The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate

by Julia Stoneham

  ‘She’s almost seventeen! Only a few months younger than Hester and Annie were when they first came here.’ Gwennan tossed her head dismissively and reached for the sugar bowl. ‘No more sugar,’ Alice said, moving the bowl out of reach of Gwennan’s spoon. ‘That’s all we have left until next week’s rations arrive.’

  ‘It’s disgusting!’ Gwennan whined to Winnie and Marion the next day, as Ferdie offered to help Eleanor off a cart from which she had been unloading beet.

  ‘It’s OK, Mr Vallance,’ Eleanor had assured him cheerfully, jumping down, ‘I can manage, thanks!’

  ‘Just look at him!’ Gwennan persisted, glaring at Ferdie as he limped off. ‘Drooling he is! Drooling!’

  ‘Jealous, Taff?’ Marion sniggered and Winnie, under her breath, added that Gwennan’s attitude confirmed, if confirmation was needed, that she was ‘a miserable old cow’.

  ‘D’you ever hear from that Kinski fellow?’ Gwennan asked Marion, one hot midday when she, Marion and Winnie, having eaten their lunchtime sandwiches, were sprawling half asleep in the shade of a hayrick.

  ‘Nope,’ Marion said drowsily, ‘I never did… What’s it got to do with you, anyhow?’ Instead of answering the question, Gwennan asked another.

  ‘He never answered your letter, then?’

  ‘What you on about, Taff? I never sent no letter to Sergeant Kinski!’

  ‘You did so!’ the Welsh girl snapped. ‘It was on the dresser when I put a postcard to my auntie out ready for the postman.’

  Because the nearest pillar box was a good mile from the hostel, the postman obliged its inmates by not only delivering their mail to the farmhouse door, together with the day’s supply of bread, but by collecting any letters the girls had written and taking them to the post office in Ledburton for them.

  ‘I never did!’ Marion said, sitting up, glaring at Gwennan and irritably picking bits of thistle out of her hair.

  ‘You calling me a liar, then?’ the Welsh girl demanded. ‘I saw it! A couple of months ago, it were. Large as life on the dresser, tucked half out of sight and addressed to Sergeant M Kinski and then there was a lot of numbers like you ’as to put when you’re writing to someone in the forces. I couldn’t help seeing,’ she added with an unconvincing attempt at innocence, adding, emphatically, ‘so don’t you dare deny it!’ She swatted something that was crawling on her leg. ‘Ugh! There’s earwigs in this straw…’ she whined, getting clumsily to her feet and slouching off.

  Marion frowned. After a moment she turned to Winnie.

  ‘You done it, Win, din’cha? You wrote to bloomin’ Marvin!’

  ‘I might of.’ Winnie glanced nervously at her friend.

  ‘What d’you mean, “might of”? Either you did or you didn’t!’

  ‘All right, then. I did.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ They were sitting now, cross-legged in the straw, facing each other, Winnie’s face flushed with embarrassment, Marion’s tense and accusative.

  ‘’Cos ’e asked you to write to him!’

  ‘And when I didn’t, you did? Without telling me? Making it look like I’d written to him?’ Her hard eyes were fixed accusingly on her friend’s face.

  ‘Anyhow, what does it matter?’ Winnie said defensively, getting to her feet. ‘’Cos he never answered, did he!’

  ‘No. He never did.’

  ‘And d’you know why?’

  ‘How should I know why?’

  ‘I’ll tell you why, Marion! ’Cos he’s most likely dead, that’s why! Omaha Beach was where his unit went ashore on D-Day. Same as Reuben. Not many of ’em as landed there made it. That’s prob’ly why he never wrote back. Never thought of that, did you?’

  ‘How could I think of it when I never even knew you’d wrote to him?’ Marion demanded. In the silence that followed they heard Jack shouting for the girls to get back to work after their lunch break. Marion got to her feet. ‘Wish I had now,’ she sighed, as they trudged across the field to the sheaves of barley that lay, ready to be lifted off the stubble and arranged in neat rows of stooks, where the hot sun and warm wind would dry them. ‘Wouldn’t have done no harm, would it really, for him to ’ave had me picture, if he’d wanted it. To keep him company, like. When he was…if he’d got wounded or anything.’

