Alice's Girls

by Julia Stoneham

  Marion, always a plain child, understood, when she first viewed her reflection in her mother’s dressing table mirror, that to look the way she wanted to look was going to be a challenge.

  By their early teens the girls were in love with the cinema and the glamorous creatures they stared at, round-eyed with admiration, whenever they could raise the ninepence each which it cost them to gain entry to their local picture palace. They would sit through the cartoons, tolerate the Pathé News and squirm with impatience while the organist, posed in front of silky curtains and bathed in a familiar sequence of changing lights, worked his way through a repertoire which seemed, to the two impatient children, interminable. Then, at last, bolt upright in their velvet seats, Marion and Winnie would revel in the feature films.

  By their mid teens Marion was determined to look like Jean Harlow. As soon as she was allowed to she would reach for the bleach bottle, pluck her untidy brows and pencil in provocative replacements. Winnie, the prettier of the two, took Jane Russell as her role model and planned to perm her dark hair until it stood out in the same stiff frizz as her heroine. By sixteen, both girls, still restrained by their strict, working-class parents, were labouring in a factory which manufactured small metal objects – the purpose of which they neither knew nor cared to know – and were obliged to contribute, to their respective parents, half of their weekly wage towards their keep. It was at that time that they identified their ambition and focused on a lifestyle which they decided they would enjoy and which, with luck and hard work, they believed they might be able to achieve.

  ‘You want to run a pub? What, you two?’ had been the astonished reaction of Marion’s uncle Ted when, because he seemed to them to be a man of the world, they unveiled their plan.

  ‘Why not?’ Marion had challenged. ‘There’s lots of women running pubs!’

  ‘Mostly they’re just hired to manage ’em,’ Ted told her, suppressing a persistent cough as he drew cigarette smoke into lungs already damaged by mustard gas in the trenches of the First World War. ‘They’re not your actual landlord.’

  ‘Maybe not, but that’s what we’re gonna be, Uncle Ted. Actual landlords. Lady landlords.’

  ‘With our own licence!’ Winnie had added, firmly.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to buy a lease, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah!’ Marion told him, although she was unsure what a lease was, where you got one or how much whatever it was would cost.

  ‘Blimey! And what are you gonna use for money, eh?’ Ted asked them, watching their expressions cloud.

  ‘We’ll save up,’ Marion announced. ‘We’re both earning. We’ll put money away. A bit every week til—’

  ‘’Til doomsday!’ Ted told her, laughing wheezily. ‘You’re talking big money for a lease on an even half-decent pub!’

  ‘What d’you call “big money”?’ Winnie enquired, nervously.

  ‘Five hundred quid, I reckon. Minimum. Then youse gotta get licensed and that’s not easy. They’re choosy who they give a licence to, specially where women’s concerned. And two young girls … I dunno … What d’you want a pub for, anyhow? Funny thing for a couple a kids like you to want!’

  But it was what they wanted and what they continued to want over the years which led the country up to and into the Second World War. By then Marion and Winnie had opened a joint post office savings account. On the day war was declared it contained seventy-five pounds, three shillings and sixpence and the girls were in their early twenties.

  Hopes of joining the WRENS, the WRAF or the ATS were soon dashed. Both Marion and Winnie had left the elementary school – where they had sat carving boys’ initials into their desktops, dreaming of freedom and paying very little attention to their teachers – as soon as the law allowed. They could read, write, add up, take away and divide, but that was all. The smartly uniformed women at the military recruitment centre had been unimpressed, not only by this lack of education but by the slightly confrontational manner both girls exhibited when they were interviewed.

  ‘What are we supposed to do, then?’ Marion demanded when first one and then another of the armed services rejected them.

  ‘You’ll have to choose between a munition factory and the Women’s Land Army,’ they had been dismissively informed.

