The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate

by Julia Stoneham

  ‘Of course. But more mechanism means less jobs. Milking machines instead of dairy workers, automatic feeders making stockmen redundant and so on. Arable crops won’t be sown or harvested by hand any more. The corn will be cut, baled and threshed by one man operating a massive piece of machinery, instead of reaped by a dozen workers, stooked by their wives and kids and threshed in a byre. These monsters are on the drawing boards as we speak but, believe me, it won’t be long before they’re in our fields.’

  Christopher nodded and, to please his father, managed a rueful smile. He had stepped back from the truck and prepared to raise a hand in a farewell salute when his father, the ignition key between his fingers, spoke again.

  ‘Don’t suppose you’d consider coming home, would you?’ Christopher was surprised by this and stood for some seconds without answering. ‘Only it seems a bit odd for you to be on your own up here, putting up with…well…this…’ His father indicted the near derelict building, shrouded by brooding trees, ‘while I’m rattling around in a comfortable farmhouse only five miles down the valley. I understood, when you were…unwell…that you wanted…what was it? Privacy? In which to recover? But now?’ There was a pause. ‘You’re looking incredibly fit, I’m pleased to say.’ There was another, longer pause before he continued. ‘Anyway…just wanted you to know that if and when you feel like coming home you’ll be welcome. Right?’ Christopher nodded and said thank you.

  ‘The thing is, Pa, I really like it up here, you know. I’ve got everything I need and I’m not lonely. Too busy for that!’ He noticed a change in his father’s expression. He looked suddenly tired, even irritated. He switched on the ignition and the truck’s engine turned over, shattering the peace of the woodland.

  ‘It makes a lot of extra work for Eileen, you see.’ Roger had raised his voice, pitching it over the clamour of the engine. ‘Having to think about keeping you supplied with food up here and so on. Bear that in mind, will you?’ Then he was reversing the truck away from his son, turning it and moving off, carefully negotiating the steep track.

  Christopher finished his cigarette, collected the whiskey tumblers, went into the cottage and lit two of his oil lamps. He poured himself a second whiskey and sat in the comfortable silence that seemed suddenly less comfortable.

  He was approaching the first anniversary of his crack-up. It was almost ten months since he had retreated from a world he could no longer tolerate and allowed the solitude of the woodland to heal him. Now he was fit and strong. His mind was clear and the nightmares that had plagued his sleep over the first months of his withdrawal to the cottage no longer troubled him. When he had been sick and even while he was recovering, he had not been conscious of the future. Now he was beginning to sense it, stretching away before him and needing to be furnished with projects and ambitions. He would go and see Alec Neale, a man who, as his housemaster at public school, had been a father figure to him when, after his mother’s death, his own father, dealing in his own way with his own grief, had been little help to the son who was, alone, trying to cope with his.

  Neale, now a widower, lived in Exeter with his sister and was surprised to hear, after many years of silence, from a student who had been, although he was too professional for his interest to have been detectable during Christopher’s education, a favourite of his.

  Neale was, without giving any sign of it, surprised by Christopher’s appearance, for although Christopher had done the best he could, his clothes, boots and shaggy hair suggested the life he was living, which appeared to be rather different to the life most of Neale’s other ex-students were leading, who, if not officers serving in the armed forces, were mostly professional men, wearing suits and ties and polished shoes.

  Over tea and biscuits, Christopher gave Neale a brief history of his flying record, his breakdown and his recuperation as a woodsman in his father’s forest. He went on to describe the ambition that had, over recent weeks, caught his imagination, and he asked for advice from his housemaster on how to pursue it. Alec Neale made some notes, suggested that since it was impossible for him to make contact by telephone or even, without difficulty, by post, Christopher should call on him again in a month’s time. By then, he told him, he would have put together some options for him to consider.

  Days and then weeks had passed since the Normandy landings and no news of either Reuben Westerfelt or Dave Crocker had reached the Post Stone farms. Rose and Hester were thrown together not only by this situation but by the fact that Hester was spending her time helping Rose with the domestic work at Lower Post Stone Farm and lodging in her cottage. They supported one another more or less silently, waiting for news, hoping, and in Hester’s case praying, that when it came it would be good.

