Alice's Girls

by Julia Stoneham

  ‘Because it was the worst!’ Georgina said, quietly. She had been shown aerial photographs of the bomb damage inflicted on most of the cities the girls had listed but the air attack on Dresden was more extreme than any she had seen – worse, at that time, than any bomb damage that anyone had ever seen.

  Reconnaissance photographs taken by the RAF, during and after the Dresden raid, had been passed around the mess at White Waltham where Georgina was based. Even here, there had been disagreement about the justification of the level of destruction wrought on the city. Georgina had sat with the pictures in her hands until Fitzie and Lucinda had removed them and passed them on to a group of fliers who were waiting to examine them, and whose reaction to what they saw was one of such unrestrained jubilation that Georgina, followed by Fitzie and Lucinda, had left the mess in tears.

  ‘They had it coming,’ Fitzie had said, gently. The three of them had wandered past the deserted hangars and out onto the grass strip beside the runway. The air was cold. Frost crackled under their feet. The sky was clear and starry.

  For Georgina, the bombing of Dresden was to prove to be another turning point in her confused convictions about war. Before arriving at the farm that day she had called at the woodman’s cottage, expecting to be able to unburden herself to Christopher, knowing that he would understand and share her feelings. But all she found at the cottage was the note he had left for her in case she arrived unexpectedly. He was away on a week’s course with the Forestry Commission. She had ridden back down the track and then turned right, into Post Stone valley, vaguely hoping for tea and sympathy from Alice Todd. Now, with the eyes of everyone upon her, she got to her feet and began winding her scarf round her neck.

  ‘I’d better go,’ she said, tightly. ‘Sorry. I might have known how you’d all feel.’ Before Alice could dissuade her, she left them. They heard the bike engine, loudly breaking the afternoon silence. Then, in the kitchen, the ticking of the clock and the click of Rose’s knitting needles were the only sounds.

  ‘See?’ Gwennan sighed, as though strangely satisfied by what had happened. ‘Once a conchie, always a conchie, I reckon!’ She turned and stared at Alice. ‘Don’t you think so, Mrs Todd?’ she demanded, her hard eyes delivering a challenge which the warden chose to ignore.

  Georgina’s journey, from pacifism to ferry pilot for the RAF and now, it seemed, back to her earlier convictions, did not surprise Alice. Nor was she disposed to comment on it or debate it with Gwennan Pringle. Instead she turned to Rose and examined the small, white garment she was knitting.

  ‘Is that for one of Mabel’s twins?’ she asked, expecting an affirmative answer.

  ‘No it bain’t!’ Rose said, sharply. ‘Mabel’s twins ’as got more’n enough woollies to last the pair o’em till kingdom come! Mrs Fred and Mrs Jack ’as been knittin’ fit to bust since the minute they was born!’

  ‘Who’s it for, then, Mrs Crocker?’ Annie asked.

  ‘’Tis for Thurza, that’s who!’ Rose was slightly flushed and her needles were flying so fast there was a danger of dropped stitches.

  ‘Thurza? Who’s Thurza?’ Winnie queried, turning to Marion, who shrugged.

  ‘Thurza be Hester’s child, that’s who!’ Rose announced firmly and everyone froze.

  ‘Hester’s child?’ Gwennan repeated incredulously. ‘You’re knittin’ clothes for Hester’s child?’

  When Hester Tucker had climbed down from the lorry that had brought her from the bus stop in Ledburton, she stood out from the rest of the first intake of girls to arrive at the hostel that day. Unlike them, she was not wearing the Land Army uniform with which she had been issued at the recruitment centre and which remained, still in its cardboard box, at her feet and beside the carpet bag which contained the rest of her belongings. She stood, shivering, either from the cold February air or from the nervousness that overwhelmed her, and waited, miserably, to be told where to go and what to do. The other girls were sporting their dowdy uniforms with as much flair as was possible – hats on the backs of curly heads, belts tightly buckled round bulky jodhpurs, lips darkened with ruby-red lipstick and, in some cases, lashes stiff with mascara, while Hester’s pale and anxious face was bereft of make-up, her skin scrubbed and almost transparent over delicate bones, her mass of fine, golden-blond hair drawn tightly back into a bun. Her shapeless clothes were in shades of brown and grey, her thick, woollen stockings and laced-up shoes, black.

