‘Have either of them said anything to any of you? Or embarrassed you in any way?’ Another silence. ‘Have either of them,’ Alice hesitated, ‘touched you?’ There was a stir amongst the girls and Annie shook her head.
‘No, Mrs Todd!’ she said. ‘’Course they haven’t touched us!’ At this point several of the girls averted their eyes from Alice’s and stared instead at the floor or at the low beams above their heads.
‘With respect, Mrs Todd,’ Gwennan began firmly. It was a phrase she had once heard used to great effect by a village registrar during a confrontation with a farmer whose provision of food and decent accommodation was consistently falling short of even the Land Army’s low standards. Two of the three land girls assigned to him had complained of his treatment and one of the three was Gwennan Pringle. ‘With respect, Mrs Todd,’ she repeated, impressed by the effect her words had, not only on the warden herself but on her fellow land girls, ‘we have discussed this between ourselves and we want something done about it right away, please.’ Gwennan, slightly fazed by Alice’s look of astonishment, concluded, lamely and slightly uncharacteristically, ‘If you don’t mind.’
Alice Todd’s experience of homosexuality was limited to the basic facts, one of which was that for men, at any rate, it was illegal and punishable by imprisonment. As a young woman she had read a novel called The Well of Loneliness, which had moved her and because of which she was, herself, inclined to be tolerant where the rat-catchers were concerned. But, as warden, it was her duty to run a hostel in which her charges felt secure and at ease with themselves and each other. Clearly, this was not now the case. So, after appealing, to no effect, for tolerance while the rat-catchers completed their remaining few days of work on the Ledburton farms, she agreed to speak, the next day, to both Mr Bayliss and to Mrs Brewster and tell them of the girls’ unanimous demand that Connie and Pat should be removed from the hostel. She insisted that the girls agreed to behave courteously to the rat-catchers during the course of what was clearly going to be a difficult evening, and they, aware of Alice’s disapproval, sulkily agreed to this.
‘I will not tolerate any unpleasantness,’ Alice repeated firmly. ‘Anyone who feels unable to behave themselves this evening had better go to their rooms now and Rose will bring their suppers up to them.’ Gwennan was tempted to accept this offer but curiosity kept her in the kitchen where she intended to observe and enjoy the situation.
Alice was just about to suggest that the girls should get out of their work clothes and set about the ritual of the evening ablutions when they caught the unmistakable sound of the rattling engine of the rat-catchers’ van. The girls hesitated and then, before they could disperse, froze, as Connie and Pat entered the kitchen.
For a moment both girls stood, smiling. Pat murmured something about not being as late back as they had expected. She stopped in mid-sentence. The smiles left their faces as their eyes moved round the crowded kitchen, registering the embarrassment, the blank disapproval and the open hostility.
The meal that evening was very different from the normal, rowdy, relaxed, weekday gatherings of hungry girls, warm and dry for the first time that day and with no further demands on their exhausted energy than to eat everything that Alice and Rose put before them and then slump in one or other of the sagging sofas in the recreation room until it was time to drag themselves upstairs to their beds.
Tonight the conversation round the table had failed to flow. Alice made a few attempts at small talk, mostly in an effort to make things easier for the rat-catchers, who, when they entered the kitchen, had instantly picked up on the tension and almost certainly guessed the reason for it.
Hester, who was unsure what the problem was, understood at least that Connie and Pat had in some way strayed from the path of righteousness. Exactly what form the straying had taken or why even the warden seemed to find it such a serious matter altogether escaped Hester. Unlike the other girls, she knew nothing of the slang terms for homosexuality with which most of them were familiar. A ‘pansy’, to Hester, was nothing more or less than a flower, and a ‘fairy’ simply something found at the bottom of the garden in a children’s storybook that had been read to her in kindergarten. A ‘dyke’ was a ditch and if something or someone was ‘queer’ it meant that it, or they, were in some way peculiar. So she chewed her way through the rather tough rissoles, which were the best Rose had been able to do with the lump of stringy brisket that was all the butcher had on offer that day, and watched the expressions on the familiar faces. And on Pat’s face. And on Connie’s.
