The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate

by Julia Stoneham

  Annie shrugged. Being fully occupied by the here and now of her life, she had not given much thought to what would become of her when the war ended. With Georgina’s encouragement she was working her way through the series of Ministry of Agriculture exams which, if she succeeded in passing them, would qualify her for a career in farming if she wanted one. A brief but intense flirtation with Georgina’s brother Lionel had damaged Annie’s self-esteem when, to his sister’s disapproval, he had ditched her in favour of a girl more suited to his class.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose I will be. I reckon they’ll close down the hostels, won’t they, once the war is over… I could give you my folks’ address, if you like?’ He searched his pockets, produced a small leather address book and fumbled through it until he reached the page marked S. Annie gave him the number of the narrow terrace house in Duckett Street, which, despite having its windows smashed and its front door blown in, had survived the Blitz. Hector returned the book to his breast pocket. Then he hesitantly held out his hand to her. As they shook hands, he rather formally thanked her for the part she had played in the preservation of Andreis’s work. Then she watched the bull-nosed Morris move off down the lane, its driver avoiding the deepest potholes and glancing repeatedly, via his mirror, at the girl at the farmhouse gate.

  ‘I liked him,’ Annie told Alice over a cup of tea, as it was too late for her to go back to work before the midday lunch break. ‘He talks posh but he’s not a bit stuck up. Not like Lionel la-di-dah Webster!’ She smiled at Alice, who knew something – but not everything – about her flirtation with Georgina’s brother. ‘He lives with his folks in Oxford. His dad works at one of the colleges there. He’s something called a don, Hector said. What’s a don, Mrs Todd?’

  ‘It’s a sort of senior lecturer,’ Alice told her vaguely, her mind already occupied by the preparation of the evening meal. ‘Give Rose a hand with the carrots, would you, Annie? There’s a dear.’

  When Marion had failed to do so, her friend Winnie had taken it upon herself to respond to the letter from Sergeant Marvin Kinski, in which he had enclosed a snapshot of himself and requested, in return, one of Marion.

  The photograph that Winnie mailed to him had been taken the previous summer on a hot Sunday afternoon when the land girls had been cooling off in the shallows of the River Ledbourne, an insignificant tributary of the Exe, which meandered through Post Stone valley. Marion, wearing a bathing dress, had posed on a boulder, arranging herself so that her legs appeared as long and slender as possible. The concentration required to maintain her position on the boulder, hold in her stomach, thrust out her chest, widen her eyes and show her teeth had resulted in a smile of acute tension as she faced Georgina’s Box Brownie camera. The overall effect was, nevertheless, fetching enough and Marvin had been enchanted. Unknown to Marion or even to Winnie, he carried the snapshot everywhere, next to his heart in the envelope in which it had arrived.

  A week after he received it, on April 27th 1944, Sergeant Marvin Kinski was among almost a thousand young servicemen, most of whom were American, who were caught up in one of the major training disasters of the war. It was part of the Allies programme in preparation for the Normandy landings but, for a number of reasons, most of which were avoidable, Exercise Tiger ended in tragedy when German E-boats attacked a convoy of under-protected ships, sinking or severely damaging most of them. More than seven hundred men lost their lives.

  Sergeant Kinski, one of the few survivors, was dragged, after six hours and only semi-conscious, from the cold waters of Lyme Bay and removed to an army hospital where, for days, he lay, more dead than alive. The snapshot of Marion, water damaged but still recognisable, was dried out and returned to him along with the pages of an illegible letter from his mother, which had been recovered from the same sodden pocket.

  For obvious security reasons, and with the planned invasion of France only weeks away, a total news blackout was imposed on the entire incident. The few survivors, most severely traumatised, were sworn to secrecy and removed to special camps where they were held under strict surveillance. Kinski found himself at a small military establishment in Wales. Still suffering from the effects of exposure and with all the men in his own section dead, he was ordered to assume responsibility for the training of a group of almost raw conscripts. He would be allowed no leave and his correspondence, should there be any, would be scrutinised and heavily censored. Anxious letters from his mother prompted him to write carefully to her. ‘All well here, Mom. Am with a great bunch of guys and the grub is fine.’