  They had opted for the Land Army because, as Marion announced to her astounded family, ‘We feel like a bit of a change!’ This was partly true. The prospect of employment at the munition factory, a gloomy establishment only a few miles from their homes, seemed to offer a life unacceptably similar to their existing one. The countryside would provide not only a change of scenery but an escape from the parental discipline which, despite the fact that they were by now grown women, continued to restrict the way they dressed and behaved.

  ‘We seen your girl down the pub,’ a neighbour had whispered to Winnie’s mother. ‘Singin’, she was, round the piano with a load of soldiers, and that Marion were sittin’ on one of ’em’s knee!’

  They had been issued with uniforms and a railway pass and had sat, all day, in a crowded train which rattled interminably southwards. In a howling gale, it lurched to a stop at Ledburton Halt, where they stepped down onto a rain-swept platform and were met by a man in a truck that reeked of something which would soon become all too familiar to them. Dung.

  ‘Phoar!’ Marion exclaimed. ‘What’s that pong?’ The man, whom they later came to know as Mr Jack, shrugged and turned his attention to the twisting lane which was narrower, steeper and muddier than any roadway either Marion or Winnie had ever seen before.

  Working conditions on the Post Stone farms came as a shock to both girls, who had been allocated to Roger Bayliss a year before he had decided to use the lower farmhouse as a billet. During that year, while they struggled with the hard physical labour and had survived their first wet, cold, Devonian winter, they had been housed in an attic room in Ledburton’s only pub. Here, not only were conditions more comfortable than the homes they had left, but the saloon bar was immediately beneath their bedroom floorboards, together with the social life that came with it. Here they met the few local men who had, for one reason or another, escaped conscription, and better still, the increasing numbers of American servicemen, the GIs, who were undergoing training in preparation for the Allies’ inevitable invasion of northern France.

  ‘Loaded, they are, Win!’ Marion had sighed, relishing the generosity, in the form of chocolate, silk stockings, cigarettes, perfume and packets of chewing gum, that she had experienced that evening at a local hop. ‘And their uniforms is gorgeous!’

  Frequently their escorts would borrow army staff cars and drive them into Exeter to the dance halls, cinemas and hotels. There would be nights at the various military training establishments, when regimental bands would provide the music for quickstepping, jiving and jitterbugging. Often the lads would organise ‘a whip-round so the girls can go buy themselves something cute for the hop’, and Marion and Winnie would add five and sometimes even ten pounds to the pittance they saved from their weekly Land Army wage.

  By February 1943, when the lower farmhouse was opened as a hostel and Marion and Winnie were forced to move into it, together with the other eight girls for whom Alice Todd was to be responsible, the money in their post office account had risen significantly, and the prospect of acquiring a lease on a pub of their own was solidifying satisfactorily.

  Two setbacks followed. The first was that Winnie, too liberal with her favours, conceived a child which had to be dislodged. While Gwennan Pringle and Rose Crocker guessed the real reason for Winnie’s indisposition, caused, she claimed, by straining to lift heavy bags of swedes, Alice took a different view of it. If the truth of the situation had been revealed to Roger Bayliss and thence, via the Land Army Registrar, to the Ministry of Agriculture, Winnie would have been dismissed from the service and Marion would have gone with her into who knew what sort of future. So Alice Todd, in whom the two girls had confided their ambitions to run a public house and the means by wh
ich they hoped to obtain it, and who was also aware of the genuine distress which the induced miscarriage had caused both of them, contrived to gain a second chance for them, despite being uneasy about the considerable amount of money the girls had already accumulated.

  ‘The thing is, Mrs Todd,’ Winnie had endeavoured to explain, ‘that the GIs is always givin’ us stuff! Far more chocolate than we could ever eat and enough pairs of stockin’s to last a lifetime! So what we do is, we sell ’em on to the rest of the girls! And not just the Post Stone girls but other land girls billeted round ’ere. The word soon went around and now we’ve got an order book, see? Half a dozen pairs of stockin’s ’ere, some chocolate there, a bottle of Evenin’ In Paris an’ a carton of ciggies somewhere else!’

