Alice's Girls

by Julia Stoneham

  ‘Do you think you can arrange those duties to fit in with your responsibilities for your children?’ he asked her.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir. Mrs Jack’ll always keep an eye on ’em, and when they grows, Ferdie’ll make ’em a nice, safe playpen!’

  ‘I shall pay you two pounds and ten shillings per week to begin with, and when we get the milking machine …’

  Mabel’s eyes widened.

  ‘Milking machine!’ she echoed. ‘Will it be like the one over at Mr Lucas’s place? I told Ferdie about it, didn’t I, Ferdie? Lovely it is! All pipes and shiny machinery and it gets ’em milked that quick!’ Roger had been impressed by Mabel’s speedy grasp of the mechanics of the milking machine which his neighbour had recently demonstrated to him, proving its basic simplicity by successfully teaching Mabel how to operate it.

  ‘Yes,’ he told her, ‘it’ll be just like that one. If you can manage it, and I think you can, I shall put you in charge of it and your wage will be correspondingly increased. How does that sound? Both happy?’

  They smiled and nodded. Mabel had always steadfastly believed that when it came down to it, Mrs Todd, Mr Bayliss and Mrs Brewster would, between them, somehow manage to sort out the lives of the Vallance family.

  As the wedding guests left the lower farm, the girls, now wearing dungarees, heavy jackets and boots, piled into the lorry that would return them to their work at the higher farm.

  Christopher Bayliss, carrying a pile of plates and teacups, followed Alice through the kitchen and into the scullery where Rose was noisily washing up. Alice was smiling as they returned to the quieter kitchen.

  ‘You look happy, Mrs Todd,’ he said.

  ‘It’s one of those days, Christopher,’ she said, ‘when everything seems very positive. A wedding. Babies.’

  ‘Even if not in the correct order?’

  ‘In quite the wrong order, in fact! But there’s no harm done!’

  ‘No harm at all!’ He watched her as, with a heavy teapot in one hand, she used the other to return a handful of knives and teaspoons to a drawer which she then closed by pressing her thigh against it. She moved gracefully and was, Christopher noticed, a very charming woman. No wonder his father was so taken with her.

  ‘And you!’ she said suddenly, surprising him by cutting across his train of thought. ‘It’s good to see you looking so well and happy!’

  Christopher Bayliss was, in fact, hugely changed from the exhausted pilot she had first encountered two years previously, during his brief days of leave, and who, by then, had been perilously close to the breakdown that would see him ignominiously discharged from the RAF.

  ‘You are unrecognisable, you know!’ she told him. He was, in fact, almost fully restored to the robust and healthy young man he had been when he had reported for duty with his first squadron. His regained physical fitness was obvious and the nightmares and flashbacks that had tormented him after his breakdown now only rarely broke his sleep. ‘There is only one thing that bothers me,’ Alice said, offering him tea from the pot in her hand. He accepted, sitting down at the table and watching her as she filled his cup and added milk, his dark eyes and sensitive face reminding her, as they often did, of his father.

  ‘So what is it, Mrs Todd?’ he asked her, slightly indulgently. ‘This thing that bothers you?’

  ‘It’s really none of my business,’ Alice laughed, suddenly embarrassed. She had, she knew, developed the habit, since she had become warden, of studying the small community of which, for the time being at any rate, her world consisted. She did this, she guessed, partly as a diversion from her own problems – one of which was the enduring bruise caused by her husband’s cold withdrawal from their marriage which had resulted, a few months previously, in divorce. Another was the prospect of the future as a lone mother and the effect of all this on the little boy for whom she must, somehow, properly provide. So, as she worked her way through the duties that filled her days and dealt, as best she could, with the diverse routine problems that arose in the hostel, she had pondered on the lives of the girls in her care, watched them react to the various crises they had to face and, increasingly, found her opinion sought on a whole range of subjects. Their boyfriends, their marriages, debts, illnesses, fears and grievances. When disaster struck and the war took the lives of a brother, sister, mother, father or husband, it was Alice who had helped them through their grief.

