The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate

by Julia Stoneham

  Before the war had split his parents, Edward John’s experience of the world had been similar to that of most middle-class English boys. Now, with the family home bomb-damaged and boarded-up and his parents separated – not only by enemy action but by someone whose name was Penelope Fisher, his father’s secretary, a tight-lipped, nervous young woman, whom James Todd apparently preferred to Edward John’s mother – things were completely changed.

  Initially dismayed, Edward John, like many children whose lives where disrupted by the war, had found himself in an unfamiliar environment. Unlike some, who were evacuated from the major cities and billeted with strangers all over the countryside while their homes were threatened and their parents and older siblings struggled to survive German air attacks, Edward John was never far from his mother.

  To begin with, his father’s absence had merely disconcerted him but no sooner had he grown to accept it, than he was faced with the added complication of the complete breakdown of his parents’ marriage. But, with the passing of weeks and then months, he had adjusted to this too and now, occupied by his schooling and relishing the time he spent at Lower Post Stone Farm, he was happy enough.

  When Alice had accepted the job as warden, Edward John had been instantly enchanted by the prospect of living on a farm. It had, in fact, been his enthusiasm that had persuaded Alice to take on work of which she was, initially, almost incapable.

  The land girls themselves did not interest Edward John. He read the disapproval in Rose Crocker’s face when, occasionally, their behaviour was raucous and vulgar and he sensed his mother’s concern when he was exposed to language which was considered unsuitable for a young boy’s ears.

  Had he been a little older or more sexually mature, Edward John might have been intrigued and curious about the land girls and possibly even aroused by their proximity but, that year, when he was ten years old, they seemed to him to not be girls at all but grown-up women and as such he tolerated them, politely taking his cue from his mother when he was uncertain what his own reaction to them should be.

  His favourite had been Eleanor, the young runaway, who had absconded from her boarding school and had declared her intention to return to the farm as a legitimate land girl as soon as she was old enough. He had liked the one called Georgina and thought Annie was the prettiest, admiring her lustrous eyes and the cloud of dark hair that framed her face. Sometimes he polished her boots for her while Gwennan, his least favourite, snarled her disapproval.

  It was difficult, in the flickering lamplight, to see clearly enough to assemble the Bailey bridge on which he had embarked the previous evening, and when he heard his mother’s voice summoning him to bed, he was happy enough to obey her, welcoming the excuse to give up the struggle. Milky cocoa was waiting for him as he clattered down to the warm kitchen, passing the open door of Mabel Hodges’ room as he went.

  Mabel was sitting reading a comic in the double bedroom she shared with no one, when Gwennan’s strident voice reached her.

  ‘Bathroom’s free, Mabel!’

  There were several things that struck people when they first met Mabel. The first was her shape. She was squat and rotund, a smiling, female Humpty Dumpty, with short, muscular arms and legs, and large breasts, stomach, hips and thighs. Her face, too, was rounded, her deep-set eyes sharp and brown. She had coarse auburn hair, which curled aggressively, and a scatter of freckles across her snubbed nose. Another thing about her, and one which more specifically set her apart from the rest of the Post Stone girls, was that she was what Roger Bayliss described as ‘malodorous’. Alice had winced when he first used this word to describe the lumpen girl but had to admit that it was appropriate.

  Mabel had brought with her into the hostel on that cold February day twelve months previously, when she had arrived, together with seven others, a curious, thick, sweetish, oily, sweaty female odour which, despite the imposition of regular baths, clean linen and laundered dungarees, clung persistently to her. By popular demand Mabel was the last to use the bathtub each night.

  Most of the girls shared the small, double bedrooms but more often than not, as they came and went, Mabel had found herself with a room to herself. No one wanted to hurt her feelings, although Gwennan and occasionally Marion or Winnie would mutter something or other which would have been best left unsaid. But Mabel seemed not to hear them – or, perhaps chose not to – and smiled her guileless smile as she relished her food, always on the lookout for, and never refusing, a second helping of anything.

