Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings

by Julia Stoneham

  ‘A mate’s kite blew up,’ he told Georgina, ashing his cigarette. ‘Had to get him out in a hurry!’ She stared at the bandages and at the damage in his eyes which he was unable to conceal.

  ‘And did you? Get him out, I mean?’

  ‘Yeah, we did. We got him out.’ He paused and then abruptly asked her to have dinner with him that night. She looked at him. She would have preferred to decline but that, she sensed, would have been churlish, even unkind. Georgina was neither churlish nor unkind so she accepted.

  He borrowed his father’s car and, although, when he took the wheel, the pain in his hands made him wince, drove her to a favourite restaurant in Exeter where the chef managed to provide a dinner which was almost up to his pre-war standards. During the meal their good manners and similar backgrounds resulted in a steady flow of meaningless conversation in which each discovered a set of predictable facts about the other. On the drive home Georgina saw Christopher grit his teeth as he pulled the heavy car round a tight corner and persuaded him, since his injured hands were obviously hurting him, to let her take the wheel. He asked whether she was a licensed driver.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, putting the car smoothly into gear. ‘Cars, tractors… And aeroplanes, actually!’ She smiled at his astonishment and explained that her godfather, who was a director at de Havillands, having taken her up in his bi-plane on her tenth birthday, had been so charmed by her reaction and natural aptitude that he subsequently paid for flying lessons. She flew solo two days after her eighteenth birthday and got her licence on her first attempt. Christopher looked at her with open admiration. Then he sighed and shook his head.

  ‘You could be having such a brilliant war, you know! If it wasn’t for…’ he stopped carefully.

  ‘My convictions?’ she finished for him and asked whether he considered that he himself was having a brilliant war, taking her eyes from the road just long enough to catch his expression. He did not respond and they barely spoke during the rest of the journey back to Lower Post Stone. He got out of the passenger seat and opened her door. In the moment they stood facing each other he kissed her mouth. It was a brief contact. Her lips felt warm against his. His, cold on hers. Then they thanked each other for a very nice evening. He watched her negotiate the dark path, go through the porch and let herself into the dimly lit cross-passage, closing the door behind her.

  Alice, waiting for Georgina, who, that night, was the only girl to have left the farmhouse, heard the sound of the door closing, called out, reminding her to bolt it and was surprised when Georgina came through the recreation room and tapped on the open door to her room. When Alice offered her a hot drink she declined.

  ‘I had dinner with Christopher,’ she said, standing in the doorway. Alice indicated the chair opposite her and threw a small log into the embers of her fire. They sat for a while, watching the flames lick round the dry wood. ‘I think something awful has happened to him,’ Georgina said at last. Alice waited but the seconds passed and Georgina remained silent.

  ‘You mean…his burns?’ Alice prompted, uncertain whether Georgina would continue.

  ‘He didn’t want to talk about it. No more than the basic facts, anyway. I could see that. So I didn’t press him.’ Georgina was thinking aloud and Alice hesitated to interrupt her. After a while Georgina began to speak, surprising Alice by launching into an exploration of her feelings about her commitment to Conscientious Objection. ‘It seemed so simple – pacifism… But it isn’t.’ She paused. ‘I mean, in principle war is wrong, obviously. But what do you do when the rules are broken? How do you defend people from other people’s violence without using violence yourself? Innocent people get caught up and die of it. Like Chrissie did. Or their lives are wrecked. Like Andreis. And Christopher.’ She paused, then turned, looking into Alice’s face before adding hesitantly, ‘I think he’s cracking up, Mrs Todd.’

  At the Bayliss farm Roger, as Alice had been, was sitting over a dying fire. An hour previously he had finished the whiskey in the decanter which stood on a low table beside his chair. He had decided not to broach a new bottle but, eventually, hoping that his son might, on his return from dinner, join him in a nightcap, he decanted a single malt, poured himself a tot and was rolling it carefully round his tongue when he heard the car, then the front door, then Christopher’s footsteps on the staircase which led up to the first-floor sitting room where Roger spent his evenings. The old spaniel, which had been Christopher’s since he was ten years old, got stiffly to her feet, greeted him and then flopped down with a sigh onto the tartan rug that Eileen always spread for her in front of the fire.

