Dear Son, she wrote. She had asked the warden for a sheet of paper and an envelope, carried them back to her cottage and sharpened her pencil. She began by bringing Dave up to date with events. As you know, Hester Tucker married her Reuben in Jan. Well, it seems she fell pregnant straight off. Her folks do not want her no more on account of their religion and she has nowhere to go until she gets shipped off to America. So she has come to board with me. The money is useful and I have put her in your room. When you get leave you will have to sleep downstairs on the camp bed. I know what you felt for Hester, son. I saw the way you looked at her when you first set eyes on her. She is a nice girl and would of made a good daughter-in-law and I wish sometimes that things had worked out different but they did not and it was Reuben got her not you. You must remember this if you come home while she is here Dave and treat her as a married lady and not as the girl you fancy. I hope you got the cake I sent. From your loving mother.
Chapter Four
Hester, seeing the postman cycling down the lane, went to the farmhouse gate to fetch the letters and carried them into the kitchen.
‘Nothing from Reuben,’ she said, searching through the few envelopes. ‘There be one for Taff.’
‘Miss Gwennan Pringle, to you!’ Rose teased.
‘And one for Miss HM Sorokova,’ Hester read carefully. ‘We never think of her as Hannah Maria any more though, do we, ’cos of calling her Annie all the time! It’s official-looking, Annie’s one. Like it’s from the government or something.’ She propped the envelopes on the dresser where the girls would see them when they returned from work.
Gwennan collected her letter and took it upstairs. She recognised the handwriting. Her sister Olwen was sick. Gwennan would read the letter where, in the privacy of her single room, she could deal with the bad news she feared it contained, while Annie sat at the kitchen table to open hers, drawing the folded sheet from the envelope.
Annie’s letter was typed and signed with a flourish that suggested its author was someone used to dealing with a large correspondence. Alice, who was beating eggs for a batter, ready for toad-in-the-hole, saw Annie’s eyes widen.
‘It’s from the War Artists’ people!’ she said excitedly. ‘And it’s about Andreis’s painting!’
Months had passed since the inhabitants of the Post Stone farms had been shocked by the suicide of the Dutch refugee, who, with Roger Bayliss’s support, had lived in a loft above one of the barns at the lower farm. He had been a lonely figure and was only occasionally encountered by the land girls. Having escaped from his native Amsterdam while it was being systematically overrun by the Nazis, Andreis had subsequently become tormented by guilt, accusing himself of cowardice for having abandoned his Jewish friends and those members of his own family who had waited too long to escape or had perhaps simply been unable to believe what was about to happen to them, before attempting to flee from the increasing oppression of the Jewish community to which they belonged.
In an attempt to quieten his conscience, Andreis did the only thing he could do as a protest against events in his homeland. He used his skill as an artist to depict, on the huge pair of double doors that divided one half of the loft above the main barn from the other, his reaction to what he had seen and what he now believed was happening to those he had left behind.
No one had guessed, at the start of the war, what the level of barbarity, meted out by the Gestapo, would be, but as the early years passed, rumours had turned into hard evidence and as his horror and his own sense of guilt deepened, Andreis, in his cold and lonely loft, painted the nightmare of the invasion of his city and the appalling treatment of its inhabitants. He painted the families cowering in their homes, secretly supported by friends who risked their own lives to conceal them. He painted their discovery by SS officers who manhandled them out into the streets and onto trains that carried them God knew where. Horrific evidence was seeping out and the darkest suspicions were slowly becoming accepted as either the hideous truth or something perilously close to it.
It was these facts and those fears that drove Andreis. Day and night he developed his ideas, made sketches and then transferred the images onto the doors, which he had smoothed and primed so that they glowed, luminous and challenging in the lofty space. He added colour. Khakis and browns, grey-greens and black. For the faces of the men he used his own face, reflected in the small looking glass Roger Bayliss had had fixed above the china bowl and jug Andreis used for his ablutions.