  Although Marvin still carried Marion’s photograph in his breast pocket he did not write to her. The odds on his survival of Exercise Tiger had, as it turned out, been overwhelmingly against him, yet he had come through it. He believed he had, that night in Lyme Bay, used up the luck he was going to need on the French beaches. Watching his men drown, almost drowning himself, had damaged him. He had no one to confide in and no one to tell him that it was all right to feel as he did. It was better if Marion didn’t know how fond he was of her. No point, he decided, as he drilled his new section through the cool days of a Welsh May, in upsetting her. He thought too much of her for that.

  By mid-May good weather had increased the workload of the land girls on the Post Stone farms and, with Hester on light duties and the newcomers – Elsie, Eva and Nancy – working for Roger Bayliss’s neighbours, he was reluctant, when Gwennan asked for leave to visit her sister in hospital, to grant the necessary permission. Gwennan took her request to Mrs Brewster, who advised him to reconsider.

  ‘She makes a good case, Roger,’ the registrar told him. ‘The sister had an operation last year. Cancer, poor woman. She appeared to have recovered but has recently become ill again and is not expected to live. Gwennan is convinced that if she isn’t allowed to go and see her now, she will be too late.’

  Gwennan, in her Land Army uniform, a bulging carpet bag beside her, sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the arrival of Fred, who was to drive her in the farm truck to Ledburton Halt, where she would board the Bristol train.

  ‘It was just a small lump,’ she told the warden, ‘but they took away her whole breast.’ Alice nodded sympathetically and wished that she had not been so sharp on the many occasions when Gwennan had whined and grumbled and tried to make trouble amongst the other girls. ‘They said she’d most prob’ly be all right. But that’s what they said to my Auntie Rhiannon and she died, see. And now Olwen’s got poorly again.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Alice said. And she did sympathise with this difficult girl whom no one liked and who appeared, even when faced with the tragedy she was now confronting, no less gaunt and tense and angry than usual. ‘Perhaps the news will be better by the time you get home.’ Gwennan did not reply and sat quietly, her eyes blank and almost expressionless, until they both heard the rattle of the truck. Then Gwennan got to her feet and lifted up her bag.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Todd,’ she said tightly. ‘I’ll not be away no longer than I have to be.’

  ‘Looks like them artist people ’as come,’ Rose announced when, towards the end of May, a pantechnicon drew up at the farmhouse gate. Alice had been told to expect the men who were to remove Andreis’s painting from the barn loft and transport it to a warehouse in Swindon, where it could be safely stored. She had not been expecting Hector Conway but there was his car, parked behind the pantechnicon, and here was he, standing nervously at the door, saying good morning to her and to Rose, who was hovering behind her in the cross-passage.

  ‘You weren’t expecting me,’ he said. ‘Nor was I. I mean, I wasn’t expecting to come – but as I was in the area and as the removal of the doors – I mean the doors with the painting on them – is, well, might be, a bit tricky, I thought I’d come… Just to… You see?’ Alice said she did see. Hector swallowed heavily and came straight to the point. ‘Is…is Miss Sorokova about at all?’ Alice heard Rose’s suppressed laugh and thought she heard her say, under her breath, that no, Miss Sorok
ova was not about at all.

  ‘She’s working, Mr Conway,’ Alice said, seeing his anxious face fall and experiencing that gentle surge of empathy that tender-hearted women feel when faced with evidence of the onset of young love. ‘She might be at the other farm,’ she indicated the distant huddle of granite buildings that was Higher Post Stone Farm. ‘But they are haymaking this week and the hay fields are on the far side of the hill.’

  Annie saw Hector’s car as he drove cautiously in, through the gate of a meadow where the girls were turning hay that had been cut the day before and was now drying nicely in the warm sun.

  He brought his car to a stop and sat with the Morris’s engine ticking over, his eyes on Annie as she approached him and stood, smiling. He noticed that a few stray stalks of hay were caught in the dark mass of her hair and that her usually pale skin was flushed by exertion in the midday heat.

