Alice's Girls

by Julia Stoneham

  After her interviews, Margery joined Alice in her bed-sitting room and eagerly accepted the glass or two of sherry which Alice felt almost obliged to offer her. As she sipped, Margery ran through her findings, closing her file of notes on the Post Stone girls with a heavy sigh.

  ‘And what will you do?’ Alice asked her, hoping that Margery might have discovered a post-war occupation which would appeal to her and utilise the skills that the war years had developed. But the registrar shrugged and turned the question back to Alice.

  ‘I have no idea,’ she began. ‘And you? What about you?’ Before Alice could make a reply she was surprised when Margery, emboldened by the sherry, gathered up her notes, rose, slightly unsteadily, to her feet and announced that it was obvious what Alice should do.

  ‘Is it?’ Alice queried. ‘What?’

  ‘Marry Roger, of course!’ Margery continued, cheerfully. ‘Put the poor soul out of his misery! He obviously adores you! Whoops! Have I spoken out of turn?’ Alice, still seated, was staring up at the registrar’s florid face, a slow blush colouring her own.

  Mabel, with all three of her children safely under her roof and with Ferdie proving to be a contented, industrious and obedient husband, happily set about refurbishing the Vallance cottage. Ferdie whitewashed the walls, repaired the doors and windows, and because his wife knew best, used several pieces of his late mother’s redundant furniture for firewood. The Vallances ate well, supplementing their rations with Ferdie’s various poachings and pilferings. Mabel, as her employer had accurately forecast, was developing impressive organisational skills and running her home, caring for her children and carrying out her duties in the Bayliss dairy in one streamlined flow of work. She loved to cook, and now that she had her own kitchen to cook in, her own husband and children to cook for and – from one source or another – a plentiful supply of raw materials, the aroma of her stews, her roasted meats, her fish pies, when Ferdie had been lucky with a salmon, and her pasties, drifted tantalisingly round the yard of the higher farm.

  ‘Yours be better nor mine,’ Rose admitted, biting into a pasty that was hot from Mabel’s oven. Mabel repaid the compliment by bicycling down to the lower farm one Saturday lunchtime and, with Rose’s assistance, baking pasties for all the Post Stone girls, creating, under Mabel’s instruction, a culinary production line that resulted in a Saturday lunch which, for days, was the talk of the hostel and had, although no one recognised it at the time, more significance than anyone realised.

  Rose had never forgotten the success of the Devonshire cream teas she had produced for the staff and patients in the ward of the military hospital where, twelve months previously, Dave had been treated for a shrapnel wound in his leg. Nurses, orderlies and wounded men alike had enthused about the freshly baked scones piled with strawberry jam and crowned with dollops of clotted cream, and had declared their intention, when the war was over, to visit Devon for their holidays, find themselves a nice little café and sit down to a real ‘Demshure cream tea like what Corporal Crocker’s mum makes’.

  As the months passed, a thought which had taken root in Rose’s imagination became a private dream and then hardened into an identifiable project.

  There was only one labourer’s cottage at the lower farm. To this, as a bride, Rose had been brought by Dave’s father. During the early, childless years of the marriage she had pined for the village life and the people with whom she had grown up and who were now a thirty-minute walk away, but, after a difficult confinement, which deprived the couple of the possibility of further children, Dave had been born, and apart from helping out with the farm work during the various harvest times, his mother had devoted herself to raising the little boy whose labour, as soon he was done with school, was incorporated into Roger Bayliss’s workforce. Dave was eighteen years old when, on a wet winter’s day, his father dropped dead and the lease of the Crocker cottage, as was the custom, was put into his name. On his marriage it would be his wife who would be mistress of the cottage and his children who would be raised there.

  Since her widowhood, Rose’s attention had been more than ever focused on her son. The feelings of panic when his call-up papers had arrived might have destroyed her had it not been for Roger Bayliss’s decision to use the lower farm as a billet for his land girls. Suddenly there was work for Rose to do. There were scandals and gossip to amuse her, and a small but welcome income to augment the tiny pension which was all she received after her husband’s early death. But more important to Rose than the money had been the increasing sense of achievement and involvement which her work at the hostel brought her.