For the faces of the women and the girls, Andreis used Annie Sorokova as his model, whose classic Jewish beauty he had first noticed as she crossed the yard one Saturday afternoon. He had approached her, asking her if she could spare a few hours to pose for him. He showed her the early stages of his painting and watched her react to the uncompromising images of pain and terror as the fleeing people were pursued and driven towards the railway tracks, for this much, by then, was recognised as indisputable fact.
‘You’ll have to ask Mrs Todd,’ Annie had told him.
‘Pose for you?’ Alice had enquired, doubtfully, when Andreis had approached her.
‘She will of course be always clothed,’ he had said, in his precise English. ‘She has the classic look of the Jewess, you see. The long neck, the large and beautiful eyes. And the colouring,’ he added. ‘The darkness of hair and brows and the pallor of skin. All typical. And the bearing too, you understand? The way the head is held?’ He had paused, aware of Alice’s concern, as warden of the hostel, for the welfare of her charges. She had crossed the yard to the barn, climbed the ladder and stood at one end of the gloomy space, gazing up at the vague shapes and outlines of the proposed composition, at its spare lines, drawn in charcoal and barely suggesting the solidity of the groups of driven figures that would soon materialise on it. At the other end of the loft was a chair. ‘She will be quite safe here, Madam Todd,’ Andreis had said. ‘I shall be over here, where the painting is, and Hannah Maria will be there, where you are, by the stove.’ He stood, waiting for her response, the light falling on his gaunt face and unkempt hair and reminding Alice suddenly of another Dutch painter. Another lonely and tormented man.
‘If she wants to,’ Alice had said eventually, ‘I have no objection. But don’t keep her too long, Andreis, and don’t let her get cold.’
‘My many thank yous, madam!’ he had said, and smiled. Alice realised then that she had never before seen any expression on his face other than a familiar brooding tension. He took her hand and kissed it.
‘And you agreed to it?’ Margery Brewster had asked, when Alice told her of the arrangement.
‘We trust him, don’t we?’ Alice had replied. ‘Mr Bayliss has sponsored him as a refugee, so presumably he trusts him too. It’s only across the yard, Margery, and Annie is a sensible girl.’
Margery Brewster had shrugged and pulled a face that suggested to Alice that, although she would not go so far as to approve of the arrangement, she did not feel strongly enough opposed to it to voice an objection.
So it was that, through the early spring and most of the summer of 1943, Annie Sorokova, whom Andreis always called Hannah Maria, spent many of her Saturday afternoons and sometimes, as the days lengthened, an hour or so on weekday evenings, standing or sitting, stock still, while Andreis made sketches of her. Sometimes he would drape her in a blanket and ask her to stand, bowed and bent, representing an old woman. Sometimes he rolled the blanket into a shape that resembled an infant, which Annie then cradled in her arms. Her hair could be loose around her small, vulnerable face, or piled on her head, or hidden severely under a scarf. But the face was always recognisably Annie’s face, just as the men in the painting always resembled Andreis himself.
‘It is the point, you see?’ he would tell her. ‘Of what I am painting. They are, you understand, the same person. The same woman and the same man, suffering the same outrage whether they are a grandfather or a son or the woman is a young girl, a mutta, or a even a grand-mutta. They are a race, you see? Not indivi
duals.’
When his work was completed, Andreis had astonished everyone by announcing his intention to return to Holland, join the resistance and fight for his country. Roger Bayliss counselled him against this.
‘You are not a fighting man, Andreis. You don’t have the temperament or the—’
‘Or the courage? That is what you mean, of course. That I am a coward!’ Roger tried to interrupt him but Andreis would not be silenced. ‘I should not have come here when my country was overrun! I should have stayed and maybe died with my friends! I took the coward’s way but that decision has made of me a man I cannot live with! Do not wish any more to be! You have been most kind, Mr Bayliss, sir, to give me shelter here and allow me time to make my painting and I am grateful to you for it. But now that it is complete I can no longer stay. We learn each day more and more of what is happening to Jews in my country and so, whatever may happen to me there, I must go home.’
