The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate

by Julia Stoneham

  THE GIRL

  AT THE

  FARMHOUSE GATE

  JULIA STONEHAM

  Dedicated to the memory of my cousin, Flying Officer Gordon Ernest Malbon Parker RAF, killed in action over Hanover in September 1943, aged 22.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About the Author

  Available from ALLISON and BUSBY

  Copyright

  Advertisement

  Chapter One

  The small, overworked bathroom was, even on this cold February morning, warm and faintly perfumed by the cheap scents of the soaps and shampoos favoured by the ten land girls who shared its claw-footed bath, washed their smalls and shampooed their hair in its tiny washbasin and sat on the Edwardian wooden seat of the WC whose worn brass chain connected it to a noisy cistern, way overhead.

  Alice Todd lay in the hot water, relishing the one event in her crowded day which provided the closest thing to relaxation and even luxury available to her since twelve months ago, when she had become warden of the Land Army hostel that was housed at Lower Post Stone Farm.

  During the first, chaotic days following her arrival, Alice had discovered that the early mornings – when the girls were gone and the only sound in the solid old building was a distant clatter from the scullery where Rose Crocker, the cowman’s widow, was washing up the breakfast dishes – belonged to her. The empty bathroom was hers as were the contents of the tank of wonderfully hot water.

  By late afternoon, when the land girls came roaring back from the fields, hungry, cold, muddy and irritable, the pressure on the bathroom was extreme. The altercations which arose over whose turn it was to use it, how much water was allowed and how long was too long to spend in possession of each meagre tubful, erupted on a regular basis and had been known to come close to violence. Frequently as many as three girls used the same bathwater, climbing in and out, one after the other, while steam drifted and the pipes spluttered and gurgled as the range in the kitchen below struggled and failed to meet the demand for hot water which the girls imposed on it. But in the mornings, when the girls were absent, the plumbing silent and the water hot, Alice would fetch her sponge bag and her towel, make her way from her bed-sitting room, through the empty recreation room, climb one or other of the narrow staircases that led to the upper floor and take possession of the bathroom.

  Her mind, while she lay, for the ten minutes or so which she allowed herself, in the warm, soapy water, seldom wandered as far as any contemplation of the situation in which the breakdown of her marriage had placed her. Instead, her responsibilities as hostel warden dominated her thoughts. She would find herself checking, almost unconsciously, the supplies in her pantry, visualising the rows of labelled tins, the bins of dried peas and lentils, sacks of potatoes, turnips or swedes, the packets of porridge oats, pudding rice, flour and sugar. Occasionally her mind would stray towards more personal concerns. Did she, for instance, need to order any items of school uniform for Edward John, her ten-year-old son? Had she replied to her solicitor’s most recent letter regarding the divorce proceedings? But, mostly, she pondered on how best to utilise the small amount of fresh meat the butcher would deliver that day. Then she would get to her feet and with the warm water running from her skin, remove the plug, wrap herself in her towel and step down onto a bath mat which was unpleasantly clammy after its heavy use on the previous evening.

  Pale sunlight, thin with February cold, was this morning illuminating the bathroom through a low window, frosted by condensation. Alice cleared the steamy mirror above the basin and peered at her reflection.

  Sometimes, particularly since her arrival at the farm, it had seemed strange to Alice that despite the huge changes that had taken place in her life, her reflection so closely resembled the woman she had been before the progress of the war had so radically altered it. Her marriage had failed. Another woman had taken possession of her husband. Her home in Twickenham remained deserted and boarded-up since a German bomb had struck the leafy, suburban street in which it stood. Her son was at boarding school, spending only his weekends and holidays on the farm, where he shared his mother’s attention with the diverse group of young women for whom she found herself largely responsible.