  ‘He did have it, Marion.’ Winnie had stopped in her tracks. Marion, a few paces ahead of her, turned back to face her.

  ‘You what?’ she demanded.

  ‘That snap we took of you in your bathers. I put it in the letter.’

  ‘You never!’

  ‘Yeah, I did…’ They stood, both picturing Sergeant Kinski, wounded, probably dying, his eyes on the snapshot of Marion, posed in the sunshine on a boulder in the shallow river.

  ‘Did ’e get it, d’you reckon?’ Marion asked, almost inaudibly.

  ‘We’ll never know, will we?’ Winnie said. ‘Not if he got killed, we won’t. Or even if he didn’t—’

  ‘I hope he didn’t, Win…’

  ‘Come on, you two!’ Jack was bellowing at them. ‘There be work to do ’ere! Bain’t a bloomin’ picnic, you know!’

  They joined the other girls and began work, stooping and lifting the sheaves, stooping and lifting, stooping and lifting, propping them, one against the other, the grains drooping gracefully at the top, the shiny stalks concealing thistles, scratching the bare legs below their rolled up dungarees. Sweaty skin that had dried while they had rested in the shade, began to prickle and itch.

  ‘Oooh, ’ow I do ’ate ’arvestin’!’ Gwennan moaned.

  ‘I don’t reckon I’ve got another drop of sweat left in my entire body!’ Annie sighed. She had a letter in her pocket from Hector Conway. He was going to fetch her on Saturday afternoon and drive her into Exeter for tea.

  A nearby barracks, recently vacated by the American soldiers who had trained there, now housed a group of Italian prisoners of war, whose labour was available to farmers in the Ledburton area. With a heavy arable crop ready for harvesting, they were in great demand and were to be seen, always with an armed guard, working in groups of a dozen or so, sometimes near but never among the Land Army girls.

  Like the girls, they were usually transported by lorry to and from their various work sites but sometimes they were marched past fields in which the Post Stone girls were at work, hoeing the long rows of young brassicas or stooking the drying oats. Occasionally the Italians caught sight of the girls fetching in the milking herd or bringing sheep down from the thinning grass on The Tops to the lower pastures, which, even after the dry weather of late July, were still lush and green. When this happened the girls would pause, straighten their backs, shade their eyes and stare, for the men were beautiful.

  ‘Ever so friendly, they are!’ Mabel announced happily over supper on the day when a party of the Italians had been escorted past the gate of a field in which the girls were lifting a crop of early potatoes. ‘And some of ’em’s that ’andsome!’

  ‘There’s one fella who’s a dead-ringer for Stewart Granger,’ Winnie announced, with her mouth full.

  ‘An’ one’s a bit like Gregory Peck!’

  ‘On’y not so tall, though,’ Marion added, forking up baked beans.

  ‘Well, none of ’em’s what you’d call tall, are they?’

  ‘’Cos they got short legs. All Ities ’as got short legs.’

  ‘Lovely muscles, though!’ Eva flexed a bicep and the girls laughed and whistled.

  ‘Ooh, yeah! Lovely muscles!’

  ‘And ’ow would you know that, miss?’ Rose demanded, her face tight with disapproval.

  ‘’Cos they ’ad their shirts off, Mrs Crocker. That’s how!’

  ‘It were ever so hot, see!’

  ‘Their skin was all brown and shiny with sweat!’ Winnie licked her lips lasciviously and the girls giggled.

  ‘That’s enough of that kind of talk, thank you!’ Rose’s voice was sharp. ‘In case you ’aven’t noticed, they’ve an armed guard watchin’ over ’em and ’e bain’t there for nothin
g, you know! Those men was fighting our boys till they got took prisoner. They’re our enemies! And don’t you forget it!’

  ‘That’s not quite true, Rose,’ Alice told her. ‘Italy surrendered to the Allies last September. But I know what you mean and you girls need to remember that the Italians are here under certain conditions and you should treat them accordingly.’