  ‘“Let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God,” the man on the wireless said,’ Hester told Rose one evening when the two of them were sitting in Rose’s kitchen, waiting for bedtime. She remembered the words of the radio bulletin on the day everyone now called D-Day, and each morning and night she knelt beside her bed and beseeched that blessing. The child she was carrying had begun to move. Small, fluttering sensations that surprised her.

  ‘’Tis quickening, Hester. That’s what that feelin’ be. ’Tis the baby quickening, my dear.’

  On June 12th Mabel stumbled into the kitchen, her usually ruddy face, pale. She had heard in a BBC news bulletin about a new weapon the Germans were deploying. An unmanned plane, carrying explosives, which had crashed in London, causing widespread damage.

  ‘I know, Mabel, I heard about it too,’ Alice said. The V1, which was to become known colloquially as the buzz bomb or doodlebug, was a small, pilotless flying bomb, fired randomly into southern Britain from enemy launching sites in northern France. When it reached its target area its engine was designed to cut out and it would plunge down, exploding on impact and causing indiscriminate devastation.

  ‘You can ’ear ’em comin’, my gran says,’ Mabel told Alice, her lower lip trembling, when some days later she received a letter from home. ‘They gets nearer and nearer and then they stop and it goes dead quiet, Gran says, but there’s no time to take cover! They’re worse than the Blitz, Mrs Todd! At least when the bombers came over we had the siren and Gran could take little Arfur to the shelter!’

  Mabel told Ferdie of her fears for Arthur’s survival in the face of this new threat.

  ‘Reckon he’ll be OK,’ Ferdie said with his mouth full of the rabbit pie Mabel had cooked that Saturday night. ‘If you can ’ear ’em comin’ like you say, then your gran can pop Arfur under that special table she’s got, can’t she?’ Mabel had told Ferdie about the Morrison shelter, which, since the Blitz, had dominated the Deptford kitchen.

  ‘I’ve a good mind to go up to London and fetch ’im down ’ere, Ferdie! Where ’e’d be safe!’ she announced, challenging him.

  ‘Best not do that, my lover,’ Ferdie answered evenly, ‘’cos who would take care of ’im ’ere, eh? The boss be short-’anded enough as ’tis without ’avin’ you gallivanting around after your baby brother!’

  Mabel knew he was right. Too young for school and too old to be confined to a pram, Arthur was at precisely the age when a young child is most at risk on a farm. But she refused a second helping of spotted dick and instead of spending the evening in Ferdie’s bed, returned to the hostel on the borrowed bike and stomped tearfully up the stairs to her room.

  ‘What’s up, Mabe?’ Annie enquired. ‘Fallen out with your bloke, ’ave you?’

  ‘All I want is my baby safe here with me,’ Mabel gulped. She had long since given up any attempt at denial, to the Post Stone girls at any rate, of her true relationship with the little boy. ‘And that Ferdie Vallance! ’E won’t hear of it!’

  ‘But does he know?’ Annie asked. ‘About Arfur being yours? ’Ave you told ’im? No! You ’avn’t, ’ave you? ’Ow’s ’e s’posed to know, Mabel?’

  ‘Everyone else seems to!’ Mabel mumbled.

  ‘You gotta tell ’im, love! Why don’t you? W
hat you got to lose, eh?’

  ‘I can’t, Annie!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cos ’e’s goin’ to ask, isn’t ’e!’

  ‘Ask what?’

  ‘Who Arfur’s dad is, of course!’

  ‘And you don’t want to tell ’im?’

  ‘I can’t, Annie! I can’t ever tell ’im that! And don’t you go askin’ me why, ’cos I can’t tell you, neither! I can’t never tell no one. Not ever!’

  ‘You won’t even know I’m gone,’ Alice assured Edward John when, a few days after the V1 attacks began, she told him she was due in London that week for the hearing of her divorce case. ‘I shall travel up on Tuesday, go to court on Wednesday and come back here on Thursday. When you arrive from school for the weekend on Friday, I’ll be here as usual. Couldn’t be simpler!’

  ‘But who will feed the girls?’ he asked, and she laughed at the way he had adopted her priorities.

  ‘Rose will,’ she told him. ‘Hester will help her and Mrs Brewster is going to call in on the Wednesday to make sure everything’s in order. So you needn’t worry about the girls, Edward John.’