  Alice contemplated the oval face reflected in the misted mirror. The grey eyes were steady, the brows fine, the mouth good-tempered and the dark blonde hair, piled onto the top of her head, was luxuriant. Despite the loss of home and husband, the months of unremitting hard work, the pressure of responsibility and the various crises that had punctuated her time at the farm, she was still, recognisably – and slightly surprisingly – herself. Somehow she had survived it all, and perhaps by following the predictable but sound advice of the indomitable Rose Crocker – ‘Just take things one day at a time, my dear’ – she would, she realised, continue to survive for as long as she had to.

  At first Alice’s task as warden, work for which she was neither qualified nor temperamentally suited, had overwhelmed her. She struggled to fulfil the huge demands made on her and often came close to giving up and retreating back to the rented room in Exeter which had housed her and Edward John after the London bombing had left them homeless, and where her husband had arrived suddenly, one evening, and told her that their marriage was over. But, needing to provide an income for herself and safety for her son, she had squared her shoulders and struggled on.

  It had been obvious to Alice that, initially, her employer Roger Bayliss, the farm’s owner, had little or no confidence in her. The Land Army Registrar, too, had doubted her suitability as warden and only appointed her in the absence of anyone more able.

  The farmhouse, which had stood empty for years and would, in any other circumstances, have been declared unsuitable for human habitation, was more or less derelict when Roger Bayliss, having lost most of his able-bodied farmhands to the war, had been obliged to utilise it as a billet for the ten young women who were to replace them. A lick of paint and a few partitioned bedrooms on the upper floor had hardly transformed it. Years of neglect and a dozen harsh Devonian winters had left the building so cold and damp that months had passed before constant fires followed by summer weather had made any impression on it.

  Although Alice was largely unaware of it, her year as warden at Lower Post Stone Farm had changed her. She had grown stronger and more assertive. No longer simply a submissive, dependent wife, her association with her land girls and her increasing familiarity with their circumstances, some of which had astonished and even shocked her, had broadened her mind and extended her sensitivity. She was protective of them and without being conscious of it, had won their respect and their loyalty. Even her domestic assistant, the sharp-tongued Rose, initially her harshest critic, had been won over and had become a staunch ally.

  The lack of confidence, which in her early weeks on the farm had coloured her employer’s opinion of her, had developed, without her being aware of it, into an undeclared regard, now bordering on stronger feelings which, possibly, even he did not fully recognise.

  Back in her room, Alice had dressed, quickly pulling on the slacks, silk shirt and thick sweater that kept her warm in the draughty farmhouse. She brushed her hair, coiled it onto the nape of her neck and was working a trace of lipstick onto her mouth when Rose’s penetrating Devonian voice reached her.

  ‘The boss be ’ere!’ she called, ‘Rabbits, he’s brung. And daffs! Ba
in’t your birthday, be it?’ Alice said it wasn’t and went to open the door.

  Roger Bayliss had ridden down from the higher farm, dismounted, hooked his horse’s reigns over the gate post and was approaching the front door of the farmhouse. From one hand three recently snared rabbits swung. In the other he held a bunch of daffodil buds, the tightly furled petals still more green than gold. He stood, his head slightly inclined to avoid contact with the warped oak lintel, a self-conscious smile on his usually grave face.

  He was a tall man whose general bearing was slightly at odds with the broad shoulders and well-shaped, leonine head. There was something withdrawn, almost joyless, about him which had always puzzled Alice. She thought his years of widowhood might be its cause, or, more recently, the near-tragedy that had befallen his son.

  Christopher, a pilot in Fighter Command, had, a few months after Alice’s arrival at the farms, suffered a spectacular breakdown and been discharged from the service. After some time confined in a military psychiatric hospital he had retreated, alone, to manage his father’s neglected woodlands, which lay on rising ground between the Post Stone farms and the moor. Roger’s reaction to this had baffled Alice, who had expected him to show a fatherly concern for his son’s welfare but had instead seen nothing more than a reluctance to involve himself in it.