  ‘We on’y waves to ’em, Mrs Todd,’ said Mabel. ‘Mustn’t we even wave to ’em, then? I reckon they’re lonely, all this way from their loved ones an’ their homes…’

  ‘Don’t talk such rubbish, Mabel,’ Rose blustered. ‘It was one of them as put shrapnel in my Dave’s leg! And you wants to wave to ’em?’

  ‘No, Rose,’ Alice interjected gently. ‘It was a German pilot that injured Dave… It had nothing to do with the Italian army. But it’s probably best, Mabel, if you don’t wave, there’s a dear.’

  ‘But why not, Mrs Todd?’ Annie wanted to know. ‘Surely there’s no ’arm in a wave, is there?’

  ‘Not in itself,’ Alice patiently explained. ‘But if you appeared to be inviting…well…friendship, it might be misunderstood, mightn’t it?’ Already there had been some instances of local women becoming involved with the POWs and Roger Bayliss had warned Alice to keep an eye out for any such complications where the Post Stone girls were concerned.

  ‘What’s wrong with friendship?’ Annie wanted to know.

  ‘Nothing, in normal circumstances, Annie. But where you have men who, until recently, were our enemies and who are being kept under guard, who don’t understand our ways or even speak our language, gestures, such as waving or calling out – or anything – could be misunderstood and lead to…to difficulties.’ She searched the faces of her girls. ‘D’you understand what I mean?’

  ‘Well, if they don’t they’re even more stupid than I thought they was!’ Rose snapped.

  On a warm, thundery evening, Eleanor, late with her letter home, decided to take it to the pillar box on the lane to Ledburton rather than leave in on the dresser for the postman to collect the next day. She took the overgrown footpath which ran through neglected woodland from the farm down to the lane where a disused barn stood, the Victorian letter box set into its crumbling stonework.

  The evening was still and heavy with the threat of an approaching storm, and thunder was rumbling in the extreme distance as Eleanor moved quietly down the path, the letter, addressed to her parents, in her hand. By the time she reached the lane and had slipped the envelope into the postbox, she was conscious of the thick cloud that was rapidly reducing what was left of the daylight and realised that she would be lucky to reach the farm before the storm broke.

  The trees arching over the path were in full leaf, obscuring what light there was, and as Eleanor quickened her pace she heard, or thought she heard, footsteps. Someone, or something, was moving parallel to her and slightly behind her. She stopped. The footsteps continued, moving fast. Whoever it was would soon draw level with her. She heard him – she was sure now, by the weight of the footsteps, that it was a man – trip and fall heavily. He cried out and cursed unintelligibly before continuing on, obviously in pain, blundering through the tangled saplings.

  Eleanor had at least half a mile to go before the path reached the open ground below the farmhouse. She stopped again and stood still, trying to control her nerves. She told herself she was stupid to feel scared. Who could possibly be there? Who, if anyone was there, would want to frighten or hurt her? But there was someone! And why was that person struggling through the undergrowth instead of using the path, the short cut, which was as well known to all the locals as it was to the land girls themselves?

  The person, moving painfully now, seemed to be gaining on her. He was breathing hard, as was she, and like her, was stumbling in the half-light, stepping on twigs that snapped noisily underfoot. Sudden gusts of wind, preceding the storm, rustled the foliage overhead.

  Beside her, to her right, the woodland rose sharply and curved upwards, away from the path. If she went that way her keen sense of direction told her that she would emerge from the trees a good quarter of a mile closer to the farmhouse than the path she was following. The undergrowth on the rising ground was thick with brambles and dense with tall timbers, but her desire to veer away from whoever it was who seemed to be stalking her overrode her concern and she turned sharply right, then began to climb.

  It was only a few hundred yards but the going proved to be more difficult than she had anticipated. The fading light made it hard to negotiate the tangled undergrowth, which snagged her clothes and scratched her skin. There were unexpected outcrops of rock and places where the incline was almost vertical, forcing her to scramble up through slippery blocks of mossy limestone. She grazed her knees and blood ran from her lacerated shins.