  Alice Todd had been the last to guess that the little boy, whom Mabel referred to as ‘me baby bruvver’, was, in fact, her illegitimate son. Arthur lived with Mabel’s grandmother, who occasionally brought him to visit his ‘big sister’. The affection between the chubby child and the girl who had given birth to him and whom he called ‘May-May’, was as noticeable as his resemblance to her and had not, for long, escaped the sharp eyes of Gwennan Pringle.

  ‘It’s obvious, in’ it!’ she had breathed to Marion and Winnie. ‘An’ it’s disgusting, if you ask me.’ Almost all of Gwennan’s deliberations ended with the phrase ‘if you ask me’, and it irritated her considerably that, in fact, almost no one ever did ask her opinion about anything.

  ‘This has nothing to do with us,’ Alice had said firmly when Rose’s face, as she broached the subject of Arthur’s parentage, had also been hard with disapproval. ‘If Mabel wants to tell us about it she will. If not, we must respect her privacy.’ Rose had muttered darkly and kept her opinions to herself. Gwennan, however, was not to be denied.

  ‘And what about Ferdie Vallance?’ she had demanded, self-righteously, her censorious voice sharp with malice.

  ‘What about him?’ Alice had asked, as innocently as was possible.

  Since her arrival at the farm, Mabel had formed a curious relationship with Ferdie, and in doing so had transformed his life.

  Maimed as a teenager in an accident on the Bayliss farm, no girl had ever given Ferdie a second glance, and following the death of his mother, with nobody to cook for him or clean the tiny labourer’s cottage that came with his wages, Ferdie Vallance had succumbed to neglect, emerging each morning from the gloom of what was hardly more than a hovel like a wild animal leaving its lair. He was thin because he couldn’t cook, and his person, his clothes and his cottage were thick with grime because he couldn’t clean. His hair was lank, his teeth stained, his fingernails black and broken. The land girls gave him a wide berth and avoided his leering smile. Expecting no other response from them and with the exception of one, he ignored them. The exception was Mabel.

  To begin with he had observed her covertly, on the grounds that although she was not quite like the other girls, even she was unlikely to invite or welcome his attentions. But, from the early morning of the day Mabel had begun work in the Bayliss dairy, Ferdie had been at first fascinated and then distinctly roused by her. The closer he got to her, moving a stool nearer to hers as he taught her how to coax milk from a fidgeting cow, the more the oily, female smell of her inflamed him. He failed to be put off by her unwashed hair, unbrushed teeth and bitten nails, reacting positively to her smile, the brightness of her boot-button eyes, the soft voluptuousness of thighs that spilt over the edges of the milking stool and breasts that seemed barely contained by the straining bib of her khaki dungarees.

  ‘I ain’t never done milkin’, Mr Vallance,’ she smiled engagingly, ‘’cos where I worked before we was mostly pigs!’

  ‘Doan you fret,’ he had soothed. ‘Us’ll soon ’ave ee fillin’ a pail as fast as anyone – and you can called me Ferdie, if you ’as a mind to.’

  That had been the start of it. Soon, and on a regular basis, Mabel was cooking a meal for Ferdie on Saturday nights. While most of the girls went to dances, pubs and cinemas in Exeter, Mabel produced stews, roasts and copious puddings from ingredients which, one way or another, Ferdie had procured during the preceding week.

  Salmon and pheasants were poached, rabbits snared and pigeons shot. Onc
e, a lamb, accidentally killed by a fall in a quarry, was inexpertly butchered. Pans of warmed milk were set to cool and then skimmed for Devonshire cream and there were always eggs from the farm hens for custards and even cakes. Strawberries and then raspberries came and went as summer passed and then there were plums, greengages and pears for tarts and later, unlimited apples for pies.

  Soon Ferdie had lost the half-starved look with which everyone had become familiar and, while it had to be admitted that Mabel had little effect on the state of the Vallance cottage, she did, from time to time, launder his flannel shirts, his bedding and even his combinations.

