The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate

by Julia Stoneham

  ‘We did miss you, Mrs Todd. All of us.’ She raised her voice, calling after Alice. ‘And I still reckon you’ll get married again one day, so there!’

  Roger Bayliss, driving the familiar mile up the hill to Higher Post Stone Farm, considered the various subjects that he and his warden had touched on that night. Was he ashamed of his son? Not ashamed, surely. But obviously this was the impression he had given, not only to the Webster girl but to Alice herself. And she thought badly of him because of it. They both did. He nosed his car in under the covered space, where, in the old days, the horse-drawn carriage had been kept, switched off the engine and sat for a while in the silent darkness.

  So the Webster girl – Georgie, they all called her – had had feelings for Christopher, had she? Had perhaps been a little in love with him. But no longer was. He wondered, vaguely, what had changed her mind. He refused to examine the subject of his presumed embarrassment when Christopher had cracked up because he dared not let his mind explore it. Instead, and as usual, he had shut that issue, together with another that also had to be excluded from his mind, into a familiar, dark place, closed the door on it and locked it. He did this almost without being aware of it and turned his mind to the other subjects of that evening’s conversation.

  The incident of the flying bomb was the first to capture his attention. Then the injury to Alice’s hand and her concern for her son, should she die. The boy’s ambitions to farm interested him. Then they had spoken of Alice’s increasing interest in a career. As his mind moved from one set of facts to another, his tension gradually left him. These things he could relate to, speculate upon. But not the subject of Christopher’s breakdown or of his own, apparently unacceptable, reaction to it. The clues to this lay, where they had lain for more than half of his life, buried in the past. Classified information which, at the time, his parents had banned from discussion or exploration. And more or less without question, he had obeyed them. It was, they said, for his own good. The unease he felt when, on the rare occasions he had allowed his mind to stray in that direction, only confirmed the logic of their decision and he would retreat, excluding the intrusive, unsettling thoughts.

  ‘Tell them that no news is good news,’ had been Roger’s advice when the warden spoke to him of the anxieties of Rose and Hester.

  Rose was uncertain whether or not Dave was in France. Being in the Catering Corps meant, she knew, that he would not be as much at risk as those men fighting on the front line, nevertheless she shuddered whenever she heard on the BBC news bulletins, or read in the paper, reports of hand-to-hand fighting on the outskirts of Caen.

  Ever since the Post Stone girls had celebrated the news of the invasion, Hester had existed in a world of her own.

  ‘Come on, Hes!’ the other girls had implored, trying to cheer her. ‘It won’t be long now and your Reuben will come marching home! Our boys ’as got Jerry prop’ly on the run!’

  The casualty figures were almost ignored in the general mood of euphoria that pervaded the hostel but Alice and Roger were well aware of the huge loss of life the invasion had already caused, especially during the landings on the fiercely defended beaches of Normandy.

  ‘Omaha was the worst,’ he told Alice. They were sitting, one evening, in deckchairs on the terrace at the higher farm. The night was warm as they watched the daylight fade. Swallows and house martins were making their final sweeps across the face of the old building, feeding their young before leaving the garden to the bats. ‘And, unfortunately, that is where Hester’s Reuben would have been put ashore. It goes without saying that neither the American nor the British military authorities will give out information regarding the welfare or whereabouts of an entire unit, let alone an individual man, involved in this sort of offensive. Your women will have to be patient, along with all the other mothers, sweethearts and wives.’

  ‘So you see,’ Alice said, passing Roger’s comment on to Rose and Hester, who were sitting, the next morning, mute, at the kitchen table, ‘as I said to you before, and Mr Bayliss agrees with me, no news is good news. Now, let’s get on with the vegetables for tonight, shall we?’

  ‘She says ’e’s in the sea!’ Rose whispered to Alice when Hester was out of earshot.

  ‘In the sea?’ Alice was confused. ‘Why would he be in the sea?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Rose shrugged, ‘but she do keep on about it. She started just after D-Day and I told ’er not to be so daft, but every so often she sits there, starin’ into space, and she says, “He’s in the sea, Rose. I jus’ knows it. Reuben be in the sea.” I don’t know what to make of her, Alice.’