  ‘Join me?’ Roger said, indicating the whiskey. ‘It’s a rather good one. Christmas present from your Uncle Freddie.’

  Christopher poured a generous three fingers of the gold liquid into a tumbler and added to it a very small amount of water. He sipped, tasted, nodded, swallowed, said, ‘Not half bad. Good old Fred,’ and dropped into the empty chair on the opposite side of the fireplace where he sat holding the tumbler and staring into the remains of the fire. His father watched as the young man appeared to drift off, not to sleep but to somewhere. Roger cleared his throat and asked whether Christopher’s evening had been a success. For a moment there was no response and Roger thought Christopher had not heard him. Then he came back from wherever it was that his thoughts had taken him and answered brightly that yes, it had been ‘enormous fun’, and that Georgina was ‘one hell of a girl’. His father watched for a while as his son sat sipping. Then Christopher announced that he intended going back to his base the following day. Roger asked why, since his hands were not healed.

  ‘Oh, they won’t let me fly, Pa. But I’m beginning to feel a bit useless here and they’ll probably have something I can do…’ Roger was about to speak. To make some obvious remark about regretting that Christopher felt he must go, but that if he considered he should, it might be for the best and so on, when Christopher continued, or rather did not continue but abruptly changed the subject. ‘Tim Bretherton bought it the other day,’ he said. ‘A daylight raid on Brest. The announcement’s in your paper.’ Roger did not admit to having read the news. He watched as Christopher got to his feet and began to pace about the room. ‘That Dornier pilot – the one that took Fax out – he died too, you know. Shot down by our chap. It seemed good at the time. When Fax was dying, I mean. Good to know that the bastard that did it to him had paid for it.’ Christopher stopped pacing, wheeled round and stood motionless, facing his father. ‘But what the fuck is it all about?’ Roger was unprepared for this outburst. Years of reticence between the two of them made him incapable of a significant response. So he lifted the whiskey bottle, offering a top-up. Christopher shook his head, dropped back into his chair and closed his eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘You must know what I mean though, after your experience in the First World War caper.’

  Roger stiffened. ‘What experience?’ he asked sharply. ‘I wasn’t… I was too young for that one, Chris. I—’ He stopped as Christopher cut in, interrupting him.

  ‘I didn’t mean you, personally, Pa. I meant, you know, losing the cousins and so on. Hearing the news, day after day, of the carnage in the trenches. Ypres. The Somme and everything…’ Christopher failed to notice his father’s reaction to this or how the tension seemed to leave him, allowing him to relax into his armchair as his son continued. ‘I mean this tit for tat stuff. They blast Coventry to kingdom come so the next night we send a bunch of kids over to blow up Hanover or some other unlucky city. Fax gets incinerated but the bloke in the Dornier ends up spread all over a five-acre field in Hampshire, so that makes it all right! It’s madness!’ He paused. The last of a log collapsed into ash in the hearth. ‘That girl…Georgina…’

  ‘She’s a pacifist, Christopher!’

  He met his father’s eyes and after a moment lowered his lids and downed the remains of his drink.

  ‘Yes. I know.’ What he was thinking was inexcusable. Almost blasphemous, wh
en he considered his dead and injured friends. He must be drunk. He would go to bed.

  Roger sat over the last half-inch of his whiskey and heard his son moving between bathroom and bedroom. When the house was quiet the father raked the ashes, stood the guard in front of the fire and went to his bedroom.

  By mid-April Edward-John was home for the Easter holidays, Andreis had reached the point in his painting when he no longer required Annie to model for him and one Saturday afternoon, her wavering intentions bolstered by Iris, Hester had boarded the bus to Exeter where she had undergone the trauma of the selection and purchase of a frock. Coupons had been snipped from her ration book and several pound notes extracted from her purse. She had worn her new dress at supper that night and, although pleased with the compliments she received, had refused to join the girls when they left for an evening in the pub.