  Alone at Higher Post Stone Farm and preoccupied by the demands the war put on the running of his farms, Roger had possibly been unaware of the depth or extent of his solitude until Alice’s arrival. At first he had regarded her as an incompetent liability and considered that her middle-class background contributed to her unsuitability for the role which her unfortunate circumstances had forced on her. After living for so long alone with his own growing son, his contact with women had, for many years, been restricted to giving instructions to his housekeeper and to the aging wives of the few men who remained on the farm and who occupied his labourers’ cottages. He was used to being respected and obeyed but had forgotten how charming the company of an attractive, educated woman could be.

  ‘Happy anniversary!’ he announced and when Alice smiled blankly, added, ‘It’s twelve months to the day since you arrived here! And to be honest, Alice, I didn’t think you’d last twelve hours!’

  ‘Neither did I! But to everyone’s surprise I did!’

  ‘You certainly did!’ He held the daffodils out to her. ‘Wild ones,’ he said, ‘from the orchard.’ She thanked him, accepted the flowers and invited him into the kitchen where Rose, who had already poured their cups of morning tea, took the rabbits from him, laid them on the marble working surface at one end of the kitchen and prepared to skin them.

  During the early months of her presence at Lower Post Stone, Roger and Alice had met only occasionally and usually in connection with the running of the hostel or to deal with some personal problem encountered by one or other of the land girls. These meetings between them had initially been formal and slightly stiff. But, as time passed, their association had developed into an amicable working partnership. Roger began inviting Alice out for an evening drink or to modest social events hosted by neighbouring landowners. Their relationship had, as far as Alice’s perception of it went, remained platonic and almost professional – a state of affairs which Rose, her sharp eyes and ears tuned to catch any hint of gossip, could neither comprehend nor accept. Now, on the morning of the anniversary of Alice’s arrival at the farms, when Roger asked her to celebrate the occasion by having dinner with him, Alice was amused to catch Rose’s sharp eyes on her as she smilingly accepted his invitation.

  Later, with Roger gone and Rose sweeping the bedrooms, Alice stood at the scullery sink and began to peel vegetables for the rabbit stew. The familiar, monotonous task freed her mind and she smiled ruefully at the fact that she had been so deeply immersed in her responsibilities as warden that an entire year of her life had slipped by, almost without her being conscious of its passing.

  Over those twelve months the inmates of the hostel had come and gone. Some of the girls, whose stay had, for one reason or another, been brief, Alice had forgotten. One had left after a few weeks because her mother had died and she was needed at home to care for her young siblings. Another, a newly-wed, had discovered that she was pregnant and, in accordance with Land Army regulations, had been forced to resign, and one had left the service to become a ferry pilot with the RAF Air Transport Auxiliary. But the others, who had arrived at the farm during the same, freezing February week as Alice, were almost like a family now.

  There would, without doubt, be more girls coming and going this year. More squabbling over bathwater and bedrooms. Irritations and jealousies would erupt, often involving the sulky, critical Gwennan Pringle, the oldest of the group, whose spiteful, Welsh tongue and ceaseless, sulky sanctimony provoked regular outbursts from everyone except sweet-natured Hester, whose ability to forgive stemmed from a strictly religious upbringing at the hands of her preacher father. Mousy Hester, who had arrived, dressed in dark colours and black stockings, convinced that the inhabitants of the hostel were conspiring to lead her into temptation but who had, as the months passed, responded to their influence and then fallen in love with a young GI, whose innocence matched her own. Her family had refused to sanction the engagement and had rejected her. But on a snowy January day, only a few weeks previously, Hester, without their blessing, had married her Reuben at the barracks where he was stationed, after which he had been sent off to train for the invasion of France, practising war on a South Devon beach.

  ‘Fancy Mr Bayliss bringin’ flowers!’ Rose exclaimed when, dustpan in hand, she rejoined Alice in the kitchen.

  ‘Nice of him, wasn’t it?’ the warden said lightly, dumping potato peelings into the pig bin. ‘We’ll put them in the recreation room where the girls can enjoy them.’