  It was the day after the Allied troops took Caen that the telegram was delivered to Lower Post Stone Farm and shortly after it the chaplain, who in January had married Private Reuben Westerfelt to Hester Tucker, arrived. They took her into Alice’s sitting room and sat her in a chair.

  ‘Missing?’ Hester repeated, when they told her. ‘What d’you mean, missing?’ It was explained to her that Reuben had not been accounted for since his unit had left the landing craft and waded ashore on the beach codenamed Omaha. Few of the men in his section had reached the dry sand above the tideline, and even fewer, the dunes behind it. They had lain, dead and dying, waiting to be transported first to a field hospital and then, if they survived that, back across the channel, where the wounds of the lucky ones could be treated and healed. But Reuben had not been amongst them. Nor had his dog-tag been recovered from any of the mangled corpses that were scattered across the sand. So he was posted as ‘missing, believed killed in action on 6th June 1944’.

  ‘Missing?’ Hester asked again, when no one answered her. ‘So they don’t think ’e’s dead, then. It’s just that they can’t find ’im?’ They watched her helplessly. There was nothing they could say to her. She walked to the door where she hesitated and then turned to face them, ‘Tell ’em to look in the sea,’ she said. ‘Reuben be in the sea. I knows that. I’ve known it since that first day. That’s where they’ll find ’im. In the sea.’ She went through the door and Rose got to her feet and followed, walking just behind Hester as she crossed the yard and went into the cottage.

  ‘Jeez! What’s up with you, George? Look like you’ve lost a dollar and found a dime!’

  Georgina’s name, shortened by the land girls to Georgie, had been contracted further by her colleagues in the Air Transport Auxiliary, who, despite her obvious femininity, or perhaps because of it, referred to her as George.

  Georgina had, on the previous evening, delivered a Beaufighter to Little Rissington and hitched a ride back to White Waltham in an Anson piloted by Lucinda Frobisher, her closest friend amongst the women ferry pilots. Lu, as she was known, was catching up on some much-needed sleep while, in the makeshift canteen, Georgina sat over a cooling cup of coffee and waited for news of the Mustang she was to deliver to Duxford as soon as the repair workshop had finished with it.

  Neil Fitzsimmonds, known as Fitzy, was a Canadian and an experienced ferry pilot. He and Georgina had encountered one another frequently and with increasing pleasure over the five months she had been flying. Evenings spent in pubs, in shared overnight digs and at occasional social events, such as dances and group visits to local cinemas, had thrown them together and for some time they had been aware of an attraction between them, which both of them sensed was mutual. Seeing him standing there beside her, with a plate overloaded with fried sausages and baked beans in one hand and in the other, a second plate, piled with buttered toast, made her smile.

  ‘You hungry, Fitzy?’

  ‘I’ll have you know that not a bite has passed my lips since midday yesterday! I am ravenous! May I join you?’ She nodded and as he settled himself across the table from her he asked again why she was looking so down.

  ‘It’s this wretched Leigh-Mallory person!’ she said. ‘Apparently he’s the one who won’t allow women ATA pilots to volunteer for overseas ops.’

  ‘Meaning into France.’ Neil Fitzsimmonds was eating fast and with r
elish.

  ‘Of course,’ Georgina said curtly. ‘And it’s too absurd! Lots of the ATA’s women fliers have more experience and better qualifications than some of the blokes who’ll be going.’

  ‘This is true,’ Neil said with his mouth full. ‘But the guy has command of the Second Tactical Air Force as well as the Ninth USAF, so it’s a case of “Yes, sir, Air Chief-Marshall, Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, sir!” Jeez, by the time we’ve got to the end of that mouthful, the war’ll be over!’ Georgina was not amused. ‘Oh come on, George! Smile for Fitzy, there’s a girl!’

  ‘You’ve volunteered, I suppose?’

  ‘You bet! Done my dingy drill. Had my inoculations. Sorry. Not gloating. Give ’em a few more months, George. They’ll come around. There’ll be more and more call for flights into France, then into Belgium and the Netherlands as the Allies push across. I reckon you girls’ll be over there in a few weeks’ time. Be patient. Want some of my toast?’

  They sat for a while, eating in a companionable silence.