  Mabel’s grandmother, together with the two-year-old Arthur, had visited for a weekend. To enable the Hodges family to sleep together in one room, Iris had moved in with Taffy, an arrangement which she preferred and which, with Alice’s approval, became permanent.

  Arthur, looking older than in Mabel’s photograph, hurled himself into the embrace of his sister, whom he called May-May, and spent most of the weekend with his plump arms locked round her neck, her thick waist or one or other of her massive thighs. She took him to the Bayliss farm and persuaded Ferdie to give him a ride on the tractor and on the quieter of the two carthorses. She sat him astride the most placid of the milking cows and showed him how to throw corn to the chickens. On the Monday she wept when her visitors left for London.

  Winnie and Marion had succeeded in re-organising their social life and now that their whereabouts were known, servicemen from the several military training establishments and airbases in the vicinity contrived to collect them in staff cars and return them in the nick of time to the hostel on Saturday nights and sometimes during the week. Occasionally whole lorry loads of the girls would be borne off to dance halls in Exeter or barrack messes where, to recordings of Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington and sometimes to live military bands, they jitterbugged and quickstepped, pirouetting at arm’s length. Or they could be found locked in a close embrace but conducting themselves with caution for they were, most of them, sensible, well-behaved young women, aware of what was required of them if they were to avoid the disaster of besmirched reputations or, worse still, of pregnancy. They strutted and, to some extent, they teased but only because they were expected to tease and enjoyed it as much as the young men enjoyed being teased. If one girl or another drank too many gin-and-oranges, then one girl or another would take her in hand, sit her down with a cup of tea or remove her to the safety of the Ladies until the army truck arrived to convey them, hot, tousled, hiccuping, giggly but intact, back to the farm.

  Marion and Winnie seldom spent their evenings with the main group of the Lower Post Stone girls and they, more than the others, received gifts from the servicemen and, according to Rose, more than gifts. Once, stripping their beds on laundry day, Rose had discovered a Post Office book under Marion’s pillow. The account was, unusually, in the names of both girls. Each week there were entries which, confirming Rose’s darkest deductions, exceeded their combined Land Army wages. She confided her suspicions to her son, Dave, who had recently been briefly home on leave. The sight of her boy in khaki turned Rose’s stomach.

  Early on a wet Wednesday afternoon towards the end of April the lorry brought Winnie and Marion back to the farmhouse.

  ‘It’s her monthlies,’ Marion announced. ‘She came on when we was having our sandwiches.’ Marion watched as Winnie eased herself onto one of the kitchen chairs and doubled up with pain. Her face was white and beads of perspiration stood on her forehead.

  ‘Reckon I strained meself,’ she said between gritted teeth. In the yard Fred sounded the horn of the idling truck and Alice, filling a hot-water-bottle for Winnie told Marion to get back to her afternoon’s work. Marion hesitated.

  ‘I’m worried about her, Mrs Todd!’ she said miserably.

  ‘And well you might be,’ Rose snapped and then, drawing Alice aside, continued in a lowered voice. ‘That be more than “monthlies”, Alice! She needs to see the doctor and fast!’

  They put Winnie into Fred’s lorry and, Alice beside her, drove her to Ledburton where the local doctor examined her and had her admitted to the cottage hospital.

  That evening, with both Alice and Winnie conspicuously absent, the girls ate the meal which Rose, for the first time, had prepared single-handedly. She told the hushed table what she knew, but not what she suspected, finally drawing the girls’ attention to her own culinary achievement on their behalf.

  ‘You are a wonder, Mrs Crocker,’ Gwennan said nastily, her face hardening when Rose retaliated.

  ‘Kind of you to say so, missy, and since you’m so smart you can slice up that loaf for tomorrow’s packed lunches!’

  Hester, on her way through to the scullery with a load of dirty plates, heard the sound of the returning truck and peered out of the low window into the twilight.

