Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings

by Julia Stoneham

  ‘I shouldn’t have!’ she gulped reaching for cotton wool and scrubbing the colour from her mouth, her eyes still on her father’s. ‘I’ll go to hell, I will!’

  Annie soothed and calmed, pleaded and cajoled but Hester’s distress continued until she had stripped off her borrowed finery, pulled her flannelette nightdress over her head, plunged under the covers of her bed and buried her head in her pillow. ‘He’s looking!’ she moaned. ‘He can see!’

  ‘If you wasn’t so bloomin’ pathetic, Hester Tucker, it’d be funny!’ Annie said. ‘But as it is, you make me sick!’ Hester, tear-streaked, sat up and stared at Annie. ‘You tried on me frock, that’s all! You put on lipstick and brushed out your hair! What if he did see? It’s not a crime!’ But Hester’s eyes kept straying back to the photograph. ‘If it’s him that’s bothering you he’s easily dealt with!’ Annie said and she picked up the photograph and shut it firmly into a drawer in the dressing table. Then, because she’d had several shandies at the hop and because Hester’s face, now that her father’s image had vanished from sight, was such a picture of confused relief, Annie started to laugh and, once started, couldn’t stop. The thud of Marion’s fist on the partition added to her amusement and Hester, her delicate nerves stretched and sensitised by various emotions, found her weeping dissolving into a slightly hysterical giggling. The more Marion beat upon the wall the funnier it all seemed and both Annie and Hester were soon speechless and choking with laughter. It was Alice, coming to check that all the girls were accounted for and that the outer doors were locked for the night, who finally quietened them.

  That night began an accelerating change in Hester. Instead of the lowered head and evasive eyes, the girls encountered shy smiles and open curiosity on womanly matters. If Hester had been previously equipped with the facts of life by her mother and the elders of her church, they were different facts and a different life from those with which the rest of the girls at Lower Post Stone Farm were familiar.

  ‘I don’t reckon she knows which hole is which or what for!’ Winnie had sniggered after one frank and open discussion. Little by little Hester’s horizons widened. One Saturday afternoon she went with Annie into Exeter and returned without her bun. The soft, reddish hair, released from restriction, floated round her face like a pale gold cloud.

  ‘It weren’t meant to go like this!’ she beamed helplessly at Alice. ‘It did it by its own self, soon as it were cut! D’you like it, miss?’ Alice said she did and it was true. Hester, despite the changes to her appearance, for a while at least, retained the sweet timidity that set her slightly apart from the coarseness of Marion and Winnie, the hardness of Gwennan and even the assured self-satisfaction of Georgina’s well-groomed attractiveness and the dark intensity of Annie’s Jewish beauty. But she still would not go out with the girls, blushed when they teased her and trailed round the kitchen while Alice, alone while Rose had her day off, cleared Saturdays’s high tea from the kitchen table.

  ‘I’ll wash the dishes, Missus Todd… I’ll help peel the tatties for Sunday dinner…’ In return for this assistance Alice found herself endlessly plied with questions.

  ‘Do you go to church, miss?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘There’s some as say ’tis a sin not to go regular.’

  ‘You must learn to live and let live. It says so in the Bible.’

  ‘Do it? I never heard Father say that.’

  Early each Sunday morning a group of Pentecostal Brothers collected Hester in a horse-drawn wagon and bore her off with them for several hours of prayer and hymn-singing in the barn of a local dairyman who embraced their particular faith. On the Sunday after her visit to the barber’s Hester had managed to confine her hair under her church hat but, back at the farm at dinnertime, told Alice and the girls that the wind had caught the hat and carried it off, bowling it down the lane and how the brethren had stared at her as she retrieved it and stuffed her hair back out of sight.

  ‘Bugger them!’ Marion suggested.

  ‘But they could see as it’s cut!’ Hester wailed, passing a hand ineffectively over her drifting halo.

  ‘So?’ said Annie, her mouth full.

  ‘So I might be damned!’

  ‘Damned?’

  ‘Cutting hair is a sin!’ Hester whimpered. The girls groaned unsympathetically and the conversation moved on.