  ‘It’s not illegal, Mrs Todd!’ Marion added, aware of Alice’s concern. ‘Them things is gifts! It’s up to us what we does with ’em!’

  Alice had been forced to concede this point and avoided enquiring precisely what it was the two girls had done to deserve such generosity. She had become, largely through her dealings with the land girls, worldly-wise enough to know that, had they been dismissed, Marion and Winnie would probably have taken lodgings near one of the military training bases in the area and from there the slide into prostitution would have been difficult to avoid. So she turned a blind eye to the facts, demanded and got assurances from both girls that they would behave more responsibly in future, and on a possibly more practical level, contrived, with the help of the free-thinking matron of Edward John’s boarding school, to procure contraceptives for them.

  The second setback in Marion and Winnie’s quest for funding happened as a result of the D-Day landings, when all available troops took part, first in the invasion of Normandy, and then the liberation of France and the huge push on into Germany itself. But even with most of the men gone there remained a steady flow of personnel, on leave, recovering from minor wounds or in training, and Marion and Winnie found that their irregular income did not suffer as badly as had at first seemed likely.

  Having urged the sheep through the gate and onto the rising ground, the two girls, heads lowered against the driving rain, returned to the lane to begin the half-mile trudge back to the higher farm. It was past midday and they were hungry. Their packed lunches and thermos flasks filled with milky tea were waiting for them in what had been the saddle room at Higher Post Stone.

  Rounding a corner, they reached the point where a footpath, a short cut to the farm, left the lane and ran steeply uphill. Here they came upon a scene of activity that had not been there an hour previously. Roger Bayliss, his sharp eyes checking on the level of the floodwater in his valley, had noticed that a tree stump, dislodged further upstream, had come to rest against the supports of a timber footbridge. The log was jammed sideways, obstructing the flow of the water, while debris steadily accumulated against it, adding to the pressure on the flimsy structure and threatening to carry it away. Roger had left his truck, and unable to shift the log without help, had flagged down a lorry transporting half a dozen of the local contingent of Italian prisoners of war. Their driver had agreed to allow his charges to help Roger move the log and would return to collect them after he had picked up another group who were working a mile off.

  The Italians, an amiable mob, who seemed to enjoy the diversion, had quickly got a rope round the stump, hauled it aside and tethered it to a substantial willow where, when the floodwater eventually receded, it would be left high and dry. While they waited for the lorry, which would return them to their internment camp, Roger had suggested they took shelter from the continuing downpour in his open-sided barn which stood, disused and beyond repair, part of its thatched roof already collapsed, beside the lane.

  The men huddled in the limited shelter, drawing enthusiastically on the cigarettes which Roger, unable to thank them for their help in any other way, had handed round. They had responded to his kindness, nodding, smiling, murmuring ‘grazie, signor!’ and watching the approach of two figures, their faces sharpening with interest when they realised that the heavy waterproofs, wide-brimmed hats and muddy boots concealed not men, as they had at first thought, but girls.

  Slightly inhibited by Roger’s presence and not eager to be seen so unglamorously attired, Marion and Winnie continued, past the barn, towards the short cut which would take them up, through the wood, back to the higher farm.

  It was then that they heard, above the roar of the river and the softer fall of the rain, a faint but increasing rumble. The trees on the hillside which rose steeply behind the barn seemed to be reverberating strangely, quaking and juddering, while the rumbling sound intensified and was joined by the crack of splitting timber. Then, as the girls stopped and stood transfixed, a wedge of the woodland began to slip downhill, gathering momentum as it approached, and then struck, the rear of the barn.

  The landslip, it was established afterwards, had originated near the top of the hill in a hollow formed by a disused slate quarry which the relentless rain had filled with thirty feet or so of floodwater. This had placed a huge pressure on the unstable downhill side of the quarry which, collapsing, had released the accumulated water, taking with it a section of the hillside and all the timber that had been growing on it and sliding, with increasing force, down the incline.

