The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate

by Julia Stoneham

  Alice was amused by Rose’s announcement. Hester, frail and listless, would not be much help with the cooking during Rose’s absence from the farmhouse kitchen. But Rose was not asking for permission to go, she was simply telling Alice what was going to happen and Alice was not inclined to stand between an anxious mother and her ewe lamb, even if the lamb was a strapping young man whose wound, according to Roger Bayliss’s information, was not considered serious.

  ‘Absolutely fine, Rose,’ she said. ‘You go and get yourself ready. Hester and I will manage.’

  ‘I shall make pasties,’ Rose declared, ‘and Mr Bayliss says I’m to pick as many strawberries as I want from his vegetable patch and to fill a canteen with cream ’cos there’s nothing my Dave likes better than a bowl of strawberries an’ cream!’ Then her face crumpled suddenly and tears spilt down her weathered cheeks. ‘’E could of bin killed, Alice! ’E could ever so easily of bin killed!’

  Dave Crocker was sitting comfortably in his hospital bed when his mother found him. There were nineteen stitches in his thigh. Rose had been right when she had believed he could easily have died. The shard of shrapnel, when the surgeon had removed it, had been dangerously close to the femoral artery.

  She fed him the pasties she’d brought for him and then produced a platter of scones, baked that morning by her cousin. Roger Bayliss’s strawberries had suffered during the long train journey so Rose had boiled them into jam. The scones, piled with the jam and crowned with Devonshire cream, were passed round the ward.

  ‘Those boys just loved ’em!’ Rose told Alice proudly when, after three days, she returned to the farm. ‘Wolfed ’em down, they did! Said as they’d never tasted nothing so good in all their lives and when the war’s over they’re all comin’ down to Demshur for some more! And Dave’s doing that well he’ll be walkin’ in a day or so and then he’ll be sent home to convalesce or some such word. Anyway, he’ll be at home for a bit… So I shan’t have room for young Hester no more on account of my Dave’ll be needin’ ’is bedroom, see. Maybe she could move back into the farmhouse? The little room Georgina used to sleep in be empty, bain’t it?’

  Rose was well aware that the tiny room above the porch, into which Georgina had once retreated rather than share a bedroom with Marion and Winnie, had been unoccupied since she had left the hostel six months previously. Rose also knew that the accommodation at Lower Post Stone Farm was designated specifically for the use of Women’s Land Army personnel.

  Alice would, she said, discuss with Mr Bayliss and Margery Brewster what could be done.

  Officially, because she was no longer in the Land Army, Hester was not entitled to be housed at the hostel but, in the circumstances and as it was unlikely to be long before her turn came to be shipped to America, she was permitted to move herself and her few possessions from Rose’s cottage into what had been Georgina’s room.

  ‘It shouldn’t be allowed,’ Gwennan carped, predictably. ‘This place is getting more like a nursing home than a Land Army hostel! Pregnant women and wounded soldiers – whatever next?’

  ‘Preg-nant wo-men! Preg-nant wo-men!’ Annie chanted, accurately imitating Gwennan’s strong, Welsh accent. The other girls joined in the teasing.

  ‘Is she preg-nant, Taff? Indeed-to-goodness! Is she preg-nant!’

  Three days later and leaning heavily on a crutch, Dave Crocker arrived home. His mother had told him, during her hospital visit, of Reuben’s death and about Hester’s strange conviction, which had subsequently proved to be true, that he had been killed on D-Day and would be found in the sea. It was not until her son was safely home that she described to him the visit Hester’s father had paid to the farm and the evil things he had said to his grieving daughter.

  Dave sat for some time, absorbing these facts.

  ‘She’s got no one, then,’ he said at last.

  ‘She’s got ’er ’usband’s family!’ Rose countered sharply, seeing where this was leading and not liking it.

  ‘But they’m strangers to ’er, Mum. They don’t know nothin’ about ’er, nor she them.’

  ‘But they want ’er, Dave. And they want their grandchild.’