But Andreis did not go home. When he had first arrived at Lower Post Stone Farm, Roger Bayliss had lent him a shotgun to kill rabbits for the stews he simmered on his stove in the loft. On the morning of the day he was to leave he shot himself, clumsily, in the thigh and lay, undiscovered, while he bled to death in the orchard behind the barns.
Of the land girls, Annie, who had known him best, was the most distressed by what had happened and that evening she led the girls across the yard and up into the loft, where she showed them Andreis’s painting. They took flashlights with them and lit the oil lamps that Andreis had used when he worked at night. They stood, all ten girls, together with Alice and Rose Crocker, and stared at the amazing work.
Annie had resolved that night to, in some way, preserve the painting. Georgina, who had not yet left the Land Army, had a godfather who was a museum curator and whose work was connected with the War Artists’ Scheme. He had subsequently visited the farm, examined Andreis’s painting, and agreed it was impressive. He had passed his opinion on to his contacts. Now, eight months later, someone was being sent to examine the work, assess its importance and decide on the best way to both preserve and exhibit it.
Throughout the autumn and the cold, dank winter, Annie had checked the painting, persuaded Roger Bayliss to repair a leak in the roof where the wind was driving rain into the loft and, on the coldest, dampest days, she lit the stove in the sad, empty space.
She had not only known Andreis better than the other girls and acted as a model for the characters depicted in his painting, but it had been she, together with Georgina, who had persisted with the idea of preserving it, not only because of its importance as a work of art but as a tribute to Andreis himself. Aware of her involvement, Roger Bayliss gave Annie a day off from her work on the farm so that she could meet with the representative from the War Artists’ Scheme and introduce him to the painting.
Hector Conway arrived at midday in a mud-spattered bull-nosed Morris. He had lost his way in the lanes and squinting through the thick lenses of his spectacles at Alice, Rose and Annie, he apologised profusely for failing to arrive at the appointed time. His short-sightedness, which explained his lateness, also accounted for his exemption from conscription into the armed services.
Hector was tall and lean. His movements were slightly uncoordinated and the way he peered about him suggested that, for him, the world was slightly out of focus, which, in fact, it was. His hair was unkempt. He wore corduroy trousers and his tweed jacket had well-worn leather patches on its elbows. Only his manner, as he made his apologies and introduced himself to the three women who faced him, his firm handshake and his well modulated voice defined him as educated and middle class. One of his shoelaces had become untied and when Rose, who had answered his knock on the farmhouse door, pointed this out to him, he stooped to re-tie it. As he did so some papers from his half-open file slipped through his hands.
‘I’ll get them,’ Annie said, leaning down to retrieve the loose sheets of notepaper that were scattered across the kitchen floor. As he bent over his shoelaces their heads almost collided and they laughed, looking into each other’s eyes and both of them seeing something there which they were to remember. It was, Annie recalled much later, almost as though they had recognised each other, despite the fact that until that moment, they had never met.
Rose provided a cheese sandwich, which Hector devoured with a relish that pleased her.
‘It’s nice to feel appreciated,’ she said later, after Annie had taken Hector across the yard and up into the loft where she watched him make his initial assessment of the painting.
It was a bright day and a clear, bluish light poured in through the glazed section of the roof.
‘It’s huge,’ Hector breathed, intently scanning the sprawling composition. Then he produced a powerful flashlight and, standing close to the painting, moved its beam slowly across it, hesitating from time to time in order to pay closer attention to a particular detail.
Annie watched him, trying to read his reaction. His expression gave no clue. Perhaps the painting was not a good one. Maybe she saw its power because she had known Andreis and understood his passion for its subject.
‘His drawings are over there,’ she said, indicating the trestle table on which the dozens of charcoal sketches he had made, many of them of Annie herself, were piled haphazardly.
Hector moved over to the table and began leafing through them.
‘These are of you, of course,’ he murmured. ‘Hannah Maria Sorokova.’ He read the pencilled notes which identified Annie as the sitter and gave the date of each sketch. ‘I wondered what the H and the M stood for.’ He turned to Annie and smiled. ‘The initials were on the first report which was signed HM Sorokova and G Webster. Who is G Webster?’
