to strike. If it was five he would get up. If it was four he would try to sleep again. If it was seven he was already late. It was three. He lay for some time unable to control his imagination which, as soon as he relaxed his grip on it, had him plummeting out of the sky in a burning Hurricane. He swung out of his bed. On the upstairs landing he opened the heavy curtains. There was a glimmer of light from the last quarter of the moon. Enough for him to see his way down the stairs. His father, before retiring, had opened the curtains in the first-floor drawing room. Christopher made his way to the drinks table, poured himself a finger or two of whiskey and stood drinking.

  Roger Bayliss may have been woken by a creaking stair board. The slightly larger than usual amount of alcohol he had taken that evening had made him thirsty and his bedside carafe was empty. He would go downstairs and refill it from the kitchen tap where the water was best. At the same time he would check up on the sound he thought he had heard. Probably a window left unfastened. Or one of the farm cats raiding the pantry. The wind was rising and a scud of cloud brought the first rattle of rain against a west-facing window. It also drowned the faint sound of Roger’s slippers on the stairs so that when he saw the outline of his son, standing beside the drinks table, and spoke to him, Christopher spun round defensively.

  ‘Couldn’t you sleep?’ his father asked, adding uncharacteristically, ‘Bit uptight about tomorrow, perhaps?’ Christopher laughed. He had been trying to refill his glass and now, for some reason, could not seem to do so without the lip of the decanter repeatedly striking the rim of the glass so violently that it seemed likely to shatter it. Roger removed the two objects from his son’s hands, replenished Christopher’s drink and poured one for himself.

  ‘You are all right, aren’t you?’ Roger said casually, after a few moments. No point in making the boy think you were nervous about him. ‘I mean, we might be able to organise a spot more leave, if you feel you need it. They’ve been driving you pretty hard these last few months.’ Christopher swallowed a gulp of the whiskey, shook his head and assured his father that he was perfectly fine.

  ‘Too much grog, Dad! Makes the old heart go pitter-pat!’ They both chose to ignore the fact that Christopher was, at that moment, adding considerably to the amount of alcohol in his blood. They drained their glasses in silence.

  ‘Think I’ll pop down and check the kitchen,’ Roger said. ‘Reckon we’ve got a marauding tomcat!’ Christopher mimed picking off the cat with a shotgun. They smiled at each other and, relieved that an awkward moment had been painlessly passed, parted for the second time that night.

  Chapter Four

  Over the next four weeks the occupants of Lower Stone Post Farm settled into something approaching a routine. A spell of icy easterly winds was followed by a heavy fall of snow that caused the lorry to slither into a ditch, where it remained for three days, forcing the girls to make the ascent to the Bayliss farm on foot, trudging in single file through fields parallel to the lane, which was filled to hedge level with soft snow.

  A land girl called Iris Butler took Chrissie’s place as roommate for Mabel, whose odour was diminishing daily due to pressure put upon her by the other girls who encouraged her to bathe each night, insisting bluntly that she took the last turn in the second filling of the tub, thus ensuring that no one had to use the bathroom after she had – at least not until it had been well ventilated.

  Alice and Rose, despite the farmhouse being briefly snow-bound, managed to keep the girls fed, the hostel clean, reasonably warm and mostly dry. Edward-John arrived happily each Friday night and stoically returned to his school early on Monday mornings. To begin with, the attention he received from the girls overwhelmed him but he soon began to respond, developing an almost flirtatious relationship with them, which made Rose frown and left Alice slightly uneasy. Almost certainly the girls’ risqué jokes and bawdy laughter went over his head but on more than one occasion his mother had cautioned them to watch their language in his presence. He made friends with the ploughman, Jack, who allowed him to ride the carthorses when they were driven along the short lane to the paddock into which they were turned out at midday each Saturday. Once, after a morning spent at the pig-pens and over Sunday lunch, Edward-John delivered a graphic account of the birth of a litter of piglets.