  Roger Bayliss was in the habit of passing down to Ferdie any clothes for which he no longer had a use. Mabel sorted through the Viyella shirts, tweed jackets and corduroy trousers, replaced a button here and shortened a sleeve or a trouser leg there, until, on Saturday nights, after having a wash-down in the galvanised bathtub in front of his kitchen fire, the Ferdie who sat down with her to guzzle his way through the provisions he had pilfered and she had cooked, was very different from the one she had first encountered on that cold, February morning, twelve months previously.

  Mabel’s appearance, too, had been changed by her year at Lower Post Stone Farm. Although her particular odour still hung about her and was at its most pungent at the end of a hard-working day, the habits of the other girls had influenced her. She washed her hair once a week, began to relish the feeling of clean clothes against her skin and used a toothbrush and paste in a way which, until she had become a land girl, she had never done. The wartime diet, rich in vegetables and low in the sugary, fatty foods that had been the staples of Mabel’s pre-war fare, improved her figure, and although she remained what Gwennan called fat, her body was firmer and her skin less liable to the outbreaks of pimples and pustules that had previously thrived on its greasy surface.

  If Ferdie Vallance had ambitions where Mabel was concerned they were, to begin with, focused on her culinary skills. He looked no further ahead than to the meal they would cook on the coming Saturday night. But he also enjoyed her company and appreciated her attention to his laundry.

  Life, for Ferdie, had never been so good and he was content, suppressing, for the time being, any desire he might have felt for more than her presence on their regular Saturday evenings together.

  Mabel, however, had her own agenda. One that involved the two-year-old Arthur. She wanted him with her in the country. She wanted to stop pretending he was her brother and acknowledge him as her own child. She wanted to raise him herself and she wanted Ferdie to adopt him as his son.

  How she would achieve all this was beyond her and she was, to begin with, innocent of any specific plots or plans. It was enough, for now at any rate, to enjoy the changes in herself and those in Ferdie, which had evolved over the months since she came to Lower Post Stone Farm. She respected the short, twisted, limping man and had grown genuinely fond of him. So she let the months and weeks pass in their unremitting routine of heavy labour, in the pleasure of food, both at Alice’s sparse but well-ordered table and in Ferdie Vallance’s murky kitchen, and her last act each night as she climbed into her narrow bed was to make a wish that little Arthur, probably asleep in the air raid shelter in Deptford, would stay safe until morning.

  Mabel shook Vim from the carton and scoured the bath. Being the last to use it each evening, this task always fell to her. She pushed her feet into her slippers and, tying her dressing gown around the part of her body where most girls have a waist, went to the window and opened it. ‘To let out the steam,’ the warden had said, but Mabel was aware that it was to air the room and clear it of the particular aroma which, she knew, clung to her and which the other girls found offensive.

  Most of the lamps in the shared bedrooms were out and their doors were closed as Mabel padded along the corridor to her solitary room.

  ‘…And God bless Ferdie Vallance and Gran and keep little Arfur safe,’ she muttered as her cheek met her pillow and she fell, instantly, asleep.

  Alice was able, a week or so after the plane crash, to keep her promise to Christopher and give his love to Georgina who, on a 48-hour pass from the Air Transport Service, had ridden over to Lower Post Stone Farm on her brother’s motorbike, primarily, she had convinced herself, in order to see the warden whose friendship she had come to value during the ten months she had worked as a land girl.

  ‘Georgie!’ Alice had exclaimed, straightening her back after emptying a scuttleful of coke into the kitchen range.

  It was early on a Saturday afternoon. Most of the girls were preparing themselves for an evening out or had already left for a trip to the shops in Exeter. Edward John was in one of the barns where a sow was farrowing, while Mabel and Gwennan, on dairy duty, were at the higher farm, driving the cows into their stalls. When the milking was done Gwennan would cycle downhill, back to the lower farm, while Mabel made her way across the yard of Higher Post Stone Farm to Ferdie’s cottage, where she would help him cook their weekly feast.