Mabel, in her simple way, knew quite a lot about evil. She knew there were things no one talked about. Things that some fathers and some uncles did to their daughters and their nieces. And that sometimes you were expected to close your eyes and your ears and pretend, like everyone else was pretending, that nothing was wrong. Or perhaps it wasn’t wrong. Perhaps all fathers did to their daughters what hers had done to her. And all uncles did what her Uncle George had done. But whatever it was that Connie and Pat had done seemed to have upset everyone at Lower Post Stone. Mabel wondered vaguely why the other girls found the rat-catchers’ behaviour so offensive. It didn’t seem to her that they were doing anybody any harm. Anyhow, it didn’t much matter. In a couple of days they would be gone and it would be Saturday again and she and Ferdie would cook another feast and afterwards make love in his lumpy, odorous bed. She did miss little Arthur, though. She wondered how long she must wait before she would dare to ask Ferdie if she could send for him. She saw the scene in her mind’s eye. ‘Ferdie,’ she’d say, ‘I want to come and live ’ere in your cottage wiv you and I want to fetch Arfur down from London, ’cos ’e’s my baby, see? ’E’s not my little brother, Ferdie. I’m ’is mum! ’E’s my own boy!’ But what would Ferdie say to that? Would he ask her who Arthur’s father was? And if he did, what would she say? If, at that time, she knew that she was pregnant with Ferdie’s child, she was neither ready nor able to confront the situation, either to herself or to him. So, as month followed month, she would ignore the telltale signs of her condition while the thickening of her girth remained unnoticed beneath the familiar rounded shape.
Connie and Pat had finished their puddings. ‘We’re tired,’ they were saying. ‘We’re off to bed. Goodnight.’ Their chairs scraped back across the floor. The girls watched them go and heard their footsteps on the wooden stairs. Then their door closed quietly overhead.
Dear Mrs Todd, the letter began. Rose had found the envelope when, after the other girls had left for work and the rat-catchers had still not appeared in the kitchen for their breakfast, she had gone upstairs to wake them. Both the beds were neatly made in the empty room. A sealed envelope, addressed to Mrs Todd, was propped against the dressing table mirror.
In the kitchen, Rose handed the letter to Alice. ‘They’ve gone,’ she said, adding as she peered out of the kitchen window into the half-light of the early morning. ‘Van’s gone too. Funny, I never heard un go!’
Alice, at some point in the night, had heard something. Some small, unfamiliar sound which had slightly roused her. She had listened, only half awake, to the usual night noises. A rising easterly wind, audible in the tall trees behind the farmhouse, had been moaning round the chimneys and must have masked the sound of the departing van. Unable to identify anything that threatened her slumbering household, the warden had allowed herself to drift back into a deeper sleep.
Alice slit open the envelope, slid out the sheet of paper, unfolded it and, with Rose sitting across the kitchen table from her, read aloud the clumsily composed and largely unpunctuated message.
‘Dear Mrs Todd,’ she read. ‘Although you have always been kind to us things you do not know about have been said to us by some of the girls which have been hard to bear. So although our work round Ledburton is not quite finished yet we are moving out of the hostel. We will sleep in the back of our van for a couple of nights and drop our reports and time sheets in to Mr Bayliss on Friday pm and the last load of
carcasses from the other farms. We are sorry for any trouble Mrs Todd. We try to keep ourselves to ourselves but its the way we are you see not how we would choose to be. We don’t mean to upset things. Thank you for your kindness. Yours faithfully.’
Alice slid the letter across the table to Rose. It was written in pencil and both Connie and Pat had signed it.
‘It’s no good you glaring at me, Alice,’ Rose said, defensively. ‘It weren’t only my opinion. You know that. All the girls felt the same as what I did!’
‘I’m not sure that’s quite true, Rose. You, Gwennan, Marion and Winnie were the ringleaders.’
Rose bristled with indignation. ‘Ringleaders?’ she repeated. ‘Some of us is more outspoken than others, I grant you, but they all agreed. All of ’em, Alice! None of ’em liked what was going on and you can’t deny it.’
Without asking each girl for her individual opinion Alice had no proof that what Rose claimed was true, so she wisely let the debate cool. She picked up the letter and silently re-read it.