  ‘But what do she want, eh? ’As anyone asked ’er what she wants? She can’t go home to her folks so she’s to be packed off to strangers! They might well want the child, Mum, but would they want Hester? She’s got no choice. Not that she knows of, anyhow. But she has got a choice, see. And I’m gonna tell her what it is. I’m gonna ask ’er, Mum!’

  ‘And what is it then, this “choice”?’ Rose asked him, knowing the answer.

  Dave had always been popular with girls. At school they’d given him their sweets and later cheered him, eyeing his broad shoulders and short powerful legs, as he lumbered up and down the football pitch, playing for the village team. He’d even walked out with a couple of them before his call-up papers had arrived. But he had never looked at any of them the way his mother had seen him look at Hester Tucker when he had first set his eyes on her. All the other land girls were there that day and some were more fetching than Hester, but she had been the one who caught and held Dave’s attention. He had sought her out at the snowbound Christmas party and danced exclusively with her, unaware that it was Reuben she was waiting for. Now, married, widowed, pregnant and without the protection of her family, the girl he wanted was about to be sent to strangers.

  Rose knew her son. Since he had been at home, recovering from his injury, she’d seen the single-minded devotion in his face when he spoke of Hester or caught a glimpse of her across the yard.

  Dave had considered the implications of raising another man’s child but Reuben had seemed to be a decent lad. A young soldier who had died fighting in a war he could easily have avoided and who had picked Hester, loved her and married her. Dave’s code of ethics was a simple one which, had he been asked to, he would have found difficult to put into words. What he felt was almost an affinity with Reuben. Hester had loved him. But Reuben was no longer there to be loved, or to love her or to help her raise the child whose life he had begun.

  ‘You know what it is, Mum,’ he said, looking at his mother’s closed face and trying to engage the hard eyes that were avoiding his. ‘You know what I’m gonna ask ’er.’

  There was a cider-apple orchard across the lane from the farmhouse. Hester was sitting on the trunk of an ancient tree that had come down in a gale a few years previously. She had been gazing into space but when she saw a movement and recognised the figure making its way between the trees as Dave, her eyes followed his progress towards her.

  He had discarded his crutch but walked carefully, favouring his injured leg. He stopped, twelve feet from her and waited for her to speak.

  ‘’Ow be your leg, then, Dave?’ she asked him quietly, continuing before he could answer. ‘’Tis because of me you was wounded, see.’

  ‘Because of you? How was it because of you?’

  ‘Because everything bad as happens around me be my fault. And the closer folk are to me the worse it be for them.’ He approached her, dropped onto his knees, sat back on his heels and winced as the skin on his scarred leg tightened. He reached for her hands but she pulled away. ‘No, Dave. Don’t touch me!’

  ‘You got some infectious disease, then, ’ave you, Hester?’ He spoke lightly, attempting to tease her.

  ‘In a manner of speakin’, yes, I ’ave.’

  ‘’Course you ’aven’t!’ He searched her face, half smiling, still hoping to see her expression soften and lose its tension, but it did not. He sighed and, after a moment, continued. ‘This ’as got some’at to do with that rubbish your dad were on about when he come to see you, right?’

  ‘’T weren’t rubbish, Dave!’ She spoke slowly, spacing her words. ‘First ’t was Reuben, see. Then you. Next ’t will be the baby! I knows it!’ He couldn’t reach her and her manner was scaring him now.

  He tried to talk to her. To convince her that the things her father had said to her were nothing more than lies designed to f
righten her and that she must see them for what they were and put them out of her mind. But she closed her eyes and shook her head. Then he told her that he loved her and wanted to marry her and help her bring up Reuben’s child. But she got to her feet and started back towards the farmhouse. When he followed her she turned abruptly to face him.

  ‘No! No, Dave. Don’t follow me. You mustn’t follow me!’ He stood watching her as she made her way through the orchard, crossed the narrow lane, walked up the path and merged into the heavy shadow of the porch.

  ‘He’s got a lot to answer for, that Jonas Tucker!’ Rose said, later that night, watching Dave toy with the helping of suet pudding, which she had contrived to have left over from the land girls’ supper and had carried carefully across the yard for her son.