  Her familiarity with the farmhouse, its plumbing, its temperamental and inefficient boiler, its leaks, its overflowings, rattlings, creakings, howlings and gurglings, had given Rose an early advantage over the newly appointed warden, the interloper who, to begin with, seemed to Rose to be both unsuitable and incapable of the work she had undertaken. Initially hostile, Rose soon, if reluctantly, had come to admire Alice Todd’s fumbling attempts to master her task, and before long these two women, whose experience of life came from hugely contrasted backgrounds, had not only developed a strong, working relationship but had become friends, forming a united front in their dealings not only with the vagaries of the farmhouse, but with the uncompromising and sometimes difficult Roger Bayliss, as well as the forthright and often rebellious land girls themselves. As the war progressed and its conclusion loomed, Rose, like everyone else at the two farms, had begun to speculate on what the future held. Gradually her half-formed ambitions had solidified and, unsurprisingly, it was to the warden that she first confided them.

  ‘I’ve already found me premises,’ she announced one afternoon, when she and Alice were preparing the land girls’ evening meal. Edward John, on a corner of the kitchen table, was assembling a piece of a model Hurricane from his latest kit and listening, as he always did, to the grown-ups’ conversation. ‘’Tis the old bakery in the village square,’ Rose continued, smoothing sprinkled flour across the pastry board. Alice said she didn’t know there was a bakery in Ledburton. ‘’Tis closed down now ’cos the local stores gets their loaves from that big new place in Exeter these days. But years ago all our bread come from that little shop and the smell of the bakin’ used to waft round the square, makin’ your mouth water! Lovely it were! Drove us kids mad with hunger! There’s still a counter and shelves in the front bit of the shop, and that’s where I’ll put me tables and me chairs. Six there’ll be, with gingham clothes on ’em and yellow crockery! Then comes a kitchen space where the dough used to be got ready for the ovens, and be’ind that there’s a yard with a gate to an alleyway. Upstairs be three good rooms where the baker’s family allus lived. Just a pot of tea, I’ll do, and a plate of freshly baked scones, buttered and still warm from the ovens and served with plenty of jam and bowls of Demshure cream! One and six per person, I’ll charge, and I’ll be open for business for the trippers, see! All summer, from two o’clock until six o’clock every afternoon! In the winter, I’ll just do Sat’days and Sundays. I’ve done me sums, Alice, an’ I knows what me costs are, not counting me rent, though, ’cos I doesn’t know how much that’ll be ’til I asks Mr Bayliss.’

  ‘Mr Bayliss?’ Alice queried.

  ‘Yes, cos ’e owns the old bakery, see. Part of the Post Stone estate it be. Reckon I’ll ’ave to fill in some forms for to get permission for it to be a café, but Mr Bayliss’ll know about all that better nor I do. So … What d’you reckon?’ she concluded. Alice had stopped, knife in hand, and was staring at Rose, her face expressing a mix of astonishment and respect.

  ‘I think it’s a brilliant plan, Rose. I just hope … I mean …’

  ‘You mean am I up to it?’

  ‘No! I’m sure you are … but …’

  ‘There are a few things that’ll need sorting, I knows that … One thing is the walk from here into the village and back. It’s a good mile and a bit each way. I’m not bothered about the walk. I’m used to that. But it’s t
he time, see. ’Alf an hour each way it takes, easy, and that’s an hour a day … I could live over the shop, o’course. I’d like that! But my Dave’ll be demobbed before long now, and with ’im still fixed on that Hester, it don’t look like ’e’ll marry any time soon! So I’ll ’ave to stay on at the cottage to look after ’im, won’t I!’ She smiled firmly at Alice and then continued. ‘And there’s another thing,’ she said, thumping the lump of dough for the piecrust down onto the board. ‘With the shop on’y bein’ open in the summer afternoons and at weekends in the winter, I’ll be payin’ out rent for a lot of hours when there’s no money goin’ in me till!’

  Alice had considered this problem for a while as she sliced into cubes the rather tough piece of stewing steak which would form a small but vital part of tonight’s pie. Edward John looked up from the balsa wood shape he was carefully sanding. He remembered watching Mabel assembling the batch of pasties she had recently baked for the land girls’ lunch and how economically and speedily the pasties had been prepared and cooked. ‘It don’t half make the meat go a long way, a good pasty do!’ Mabel had announced that morning, happily dicing her way through the pile of vegetables which would form the main ingredient of her creation.

  ‘Mrs Crocker,’ Edward John began, coolly, ‘I’ve just had an idea.’ Rose was concentrating on rolling out the pastry.