  Hector was, Annie realised, looking nervously past her at the eight land girls of assorted shapes and sizes, some with their dungarees cut off at the thigh, others wearing shorts and thin shirts, their limbs and faces sunburnt and shining with sweat, who had stopped swinging pitchforks loaded with hay up onto the wagon and were standing, staring at him. Transfixed with shyness, he blushed and gulped.

  ‘Have you come to collect the painting?’ Annie asked him. The question seemed to restore his composure. He smiled and answered her. Then he suggested he might take her for a spin. This experience was something his older brothers were in the habit of offering to their own girlfriends.

  ‘I can’t, Hector. I’m s’posed to be working!’

  ‘Go on, Annie!’ Marion’s sharp voice pierced the heavy air. ‘Jack won’t be back for half an hour! We’ll cover for you! Go on! ’Op it!’

  ‘We’ll tell him it were a call of nature!’ Winnie bellowed. The other girls shrieked with raucous laughter at the double entendre and Mabel was so overcome that she tripped, lost her balance and sprawled onto a pile of hay where she lay, giggling helplessly.

  So Annie got into the little car and Hector, having recovered from his shyness, beeped his horn, let out his clutch, waved to the cheering girls and drove Annie through the gate, out into the lane and along it. He turned onto the main road and they sped towards Ledburton, made a neat circuit of the village pond and headed back again, through open country.

  The bull-nosed Morris coped heroically, if noisily, with the steep inclines. Its canvas roof was folded down and the slipstream lifted Annie’s hair and whipped Hector’s back from his smooth, high forehead, making him look, Annie thought, almost handsome. He would have driven further but, as he explained to her, his petrol allowance from the War Artists’ Scheme had to be precisely accounted for.

  ‘She was taken short!’ The girls had told Jack as Annie, who had asked Hector to drop her in the lane, entered the field on foot. To corroborate their story, she pulled a face at the wily old man and rubbed her abdomen.

  ‘Pain under your pinny, were it?’ he called to her, rolling his eyes and muttering about ‘bloomin’ women! Alus got a pain somewhere, they ’as!’ He turned to the other girls and bawled, ‘Thought you lot’d ’ave got this meadow done by now! I dunno… Turn me back for five minutes…’

  Had Gwennan been there she would have pointed out to Jack that his absence had, in fact, been for thirty minutes, not five, and that, as he’d taken the tractor, it was obvious to all of them that he had made a foray down the valley for a quick pint at the Maltster’s. Then she would have wondered, aloud, what their boss would have made of that. But Gwennan was not there. She was in Wales at her sister’s bedside, reading aloud to her.

  Olwen’s pallid face bore traces of pain. It was as though she was braced for the onset of the next spasm, knowing it would come, taking away her breath and her awareness of everything around her while she endured it, her fingers biting into the mattress of her sickbed.

  ‘Go on, Gwennie,’ she said. ‘Read it to me.’ Gwennan was marking her place on the page with her forefinger. She cleared her throat and began to read.

  ‘“I caught at his arm…”’

  ‘Louder, Gwennie,’ said her sister. Gwennan raised her voice and continued.

  ‘“And tried to speak to him and failed as I had failed when I tried before. He went on, following the footsteps down and down to where the rocks and the sand joined.”’

  Olwen’s eyes were closed and she was breathing evenly.

  ‘“The South Spit was just awash with the flowing tide; the waters heaved over the hidden face of the Shivering Sand.”’ Gwennan paused, her eyes on the face that was being slowly and subtly changed by illness.

  ‘Go on then, Gwennie,’ Olwen murmured. ‘Go on.’

  ‘But you know it,’ Gwennan said quietly. ‘You’ve heard it all before. You know what happens to poor Rosanna Spearman.’

  ‘Yes, I do. But I like to hear it again. I like the bit about the Shivering Sand…’

  Gwennan returned to the farm after five days and when, several weeks later, Olwen died, she refused to travel to Wales for the funeral.

  ‘I don’t believe in the Bible no more,’ she told Alice, her pale face hard with anger. ‘“God in his mercy,” it says, but there’s nothing merciful about letting our Olwen die like that, is there? Nor our Aunt Rhiannon, either! So I don’t want to hear what the preacher has to say, standing there, trying to look sorry and most likely not even properly remembering her name!’