  ‘If it wasn’t for this war I’d make the most colossal pass at you, Miss Webster!’ he said heavily.

  Georgina studied his face, uncertain of his mood. She had been at the receiving end of many passes since she quit the Land Army. Some had been charming, others less so.

  ‘What has the war got to do with it?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know… It’s given people an excuse to trivialise things,’ he said, and she understood precisely what he meant. ‘Which is OK, if all that’s wanted is a bit of fun, and God knows that’s justified, the way things are…’ She watched him follow the lift of a Dakota that was at that moment taking off from the ’strip. ‘People flying away and not coming back…’ He said and paused again, watching her face and trying to read her. ‘I’d like to get to know you, Georgina. Slowly and in great detail. How does that strike you?’ She was smiling as she helped herself to a second slice of his toast.

  ‘As being impossible,’ she said. ‘We run into each other, what, once a week? Twice a fortnight? Always with a bunch of fliers. Never alone. We don’t know where we’ll be or when. We can’t plan anything. I see no hope for us!’ She was laughing as she reached for her coffee cup and drank. He smiled ruefully, offering her a cigarette, lighting hers while he held his own between his lips. Then, his eyes still on her, he exhaled smoke in a long, thoughtful sigh.

  ‘What about leave?’ he asked her. ‘Got any due?’

  She had completed less than six months’ service with the ATA and, apart from a 48-hour pass in May, had neither been offered nor requested anything more than a brief visit to her home. ‘You should be due for seventy-two hours by now.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I must be.’

  ‘I’ve got a mate who’d lend me his car.’ He deliberately made his invitation into a light-hearted suggestion so that it would be easier for her to refuse it if the idea didn’t please her. ‘I could wangle some gasoline and you could give me a tour of your England. So far I’ve only seen it from the air!’

  Neil Fitzsimmonds had arrived in England six months before the outbreak of war. Following his graduation as an engineer and as part of his grooming to prepare him to take on an executive position in his family’s aero-engineering company in Vancouver, he was to spend a year or so gaining experience in their London office. Despite family opposition, he became determined, as the war progressed, to play his part in it and was frustrated to discover that his civilian flying qualifications, gained in his native Canada, where he had worked for some time as an instructor, did not, without extensive military training, qualify him for a commission in the RAF or its Canadian equivalent. He was, however, eligible to join the ATA without further training and this he did. The organisation seized on his skills both as a flier and as an instructor and he was, to use his own words, ‘having a bloody good war’.

  ‘We wouldn’t be able to cover much ground in seventy-two hours!’ Georgina had said, keeping her tone as light-hearted as his. She looked at him quizzically and saw his expression become suddenly less confident and more serious.

  ‘I reckon we could cover a lot of ground, George. You and I. One way or another. But I guess you’re not the sort of girl who—’

  ‘Who what?’ she challenged ‘Who would want to spend some time alone with you? Or who, if she really liked you and perhaps even fell a bit in love with you, would…’

  ‘Stop it!’ he said laughing. ‘You hold it right there, lady!’ He leant back in his chair, smiling and drawing heavily on his cigarette, his eyes squinting against exhaled smoke. ‘Let’s think about it though, shall we?’ She was looking past him now, at the mechanic who was making his way through the tables and chairs of the empty canteen.

  ‘The Mustang’s ready for you, miss. Take off in five, OK?’ She got to her feet, shrugged on her flying jacket, shouldered her knapsack and held out a hand to Neil. He took it and kissed it, looking up at her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘let’s.’ He watched her go. In the bulky leather jacket with which she had only recently been issued, she looked at ease and even elegant. Her long legs were clad in tight trousers and the regulation sheepskin boots, which, when women had begun flying for the ATA, had initially been denied them. Minutes later, he saw the Mustang lift off, climb and then bank round, heading north. He visualised her at the controls, checking her route, settling into the concentration that she would maintain until she touched down two hundred miles away. ‘Let’s think about it,’ he had suggested. And she had said, ‘Yes, let’s.’

  ‘It’s called a coup de foudre,’ Alice said, when Georgina had described her first encounter with Neil Fitzsimmonds. It was a phrase that none of the other land girls would have understood.