  ‘What’s that, then, Edward John?’ she asked him in the tone of voice she used when indulging small boys.

  ‘What about serving Mabel’s hot pasties in the mornings … and your cream teas in the afternoons?’

  Mid afternoon on a hot day and the farmhouse, except for one person, was deserted. Rose, her arm through the handle of a large punnet, had strolled along the lane to the field where strawberries were ripe and ready for use for tonight’s pudding. Alice, as quite often happened these days, had been collected by Roger Bayliss and driven off for what he called a ‘spot of lunch’. Which left Gwennan, who, feverish following a bilious attack, was lying, half asleep in her bed.

  Hearing an unfamiliar vehicle draw up in the lane outside the farmhouse, followed by the rattle of the catch on the gate and heavy footsteps on the cobbles approaching the front door, Gwennan left her bed and peered out of her window.

  The vehicle at the gate was a jeep and someone, their identity concealed by the porch, was rapping their knuckles on the front door.

  ‘What d’you want?’ Gwennan called sharply. A figure in an American army uniform stepped backwards, out from under the porch, tilted his head, saluted crisply and smiled up at her.

  ‘Hi there!’ he said, squinting into the sunlight. ‘Which one of the gorgeous Post Stone babes are you?’ It was Sergeant Marvin Kinsky. He was smiling, his white teeth gleaming, his five o’clock shadow just beginning to darken his jawline.

  ‘It’s Gwennan Pringle,’ Gwennan told him, crisply, disconcerted by his arrival and attempting to conceal this reaction in a show of irritation.

  ‘Aha!’ he grinned, ‘the Welsh one! The one they call Taffy, right? I recognise the accent! I was stationed in Wales just before D-Day, ma’am, indeed to goodness I was!’

  ‘I s’pose you’ve come about Marion,’ she said. Kinski laughed, dropped his head and walked round in a small circle before looking, almost shyly, back up at her, his jaw working on a lump of peppermint gum.

  ‘That’s a quaint way of putting it!’ he said. ‘But yeah, I guess I have. So … Where can I find her, ma’am?’ For a moment Gwennan hesitated, then she told him to wait and said she would come down. She pulled on her dressing gown and tied it firmly, slid her feet into her carpet slippers, went down the narrow staircase into the cross-passage, opened the front door, led Kinsky into the recreation room and told him he had better sit down. He sat, holding his cap loosely in his hands and watching her as she perched herself neatly on an upright chair. He was still smiling.

  ‘This is where I first met her,’ he said, glancing round the quiet room. ‘Christmas Day. Forty-three. Reckon I was smitten straight off!’ There was a silence. ‘You OK, lady?’ he asked her, his face suddenly serious. ‘Only you look real peaky.’

  ‘I was ill in the night,’ Gwennan told him. ‘I’m s’posed to rest in my bed today.’ He was on his feet.

  ‘Jeez! I’m sorry I disturbed you! You get off back to bed and I’ll … I’ll …’

  ‘Don’t you want to know where Marion is?’ she asked him.

  ‘Sure I do, but …’

  ‘If you go up to the higher farm someone there will know,’ she said. He thanked her and was apologising again for disturbing her when she suddenly interrupted him.

  ‘But if I was you I wouldn’t bother with her.’ He turned to face her, gaping in surprise. ‘You seem a nice fellow,’ she said, her voice, even in her ears, sounding harsh in the quiet room. ‘You deserve better than Marion Grice!’

  ‘Better?’ he echoed, astonished. ‘Better than Marion?’

  ‘You don’t know how she goes on, do you? With blokes, I mean. With soldiers and airmen and GIs!’ Her voice had thinned into an unattractive whine. ‘’Specially with GIs! They gives her presents! Loads of presents! Frocks and smokes and silk stockings and undies! And you don’t get nothing for nothing in this world, do you!’ He was gazing at her, his jaw frozen, his chewing gum forgotten. ‘What do you want with a girl like her?’ she finished and was aware, as the silence closed on her final words, of the sergeant’s eyes, searching her face. Sharp, dark and unreadable, his gaze held hers. After a moment, she lowered her head and stared at the floor. ‘You don’t know nothing about her, do you?’ she concluded lamely, her voice wavering.