  ‘Will my father be there?’ he asked, after a pause. ‘In court, I mean.’ He had taken, Alice noticed, to referring to James as his ‘father’, rather than the more familiar ‘daddy’ he had always used before.

  ‘No, he won’t be.’

  ‘Why? It’s his fault you’re getting divorced.’

  ‘Well… Yes, it is. But you see, he isn’t defending the case. So I have to be there and he doesn’t.’

  ‘It ought to be the other way around,’ Edward John said sulkily. ‘It’s not fair!’ The same thought had occurred to Alice.

  ‘I know. But it’s the law, darling.’ There was another pause.

  ‘But what about these V1 things?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, you mean the buzz bombs!’ Alice answered dismissively, attempting to turn the new threat into an inconsequential joke. ‘The doodlebugs! I shall be staying in Highgate with your Aunt Ruth. Well out of harm’s way.’

  Ruth was, in fact, not Edward John’s aunt but his godmother. She and Alice had met at high school and remained friends, despite the very different paths their lives had taken, she being an academic, currently working at the British Museum, while Alice had become a wife and mother.

  Highgate was not ‘out of harm’s way’, but Ruth’s flat had, so far, escaped damage and from its elevated position she had watched the bombing of the city of London, standing in her darkened room with the curtains open, a glass of wine in her hand. I stand and curse, she had written to Alice at the height of the Blitz, at these bloody Germans! Sometimes I can actually see the bombs falling, silhouetted against the fires blazing around St Paul’s. How that building is surviving is amazing. It almost makes one believe in miracles. Long may it continue – the miracle, of course, not the bombing!

  One of Alice’s early achievements at Lower Post Stone Farm had been the redesigning of the kitchen. It had been immediately apparent to her that the preparation and serving of breakfast, packed lunches and a satisfying evening meal for ten ravenous land girls was virtually impossible in the cramped space, initially devoid of working surfaces, cupboards or shelving for pots, pans, sieves, colanders, graters, crockery or cutlery. She had eased some pages of graph paper from one of Edward John’s school exercise books, considered carefully where, in order for herself and Rose to work efficiently, everything needed to be, and then drawn up her plans. She discovered, in a disused dairy, a dozen slabs of marble together with the heavy timber framing that had once supported them, and devised a new layout, incorporating her ideas.

  Roger Bayliss had, at first, been reluctant to spend any more money on Lower Post Stone Farm, but as Alice defined her scheme he soon understood not only how impossible the old kitchen had been but how cleverly Alice planned to use the space and how practical was her application of the materials she proposed to utilise. Within two weeks the streamlined kitchen was in operation. With everything now in its logical place, the preparation and cooking of the food, its speedy transference to the girls’ plates, the stacking of dirty dishes near the scullery door and of the clean ones where the pudding was being dished up, transformed the ritual of mealtimes. There was suddenly more space around the long pine table and Alice and Rose no longer got in each other’s way as they worked and as a result were visibly less harassed and exhausted.

  ‘I would never of believed it could make such a difference!’ Rose exclaimed, finishing the washing-up half an hour earlier than usual for the third time in a week. ‘Everything’s sorted and put away and supper was bang on time again! I reckon you’m a clever woman, Alice Todd! That’s what you are!’

  Roger Bayliss had brought a neighbour to admire Alice’s achievement and he requested Alice’s advice on the layout of his own staff kitchen. As her reputation grew she was requested by the adjutant of a nearby Fleet Air Arm establishment to design the catering area of a new canteen and this was followed a few months later by a commission to suggest a plan for the kitchens of a local nursing home.

  ‘Next thing you’ll be too busy for the likes of us!’ Rose had once exclaimed, and it was at this point that it occurred to Alice that she might possess a skill that could possibly provide her with interesting and even lucrative employment when the war was over. She had confided these aspirations in letters to Ruth, whose attention had immediately been caught by the prospect of Alice finding a rewarding direction for her life as a single mother.

  ‘Here’s to having you here after all this time!’ Ruth said, saluting Alice. The rims of their wineglasses chimed delicately as the two well-acquainted women smiled and sipped. ‘So… Tell me how your kitchen design project is developing.’ Ruth intended to keep the evening’s conversation as positive as possible and to avoid the painful subject of the reason for Alice’s visit to London.