  Georgina had sprained her wrist when the under-cart of a Mosquito had collapsed under her and, being considered unfit to fly for a few days, had been sent home to recover.

  ‘If you can ride you should be able to fly!’ Lionel had protested when she persuaded him to lend her his motorbike.

  ‘I could fly, little brother. It’s a fuss about nothing! But while I’m home I want to ride over to Post Stone to visit Mrs Todd. So, keys please and stop being so horrid!’

  Her bandaged wrist had hurt her when she used the throttle, taking the bike, cross-country, from her parents’ acreage to the Post Stone farms, through warm air that was thick with the scent of drying hay. The high banks of the lanes were spiked with the clashing colours of early summer flowers. Campion, bluebell, milkwort, buttercup and foxglove studded brilliant green foliage, which shimmered like silk and almost met over her head as the bike hurtled through it.

  Alice, sensing that Georgina wanted to confide in her, had led her through to the privacy of her sitting room.

  Since Christmas, when Georgina had announced to her parents that she was, to some extent at any rate, renouncing pacifism and intended to fly for the ATA, her relationship with her family, while not difficult, was not as easy as it had been when they had been united by their common opposition to war. In consequence, she found herself more inclined to confide in Alice than in her mother on the complex subject of her feelings for Neil Fitzsimmonds.

  ‘You mean like eyes across a crowded room?’ Georgina said, confirming her understanding of the phrase. Alice nodded.

  ‘It means like a thunderclap.’

  ‘I know what it means,’ Georgina said, ‘and it was like that. Just like that. Quite ridiculous! And very odd. I felt as if I already knew him. And as though everything was decided. About us liking each other, I mean. It was a most peculiar feeling.’ She sat for a moment, examining her feelings. ‘Did you have a coup de foudre, Mrs Todd, when you first met your husband?’

  Alice recalled the evening when, at a students’ ball in Cambridge, she had been introduced to James Todd and he had, very formally, escorted her in to dinner on his arm. She remembered experiencing a sensation, which had not entirely pleased her, of being somehow taken over by the good-looking, well-mannered young man James
had then been.

  ‘It’s so long ago, Georgie, and such a lot has happened since. I don’t know. Maybe I did. A bit.’

  Georgina laughed and Alice asked her what she found amusing.

  ‘I don’t think you can have “a bit” of a coup de foudre, Mrs Todd. It’s an “all or nothing” thing, isn’t it?’ She hesitated and her face clouded. ‘I don’t think I had one with Christopher. In fact, I disliked him at first. He was so much the pushy fighter pilot. It was only later, when he went through that awful time and cracked up and everything, that I felt… I don’t really know what I felt. I do sort of love him though…’

  ‘But not the way you love this Neil person?’ Georgina caught, or thought she caught, a touch of disapproval in Alice’s voice and evaded the warden’s question by asking one of her own.

  ‘Did I say I loved him?’

  ‘No,’ Alice replied, ‘you didn’t. But all this coup de foudre business?’

  ‘I think what it is…’ Georgina said, trying to make sense of her feelings, ‘is that the war distorts things so. Fitzy said the same thing—’

  ‘Fitzy?’

  ‘It’s what we call Neil. Almost everybody in the ATA has a nickname. We were talking about how impossible it seems to get to know each other properly because,’ she hesitated, ‘because of all the pressures.’

  ‘What pressures?’

  ‘It has to do with not knowing what’s going to happen to people. How long you’ve got with them. It scares you into grabbing what you can get of them in case…well…in case something happens and you…you miss them. I think I’d rather hate to miss Fitzy, Mrs Todd.’

  Alice had let the ensuing silence extend itself, knowing Georgina well enough to understand that if she wanted to continue she would do so when she was ready and without prompting.

  ‘We – Fitzy and I – don’t want to plunge into anything,’ she continued, ‘but we want to spend some time together. Really together, before either of us gets posted somewhere where we won’t see each other any more.’ She paused, gazing into her empty cup. ‘I’m almost twenty, Mrs Todd. I think I’m old enough to take a lover, aren’t I?’ She searched the warden’s face and when she thought she saw a flicker of suppressed amusement, added, ‘You’re laughing at me!’