‘You’ll ruin your ’air, you will!’ Gwennan’s comment, as usual, was a negative one. ‘Girls as carry on like you do, bleachin’ and dyeing and that, are bald by forty! I read it in the paper!’
The land girls, their rice pudding bowls scraped clean, were preparing to leave the table when Rose, not to be outdone by her employer’s attention to the warden’s anniversary, emerged from the pantry bearing a sponge cake, decorated with Devonshire cream dotted with strawberry jam. The girls responded enthusiastically to the treat.
‘Is it somebody’s birthday?’ they chorused.
‘Whose?’ several demanded.
‘Nobody’s,’ Rose announced. ‘But ’tis an anniversary just the same! Alice…Mrs Todd to you…’as been ’ere at Lower Post Stone Farm for a whole year!’
‘Never!’
‘We all have, Mrs Crocker!’
‘True,’ Rose grudgingly admitted, ‘but ’tis Mrs Todd’s cake all the same!’
‘Twelve months, already!’ someone sighed.
‘Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself,’ Gwennan murmured, dolefully examining the line of new blisters across her palm, caused by three days of hoeing between rows of brassicas.
‘Cut the cake, Mrs Todd!’
‘Go on!’
‘Make a wish, Mrs Todd!’ Alice took the knife from Annie, the vivacious young Jewess who was smiling up at her.
‘What shall I wish for?’ Alice asked them.
‘For a week’s leave for my Reuben,’ Hester suggested, her Devonian accent matching Rose’s. ‘So us can honeymoon proper!’
‘For someone to put a bullet through Adolf Hitler, so we can all go ’ome!’
‘For that gorgeous GI I met last Sat’d’y to make an honest woman of me and ship me off to the States!’
Alice expertly divided the cake into eleven equal portions. There were eight girls in residence. Then there was Rose, Alice herself and Edward John who, as usual on a Friday evening, had arrived from his boarding school for the weekend. She did not make a wish except in a general way, for the well-being and happiness of all of them.
It was on the evening of that day that the war, which had brought about the situation in which she and her charges found themselves, intruded in a violent and distressing way upon it. This was something that had happened on several occasions over the past year, when the quiet, pastoral routine of the higher and lower farms had been disrupted by disasters which always seemed to take their occupants unawares.
The Post Stone girls were, of course, always conscious of the war, which was rumbling on, far away, in Italy, Greece, Russia, North Africa, in the skies over England and at sea, where the North Atlantic convoys and their Royal Naval escorts were constantly under attack from German U-boats, but the details of the various theatres of operation and the outcome of specific battles mostly escaped them.
Letters from men on active service were heavily censored and when home on leave, boyfriends and brothers had better things to do than talk about the war.
Alice kept herself informed of the war’s progress by listening, when time permitted, to the regular bulletins broadcast by the BBC. She sometimes discussed the news with Roger Bayliss and occasionally with Margery Brewster, who, as village registrar for the Women’s Land Army, was responsible for Lower Post Stone and a number of neighbouring hostels. But Alice’s girls were, most of them, fully occupied by the struggle to survive their punishing workload, to keep as warm and dry as they could and, on Saturdays, to make themselves as attractive as possible for a weekly outing, when they hitched a ride to Exeter and went to the flicks or a dance, or, if they were lucky, both.
And so it was that on the night of Alice’s anniversary, they were again pulled up short and shocked by what happened.
When they recalled it, during the hours, days, even weeks, that followed, no one was ever quite certain who had been the first to hear the weird howling sound as a burning aircraft approached, fast, through the darkness and roared, low, over the farmhouse and its cluster of barns. Trailing smoke and flames, it dropped briefly out of sight before smashing into the stand of elms at the far end of the five-acre paddock, less than a mile from the building in which nine women and one ten-year-old boy listened, transfixed.
Edward John, engrossed in the latest Biggles book, was already in his bed, which stood at one end of the large downstairs room designated as his mother’s bed-sitting room. Rose, the scullery tidy after the meal and the kitchen table set ready for breakfast, had crossed the yard to her cottage and was just about to prepare her bedtime cup of Ovaltine when she remembered she had washing on her line. Scolding herself because the night air would have dampened it, she went out into the total darkness of her back garden to fetch it.