  She had settled herself in one of the pair of armchairs she had recently purchased from Liberty’s and listened attentively while Alice gave a brief and characteristically modest account of the various commissions she had recently undertaken, redesigning the catering facilities of several more hostels, a private hotel and two military establishments in the Ledburton area.

  ‘I always told you there was more to life than domesticity,’ Ruth teased, lighting her cigarette and exhaling the smoke carefully into the air above Alice’s head. ‘But seriously, Allie, a year is quite long enough to be up to your waist in mud. Come to London! Move in with me! There’s bags of room here! I’ve been working on a list of contacts for you… Hoteliers, restaurateurs, people who run clinics and venues for large corporation events, that sort of thing. The list is endless once you start thinking about it. And they’ve all got kitchens, Allie! And most of them are dismal, time-consuming, unhygienic holes! Very like the one on your farm used to be!’

  ‘I doubt that!’ Alice laughed, and then became serious. ‘It has been an amazing year, Ruth,’ she said reflectively. ‘It may have scared me and exhausted me but it got me through a really bad time.’

  ‘It’s changed you, you know. You’ve gained confidence.’ Ruth smiled and drew on her cigarette. ‘I reckon that, when roused, you could be quite formidable, Alice Todd!’

  ‘I shall take that as a compliment!’ Alice smiled, letting Ruth refill her glass. ‘Life has been – and is – surprisingly good at Lower Post Stone. And your godson absolutely adores it there.’

  ‘Ah!’ Ruth said, identifying the problem. ‘I hope you’re not proposing to put his needs first and sacrifice an opportunity to make a career for yourself on his account?’ A glance at Alice’s face confirmed her fears. ‘You can’t be serious, darling! Kids are resilient! And Edward John won’t thank you for it, you know. In a few years’ time he’ll fly the coop without a backward glance!’

  ‘He’s had a very disruptive time, Ruth. He loves the farm and he’s settled at his school. I don’t want to—’

  ‘Great God, woman,’ Ruth interrupted good-naturedly, ‘you
must think of your future now! I absolutely insist on it! In the long run, it’ll be bad for both of you if you don’t. You’ll resent the fact that you gave up an opportunity – should one present itself – and he’ll feel guilty that he let you. We all have to adjust to the mess this war is making of our lives and your little boy is no exception.’

  The war, Alice noticed, did not appear to have had a detrimental effect on Ruth’s life or on her flourishing career, which had, in fact, benefited from the fact that some of her male rivals had been removed from the promotion ladder and diverted into the armed services.

  ‘Of course he’ll adjust when the time comes,’ Alice said. ‘But, for the moment…’

  Ruth glanced at her wristwatch. ‘For the moment,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette and getting to her feet ‘You should be using this precious time in London to meet people! Come on!’

  ‘What? Where to?’ Alice was reluctant. She had been looking forward to spending a quiet evening with her old friend.

  ‘Charlie Maitland,’ Ruth said. ‘He lives down the road, which couldn’t be handier and he’s just about the most useful man in London! You’ll adore him. More importantly, he’ll adore you!’

  Alice was not certain whether the meeting with Charles Maitland was to be a job interview or a social occasion but by the end of it she had made a good impression on him and he had suggested bearing her in mind when a suitable project, involving a catering complex, came his way.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he told her. ‘I’ll ease you in gently and take into account your areas of expertise as well as the things you’ve less experience of. Throwing you in at the deep end wouldn’t be beneficial to anyone but you’ve obviously developed a very basic and practical approach, Alice, while a lot of the designers I’m expected to work with exist in cloud cuckoo land when it comes to the logical flow of work through a kitchen and are incapable of visualising one from the point of view of those who will be actually working in it. That’s where your skill lies and that’s precisely what I’m after! It’s a specialist area and a uniquely important one!’ He asked Alice to assemble a portfolio of her design projects together with photographs of the completed work. ‘A few references from the people who’ve hired you would be useful, too. We’ll keep in close touch and hope to meet again before long.’ Then he had smiled, got to his feet and extended his hand. The interview, for that was what it obviously was, had ended.