  Befriended by Annie, with whom she shared a bedroom, Hester slowly grew to trust the girls into whose company the war had thrust her. As the weeks and then months passed, the facts of her upbringing emerged.

  She was the daughter of a religious zealot. A man who exerted an unhealthy dominance over his family and anyone who fell under his influence. The sect, in whose name he preached each Sabbath to a series of small, intimidated congregations who met in barns, deserted chapels and sometimes on the open cliff tops of the North Devon coast, had split, when Hester and her brother Zeke were still young children, from a less fanatical faith which was based in Plymouth.

  Jonas Tucker spent most of his waking hours in prayer, working his smallholding only enough to provide a meagre living for his submissive wife and obedient children. He had been reluctant to deliver his elder child into the hands of the authorities when she turned eighteen and was required to do some form of war service, and had seen to it that she enrolled in the Women’s Land Army, considering it to be a better option than exposing Zeke to the risk of conscription when, in a year’s time, he would reach that age. A bit of farm work wouldn’t hurt her, Jonas reckoned, and it would be one less mouth for him to feed. He was, at that time, ignorant of the reputation Land Army girls were acquiring.

  Hester, brought up to fear her maker, had left home for the hostel with her father’s harsh voice ringing in her ears, reminding her of his rules on modest apparel, no paint, and hair which must never be cut and should always be coiled out of sight. She knew better than to consort with strangers, would say grace before she ate, and go down on her knees night and morning. On Sundays, her father told her, members of the Brethren would collect her from Post Stone farm and convey her to their nearest meeting place for prayer and supplication.

  As the weeks passed, Alice had witnessed a change in Hester. When she had first arrived she had flinched at the language she heard at the supper table and at the raucous laughter that greeted jokes which she didn’t initially understand. But soon she began to respond to the warmth and good humour of her companions. Eventually she yielded to the temptation to try on the clothes they offered to lend her, and sometimes, when the girls were out dancing with soldiers or drinking with them in pubs, she experimented with the make-up which cluttered their dressing tables. Then, one Saturday afternoon she went into Exeter with Georgina, visited a hairdresser for the first time in her life and had returned to the hostel, transformed and almost unrecognisable, with her hair floating around her head like Lizzie Siddal’s in a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  ‘You wouldn’t credit how that girl’s come on since ’er got yer!’ Rose exclaimed to Alice on the first occasion when, after a lot of persuasion, Hester finally agreed to go with the land girls to a local hop.

  It was a Saturday evening and Edward John was sitting at the kitchen table dipping fingers of bread into the yolk of the boiled egg that was his favourite supper. Rose had brought Alice a snapshot she had just received in which her son Dave was the centre of a group of khaki-clad conscripts who were peeling their way through a mound of potatoes.

  ‘I’m that glad he’s in the caterin’ corps! Be worried sick if they’d given ’im a gun! It’s his feet, see, too flat for the marchin’ they said!’ Rose paused, sliding the snapshot back into its already dog-eared envelope and comforted by the thought of Dave’s comparative safety. ‘You reckon young Hester’ll be all right, do you? Gaddin’ about with our lot?’

  Alice was well aware of the influences that were affecting Hester but she had confidence in the common sense
of most of the other girls who, she rightly believed, would make sure the youngest and least experienced of the group came to no harm. They would keep an eye on her much as they would have protected a younger sister from unwelcome advances.

  Over the preceding months, on the evenings when Hester had refused to go out and about with the other girls, she had begun to confide in the warden. Often confused, and even occasionally shocked, by the land girls’ behaviour, she had confessed that her father, given the chance, would have consigned them all to the everlasting flames. But Hester soon came to understand that her fellows were, despite their sometimes brash manners, both good and kind, and that they were innocent of most of the evils her father had warned her of. She began to question his rules. Why was cutting her hair and wearing coloured frocks a sin? Whether or not her frock was blue and her hair floated prettily around her head, she knew right from wrong and would behave herself accordingly. When she asked Alice if she should go to the hop with the girls, Alice, knowing that both Georgina and Annie would be with her, had encouraged her to. She left, having been astonished and slightly disconcerted by her reflection, in a dress borrowed from Annie and shoes borrowed from Evie. She had even been persuaded to wear a trace of lipstick.