  On the following Saturday afternoon most of the Post Stone girls went, as usual, into Exeter to visit the cinema and then, depending on what was on offer, either to a pub or a dance hall for the evening. Mabel, who had plans of her own, spent the afternoon in the warm kitchen, knitting Arthur’s scarf and writing home, printing the words laboriously. ‘Dear Gran, hope you are well…love to Arthur, kiss, kiss, kiss…’ Annie, who would meet up with the girls later in the day, presented herself as usual on Saturdays at Andreis’s studio.

  ‘Do you get letters from your folks?’ she asked him when they broke for a cup of tea. His mind was on his composition and she watched his expression change as he addressed her question.

  ‘To begin with, ya. But then not so often and from some of them none at all any more.’ He sipped, wincing as the hot tea burnt his mouth. ‘I try not to think, Hannah-Maria, not to imagine, for to do so is painful. While I work on my painting – which is my account of things – my mind is easier, you see.’ They sat in silence. Annie could not share the intensity of his feelings. Her own Jewishness was something of which she was not often aware although she knew that it grieved her grandparents that their children and grandchildren paid only lip service to their faith.

  The farmhouse was quiet. Alice, having prepared a cold supper for those few of her charges that were not out for the evening, had gone for a walk with Edward-John.

  In the room Hester shared with Annie the light was already fading. The dress which Annie was to wear that evening lay across her bed. Hester, having darned a hole in her khaki-green Land Army-issue socks, sat looking at the dress. Its colour, a rich garnet red, attracted her. The fabric was soft to her touch. The photograph of her father had been restored to its prominent place and his eyes regarded her balefully until she reached suddenly forward and placed the picture face down on the bedside table. She breathed deeply for a moment and then was on her feet, stepping out of her long shirt, dropping her thick sweater on the floor and easing Annie’s red frock over her head. Its colour, as she surveyed her reflection, did not flatter her as obviously as the blue dress had done. Nevertheless, against her pale skin and the floating red-gold of her hair, it worked a sort of alchemy, lending to the overall impression a glowing pre-Raphaelite richness which astonished her.

  In the kitchen Mabel had heard a timid tap on the front door. She put down her knitting and lumbered along the cross-passage, lifted the latch and pulled open the door.

  The young man in the porch was silhouetted against the fading sky so that all Mabel could see of him was the narrow-trousered dark suit and skimpy jacket, from the sleeves of which large wrists and hands protruded as he bent to remove bicycle clips from his bony shins. She did not notice that the boy’s hair was the same pale gold colour as Hester’s.

  ‘Yes?’ Mabel said cautiously, for visitors were rare at the farmhouse and male ones were taboo. She was unsure of herself and wished Alice would return from her walk.

  ‘I’m here to see Miss Hester Tucker,’ the boy announced, just as he had rehearsed it and sensing that Mabel, although bulky, presented no threat to his mastery of the situation. She was undoubtedly evil. Her jumper was too tight across her breasts and there was a faint suggestion of nipples under the pilling wool. Flushing, he lowered his glance to the safety of the stone floor aware, nevertheless, of the fleshy shins below Mabel’s skirt. Without turning her head or removing her eyes from the young man’s face Mabel raised her voice and bellowed Hester’s name. Hester heard her, responded instinctively and got as far as the top of the stairs before hesitating. She was still dressed in Annie’s frock. But the voice that had summoned her was o
nly Mabel’s, so she came quickly to the head of the staircase and stood, peering down, instantly recognising the young man who was standing, flat-footed, in the cross-passage. She stared, her hands flying guiltily to the bodice of the dress as though attempting to conceal its cut and its colour from him.

  ‘Zeke!’ Her voice was thin with surprise ‘It’s me brother!’ she added, for Mabel’s benefit. Mabel relaxed slightly and decided that a visiting kid brother was acceptable, at teatime at any rate.

  ‘Best take ’im into the recreation room,’ Mabel said, moving back towards the kitchen. ‘I’ll fetch youse a cuppa.’

  Left alone, brother and sister gaped at one another. He stood, peering up at her as though doubting what he saw. After a moment of silence she came down the staircase, opened the door to the recreation room and went through it. Zeke followed her. The air smelt faintly of cigarette smoke. The fire was laid but unlit and the room struck cold. But it was lighter than the cross-passage and for the first time Zeke could clearly see his sister’s red frock and the loosened, brilliant hair. He froze.