  Hester, alone in the hostel’s recreation room, was writing her regular letter to Reuben. Dearest Love, it began, This week we’ve been mostly lifting swedes and carting them out to the cattle. Annie’s got a bit of a cold and I daresay I’ll catch it, sharing a room with her and everything. Mrs Brewster the Land Army lady came the other day to make sure things was in order here. She comes once a month. She said I was looking very bonny and that married life must suit me. She was red in the face and a bit giggly like she might have been having a drink or two but she wouldn’t do that would she? Being a posh lady and everything? Let me know as soon as you can when you’ll get your next pass and I’ll book our room at the pub. I do love you so much Reuben and think of you all the time. Your wife Hester. Kiss, kiss.

  She sat for a while, chewing the end of her pencil and occupied by thoughts that were too complex for her to commit to paper. She wondered what it was going to be like when arrangements were made by the US Army to put her on a ship together with dozens of other girls who had married GIs and deliver her to Reuben’s folks in Bismarck, North Dakota. If she had the choice she would have preferred to continue to work as a land girl until the war was over and Reuben could come for her and take her home to America with him, but that was not the way it worked and you had to do as the authorities said. It worried her that she had had no contact with her family since they had rejected Reuben as a son-in-law and dismissed her marriage to him as unseemly. ‘Forgive us our sins,’ the prayer book said but there seemed very little room for forgiveness in the creed of the Pentecostal Brothers, which her father so strictly followed that he was prepared to lose his only daughter because of it. Hester sighed. Then, hearing Alice and Georgina’s voices from the kitchen, added to her letter. PS, she wrote. Georgina has come to see Mrs Todd. She’s left the hostel now but maybe you remember her from last year. She is the very pretty one with straight dark hair cut short. She talks like Mrs Todd does and we all thought she and Mr Bayliss’s son Christopher was in love but he’s a pacifist now and they fell out when she joined up in the RAF and he went off to look after the timber. It seems a shame because she was very good to him when he was sick in the mental home. She thought for a while about Georgina and Christopher. Then she kissed her letter, folded it and slid it into an envelope on which she carefully printed Reuben’s address.

  In the kitchen, Alice and Georgina were sitting over cups of tea.

  ‘So you haven’t seen him since Christmas?’ Alice had asked, as they sipped. Georgina had borrowed not only her brother’s motorbike but the heavy-duty trousers, jacket and even the flying helmet and goggles that he wore in the winter when he rode it. She looked, Alice thought, as though she had flown, rather than ridden from her parents’ house, which lay twenty miles to the east of the Post Stone farms.

  Alice, as requested, had given Georgina Christopher’s love and caught the resulting look of tension that briefly clouded her open face.

  ‘Nope,’ she said lightly, in answer to Alice’s quest
ion. ‘I hardly get any leave and when I do I’m so dog-tired I just go home to my parents and sleep!’

  ‘You could have gone to see him this afternoon,’ Alice said, her eyes on the tea leaves in her empty cup. ‘The woodsman’s cottage is closer to your home than we are.’

  ‘Trying to get rid of me, Mrs Todd?’ The implication behind the question was obvious to Alice but she decided, on this occasion, not to mind her own business.

  ‘He misses you, Georgie. You mean a lot to him.’

  ‘I know.’ Georgina sighed. ‘I know he does. And I know I do and I’m fond of him too, but…’

  ‘“Fond,”’ Alice repeated. ‘Not a word he’d appreciate, Georgie dear. Not a word lovers use!’

  ‘We’re not lovers!’ Georgina said firmly. There was a pause.

  ‘Is it still the pacifism thing?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Not only. After he got better from his…his…’

  ‘Breakdown?’

  ‘Yes. He got too… I don’t know… Too close!’

  ‘Close?’

  ‘I don’t mean physically. Although, in a way, I suppose I do mean that. Too…sort of…dependent. He doesn’t give me enough space. He’s so…there! Waiting for me to… I don’t know how to explain it! He’s too…’