  Then, at a cricket match – a light-hearted fraternisation between Alice’s girls and a group of infantrymen training at a nearby army base – Hester had met Reuben Westerfeldt, an American GI who was as young and inexperienced as she. It had been love at first sight for both of them and had possessed all the overwhelming passion of a first infatuation, heightened by the war and the threat of looming separation. Rose’s Dave, who, during a brief leave, had encountered Hester, carried the image of her back to his barracks and found himself unable to think of anyone else, had stood little chance against Reuben Westerfeldt who proposed to Hester, was accepted and, despite her father’s refusal to approve the engagement or attend the wedding ceremony, married her.

  Rose, observing her son, had from the beginning been aware of the intensity of his feelings for Hester Tucker and had warned him that she was already spoken for. Nevertheless she felt then, as she was increasingly to feel, that fate had somehow failed not only her boy but the girl he wanted so much. The two of them were, Rose felt, suited. More than suited. They were destined. Both were Devonian born and bred. Both spoke with the same soft accent and, before the advent of Reuben, there had been, Rose was certain, an attraction between the two of them at their first, brief meeting.

  ‘But you can’t ’ave ’er, son!’ she told Dave, when, on leave shortly after the wedding, he slouched aimlessly about her cottage and refused to socialise with his village friends. ‘She’m a married lady now and that’s that!’ Dave sat, looking, his mother noticed, and despite his low spirits, a picture of health and strength. His robust frame, the shock of thick, chestnut hair and lustrous, dark eyes still reminded her of the chubby baby she had suckled. But sometime between his sixteenth and seventeenth birthdays, and following the unexpected death of his father, Dave had become a man, and now, at almost twenty and despite his flat feet, was approaching his prime. ‘’Tis no good you sulkin’ like a spoilt brat, Dave! I know’s you spotted ’er afore Reuben come on the scene but ’twas Reuben she wanted and Reuben she got and there’s an end to it!’ Her words, she knew, were falling on deaf ears, yet she persisted. ‘Eileen says as ’er niece Albertine were askin’ after you las’ week. ’Er works as barmaid over to The Anchor at Lower Bowden these days. Ever such a nice girl she be. Alus liked you, Albertine did. You should go see her, Dave. Better nor broodin’ about the place sighin’ after some girl you can’t ’ave!’

  But Dave was remembering Boxing Day when, Reuben having returned to his barracks, he had taken Hester tobogganing. He had settled her between his thighs and kept her safe while they flew downhill and she shrieked with the thrill of it, the cold air making her cheeks glow, snow crystals catching in her pale lashes, and he had loved her so much it seemed impossible that she couldn’t feel it. And perhaps she did feel it. And perhaps it had disturbed her. But Reuben had slipped his grandma’s ruby ring onto her finger only twelve hours previously and there it was, like a drop of blood, the tiny diamonds surrounding the central stone, glittering in the winter sunlight, reminding her of Reuben’s whispered promises. And the next day Dave too was gone, back to his unit with the catering corps.

  By May, Hester, three months married, was pregnant. With Reuben soon to be deployed in the Allied invasion of northern France, the American military authorities decided to ship Hester, along with a few hundred other GI brides, out to the States as soon as was feasible. Her pregnancy meant that she could no longer be employed as a land girl and her parents had disowned her, so light domestic work had been found for her at the two farmhouses while she awaited embarkation.

  Three weeks after the D-Day landings, news of Reuben’s death reached Hester and she had withdrawn into a private world of grief, into which her father had briefly and cruelly intruded, telling her that because she had defied him she was cursed and that her sins would bring the wrath of God down onto the heads of all whose lives touched hers.

  While Alice was shocked by the effect Jonas Tucker’s visit had on his daughter, and concerned by the distress it caused her, Rose wrestled with more complicated concerns. Hester’s widowhood made it likely that, after a while, Dave would approach her. Rose’s feelings about this were confused. While she was fond of Hester and, in other circumstances, would have welcomed her as a daughter-in-law, and although Reuben had been a fine, upstanding lad, she was not entirely happy with the prospect of her son raising another man’s child, having, understandably enough, expected her grandchildren to have been sired by her own son, rather than by someone else’s. This, however, was not her main concern, which lay with Hester’s mental state. Her subservience to her father and to his fanatical religious beliefs seemed, to Rose, to have affected her sanity.