‘Georgina,’ Annie told him. ‘Known as Georgie. And I’m known as Annie. It was Georgie and me who decided, when Andreis…’ she hesitated, ‘when he…died…to try to get his painting preserved. Sort of…in his memory. Because it was so sad.’
‘His suicide. Yes. I heard about that. Tragic.’ Hector was still sorting through the sketches. ‘Some of these are good… Very good.’ Annie was becoming concerned that he seemed more interested in the sketches than in the painting itself.
‘It wasn’t just the suicide that was tragic,’ she said emphatically. ‘It was everything about him. This painting was very important to him! And now it’s important to me. And to Georgie. And all the girls here. And Mrs Todd and Mr Bayliss. Everyone who has seen it!’
‘Important, yes,’ he said vaguely, ‘but technically it is not of a very high standard, you know.’ He caught her reaction of acute disappointment and perceived at once what a blow his statement was to her. ‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ he added quickly, ‘it is, as you say, important. And significant and powerful. The fact that Andreis van der Loos was, I would guess, self-taught, doesn’t detract from that significance, nor from its right to be preserved and exhibited.’ He had turned back to face the painting and stood, his eyes narrowed, exploring it, Annie watching him. ‘My feeling is that it may be in his native land where it will be most highly valued as a record of what happened there during the Nazi occupation. It may take some time for decisions to be made about its future but in the meantime it must be carefully stored.’ Hector’s voice was low. He spoke, Annie noticed, as he thought. Slowly and considerately. ‘I shall recommend that it’s taken from here, where, clearly, there is a risk of it becoming damaged.’ He moved slowly backwards, stepping away from the painting, his eyes still on it.
‘But how can you take it?’ Annie asked quietly, matching her tone to his, the practicalities of his proposal slowly occurring to her.
‘We’ll have to remove the doors,’ he said, as though pulling barns to pieces was all part of his day’s work. ‘We’ll replace them, of course,’ he added. ‘For your Mr Bayliss.’ He was preoccupied and professional. Annie had never before encountered anyone quite like him.
She watched him carefully gather up the loose, smudged charcoal sketches.
‘The
first thing our arts department will do is spray these with a fixative or there’ll soon be nothing left of them… What’s this?’ The monochrome sketch was of Annie’s head and shoulders. Her hair, on this occasion, was much as the other girls wore theirs, piled high on the crown of her head and then falling in heavy curls down to her shoulders. Her summer frock had short sleeves and the sharp definition of her mouth suggested the deep red lipstick she had been wearing. Andreis had written Hannah Maria, July 1943 in the corner of the drawing and initialled it, as he had most of the other sketches. Annie examined it and smiled.
‘I remember that day! It was a Saturday and I’d been to Exeter with Georgie. Andreis said I looked pretty and he would draw me in my frock instead of the dreary old dungarees we girls always wear for work!’
‘Did he flirt with you?’ Hector asked vaguely. ‘Were you his girl?’
‘No,’ Annie said, and then paused, adding thoughtfully, ‘No, I wasn’t. Andreis never flirted. He wasn’t like other blokes, you see. Maybe, before the war, he had been. But, here, we only saw one side of him. It seemed like he’d left that part of himself behind in Holland.’
‘I think you should keep this one,’ Hector said, holding the drawing out to her. ‘To remember him by. This sketch is irrelevant to the project, anyway. It was between you and him.’ Annie took the sketch and thanked him.
Later, when he had stowed the loose sketches in a portfolio which he carefully placed on the back seat of his car, he hesitated awkwardly beside it, as though he was reluctant to leave.
‘I shan’t be involved in the removal of the painting,’ he said, ‘so I may not see you again. But perhaps… when the authorities have decided what to do with it…’ he paused, his eyes on Annie’s. ‘My guess is that the Dutch government will want to display it in the Hague or possibly Amsterdam. We shan’t know for certain until after the war… But when we do… may I write to you and let you know?’ She nodded and said yes. ‘But will you still be here?’ he asked, peering through his thick lenses at the shabby face of the farmhouse.
The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate Page 8