  ‘I didn’t know you was coming, Zeke!’ she said, desperately. His eyes, the same light grey-blue as hers moved incredulously over her.

  ‘Go see your sister, Father said.’ His voice was young and barely broken. ‘Go see how she is.’ He paused, wretched. ‘Look at you, Hester! Your frock! Your hair!’

  She clasped her hands together, avoiding contact with the fabric of the dress. Her voice was a plaintive whisper. ‘There’s…there’s no harm in it, Zeke! Inside the dress I be the same as always!’ It was the truth. She was innocent. Unsure. Scared. They faced each other, the brother and the sister, the established relationship yawing between past influences and present pressures.

  ‘But Father!’ Zeke’s voice was querulous. ‘What would he say?’

  ‘You won’t go tellin’ ’im, will you, Zeke?’ Pleading, she took a step towards him but he drew back, raising an arm as though to ward off the evil she represented. He stood, tense and miserable.

  ‘He’s gonna ask. What shall I say to ’im?’

  There was a pause, both of them wilting at the prospect of their father’s anger.

  ‘You mustn’t lie, Zeke. That’s for sure,’ she said with a low hopelessness, resigned to what would inevitably follow.

  ‘So what shall I say to him?’

  ‘That it baint my dress… That I only borrowed it…!’

  ‘But you shouldn’t of!’ He was shouting at her now. Sounding like their father. Suddenly she remembered Annie’s words and felt a sharp surge of self-defence rise in her.

  ‘But why not, Zeke? I like pretty colours! Why’s pretty colours sinful?’ She could hardly believe she had said it. The words hung in the air and Zeke shook his head as though trying to keep the sound of them out of his ears. He knew, because he had been told, they both had, that colours and laughter and loosened hair were signs of debauchery and wickedness. She stared at him in hopeless defiance. ‘Them that comes for me, Sundays,’ she said, ‘to take me for prayers. They told Father that I’d cut my hair! That’s how he knew! And now you’ll go off home and you’ll tell him the rest, I suppose! About me having on a red dress! Well then, you do it, Zeke! You go tell him! But I baint a sinner, Zeke! Leastways I ’aven’t done nothin’ as I’m ashamed of, so there!’ She stood, breathing hard in the silence, holding her brother’s eyes until he faltered and looked away.

  ‘That woman,’ Zeke said flatly. ‘She looks like a whore!’

  ‘Mabel?’ Hester breathed, incredulous. ‘No, Zeke! She’s kind! When I first come here and I was homesick for you and our mother, Mabel was good to me! Nearly all of them was! Mabel and Annie and Missus Todd! You’d say they all was evil sinners but they baint!’ She was interrupted by Mabel who came carefully into the room bearing two brimming cups, her tongue protruding as she concentrated on delivering them without slopping tea into the saucers. Then she watched, astonished, as Hester’s brother went, without a word, past her to the door and through it.

  In the lane Alice and Edward-John stood to one side as the cyclist pedalled past them. By the time they reached the kitchen, Hester, who had changed back into her black skirt, had joined Mabel at the kitchen table where the two of them sat sipping tea.

  At five o’clock Mabel announced that there was a calf she wanted to check on at the Bayliss farm. She asked if she could borrow Alice’s bicycle. Alice was surprised at this request but agreed to it and Mabel, her face rosy with quiet determination, departed leaving Alice, Edward-John and Hester to eat supper alone that night. Afterwards Hester declined Edward-John’s invitation to play Monopoly and went to her room where she read her Bible for an hour and then sat with it open on her knees, wondering, despite herself, where Annie and the other girls were and what they were doing. She was in her bed before the lorry which had met the last bus from Exeter to Ledburton deposited them in the muddy lane outside Lower Post Stone Farm. When Annie entered the shared room, Hester pretended to be asleep.

  ‘Calf, my eye!’ said Rose, when Alice told her about Mabel’s excursion on the previous evening. ’Tis Ferdie Vallance she’m after! Or maybe ’tis he who be after ’er! He’s been that lonesome since his mother was took! Well, perhaps not so much lonesome as incapable!’

  ‘Incapable?’