  ‘They bain’t for the girls, Alice!’ Rose teased. ‘They’m for you and you knows it! A married woman too! Ought to be ashamed!’

  Rose missed nothing. She was shrewd, sharp-tongued, inquisitive and, if it suited her, protective. When the two women had been thrown together, Alice as warden and Rose as her domestic help, Rose had at first been spiteful. She saw only the warden’s obvious lack of confidence in her ability to carry out her work and resented what she perceived as Alice’s unjustified authority. Then she had watched as the warden struggled with her situation, overcoming her initial panic and vulnerability, turning her determination to survive into strengths and then skills. Gradually, as Alice had established respect from the land girls, their employer and the farm hands, she had won Rose’s unconditional support. She had flushed with pleasure when, after only a few weeks, the warden had put the relationship on Christian-name terms. ‘Alice,’ she had breathed to herself. ‘I am to call her Alice!’

  Alice had put the daffodils into a china jug and set it in the centre of the large, scrubbed pine table where the buds soon responded to the warmth of the kitchen. By five o’clock, when the lorry delivered the land girls back to the hostel, they were already unfurling.

  Before the girls were allowed into the building they were expected to remove their boots and, if the weather was wet, their waterproofs. Often these were so caked with mud that Rose would insist on the girls taking them into the yard and sousing them under the pump before they could be hung, in a dripping row, under the porch. Damp dungarees, sweaters and even socks would be hoisted up above the kitchen range, where they would steam and then dry, ready for the next morning.

  Today, half an hour after they arrived home, some of them already bathed and all of them at least warm and dry, the girls clustered round the kitchen table where Alice and Rose were doling out stewed rabbit, mashed potato and carrots.

  The two close friends, Marion and Winnie, both Northerners, had over the months observed Alice’s table manners. To begin with they had dismissed them as ‘posh’ but after a while they adopted them and now, when they had finished eating, placed their knives next to their forks and no longer pushed away their empty plates.


  ‘Your roots is showin’, Marion.’ Winnie, with her mouth full, eyed the dark parting through her friend’s bleached hair. ‘I’ll have a go at ’em after, if you want. That’s if there’s any peroxide left.’ Marion did want and was sure there was at least half a bottle of peroxide, which, she said, would be more than enough.

  Marion’s ambition, when it came to her appearance, was a simple one. She wished to be – in fact she needed to be – glamorous. Her hair must be as blindingly blonde as Jean Harlow’s, her lashes as thick and dark as Jane Russell’s, her stomach flat, her breasts voluptuous, her fingernails long, curved and crimson. Since joining the Land Army she had been forced to rethink the fingernails but, as a result of an hour or so of hard work, when she was bathed, foundation creamed, eyelashed, powdered, corseted and perfumed and ready to respond to the hooted horn of the army staff car that had arrived at the farm to collect her and Winnie for a night out, Marion would have transformed herself from a plain, scrawny bottle-blonde, with features that were too sharp, eyes that were too small, lips that were too thin and skin that was too coarse, into a being, scented with Californian Poppy, who, in the subdued light of a public bar, a dance hall, or the back row in a cinema, would pass as beautiful. Knowing she had achieved this gave Marion an assurance which captivated and held the male attention she craved. She would be the life and soul of every party, the loudest voice in a sing-song, the leader of the conga. She jitterbugged and Lambeth-Walked longer and faster than anyone, and when she kissed a bloke, he stayed kissed. Winnie, on the other hand, was basically pretty. It required very little time for her to reach the standard of readiness for a night out which it had taken Marion hours to achieve. Her naturally blonde hair may not have been as brilliant as her friend’s but it was lustrous and heavy, curling prettily round her winsome face. Men liked her smile. Marion may have been their first choice but with Winnie they could relax. She would happily spend an entire evening with one young man or another without him feeling threatened, as Marion’s conquests would often be, by uniformed rivals, who pulled rank and challenged for her favours.