  Rose had watched, from her cottage window, when Dave, on a twenty-four-hour pass, approached Hester in the cider apple orchard. She guessed, correctly, that he was asking her to be his wife and promising to raise Reuben’s child as his own, and she knew, by the droop of his shoulders as Hester left him, that she had refused him.

  ‘I don’t know what to think an’ that’s a fact!’ she confided miserably to Alice. ‘It bain’t so much the babe, ’cos Reuben were a nice enough lad an’ died for his country an’ all.’

  ‘And for ours, Rose,’ Alice added, quietly.

  ‘Yes, and for ours. I knows that, Alice … But you can see what I mean, I’m sure. A woman would rather have her own son’s flesh and blood for a grandchild … But, no. It bain’t just that, see, ’tis Hester herself, poor child! She’s … well … a bit … odd, bain’t she, Alice? Which be understandable, what with losing poor Reuben and the way her father do go on! I never heard of a religion so full of evil! ’Ow would my Dave cope with all that? I don’t reckon ’twas Reuben’s death as drove Hester half out of ’er mind, neither! T’was more likely her father and what he said to ’er that day he come ’ere! You ’eard ’im! Wicked it were! Poor child. I don’t know … And now she’s sayin’ she don’t want to go to Reuben’s folks over in America! When that would surely be the best thing all round!’ Rose paused, hoping for Alice’s approval of this solution to Hester’s problems. ‘Don’t you reckon it would be?’ Alice kept to herself her honest opinion, which was that for Rose, Hester’s immediate departure for Bismarck, North Dakota, might have been the ‘best thing’, but for Hester herself, for her unborn child and possibly for Dave, too, it might not be. The warden’s silence on the subject did not escape Rose.

  The land girls, who were keenly following every twist and turn of Hester’s story, were more outspoken.

  ‘I reckon you’d be ’appy to see the back of her, Mrs Crocker,’ was Gwennan’s opinion. ‘Pack her off with the other GI brides, eh? Then p’raps your Dave would settle for some nice local girl with a dad who’s not a ravin’ loony like that Jonas Tucker!’
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  ‘I just want what’s best for Hester,’ Rose declared emphatically, but the other girls were clearly sceptical and the discussion would have continued had Alice not put a stop to it.

  Two days later Hester vanished. Although officially, having left the Land Army, her welfare was no longer its responsibility, Margery Brewster, as local village registrar, assuming that Hester had returned to her parents’ smallholding in north Devon, had persuaded the Ministry of Agriculture to allocate to her enough petrol for her to drive over the moor to confirm Hester’s safe arrival there.

  While Margery’s description of what she found – the near derelict cottage, Hester tremulous and silent under the sharp eyes of her hostile parents – had depressed everyone at the hostel, it was Rose who was most lastingly affected by it. She knew that Dave’s feelings for Hester were unlikely to change and was unsurprised when, months later, when the time had passed when the baby’s birth was due, Dave rode his bicycle north-westwards, over the moor.

  The baby girl, he told his mother when he arrived home, soaked to the skin by icy, November rain, was to be called Thurza. Hester seemed well enough, although her father was now bedridden, cursed, Hester insisted, by the same evil that her sins had brought down on all her family.

  ‘First Reuben,’ she had told Dave, ‘then my father, getting the fallin’ down sickness, and if I don’t repent, t’will soon be my baby! Stay away from me, Dave, or it could be you who’s next to suffer for my sins!’

  ‘So she be just the same, then?’ Rose asked Dave while he sat, his clothes steaming, sipping hot tea by her fire. ‘About the religion and that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, dully, ‘she be just the same. But I can’t let go of her, Mum. I won’t never let go of Hester.’

  Rose bought a rag doll for Thurza’s first Christmas and Dave wrote a message to go with it and posted it in mid December at Ledburton post office. They did not hear from Hester and did not know that her mother, on her father’s instructions, had burnt the doll in the grate on the day it arrived. Hester had read Dave’s message before her mother threw it, too, into the flames. In it he promised to fetch her whenever she would come to him and told her he would love her for ever.