  Christopher was smiling, waiting for her to continue. She sat down at the table, her own cup of tea in her hands.

  ‘It’s this estrangement,’ she began, her voice too low for Rose to overhear it from the scullery, ‘between you and your father. It’s you … living, all this time, by yourself in the woodman’s cottage.’ Christopher lowered his gaze. ‘I could understand it last year when you needed to be alone to sort of …’ she hesitated.

  ‘Pull myself together?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘And that was, to some extent, logical. And it has done you good. The exercise. The peace and quiet after what you went through when you were flying. But there was more to your withdrawal into the forest than that, wasn’t there.’ Her words were a statement, not a question. ‘I’m not prying or intruding, but the fact was that all of us – the land girls and the people here who had known you all your life – were bewildered by the way your father treated you.’

  ‘Not visiting me in the nuthouse, you mean?’

  ‘Not only that, Christopher. He’d known for weeks that you had … had …’

  ‘I had deserted, Mrs Todd,’ he said, firmly. ‘Don’t let’s beat about the bush. I had gone AWOL.’

  ‘And he never told us, Christopher! Never said a word! Kept it to himself! All that time! Then, when the military police found you and arrested you, he turned his back on you! He did! Literally. Everyone saw it and we were shocked by it. It was as if … as if he was ashamed of you.’

  ‘He was!’

  ‘But why? Your record in the RAF was impeccable! You had flown more missions than anyone in your squadron! Too many more! You were exhausted! You were as much a casualty as you would have been if your plane had been blown out of the sky! So why was he ashamed?’ Christopher shrugged.

  ‘Pa just has a problem with it, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I was a big disappointment to him.’

  ‘And he was a disappointment to me – to us, I mean,’ she added, quickly. ‘To all of us here.’ Christopher looked baffled. ‘When someone you respect does something that shocks you,’ Alice continued, ‘something that seems out of character, you try to find a reason for it. Or to justify it. To excuse that person so that you can begin to respect them again. So … please forgive me if you feel I have no right to … to pursue this … but I found myself struggling to find a reason for his treatment of you.’ When Christopher made no response she went on. ‘I thought at first his loss of your mother might have had something to do with it.’

  ‘Could be,’ Christopher said, vaguely. ‘Pa always keeps things very much to himself. Stiff upper lip and all that.’

  ‘And now you’re sounding just like him!’ Alice smiled briefly and then became serious again. ‘But it is unusual, Chris, to allow one grief to roll on and cause another. You needed him when you were ill. He should have been there with you. He should have brought you home. Nursed you back to health!’

  ‘He couldn’t,’ his son said. ‘He just … couldn’t.’

  ‘No!’ Alice agreed, emphatically. ‘He couldn’t. What interests me is why he couldn’t. Why, when it should have been all about you, it seemed to be all about him!’

  ‘I don’t know, Mrs Todd,’ Christopher said, smiling and shrugging. ‘I honestly don’t! And actually, right at this moment, I don’t much care!’ He was laughing now. Despite the warden’s outburst, Roger Bayliss’s son was laughing and rosy with happiness.

  ‘You’re blushing!’ Alice exclaimed, peering at him. ‘What has happened to make you so pleased with yourself?’ He got to his feet, rounded the table, and taking her by the shoulders, kissed he
r on each cheek.

  ‘Can’t tell you!’ he said happily. ‘Sworn to secrecy!’ He was making for the door. ‘Lovely talking to you, Mrs Todd! Got to go!’ As he left the kitchen Rose Crocker, her hands pink from the washing-up, entered it from the scullery.

  ‘And what was all that about?’ she demanded.

  ‘I don’t know, Rose. I honestly don’t. But whatever it is, Christopher Bayliss is happier than I’ve ever seen him!’

