The Land Girl

by Allie Burns

  Mr Tipton found his place in his story as Emily took the armchair closer to the fire. Sally the collie dog joined her, rested her head on Emily’s feet. The warm weight comforted her toes, as the heat of the flames rose and fell against Mr Tipton’s cheeks and stroked the back of her neck.

  When he’d finished the story, the conversation moved on to bemoan his dwindling workforce. He’d taken on local schoolboys and a few labourers who’d not yet joined in with the war, but more and more men disappeared every week. Some had volunteered to do their bit, a patriotic answer to the call of duty. John had joined up after the recruitment drive marched through the village. It had encouraged many of the villagers to enlist with him. Then Lady Radford had run a campaign to make their village the bravest in Britain and those who hadn’t answered those calls had gone to help build the seaport at Richborough.

  ‘The government are setting up a corps of educated women, to act as gang leaders,’ she said, but before she could continue he’d sent Tiger scurrying from his lap. ‘Good God and heaven preserve me. Not over my dead body. If women like Olive Hughes who’s worked the harvest on this farm since she was a girl can’t hack it, how am I supposed to cope with a lady who’s never done a day’s work in her life?’

  Emily stiffened. After all these years of following him around, helping and learning from him, how could he not see that she could be useful?

  ‘What about Mrs Hughes and Mrs Little?’ Emily said. ‘Lily would have injured them if I hadn’t been there.’

  ‘You took a terrible risk to help that undeserving pair. You got lucky, but don’t ever think just because a cow knows you that she won’t trample you.’

  He had a point. Standing her ground like that against Lily had been perilous and she was fortunate Lily had decided to stop, but surely it had shown that she was prepared to put herself forward and be counted.

  ‘Women don’t belong on the farm, and I shan’t be taking on any more. I’m sorry about that. The Belgians are in need of work, kind souls they are an’ all. I’d rather take on a rotten German prisoner o’ war than any more work-shy, weak-willed women. No offence.’

  ‘Well I am offended, Mr Tipton.’

  He stood, snatched a lantern up from the wall and stomped off into the yard, slamming the door behind him before she could say any more. Emily rose to her feet and watched from the window as he swung his lamp across the farmyard. The shadows stretched and grew to ghoulish heights against the farmhouse and the Kentish ragstone of the stables.

  Then as she stoked the fire, she noticed wet newspaper soaking in a bucket, being readied to make into bundles for the fire. Next to that, a pile of old newspapers. The Standard sitting on top. She pulled the newspaper cutting from her pocket just as Mrs Tipton emerged from the scullery, wiping her hands on her pinafore.

  ‘You got my hand delivery then.’ Mrs Tipton pointed her nose towards the cutting.

  It had been Mrs Tipton? She knew more than anyone how much Mr Tipton and Mother would object. What was she thinking of – encouraging Emily to taste ideas and dreams that were out of her reach?

  ‘You shouldn’t take any notice of the ole man’s bluster. He’s ready for his retirement, that’s the problem. He wants life nice and easy; he doesn’t want the trouble the war is bringing.’

  Sally the collie nudged at her with her wet nose.

  ‘It’s true, those villagers are a let-down to the farm, your family and the country,’ Mrs Tipton said. ‘And no one’s as surprised as me to learn that Olive Hughes is shirking off. But I think the ole man is wrong to say he won’t take on another woman, because a bright, strong girl like you who loves this place and the outdoors and is familiar with the animals is just what he needs. He just doesn’t know it yet.’

  Chapter Four

  June 1915

  Dearest Emily,

  I expect it is so very quiet with you in Kent. No such luck in Flanders. Fritz called on us twice in the night with his gas shells. I lay in a fitful half-sleep waiting for him to pay us another a visit.

  How is your beautiful corner of Blighty? Please fill my head with more tales to take me far away from the goings-on here.

  Must dash.

  Fondest wishes

  Theo

  But neither Mr Tipton nor Mother would entertain the idea of Emily working on the farm and even Mrs Tipton’s initial enthusiasm for the idea waned. The authorities would be looking for a different sort of girl to her anyway, one with more experience and fewer family commitments.