  ‘But how can she believe him?’ he asked, still incredulous at Hester’s outburst.

  ‘She were born and raised to it, Dave. Don’t forget that, boy. Seventeen years she’d had of it by the time she come ’ere. You didn’t see ’er in those early days. She barely spoke. ’Er face was scrubbed and ’er hair was dragged back into a bun. Black stockings she wore and no make-up! Months it took, for ’er to learn to trust us ’ere. But it seems ’er father still had a hold on ’er and losing Reuben like that and then you almost dyin’…’

  ‘Did you tell her that? That I almost died? I was on’y wounded, Mum! A bit of shrapnel in me leg was all! You helped to put the fear of God into her, you did!’ He pushed away the untouched plate, left the kitchen and limped upstairs to his bedroom.

  Rose sat for a while, staring at the uneaten pudding. She hadn’t meant to add to Hester’s misery. But if it had led her to reveal to Dave the extent of the damage done to her, then perhaps, Rose thought, overcoming a slight sensation of guilt, it was for the best.

  Next morning, when Hester failed to come down to the hostel kitchen at breakfast time, Mabel was sent up to the tiny room above the porch to wake her. Then, after a moment they heard Mabel’s bare feet thudding down the stairs and she burst, breathlessly, into the kitchen.

  ‘She’s not in her room, Mrs Todd! The bed’s made up, neat as ninepence, but ’er bags ’as gone!’

  Margery Brewster applied to her superiors for a special allowance of petrol in order to drive the fifty-odd miles to the isolated North Devon smallholding tenanted by Hester’s father.

  ‘Someone must find out where she is,’ she declared, emphatically, to Roger Bayliss. ‘I realise that, strictly speaking, she is no longer our responsibility but I personally feel morally obliged to make sure she arrived home safely. We don’t even know she intended to go home! She could be anywhere!’

  Margery returned to Lower Post Stone Farm mid-afternoon and, over a cup of tea, described to Alice the bleak clutter of outbuildings, disused farming equipment, pig-pens, rotting hen-coops and rusting sheds that stood around the neglected cottage that housed the Tucker family.

  ‘She was picking raspberries on a patch of land on the far side of the property,’ Margery said, ‘so I made my way over to her and asked her how she was. She was polite enough and told me she was quite well, thank you. She enquired after my health and yours. I told her you were concerned because no one knew where she’d gone. She said she was sorry you’d been worried but that she’d thought it best to come home. I asked her when she expected to leave for America but she just shook her head and went on picking the raspberries. She kept glancing, nervously, I thought, at the cottage. Then a woman, presumably her mother, came out of the door and called her in. She said she had to go and ran – yes, Alice, ran – back to the house and in through the door, which was immediately closed behind her. Someone lowered the blinds in the downstairs windows and there I was, standing in the yard with two emaciated cats rubbing round my ankles and half a dozen scrawny hens scratching in the dirt. I felt…I know it’s silly of me, but I felt quite…threatened! I didn’t waste much time getting into my car and driving away from the place, I can tell you! It was…well it was horrible, Alice!’

  ‘Poor Hester!’ Alice sighed.

  ‘Yes. Poor Hester. I wonder if she will go to America.’

  ‘Could her parents stop her, d’you think?’

  ‘I don’t suppose they could physically stop her, but…’

  ‘They could influence her. Which is more than any of us can do now… Oh dear… Perhaps that was part of the trouble. That we did influence her. The girls taught her how to make the best of herself and how to dance. They probably changed the way she thought about things.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting they led her astray?’

  ‘Not exactly. But their standards are very different from her’s and totally opposed to those imposed on her by her parents.’

  ‘Which were the right ones, you think?’

  ‘No, I don’t think that. But the glimpse of freedom she had when she was with us doesn’t seem to have made her very happy, does it?’

  ‘Nonsense, Alice! She was the happiest girl in the world these last twelve months! Remember the way she blossomed in the spring. And then she met Reuben and married him and, whatever else happens, she’ll soon have his child to care for… She’ll survive – people do. There isn’t a drop more tea in that pot, is there?’