  ‘It’ll be Georgina, then.’ Rose announced as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, which, Alice instantly realised, it was.

  Georgina Webster, when, in 1943, she had arrived at Lower Post Stone farm as one of the first intake of girls to be billeted there, had looked, her fellows had thought, very like the girl on the Ministry of Agriculture posters which were displayed that year, up and down the country, seeking volunteers for the Women’s Land Army.

  Georgina was sleek and healthy. The stylish cut of her dark hair suggested the Thirties rather than the Forties when most girls were favouring frizzy curls, created by ‘perms’ and maintained by curlers. Her skin and eyes were clear. Somehow she contrived to make the much despised Land Army uniform look almost elegant.

  ‘You’ve took in them breeches!’ Marion had accused her.

  ‘No I haven’t! Honestly!’

  ‘Well, you’ve lengthened the sleeves of that overcoat! Mine ends above me wrists!’

  ‘I think it’s just that your arms are longer than mine.’ Even in the dungarees, rubber boots, heavy sweaters and waterproofs which the girls wore day in and day out, Georgina Webster had a style about her that most of the other girls were always aware of and which some of them either resented or envied.

  Young women who were well educated, when faced with the necessity of doing ‘war work’, had tended to choose the more glamorous of the armed services, joining the WRENS, the WRAFS or the ATS, rather than working in munition factories or on the land. Consequently, and as a result of schooling that had been brief and often unheeded, the majority of land girls came from families regarded as working class and the Women’s Land Army became patronisingly referred to as the ‘Cinderella Service’.

  Georgina’s choice had not been forced on her by the level of her education, which was high, but by two other factors. The first was that as the elder of two children of a wealthy, East Devon farmer, her brother, two years her junior, could only avoid conscription if she herself volunteered for some form of war work. The second factor was that the Webster family were pacifists and the prospect of any of them being involved in combat was abhorrent to them. Georgina’s farming background made the Land Army an obvious choice and she arrived at the hostel prepared for the disapproval of her fellows.

  ‘I’m not sharing a room with no “conchie”!’ had been the uncompromising reaction of Marion and Winnie, a couple of outspoken, north-country girls, and Georgina had, at her own request, moved her monogrammed suitcases out of their room and into one of two tiny, drafty spaces above the porch, which were hardly large enough to be described as bedrooms.

  The girls had smirked and nudged when it became obvious to them that Georgina was attracting the attention of Christopher Bayliss, whom they encountered when he was on leave from the RAF.

  The young pilot, his nerves fraying, the breakdown he was about to experience only weeks away, approached Georgina clumsily, teased her about her pacifism and insulted her by implying that she, like most of the girls he fancied, was his for the taking. When she finally agreed to have dinner with him it was, although it was a long time before he realised it, because she sensed his underlying vulnerability and saw, beneath the gung-ho bravado, the fragile state he was in. Nevertheless it had been she, when he finally cracked, who supported him through the early months of his breakdown. This, added to several other incidents which had shocked the Post Stone community – the death of one of the girls in an air raid on Plymouth, the suicide of a Jewish refugee and now the devastation of a young man, however obnoxious Georgina may have thought him, who had, for years, been risking his life in defence of his country – began to shake and then to undermine her pacifist convictions.

  Ironically, Christopher, by then slowly recovering in a military nursing home, astonished Georgina by announcing suddenly that he himself was now opposed to war. He was, unsurprisingly, dismayed when she told him of her own change of heart and that she was about to quit the Land Army and use the flying skills she had learnt as a schoolgirl to serve in the Air Transport Auxiliary, a non-combative arm of the RAF.

  They had been walking in the overgrown grounds of the building to which the psychiatric hospital had been evacuated. Christopher had stopped in his tracks when she told him.

  ‘But you can’t!’ he said, staring at her in astonishment. ‘It’s against everything you believe in! Everything you’ve taught me to believe in!’