  The whole notion had set her back in the end. Mr Flitwick had taken over much of her kitchen garden work now that Mother had stopped the pretence of turning a blind eye and watched Emily even more closely so that her opportunities to attend to her herbs and vegetables grew fewer and further between.

  Then summer came, and the warmth brought first Cecil, her younger brother, from his studies at Oxford, and then her older brother John, home on leave from the Front.

  Cecil took up residence in the library, writing who knew what. He was always writing, or reading, or arguing the case of this and that.

  For the first few days John was restless, and never in the house for long before he thought of somewhere he ought to be or something he ought to be doing.

  ‘Wherever is he?’ Mother asked her again and again. This time though, Emily knew where he was. Mr Tipton had lost even more men from the farm and asked for John’s help to discuss how they might fill the gaps.

  ‘I’ll go and tell him you want to see him,’ Emily told her mother, desperate for an excuse to leave. She found him mending the broken wain with Alfred, the farm’s oldest member of staff.

  John had already cast the word out and that morning he’d recruited a couple of Belgian refugees and arranged to move them into one of the cottages at Perseverance Place.

  To encourage him back up to the house, that afternoon Emily asked John to help her dig up the rose garden that sat at the edge of the terrace, so she could turn it into a vegetable garden. Mother perched in the window of the sitting room.

  ‘We’ve got an audience.’ John gestured as he thrust his spade into the soil beneath the roots of a stubborn rose bush that she’d not been able to dislodge herself.

  Emily lifted herself up. Her breathing was heavy with exertion, her booted feet spread wide in the tilled soil to steady herself. Her skirts were tucked up in themselves and her hair had fallen out of its knot. Cecil sat beside Mother, smirking, while Mother’s mouth was gathered in a pinch, her brow furrowed.

  ‘I’m going to make the most of you being here to do as much outdoors as I can,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t belittle me in front of you.’

  Emily joined John now to bend the rose bush into submission.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll get used to the idea of the Victory Garden.’

  Didn’t he realise that it wasn’t the loss of the rose bushes that had upset Mother? She’d retrieved the newspaper article from her drawer to show him. He’d been the first person, beside Mrs Tipton, not to dismiss the idea.

  ‘Have you asked Mother?’ he’d asked.

  ‘I have, and Mr Tipton,’ she sighed.

  ‘Like that, is it?’

  ‘Yes, and I suppose …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I mean they’re probably right, aren’t they? What do I know about farm work really?’

  ‘What, you mean apart from following Mr Tipton about since you were this high?’ He held his hand beside his thigh. ‘And growing your own crops and your love of the outdoors, and your natural affinity with the animals?’ He shook his head.

  ‘All right, all right,’ she said. ‘But none of that means I could supervise a bunch of farm workers, not really. Mother probably is right …’

  ‘Would Father have built this place or opened the cement works if he’d questioned himself? You can’t give up that easily, Emily. They’ll train you, but I’ll bet you hardly need it.’

  She smiled. He made it all sound so easy. It was true; she could do all
the things he said, and Edna said she looked forward to her vegetables and herbs because they had the best flavour. Emily always kept quiet about her secret weapons; double digging and the manure she collected from Hawk’s stables to enrich the soil. Even Mr Flitwick said she had green fingers. But none of that meant anything if Mr Tipton and Mother wouldn’t listen, and even John’s golden charm couldn’t make light work of the situation.

  *

  It was Christmas in July at HopBine House. The last two days of John’s leave were a washout; the rain fell with a constant and unrelenting force, while heavy winds whistled around the house.

  John said it was too frivolous to take a goose from the farm, but even without any of the trimmings, they lit the fire and hung stockings on the mantelpiece and she began to believe it really was Christmas. Especially being trapped inside the house with her mother, her grandmother – down for the night from London – and Cecil.

  After lunch Emily slumped on the sofa, her hand propping up her chin while the rain lashed against the living-room window turning the view to a blurred grey.