  The solid walls of the barn took the full impact of the landslide and halted its progress into the lane, but not before what was left of a roof, already weakened by years of neglect, was driven forward, collapsing and burying the Italian prisoners under piles of rotting thatch and the timber beams that had supported it.

  The men clambered out, checking first to see if they were themselves unscathed and then assuring themselves that all their companions were accounted for.

  ‘Allesandro!’

  ‘Si, bene!’

  ‘Stai bene, Luca …?’

  ‘Giorgio? Vai bene?’

  ‘Si … Luigi?’

  Then it was discovered that all that was visible of Luigi was a booted foot protruding from a heap of mouldering thatch. But the thatch, they discovered, as they tried to extricate him, concealed an oak beam which had trapped his left forearm against a granite lintel that had once supported the entrance to the barn.

  Having cleared the beam of thatch the men heaved at it, straining every sinew in their strong backs, shoulders and thighs. It was the length of the beam that was the problem. Two thirds of it was embedded in a pile of collapsed stonework.

  The trapped Italian was howling with pain as his fellows swarmed over the heaped masonry, heaving the limestone slabs aside and frantically scooping away the loosened debris with their bare hands.

  Winnie, who had pushed forward in an attempt to reach the injured man, succeeded in freeing his head and shoulders from the damp reeds, and while she tried to support him more comfortably, Marion examined his trapped arm. The beam had caught him just below the elbow. What was visible of his lower forearm was already contused. She turned to Roger Bayliss.

  ‘You haven’t got a rug or nothin’ in your truck, ’ave you, sir? Only it’s the shock, see. You’re s’posed to keep ’em warm.’ When Roger did not respond, Marion became aware that he was standing, stock-still, his face gaunt and stark white, even in the half-light of the barn. His eyes were on Luigi’s shattered arm and he was breathing strangely.

  ‘It was like Mr Bayliss never even ’eard me!’ Marion told Alice, later that day. ‘Like ’e’d seen a ghost or some’at! Shakin’ like a leaf ’e was! So I went out to the truck to see if I could find anything to wrap round the fellow what was ’urt and I found a horse blanket. As I ran back into the barn Mr Bayliss went past me and got into the cab of his truck. ’E looked that strange, Mrs Todd! ’E just sat there, shakin’ and breathin’ funny. Then he puts his head down on the steerin’ wheel and he starts cryin’! Honest! Sobbin’ ’e was. It were awful to see! A man like Mr Bayliss, cryin’ ’is eyes out! I put the rug round the Eyetie fellow. By that time they’d dug away the stones so they could shift the bit o
f timber off of his arm. You should of ’eard ’im ’olla! Then the other lorry come back and they took ’im off to ’ospital. It were touch and go with ’is arm, though, it bein’ that badly broke.’

  ‘And what about Roger – I mean, Mr Bayliss?’ Alice had asked. Winnie took up the story.

  ‘’E were still sittin’ in his truck …’ she said. ‘’E wasn’t cryin’ no more and ’e told the pair of us to get in and ’e drove us back up to Higher Post Stone. ’E didn’t say nothin’ to us. Just drove, starin’ ahead.’

  ‘We was an hour late for our sandwiches, Mrs Todd!’ Marion added. ‘Starvin’ ’ungry we was!’

  Alice was concerned by the girls’ account of Roger’s reaction to what was, after all, a natural disaster caused by the extreme weather. But the old building was his and its poor condition could be said to be his responsibility. Did he, she wondered, feel guilty about what had happened?

  She crossed the yard to the barn which housed the farm telephone and dialled his number.

  ‘Are you all right, Roger?’ she asked him.

  ‘Bit damp!’ he said, sounding relaxed, and as far as she could tell, normal. ‘You? Lower Post Stone’s not under water yet, I trust?’ Was he, she wondered, a little too jovial, considering what had happened that day? She reassured him that apart from the lower farmhouse being filled with damp clothing, all was well with her and her girls.