It was then that she heard it and almost instantly saw it. What she heard, and what everyone at the farm became simultaneously aware of seconds later, was a sound like an express train approaching at speed – or a hurricane – or a tidal wave. Everyone had subsequently described it differently but all of them agreed that it was the most terrifying sound they had ever heard.
In the hostel bathroom the bottle of peroxide was almost empty and Marion’s hair was standing in pungent tufts as Winnie worked the pad of saturated cotton wool, back and forth across her friend’s skull. Both girls heard the noise and reached the window as whatever it was skimmed the farmhouse roof, grazing the ridge tiles of the barn and spraying burning fuel into the darkness. Gwennan, clad in flannelette pyjamas, curlers dangling from her thin hair, stood aghast at her bedroom window and later described what she saw as looking like an enormous sky-rocket.
It was Annie, from the small window in her room above the porch, who distinctly saw the dark shape of the plane as it dropped below the outline of the barns. Seconds later, they all heard the shuddering thump and tearing of metal as it ploughed into the trees. Alice and Roger, returning to the lower farm in Roger’s car, had simultaneously glimpsed, from the lane, the astonishing sight of a plane just clearing the farm roofs before plunging into the ground.
The Dakota had been on a routine exercise with three others. It had dropped its group of trainee parachutists in the designated area some miles west of Bridgewater and all of them had been safely recovered. It was when the three planes turned and headed away from the drop-site that there had been an explosion in the engine of one of them.
As the stricken aircraft began to lose height, the pilot banked, making for the small airstrip at Dunkerswell. He ordered his crew to bale out, intending to follow them once he was certain that if he failed to reach the airstrip he could put his plane on a course that would ensure a crash-landing in open country.
High ground above the Post Stone farms, known locally as The Tops, loomed ahead of him. The altimeter read six hundred feet and the pilot knew that to deploy his parachute effectively he must jump before he lost any more height. It was at that moment that he saw, between him and the rising ground, the solid outline of a farmhouse and the cluster of barns surrounding it. He forced the stick back, managed to gain fifty feet and then, as he narrowly cleared the buildings, felt the aircraft judder and stall. Seconds later, as it began to drop, he hauled himself away from the controls and leapt clear of the plane, pulling his rip cord as the slipstream took him and spun him, the ground looming rapidly towards him, the useless ’chute barely inflated behind him.
Most of the land girls who were already prepared for bed had pulled sweaters and jackets on over their nightdresses, run down the stairs, shoved their bare feet into the first pair of boots that came to hand, elbowed their way along the cross-passage and pushed out through the porch. Roger, his car lurching from one pothole to the next, wrenched on his handbrake as the girls streamed out of the building, clutching at each other for support as they negotiated the slippery cobbles. Alice, grabbing a pair of rubber boots from the porch, ordered her son, who, his dressing gown over his pyjamas, was heading after the girls, to stop at once and wait for her.
Rounding the barns,
the girls emerged into the field that lay between them and the blazing plane and stumbled forward, increasingly dazzled by the glare of the flames. Edward John kept pace with them until his mother grabbed him by the hand and slowed him. Gwennan, her curlers bouncing as she ran, pulled at Alice’s sleeve.
‘Don’t go too near, Mrs Todd!’ she gasped breathlessly, stumbling over the uneven ground, her gaunt face lit eerily by the fire, her sing-song Welsh voice thin with alarm. ‘They could be Jerries for all we know!’
The impact had split the plane into two. Fire engulfed the fuselage but the cockpit section, several yards from it, was intact and was not burning.
Roger Bayliss had used the yard telephone to summon the air raid warden on duty that night in Ledburton village and then hurried through the stumbling girls. Moving ahead of them, he stopped, spread his arms and forbade them to go closer to the wreckage.