  ‘Emily dear,’ Grandmother called from the other end of the sitting room. Grandmother had been in mourning since her son, Emily’s father, had passed away in 1913. Her hat was alive with twitching black feathers, and she hid behind a nose-length veil and a flowing black dress. ‘I’m in need of news of romance. Tell me. Do you have any? An attractive young girl like you, even one with that disconcerting hint of wildness, must have some young suitor in pursuit.’

  ‘Mr Tipton’s bullock is the only male interested in my sister.’ Cecil smirked.

  ‘Actually,’ Emily cut in, ‘I’m writing to an officer at the Front.’

  As Emily took her seat at the piano, she noticed her mother was holding her breath, waiting. But she couldn’t meet her eye; Theo was a lowly corporal, a non-commissioned officer. If she dared to tell Mother the truth she’d say Emily was wasting her time and giving false hope to an unsuitable young man. But lowly or not, he’d been a ray of happiness, and she wouldn’t give him up easily.

  ‘He’s from Yorkshire, he’s very attentive and interested in me and my life,’ she said. That seemed to satisfy both Mother and Grandmother and so she stretched her fingers out across the keys.

  ‘Oh,’ Cecil whined. ‘Do you have to make that din?’ Deftly he turned the attention to himself. He hadn’t looked up from his book since he’d sat down. He’d even read it at the dinner table.

  ‘It’s a piano, Cecil,’ she retorted. ‘Not a brass band.’

  ‘Emily won’t play if you find it distracting,’ Mother said. ‘Emily dear, can’t you find a less invasive occupation?’ Mother’s gaze remained trained on her lap.

  She sighed and slammed the lid shut. She could do no right. As it was, within a few moments Cecil had lost interest in his books and wandered out of the room in search of something new.

  ‘I would like to hear you play,’ said John. ‘Cecil?’ He called down the hallway. ‘Will you come back shortly for a game of charades?’

  Cecil returned momentarily to poke his head around the doorway. ‘Anything for you, dear brother,’ he said.

  Emily straightened her back and prepared to play. She hadn’t sat on this stool since before the war, before John had joined up, when they all came together in the evenings for piano music, song and laughter. They hadn’t done any of these things when it was really Christmastime, and John was away. It would have been wrong to carry on as usual without him. They hadn’t sung or played charades, either.

  Grandmother and Mother stood beside Emily, while John leant an elbow on the body of the baby grand before them, where Father had done the same when he was alive. He warbled in a silly false tenor, his arms stretched out to accentuate his notes.

  John took Mother’s hand. Emily had warmed up now, switched to a show tune, and John and Mother glided together to a foxtrot. Emily glanced up every now and then. Mother wasn’t hamming it up – she really did have style and grace. She gazed into her dance partner’s eyes with unbidden pride. Mother’s slim waist and hips meant she could pass for a woman John’s age, from behind. Her energy too. She was so often in her armchair these days it was a jolt to see her out of it and dancing and to recall how full of verve Mother had been when Father was alive, especially when she entertained.

  Emily smiled to herself in the hallway later that evening. Home really was home when John was there. How did he do it? He was the glue that bound them together. It gave them the confidence and freedom to be and please themselves. To prove the point, Cecil was in his room with his books, while Mother, Grandmother and John talked in the library. On her way upstairs, she passed them, the door open a crack to reveal the light inside.

  ‘I don’t think you should ask him for help,’ she overheard Grandmother say. ‘Too much has passed.’

  ‘But what choice do we have?’ Mother said. Emily stopped and held her breath. ‘Things can’t go on as they are for much longer.’

  ‘I know,’ said John. ‘We’re approaching a point where we’ll have to shut HopBine House up.’

  ‘Or sell …’ Mother said. Emily put a hand to her mouth. Sell their home? No wonder Mother was so keen for her to marry someone from a good family; she must be hoping she’d save them.

  Why hadn’t John said anything when they’d been on their own, digging up the rose garden? He’d had plenty of opportunity to tell her they had problems. Where would they go, and what would happen to the farm? Her legs lost their strength beneath her.