  He stood for a moment, still looking at her, taking in the stony features which had been distorted by an outburst that had remained for so long locked into her head, waiting for this moment. Now that it was over, the words out and the air still vibrating with their intensity, an emptiness washed over her face as she raised her eyes and stared at him, blank and blinking, uncertain what to expect from him. There was a considerable pause.

  ‘Maybe I don’t,’ he said quietly. ‘And maybe she don’t know much about me, neither. No more’n you do, ma’am. I’m no angel, see. I bin around. I done things I’m not proud of and I guess she might have, too. Haven’t we all? But with Marion things was different, see. Right from the start. For me and for her too, I reckon. We just … clicked,’ he finished, unable to find a better phrase. ‘Just clicked,’ he repeated, his voice stronger and increasingly confident. He squared his sturdy shoulders and lifted his chin. ‘You say I don’t know her … But do you, ma’am? Do you really know her?’

  ‘I’ve seen her rowdy!’ Gwennan retaliated, defensively, feeling her heart beating against her ribs. ‘I’ve seen her flaunting herself!’

  ‘Sure! Me too! And she’s got a sharp tongue and a quick temper when she feels like it! I seen that too. But it’s a tough old world out there, Taff, and Marion’s had to fight her way through it. Don’t reckon things have been that easy for her, one way and another.’ He paused. ‘But is she unkind?’ he persisted. ‘Is she dishonest? Have you ever known her hurt anyone?’ He paused again and fumbled for something in his breast pocket. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ he said. She shook her head and watched him light the stub of a cigar and in the silence she heard, in her head, the faint thud of the envelope containing his letter to Marion, dropping down behind the dresser, almost twelve months ago, and she felt her own unkindness and her own dishonesty break over her like a wave. He was observing her keenly, screwing up his eyes against his cigar smoke. ‘Reckon you should get back to your bed,’ he said, almost gently. ‘Reckon you’re real sick.’ There was, he saw now, a sort of desperation about her. He got to his feet. ‘I guess what you said just now was kindly meant, ma’am. Your intentions were good, and I sure’preciate your concern, I really do. It was kind of you to worry on my account, even if I don’t deserve it, and I thank you for that. I reckon you’re a good person, you know that? Now, you get upstairs and I hope you get well real soon, OK?
’

  Gwennan nodded dumbly and stood stock-still in the recreation room while the little sergeant clicked his heels and inclined his head in a gesture suggesting respect. Then he left her, his boots loud on the slates of the cross-passage, through the porch, along the cobbled path and out through the gate. She heard the jeep’s engine rattle into life and then fade to silence, the sound quickly absorbed by the dense foliage of the lane. She realised suddenly that tears were sliding down her face.

  ‘But I’m not!’ she whimpered. ‘I’m not kind and I’m not a good person.’ And then she thought, ‘But perhaps I am, though.’ She stood in the empty room, considering the circumstances. Perhaps it had been the shock of discovering her illness that had made her hide the sergeant’s letter all those months ago. Not unkindness at all. And not dishonesty. It had been the fear of being ill and dying unloved that had made her commit a stupid, jealous, spiteful act. And warning the sergeant that Marion’s no good … Perhaps he was right and she did mean that for the best. She began to feel slightly light-headed and almost virtuous. Perhaps that was all it had been, after all. A silly, thoughtless act and an attempt, however well meant, to interfere between two people who were best left to make their own decisions. And now it was over and done with. Kinsky, after all this time, had found his way back to Marion. He might even marry her. Which meant that she, Gwennan Iris Pringle, was innocent! She might even be, as Sergeant Kinsky had suggested, ‘a good person’ with worthy motives, not cruel, vengeful ones. She climbed the stairs to her room and lay, comforted, dozing in her narrow bed.

  After a while Rose returned from the strawberry field. Later, Gwennan heard her boss’s car deliver the warden back to the farmhouse. She heard the chickens in the yard and the geese and the ducks on the pond and the house martins under the eaves. She may be going to die, painfully and slowly like her sister Olwyn had and her Aunt Rhiannon before her, but she would bear it bravely. She knew the other land girls disliked her, and that neither the warden or the village registrar had much time for her, but Sergeant Kinski understood her. He had valued her intentions and believed in her goodness. There was a tap on her bedroom door. The warden had brought her a cup of tea. She flushed with pleasure, raised herself on one elbow, smiled as she took the cup and said ‘much better, thanks’ when Alice asked her how she was feeling.