  ‘I think I was wrong, Chris! And I think, until recently, I rather went along with what my family feels about the war instead of working it out for myself. But so many awful things have happened! Poor Chrissie getting killed! Andreis shooting himself because of what the Nazis are doing to the Jews! And you! Look what it’s done to you! We have to stop them, Chris! We have to!’ He began walking on, away from her, leaving her standing. After a beat she hurried after him, caught up with him and they moved on, side by side and in silence, along the mossy path.

  ‘I’d thought you might come with me to live in the woodman’s cottage,’ he said, eventually. It had been decided that, when discharged from the hospital, Christopher would spend some time working in his father’s woodlands. There had been some discussion regarding the wisdom of this. The woodman’s cottage was primitive, isolated and near derelict, but he had been determined and his father’s reservations had been overruled. ‘I’d thought we could work together and be together and …’

  ‘Just shut our eyes and ears to what is happening in this war? I can’t do that anymore, Chris!’

  ‘So you don’t want to be with me?’ he said flatly, and she couldn’t meet his eyes because she knew that what she would see there was a side of Christopher that disturbed her. She had not cared for the brash, young man she had first encountered, but when, almost unrecognisable under three weeks’ growth of beard, his hair tangled, his clothes fouled, his wrists cuffed as he was manhandled into a military police van, her temper had flared and she had shouted at his captors and tried to pull them away from him, when no one else had made any attempt to defend him.

  Their relationship, in those early weeks of his breakdown, had subtly shifted. While she had become strong and supportive, he had grown needy and reliant. She had, in fact, pitied him and he, much later, had recognised this and reluctantly accepted the fact that it made him unattractive to her. They had parted, remaining curiously aware of one another, encountering each other only occasionally and unsatisfactorily. It was Alice Todd who sensed that there was something significant between the two of them, and she who remained Georgina’s confidante even after the girl had left the hostel, acting as a sort of go-between, observing Christopher’s recovery and Georgina’s experiences in the ATA. She wisely avoided giving direct advice and had considered her words very carefully when she responded to what they told her of their lives and their feelings.

  Over recent months Alice had seen little of either of them but, shortly before Christmas, on the night of Margery Brewster’s party, Alice had urged Roger Bayliss to try to persuade his son to spend Christmas Day at home with him at the higher farm, rather than alone in the isolated cottage. She had insisted that they drove, on the spur of the moment and through wind and rain, up into the forest to fetch him. As they approached the cottage they had found the track blocked by a fallen tree and been surprised to discover that Christopher already had a visitor. Someone who had arrived on a motorcycle, which Alice immediately recognised as the one which Georgina often borrowed from her brother. Guessing, correctly, that Christopher and Georgina were alone together in the cottage, Alice had dissu
aded Roger from interrupting his son’s evening.

  At Lower Post Stone, Rose, having crossed the yard to take several telephone calls from Georgina’s worried father, expected and received an honest account of the night’s events from Alice.

  ‘They need to work things out between them,’ she told Rose, who was flushed with excitement. ‘We must respect their privacy. I’m sure Georgie will tell us whatever news there is when she’s ready.’ Rose, shocked by this irregular behaviour, yet thrilled to be privy to it, had allowed Alice to swear her to secrecy.

  It was several weeks before Georgina, whose Christmas leave from her base at White Waltham had been brief, visited Lower Post Stone, arriving one cold, sunny January morning, riding her brother’s motorcycle and wearing borrowed leathers which she stepped out of, emerging lithe and elegant, and draped over one of the kitchen chairs. She sat, warming her cold hands, watching Alice prepare the pie the land girls would eat that evening.

  ‘Good Christmas?’ Alice asked as innocently as she could, aware that Georgina’s clear, uncompromising eyes were scrutinising her, and that every inflection of her voice or expression on her face which might confirm the girl’s suspicions was being noted.

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ Georgina said, smiling. Alice was relieved by her light-heartedness. Georgina was, in fact, almost mocking her. ‘You and Mr Bayliss.’