‘I think the girls should see this,’ she said. ‘I shall pin it on the noticeboard in the recreation room. I think they must be made aware of what they’ve done.’
‘Maybe even proud of it,’ Rose countered defiantly, under her breath.
‘The fact is, Rose, that the rat-catchers were prevented from carrying out their work – important work – by prejudice and intolerance and our girls must take the responsibility for that.’
‘But you won’t go telling Mr Bayliss or Mrs Brewster, though?’ Rose was beginning to comprehend the wider implications of what had happened.
‘Of course I shall! Connie and Pat were in my care while they were here and they should have been here until the end of the week. Now the pair of them are sleeping in their van! I am responsible for what has happened here. I should have been more observant but I chose to ignore a state of affairs which, I can see now, was more serious than I realised.’
In Roger’s cold office, Alice watched him read the rat-catchers’ letter. The one or two of the Post Stone girls who were working at the higher farm that morning, although unaware of the letter or its contents, guessed the reason for Alice’s visit to their boss.
‘I’ll have to track them down,’ Roger said. ‘Can’t have them sleeping rough in this weather; it’s dangerous.’ He consulted a worksheet. ‘They’re due to finish clearing Tom Lucas’s place today. I’ll send Jack. He can take over from them and as it’s clearly pointless trying to re-establish them at the hostel we’ll get them on their way by midday. That OK with you?’ He glanced at Alice, anxious not to appear to be overriding her authority. She agreed that his plan was sound and apologised for what she considered a failure on her part to manage the situation better.
‘It’s a tricky call, Alice,’ he said. ‘Not one you or I or anyone has to make everyday and, with respect to the Post Stone girls, mob rule soon gets ugly. I wonder whether the rat-catchers have encountered this sort of prejudice before.’
‘It’s possibly to do with the size of our hostel,’ Alice said. ‘Any larger and the rat-catchers’ relationship might well have gone unnoticed. Any smaller and my guess is it would not have been challenged. Our girls just sort of…ganged up on them. It’s dangerous, that kind of bullying.’
With the centre of contention removed from the hostel, the atmosphere round the kitchen table that night was heavy with reflection, speculation, justification and, in some cases, with touches of remorse.
Annie Sorokova in particular, felt, in retrospect, that she and her peers had been unduly harsh. ‘It was like our first night here,’ she said at supper, ‘when Georgina told us she was a pacifist and we all let her know what we thought of them!’
‘And still do!’ Winnie stated emphatically. Marion, her mouth full, nodded in agreement.
‘Anyroad,’ Winnie added, ‘Georgie stopped being a conchie soon enough!’
‘Saw the error of her ways, she did!’ Marion had swallowed her food and was laughing. ‘And look at her now! In the RAF, bless her!’
‘No, she’s not!’ Annie corrected. ‘She’s in the Air Transport Auxiliary. Not involved in combat. Just delivering planes…’
‘To airmen who are involved in combat! Stop splitting hairs, Annie Sorokova, there’s a good lass!’
Annie had the grace to laugh but her point had been made.
‘Where’s the rat-catchers to tonight, Mrs Todd?’ Hester wanted to know.
‘Off to their homes for a day or two of leave,’ Alice told her. ‘Mr Bayliss let them go early as they had finished their work in this area.’ The girls all knew that Jack had completed the rat-catchers’ tasks at Tom Lucas’s farm. They’d seen him arrive back at Higher Post Stone with a sack of dead rats. He had dug a deep hole in the soft ground behind the sow-house, wheelbarrowed the corpses that had accumulated in the yard round to it, tipped them in, sprinkled on the quicklime, shovelled back the earth and packed it down with the flat of his spade.
‘It was almost like Jack dumped Connie and Pat in that pit with the dead rats, Mrs Todd!’ Annie said reflectively, after one of several long silences round the kitchen table that night. ‘Buried them under a sprinkle of quicklime and a load of dirt!’ When Gwennan sniggered, Annie added heavily that she wondered if the rat-catchers knew how easy it had been to solve the problem of what you do with people like them. It was an unpleasant image and one which Alice soon had to replace with other concerns.