  During the previous summer, when Eleanor Fullerton, then aged fifteen, had absconded from her boarding school, adopted the name Nora Fuller and arrived at the hostel during supper one evening wearing a ‘borrowed’ Land Army uniform, she had succeeded in convincing Alice that she was an authorised addition to the work force.

  After several days her cover had been blown and she was removed by her embarrassed and angry headmistress and driven away, protesting vigorously and promising to return to the farm as soon as she was allowed to. Now, almost a year older but still too young to be accepted into the Land Army, she had persuaded her parents, as a reward for high marks in her exams, to let her spend her six-week school holiday working on the Post Stone farms.

  ‘You must be potty, Nora or Eleanor or whatever you call yourself!’ Marion exclaimed when she arrived, delighted to be back and eager to be absorbed into the chaotic life at the hostel, which seemed to appeal to her so much more than the sterile routine of her boarding school. ‘Fancy choosing to live in this dump and work like a slave for next to nothin’ when you don’t have to!’

  Eleanor’s holiday assignment, which she had promised to send home, regularly, by post, was to be a five-page essay describing each week of her life on the farm. The small room over the porch that had once been Georgina’s and, more recently, Hester’s, now became hers.

  Edward John was delighted to have Eleanor back again. The two of them had, during Eleanor’s previous stay, become close friends, playing in the evenings with his Meccano set or challenging each other to games of Monopoly. But a year proved to have been a longer time for Eleanor than it had been for Edward John, who remained, in her eyes, a little boy while she had metamorphosed from schoolgirl into young woman.

  ‘Don’t you like Monopoly any more?’ he asked her plaintively when, for the third time, she declined his invitation to play.

  ‘Not much,’ she said, heading for the recreation room where a Glenn Miller record was being played at full volume on the wind-up gramophone. ‘You used to,’ Edward John reminded her, shouting over the music.

  ‘But that was last year! I was only fifteen then,’ she said in the tone of voice that he recognised at once as the one grown-ups use when addressing small children.

  ‘Can’t you play Monopoly when you’re sixteen?’

  ‘Of course you can, silly!’ Eleanor said loftily. ‘But you don’t want to!’

  Eleanor had matured considerably in the twelve months since her brief stay at Lower Post Stone Farm. Now she was rounded where, before, she had been straight, soft where she had been hard. Her jawline was firmer, her cheekbones more defined and her movements had become fluid and feminine.

  ‘She’m a corker, that one!’ Ferdie had been heard to sigh, under his breath. Then he r
aised his voice, adding, as Eleanor heaved a forkful of hay up onto a cart, ‘That’s it, my beauty! Up and over! Up and over, that’s the way!’

  ‘She’s barely sixteen, Ferdie Vallance,’ Gwennan reminded him sharply, watching his eyes wander appreciatively from the crown of Eleanor’s dark head, past the cut-off dungarees, to the tanned and slender thighs and calves. ‘And don’t you forget it!’ Gwennan moved away muttering about Ferdie being ‘drawn to that girl like iron filings to a magnet!’

  Mabel often caught her lover with his eyes on Eleanor but she was not jealous. She knew that however much he might be attracted to her, Eleanor would never give him a second glance. So she smiled and teased him.

  ‘She’s lovely, in’t she, that Nora?’ she cooed, reverting to the name Eleanor had given herself on her first, brief visit. ‘Fancy her, do you, Ferdie love? Reckon you’ve got a chance with ’er, do ya?’

  ‘What? That one? Me?’ Ferdie would enquire innocently. ‘Not I! All skin and bone, she be!’ He would wink at Mabel and reach down to pinch the ample buttocks that he knew were his and his alone.

  Gwennan, who relished any opportunity to see evil in a situation, whether it existed or not, became preoccupied by Ferdie’s fascination with Eleanor and watched him closely whenever he was anywhere near her. Stirring sugar into a late night cup of cocoa one night, she spoke to Alice about it.

  ‘He leers at her, Mrs Todd. It shouldn’t be allowed. I don’t reckon she should be here in the first place. She’s too young to be living in a hostel with men like him prowling round her!’