Annie Sorokova, her dark hair loose and streaming, the flames of the burning plane reflected in her wide eyes, was reminded of the nights in the East End before she had been old enough to join the Land Army. The London Blitz had been at its height and every night the area around the docks, where the Sorokova family had lived since their arrival from Poland in the 1920s, had been set ablaze, the air shuddering as warehouses and factories disintegrated, crumpling into gritty dust as the shock waves rolled along the streets.
Each morning there had been more gaps in the reeling rows of terrace houses in Duckett Street, more doors and windows smashed in or blown out. There had been empty desks in the schools, shops that didn’t open for business-as-usual because their keepers were dead or dying under piles of rubble. Annie stopped and stood, choking on country air that was now fouled by the stench of aviation fuel and burning rubber.
‘There’s no one in the cockpit!’ Marion’s sharp North-Country voice rose above the noise of the fire. The towel had slipped off the bleached corkscrews of her hair, giving her, in the light of the flames, the appearance of Medusa.
‘Thank the Lord!’ Rose gasped, arriving breathlessly, her apron spattered with mud.
‘There were parachutes!’ Winnie shouted. Several of the girls had seen the ’chutes drifting silently down and being carried eastwards by a rising westerly breeze.
The ARP warden, his tin hat slightly askew, wobbled across the field on his bicycle, looked round anxiously for something against which to lean it and, finding nothing, laid it carefully on the ground. This was by far the most serious incident he had been called upon to attend. Dry-mouthed, he struggled to remember the procedure he had been taught on the Air Raid Wardens’ Induction Course. The sight of half a dozen wide-eyed, scantily dressed young women, clutching at dressing gowns below which flimsy nightdresses were fluttering incongruously in the wind, confused him, but supported by Roger Bayliss, he began moving them back, out of range of possible explosions.
The plane’s markings, just visible as the flames blistered the twisted metal, confirmed that it was ‘one of ours’ and there did not appear to be any casualties scattered on the ground.
‘There wasn’t no one inside the burning part, Mr Bayliss, sir!’ Gwennan informed her boss, irritably shrugging off the ARP warden’s hand when he tried to move her further from the wreckage and adding spitefully, ‘Don’t you pull at me, mister! I’ve already gone over once on my bad ankle!’
Reassured that no airmen had been visible, trapped and possibly dying inside the shattered fuselage before it was engulfed by flames, and given the fact that parachutes had been seen before the moment of impact, it was assumed that no lives had been lost and the mood of the onlookers lifted. They clustered, shivering with a pleasurable sense of guilty excitement as the heat of the fire began to reach them.
Soon the first of several military vehicles lurched onto the scene and it was confirmed that a training parachute-drop had been successfully completed before the mishap. With this news the atmosphere became positively jovial and when Marion and Winnie recognised several acquaintances amongst the attending servicemen, a robust banter began.
Roger Bayliss suggested to Alice that it was inappropriate for the girls, most of whom were in their nightclothes, to be engaging the servicemen in small talk, in a field, at what was now past ten o’clock at night, so Alice, despite being labelled a spoilsport, rounded up her charges and with Rose beside her, walked behind them as they picked their way across the wet grass towards the farm, stumbling over tussocks and molehills and protesting sulkily at being packed off, back to the hostel, when there was a good time to be had at the scene of the plane crash.
It was Hester who spotted the pale, undulating shape in the far corner of the field. She stopped in her tracks, clutched at Annie and pointed.
‘Look, Annie! Be that a ghost?’ Annie peered through the darkness.
‘More like a parachute!’ she said. ‘Come on!’ and she started to move off towards the white object which, by then, had caught the attention of the rest of the girls, who changed direction and began loping and stumbling towards it, laughing, tripping and staggering as they crossed the uneven ground.
Parachutes were made of silk. You could make them into cami-knickers, nighties and petticoats. Even wedding dresses. This one would probably already be snagged on brambles. Perhaps torn. But yards of it would be salvagable. They would fight over it and argue about who should have the best bits.