  ‘The mother pig has this special place,’ he announced, his eyes moving from face to face as he addressed his captive audience around the table. ‘It sort of opens up and out comes the piglet and blood and things!’ The girls howled in disgust and Alice was dismayed.

  ‘It won’t do him no harm, Mrs Todd!’ Mabel assured his mother, mopping gravy from her plate with a second wedge of bread. ‘He’s gonna learn sooner or later, i’nt ’e!’ Alice confined herself to suggesting to her son that in future he must chose his topic of mealtime conversation more carefully.

  One night, as Alice tucked him into his bed, he asked her what a ‘monthly’ was and remained only partly satisfied when she explained that it was anything which happens every month.

  On the coldest nights, before the snow fell, it had proved impossible to adequately heat the recreation room and the girls had spent their evenings in the kitchen, sprawling round the table, taking it in turns to press their feet against the hot metal of the range while Alice sliced up loaves for the next day’s sandwiches and Rose mashed up canned sardines before levelling the result thinly over the margarine-spread slices. Some of the girls helped her, taking knives from the cutlery drawer and spreading the filling.

  ‘Not too thick, now!’ Rose cautioned them, mainly in order to reinforce her own, superior status within the hierarchy of the kitchen.

  ‘Yessuh, Sarge!’ said Annie and the girls, comfortable together and easily amused, giggled at her because, in response to Rose’s brusque manner, Annie had already nicknamed her Sergeant Crocker.

  ‘Mrs Crocker, to you!’ Rose snapped, peering at the family snapshots which Gwennan was showing round. ‘Which is you then, Taffy?’ she asked. ‘The one in the hat, is it?’

  ‘Noo!’ Taffy wailed. ‘Tha’s my gran!’ A chorus of laughter. ‘This one’s me, yer!’

  Mabel was knitting a scarf on a pair of thick wooden needles. It had reached two feet in length and was striped in assorted, garish colours.

  ‘It’s
for me bruvver,’ she told them. ‘Gran give me her leftover wool ‘fore I come here. But I’m runnin’ out, see? This is me last ball.’

  ‘I’ll ask Mrs Brewster if she could get you some more,’ Alice said, measuring out porridge oats in preparation for the morning. ‘She’s been organising the villagers to knit blanket squares for refugees and there might be some spare wool.’

  ‘Organising!’ muttered Rose. ‘Pestering, more like!’

  ‘Ta, Mrs Todd!’ said Mabel and she pulled a dog-eared photo from the envelope of a letter she had recently received from home and laid it before them on the kitchen table. ‘This is Arthur,’ she said, pronouncing the name Arfer, her face ruddy with pleasure and pride.

  He was a lumpen child, about eighteen months old, his straggling hair and slightly gross features resembling Mabel’s.

  ‘He don’t half look like you, Mabel!’ said Iris and everyone laughed when Marion added, ‘Never mind! As long as he’s healthy, eh!’ Mabel’s face had reddened. Her stubby fingers closed clumsily round the picture. She fumbled it back into the envelope, stuffed it into her cardigan pocket and resumed her knitting.

  Mrs Brewster did provide some leftover wool. It came from her own knitting box and Mabel’s scarf, which had begun with stripes of harsh reds, greens and sharp blues from the Hodges family, became progressively quieter as she incorporated into it the softer beiges, lavenders and crushed raspberry shades favoured by Margery Brewster.

  The early mornings remained the least pleasant part of these winter days. In pitch darkness Alice’s alarm clock dragged her from sleep. She would pull on her clothes before the cold struck her and then, as she made her way through to the kitchen, where her first act would be to open up the fire in the range, she shouted to the sleeping girls in the partitioned rooms above her head.

  ‘Wake up everyone! Breakfast in ten minutes!’ Rose would arrive from across the yard, shuddering with cold and bearing reports of icicles, frozen puddles and a piercing wind. The porridge, which had simmered through the night, would be brought to the boil, the tea brewed, the milk fetched, ice-cold, from the pantry as the first of the girls, bleary with sleep and depressed by the prospect of another day of exposure to sub-zero temperatures, came stumbling into the kitchen.