‘Mrs Todd…?’ Hester began, in the tone of voice Alice recognised at once as a precursor to a request for advice. She led Hester through the recreation room and into the privacy of her sitting room.
‘I think I might be pregnant, Mrs Todd. I’ve missed my monthly and I’ve never done that before!’
Where pregnancy was concerned, Land Army protocol was rigid and unequivocal. The girl, whether or not she was married, was required to leave the service immediately. Because of this, some girls, more often than not the unmarried ones, concealed their condition until, for one reason or another, it was discovered. This situation often resulted in health problems such as miscarriage and premature, or even concealed, births.
Hester and Reuben, more concerned with their decision to marry, despite her family’s opposition to the union, than with the possibility of an immediate result of it, had taken no precautions. Consequently she, together with other batches of pregnant GI brides, was destined to be shipped across the Atlantic and delivered to her in-laws, where she would await the birth of her child and, it was hoped, a reunion with her husband when the fighting was over.
‘Are you sure, Hester?’ had been Alice’s first question.
‘Well, I doesn’t get sick in the mornings nor nothin’ but I was due to come on las’ week and I never.’ ‘Coming on’ was a euphemism Hester had picked up from the other girls who used it when they referred to menstruation.
Hester’s reaction to her possible condition was a complex mixture of delight at the prospect of bearing Reuben’s child and a confused awareness of the complications of her situation. Her bland, open face first blushed with pleasure and then clouded with concern as she sat on the edge of one of Alice’s chairs, nervously seeking the warden’s advice. What, she wondered, would it be like to leave her native land behind her for ever? Would Reuben’s family welcome her? Or would they resent the intrusion of a total stranger?
‘They’ll love you, Hes!’ Reuben repeatedly assured her during the brief hours they were able to spend together. ‘Mom’s already put your photo on the dresser and my kid brother, Charley, thinks you look real cute!’
‘So you’re only ten days late,’ Alice had confirmed when Hester first broke the news to her. ‘It could be just the excitement of the wedding and everything, you know. I’d give it a few more weeks, if I were you, Hester. If you miss your next period we’ll get the doctor to have a look at you.’ But Alice, observing Hester closely from then on, saw, or thought she saw, certain other subtle changes in her and was unsurprised, early in May and
with no sign of any bleeding, when the doctor who examined Hester confirmed that she was, as the girls put it, ‘two months gone’.
At first everyone’s reaction was positive, though Gwennan, predictably, voiced her fears about the effect on the baby should Hester become seasick on the voyage to America or, assuming she arrived there safely – what with the German U-boats – that she would most likely become lost in that vast, dangerous country and never be heard of again. Gwennan had, she assured them all, read about such things in the newspapers. The other girls howled her down and hugged Hester until she became quite overcome and needed to sit down quietly with a cup of strong tea.
Reuben was allowed a 48-hour pass on the strength of the news, and he and the girl who was to bear his child went off to the pub in Ledburton for the night.
To Alice the situation was problematic. With the pregnancy confirmed, Hester would be required to leave the Land Army without delay. Clearly her departure for the States was not imminent and her estrangement from her parents meant that, in effect, she had no home to go to while she waited for embarkation.
It was Rose Crocker who offered a practical solution. With her son, Dave, in the army, Rose had a spare bedroom in her cottage across the yard. Hester’s allowance as a US army wife would more than cover the cost of her board and lodging.
‘But what will I do all day?’ Hester asked when, a week later and with the arrangement approved by both Margery Brewster on Hester’s behalf and Reuben’s adjutant on his, she packed her bags and followed Rose across the yard.
‘We’ll find enough to keep you busy!’ Rose assured her. ‘Girls who’s in the family way shouldn’t sit about. ’Taint good for ’em.’
So Hester spent those early weeks of her official pregnancy helping with the chores at Lower Post Stone. Sometimes she even went to the higher farm and collected the eggs or scattered corn to the hens. Reuben visited her whenever he could and while she slowly moved up the queue for a place on a ship to Hoboken, New York, Rose took the precaution of writing a carefully worded letter to Dave.
The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate Page 7