They reached an area of the field which had, earlier that day, been ploughed, making the going even more difficult, their boots sinking into the soft loam, slowing their progress. Marion and Winnie thrust their way into the lead and were the first to arrive at the rippling, translucent mass. Squealing with excitement they lunged for it, and were gathering the silky folds into their arms by the time Annie, Hester and Gwennan joined them, Alice close behind them with Rose a few breathless yards in her wake.
The cords, anchoring the billowing ’chute to the ground, ran off, upwind. Alice, who had maintained a firm grip on Edward John’s hand, released him and he followed the cords to the place, twelve yards away, where they appeared to be imbedded in the earth. Suddenly he was back at his mother’s side, pulling at her sleeve.
‘There’s someone there!’ he shouted shrilly, pointing into the darkness beyond the mound of white silk. ‘There’s someone in the ground!’
The pilot’s body was barely visible. He lay, face down, imbedded in the newly ploughed soil, which had absorbed much of the impact. But as he was lifted out of the earth and laid carefully on his back, it was obvious to the watching land girls that he was dead.
‘It’d be comical if it wasn’t so awful,’ Annie sighed later, looking round at the woeful faces of her fellows. They had returned to the farmhouse. Rose had heated a pan of milk and made cocoa. They had carried their mugs of it into the recreation room where Marion, her bleached hair now dried into stiff ringlets, had thrown some kindling onto the dying fire. They had all been sitting, sipping, watching in a shocked silence the quiet, domesticated flames when Annie had spoken. Gwennan turned on her sharply, her clipped words cutting the air.
‘Comical? What d’you mean comical? There’s nothing comical about it! An airman’s dead! I don’t call that funny, Annie Sorokova, and nor should you!’
‘I don’t mean “funny”, Taff. Not him dying. It’s just…well, whenever anything awful happens, we always end up in ’ere, don’t we? Sittin’ like this… round the fire…no one saying nothin’. Drinkin’ cocoa. That’s all I meant, Taff. Most of the time when there’s bad news we just get on with things, don’t we? Keep “smiling through” like we’re s’posed to. But every so often, something ’orrible ’appens and ’ere we are…sort of…sort of admitting that the war is goin’ on out there and people are dyin’ and… There was a pause. A log shifted in the hearth and sent a scatter of sparks up the chimney.
‘Them RAF blokes reckon it were the pilot we found,’ Winnie murmured.
‘’E should of baled out sooner,’ Marion added knowledgeably.
‘They said ’e would of
bin trying not to hit the farmhouse.’ Hester’s words were almost inaudible. ‘What ’e done prob’ly saved our lives.’
The silence that followed her words was broken by the sound of a vehicle arriving outside the farmhouse gate. They heard the light tap on the front door and then the familiar creak of its hinges as it was pushed open. Footsteps moved along the slate floor of the cross-passage and then Christopher Bayliss was standing in the doorway to the recreation room.
Before his breakdown, their boss’s son, whom they had occasionally encountered when he was home on leave, had been a brash RAF fighter pilot, concealing shattered nerves under a facade of swaggering arrogance. His increasing exhaustion had left him pale and hollow-eyed. Now, almost a year after his catastrophic breakdown and many months since he had taken refuge in the forester’s cottage, he appeared taller and more robust than the girls remembered. His clothes were the colours of the forest in which he worked. He seemed relaxed. Strenuous exercise, supported by the regular supply of nourishing food that was sent up to him by Eileen, his father’s housekeeper, had restored him, building him physically and soothing his damaged nerves. His hair, untouched by a barber for six months, fell, dark and glossy, almost to his broad shoulders.
‘Well, I never did!’ Rose had exclaimed, coming from the kitchen with her own cup of cocoa in her hand, stopping and staring at their visitor. ‘’Ere… you take this one, Master Christopher,’ she said, offering him the cup and addressing him as she had done when he had been a small child. ‘Go on! I’ll make meself another in a bit!’ But Christopher had interrupted her.
‘No, Rose, you have it. I won’t stay… But I saw the plane come down and guessed it was close to the farmhouse.’ He glanced round at the wide-eyed girls. ‘Just wanted to make certain everyone’s all right.’
The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate Page 2