  ‘He’s offered help,’ John said. ‘I suggest we hear what he has to say.’

  Emily took a light-footed step back towards the door, straining to hear whether John would reveal who this ‘he’ was.

  ‘What are you doing lurking about in the hallway?’

  She jumped clean into the air and clubbed herself on the chin with the back of her own hand; Cecil had appeared on the stairs out of nowhere. ‘I was just getting a glass of water,’ she said loudly enough for John and Grandmother to hear her in the library, and then strode purposefully towards the kitchen.

  She was about to chastise him for creeping around, but to her surprise he’d joined the others, too. She back-tracked. It must have been a family meeting and she’d not realised. As she reached the door, she caught a glimpse of John. He smiled, but just then Mother came into view, and snapped the door shut in her face.

  ‘Should I come in too?’ she called.

  ‘Take yourself off to bed, dear,’ Mother said turning the key in the lock. ‘It’s getting late.’

  Chapter Five

  July 1915

  Dearest Emily,

  I am moving up the queue and it will soon be my turn for leave. I ought to go to Yorkshire to see my mother, but I wonder could you meet me at King’s Cross station when I break my journey and pick up the train for Wakefield? I keep the photograph you sent me in my pocket, and look at you before I sleep – often you’re illuminated by shell light. But I long to see that determined chin for myself, your lively, mischievous eyes alight on me in person, my love.

  What do you say?

  Fondest wishes

  Theo

  ‘You and John have had a lot of clandestine meetings in the library.’ She probed Cecil two days later under the shade of the monkey puzzle tree on the lawn, the brim of her sun hat low. Cecil lounged out on the other side of the trunk, reading, as usual. The soporific heat pushed her eyelids shut. ‘I waited up for you both last night but in the end I had to go to bed.’

  ‘We were playing chess.’ Cecil’s tone was falsely flippant. He was no more going to let her in on what was going on than Mother.

  ‘And who won?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d like to think I thrashed him, but I think he let me win.’

  ‘He always lets you win.’ She chuckled. ‘Has he ever beaten you or I at anything?’

  Cecil reflected for a moment and then groaned. ‘All that effort to try and outwit him and all for nothing,’ he said banging his book agai
nst his thighs.

  She hadn’t written back to Theo in the end. It would be difficult for her to travel to London without a chaperone. And after the conversation she’d overheard when Grandmother was visiting, it seemed she might need to a find herself an officer, not a corporal.

  Her gardening journal slid from her grasp and her lap, but her hand was too heavy to move and catch the book. The buzzing of the bees and the collared dove in the canopy above all faded away …

  She woke much later with a start, heavy still with sleep. A car door had slammed shut, footsteps on the gravel.

  No one had mentioned that they were expecting guests.

  Cecil had gone. She carried on where she had left off with her journal for the vegetable garden, planning which new crops she would plant and where. She hated afternoon tea and polite conversation with strangers, but it was nearing the end of John’s leave and there was no telling when he might next be back.

  Now that the stinging heat of the sun had faded it was safe to emerge from the shade and cross the lawn to the borders she had helped Mr Flitwick to plant. Taking the secateurs from her pocket, she snipped the stems of some cosmos for Mother.

  Declining Daisy’s offer of help, she placed the blooms into a vase in the kitchen and made her way through to the sitting room so she could casually drop by and determine whether the guest was someone she wanted to stay for.

  ‘Hello …’ She stopped on the threshold to assess the scene of John and Cecil flanking Mother, who perched on the edge of the sofa, wringing a lace handkerchief with her fingers.

  A man with his back to her in the armchair by the door turned to face her. Her hand froze around the vase as she placed it on the bookcase. The man was the ghost of her father yet greyer, sterner, leaner. In a smarter, tailored suit, with neater hair. Altogether more groomed than her father, Baden.

  The man held out his manicured hand to Emily.

  ‘I’m your Uncle Wilfred,’ he said. ‘Your father’s brother.’

  ‘How do you do,’ she said. Her mother and brothers’ faces were a mask of blank politeness, betraying no clue as to what she should think of this unexpected visit.