  At Lower Post Stone, Rose’s washing had dried quickly in the warm May breeze, and it had been barely midday when she sent Hester from the farmhouse to fetch it from the line. Hester had carried the heaped basket of aprons, cotton dresses and undergarments that Rose had soaked, pummelled and mangled earlier that morning, back into the Crocker cottage.

  The interior of Rose’s kitchen was a dark contrast to the brilliant sunlight of the yard outside it, so, for a moment, Hester failed to see the figure at the kitchen table.

  Corporal Dave Crocker sat sweating. The walk from the bus stop in Ledburton had overheated him and patches of sweat darkened his khaki shirt. He had pulled off his heavy boots and was enjoying, through his damp socks, the cool of his mother’s slate floor. He laughed at Hester’s surprise at seeing him there and then apologised for scaring her.

  ‘You didn’t scare me, Dave! Why would I be scared of you? It were just that at first I didn’t see you there, sittin’ in the shadow – and we wasn’t expectin’ you, was we! I’ll go tell your mum you’m here, but first I’ll put on the kettle. She’s sure to want to make you a cuppa tea!’

  Both of them were remembering Boxing Day, when the farm had been deep in snow. Reuben had hitched a ride back to his barracks, leaving Hester with his grandmother’s ruby ring on the third finger of her left hand, the warmth of his kisses on her mouth and the promise that the two of them were going to live happily ever after fresh in her mind.

  But by mid-morning Dave had fixed the broken toboggan that was a relic of his childhood and, with Hester securely held between his warm thighs, they had skimmed down the long slope of the hill. As he guided the sledge and protected her from harm when they inevitably overturned, he couldn’t believe how much he loved her or how hopeless his situation was. But with the low, winter sunlight glittering on pristine snow and the perfect blue of the sky arcing over them, Hester Tucker was, for that moment at least, his. They had ended up, she helpless with innocent laughter, pitched into a pile of loose hay near the ricks.

  Hester remembered how prettily the tiny diamonds on Reuben’s ring, which, by that time, had already been on her finger for more than twelve hours, twinkled in the sunlight, and how safe she had felt as she and Dave hurtled down the slope, flying through a fine spray of snow which sparkled in the freezing air and prickled when it struck their cold cheeks. She had been the luckiest and happiest girl in the world that day. And she still was. Of course she was. Despite the letters from her father. Letters that had struck into her like a cold fist, telling her that in the eyes of the Lord she was damned
. She was happy because she had married the boy she loved. And she was happy to be carrying his child. Of course she was happy. Why would she not be? She was conscious of Dave’s eyes on her as she set his mother’s kettle on the hob.

  ‘You’m a married lady now, then, Hes.’ Dave was saying as he watched her unhook the teacups from the dresser and arrange them on the table. His rounded accent exactly matched hers. ‘Mrs Reuben Westerfelt, eh! With a baby on the way an’ all.’

  ‘How d’you know all that?’ Hester asked him, blushing. She glanced at him and then, disconcerted by the way his eyes engaged hers and seemed to make it impossible for her to look away, turned her back on him and searched, although she knew where it was, for the tea caddy.

  ‘From me ma, o’ course!’ Dave told her but did not add the fact that his mother had also told him to forget his earlier attraction to Hester and treat her with the respect her newly acquired status demanded.

  ‘I best go tell ’er you’m ’ere!’ she said. ‘She’ll kill me, else!’ For a moment she was a dark silhouette in the doorway and then, lit by brilliant sunlight, she was crossing the yard and he could hear her calling out to his mother, ‘Mrs Crocker! Where are you? Come quick! Guess ’o’s ’ere!’

  That night Dave slept on the camp bed in his mother’s tiny front parlour. Every so often he heard the familiar twang of the bedsprings directly above him, where Hester was sleeping in the room that had always been his. The camp bed was uncomfortable. His feet protruded beyond the blanket and the thin patchwork quilt slipped off him as he tossed and turned.