  ‘The lorry’s back!’ she called. ‘Missus Todd’s getting out… But Winnie bain’t with ’er!’

  They sat Alice down at the table and gave her a cup of tea because, Rose insisted, she must be famished.

  ‘They’re keeping her in hospital for a few days,’ Alice said, confronted with anxious, though in some cases merely curious, faces. ‘She was asleep when I left. Is everything all right here?’ Rose assured her that it was and that, as a gesture of helpfulness, the girls had volunteered to do the washing-up. The girls groaned good-naturedly and Annie began to collect the used cutlery.

  ‘We don’t have to do this, you know!’ Marion whined but it was a muted protest.

  As soon as the girls were occupied in the scullery and she had the warden’s ear, Rose whispered, encouraging her to confide, ‘The doctors didn’t say what the matter is then?’ Alice sipped her tea for a moment and then answered quietly that they had not but that she supposed it was as Marion had suggested. Winnie had been moving heavy bags of swedes and the pulling and dragging had proved too much for her. Disappointed, Rose bit her lip and considered sharing her suspicions with one or other of the girls but the one most likely to enjoy a scandal was Gwennan, whose tight-laced Welshness irritated Rose. Also, there were ramifications to the situation which were beginning to nudge at Rose and to alarm her.

  In the scullery Gwennan had sidled up to Marion.

  ‘Bet you won’t try that again, eh!’ she muttered as Rose approached with the last of the dishes, her sharp ears picking up Gwennan’s words.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on about, Taff,’ Marion whined defensively.

  ‘Yes, you does, Marion!’ Rose muttered, adding, still quietly but loudly enough for the other girls to hear her, ‘and so do the rest of you. But if you knows what’s good for you, you’ll keep it to yourselves!’ Gwennan, in her sing-song voice, demanded to know why.

  ‘’Cos if Mr Bayliss found out he’d have Winnie and Marion out of here so fast their feet wouldn’t touch the floor!’ Rose hissed.

  ‘Well, they shouldn’t have done it! It’s disgraceful!’ Gwennan snapped back.

  ‘Of course they shouldn’t!’ Georgina said coolly. ‘But if Mr Bayliss finds out about it he would hold Mrs Todd responsible!’

  ‘If you ask me,’ Gwennan continued, enjoying herself, ‘Mrs Todd don’t know what happened! She thinks Winnie hurt herself lifting swedes!’

  Hester was following the conversation as an observer follows a tennis match, her head turning from one speaker to another, eyes wide and mouth ajar.

  ‘But she did…! Didn’t she?’ she breathed, confused, searching the girls’ faces. They groaned and Gwennan told her not to be so stupid.

  ‘Reckon you’re right, Taff,’ Annie said, ‘about Mrs Todd not knowing. And she mustn’t know, ’cos if she did she’d probably feel obliged to tell Mr Bayliss and—’ Annie stopped abruptly as Alice appeare
d in the doorway with her teacup and saucer. ‘Nearly done now, Mrs Todd!’ Annie continued brightly, filling the awkward silence, lifting the last plate out of the suds and inserting it into the wooden rack, next to its fellows. Rose suggested that Alice might like to eat her dinner, which would be ruined if kept waiting in the oven for much longer.

  The following Saturday was Edward-John’s tenth birthday. As Iris’s twenty-second had fallen during the previous week it was decided that the two occasions should be jointly celebrated with a cake and candles at teatime.

  James Todd had sent his son a selection of additional pieces to add to the already comprehensive Meccano set with which the boy played in an attic directly above the bathroom. Here, after the evening meal, well muffled against the cold, Edward-John spent as much time as his mother would allow him, meticulously constructing bridges, cranes and towers while the pipes gurgled, the lavatory cistern hissed, the distant strains of the gramophone, the untuned piano and from directly beneath him, the rise and fall of the girls’ voices as they took their shared baths and rinsed out their smalls, floated up through the ill-fitting floorboards.

  As Rose carried the birthday cake through to the recreation room, its candles illuminating the gloom of the cross-passage, Margery Brewster delivered Winnie back from the hospital.