  ‘Of washin’ ’is clothes! Cleanin’ ’is cottage! Cookin’ ’is meals! I hear all about it from Mrs Fred, see.’ As usual other matters intruded on this conversation. More often than not Alice was unable to come to grips with any situation before it was overtaken by another and a scenario which, one day, would seem complicated and possibly threatening to one or other of her charges had, the next, been replaced by another, involving a different girl.

  At the Bayliss farm there were two adjacent labourers’ cottages. In one, Fred and his wife, who was known as Mrs Fred, had raised their daughters, both of whom were now married and gone. In the other cottage, Ruby Vallance, widowed early, had mothered her Ferdinand and when, at nineteen, he had been maimed by a rolling tractor, had refused to permit the doctors to saw off the mangled leg. She had gritted her teeth and nursed him back onto his feet. The farm’s insurers had paid for a labourer to take Ferdie’s place while he mended and the rent for the cottage was part of the injured boy’s wages so he and his mother had, at least, a roof over their heads. But throughout his recovery they lived on charity and the vegetables and hens that Ruby raised in the tiny patch of garden behind the cottage. So focused was she on keeping herself and her son fed that she had little time or energy for housework and as she aged, and after Ferdie became mobile enough to resume at least some of his work in the dairy, she grew exhausted, then weak, then sick, until one morning, Ferdie came down to a cold kitchen, no porridge in the pot and his mother stone dead in her chair. After that he had used the cottage more or less as an animal uses its cave. He made no attempt to clean it. When all his clothes became so stiff with sweat and dirt that he could barely get his limbs into them, he dumped them into the copper and boiled them up as he thought he remembered his mother doing. Woollen jerseys became slimy, colour bled from his shirts into his pyjamas and his combinations. His entire wardrobe took on a khaki-ish, greyish tone. Mrs Fred gaped at the line of strangely pegged, monochrome washing. She considered offering her help but Ruby had always been a slut and what had Ferdie ever done for her?

  ‘I’ve got meself a lovely piece of stewing steak for me tea,’ Ferdie had announced to Mabel during the course of the Saturday morning milking, ‘and a couple of kidneys…’ Mabel thought of the high tea which, after a hot meal at lunchtime, would be all she’d get at the hostel. ‘You much of a hand at cookin’?’ Ferdie had enquired casually and in the course of only a few minutes Mabel had agreed, in return for a share in the resulting meal, to make her culinary skills available to him later that day.

  When she entered the cottage at five o’clock Mabel quickly became too engrossed in the preparations of the meat and vegetables and the mixing and rolling out of the
pastry for the pie to pay much attention to the small, dark, cluttered room which served Ferdie, as it had served his mother before him, as kitchen and living room. A galvanised tin bath hung from a nail on one wall and it was in this, in front of his fire, that Ferdie occasionally – and only occasionally – submerged himself in soapy water. The walls were coated with a film of accumulated grease, the result of many years of smoky cooking and through which the outline of the pattern of a floral wallpaper was only faintly discernible. A few framed pictures, each subject a dark blur, hung haphazardly and askew and the mirror over the tilting sideboard revealed nothing more than a speckled, silver haze.

  Soon an aroma of the baking pie filled the kitchen and Ferdie and Mabel, while they waited for their meal to be ready, passed the time sipping home-brewed cider, the effect of which, together with the warmth of the kitchen and the welcome respite from the unremitting cold in which they had laboured all week, loosened them. They chatted about this and that, Mabel reacting with appropriate enthusiasm as Ferdie expounded several of his theories on farming. She sympathised volubly while he described in detail the accident that had maimed him. How for three hours he had been trapped under the overturned tractor before another could be found to pull it off him and how Christopher Bayliss, then only a boy in short trousers, had crawled under the wreckage and fed him brandy from the master’s hip-flask to deaden the pain in his crushed leg. For two months Ferdie had lain with the limb supported in a wooden frame, until the flesh had healed sufficiently for the splintered bones to be set in plaster. After that, for a whole summer, he’d hauled himself about on crutches and, when the plaster was removed, been left with a leg that bore very little resemblance, either in appearance or performance, to its mate. The ligaments and sinews had been so damaged that the mechanism of both knee and hip refused to articulate and it had taken years for Ferdie to maximise the wrecked limb’s performance and to evolve the curious, gyrating limp which now bore him about the farm.