  She emerged from the wood into what seemed to be the violent centre of the storm and stumbled on, blinded by lightening and deafened by thunderclaps that seemed so close to her that she could sense their dangerous energy. The farmhouse was an indistinct shape obscured by rain so torrential that it formed a wall of water which seemed likely to drown her. Choking, she lowered her head and pushed onwards, slipping and staggering over the last hundred yards, and was close to hysteria when she burst into the kitchen, where Alice and the girls had gathered, drawn together by the violence of the storm and their growing concern for the girl who was out in it. For a moment they stood gaping while rainwater poured off Eleanor.

  First, they draped her quickly in a blanket and Eva ran to fetch a towel to dry her dripping hair. Then, while Annie cleaned her wounds, Eleanor breathlessly sobbed out the facts of her experience to Alice and the girls, who clustered anxiously round her.

  ‘I heard someone, Mrs Todd! Sort of…moving in the undergrowth,’ she gulped.

  ‘Who was it?’ Alice asked her.

  ‘I don’t know! I didn’t see him!’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘It sounded like a man. The footsteps were heavy and he was…sort of gasping and mumbling. Once he must have tripped or something and he shouted out as though he’d fallen and hurt himself… I couldn’t understand what he said. It was a word I’ve never heard before. It sounded like…“Kazzo”?’

  ‘So you never actually saw him?’

  ‘No! He stayed in the trees. But he seemed to be keeping level with me. It was horrible! I was scared! I didn’t realise that climbing up through the wood was going to be so difficult but I couldn’t go back to the path in case he was there. The thunder and the wind was making such a row I couldn’t tell whether he was behind me or not. Ouch! That hurt, Annie!’

  ‘Sorry, but you’ve got a thorn stuck in your knee… Here it comes!’

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Sorry!’

  ‘But he didn’t catch you, Eleanor? He didn’t touch you?’

  ‘No, Mrs Todd.’ Eleanor shuddered. The towel had slipped off her hair, which was hanging in dark corkscrews down her back, water dripping from the end of each curl. ‘Nobody touched me.’

  ‘I’ve filled the bath, Alice,’ Rose announced, calm in the face of the crisis. ‘A warm tub’ll do her a power of good. Come on, my dear, I’ve got nicely aired towels and a clean nightie all ready for you!’ Eleanor was about to follow Rose out of the kitchen when Gwennan came briskly into it.

  ‘Did you say you was on the old footpath that leads through to the lane when you was followed?’ she asked, and when Eleanor confirmed this, continued, ‘Then I saw who it was!’ Gwennan was relishing her moment. ‘I saw someone from my bedroom window, Mrs Todd. And I recognised him!’

  Gwennan had everyone’s attention now and in unison they clamoured for details, demanding to know who it was she had seen, while Alice attempted to subdue them. The Welsh girl timed her announcement to perfection, letting her words fall dramatically into the silence the warden had imposed. ‘It was Ferdie Vallance,’ she said shrilly. ‘That’s who!’

  There was a gasp of astonishment.

  ‘Never!’ Mabel yelled. ‘It
were never Ferdie! Why would my Ferdie do that? You’re a liar, Gwennan Pringle, that’s what you are! A wicked liar!’ She clenched her fists and with a howl of anger, launched herself at Gwennan, who flinched and stepped smartly aside while Winnie and Marion caught Mabel by the arms, sat her down at the table and held her there, squirming and swearing.

  ‘You watch your language, miss!’ Rose commanded. ‘I won’t ’ave words like that spoke in my kitchen!’

  ‘It’s not your kitchen!’ Mabel muttered. ‘It’s Mrs Todd’s!’

  ‘No, it’s not! It’s Mr Bayliss’s, so there!’ Gwennan chipped in, punctilious even in the excitement of the moment.

  ‘Stop bickering, you two and listen to me, please!’ Alice, mustering all the authority she had acquired since she had found herself in charge of these girls and this place, turned to Gwennan.

  ‘I want you to think very carefully about this, Gwennan,’ she said. ‘What you have said has serious implications and may involve the police.’

  ‘And so it should, Mrs Todd!’ Gwennan answered crisply. ‘You should be telephoning ’em now, this minute!’

  At the mention of the word ‘police’, Mabel burst into noisy tears, Gwennan’s strident voice rising over them.

  ‘I’ve seen the way that man looks at Eleanor – we all have! – his eyes is all over her! He can’t hardly keep his hands off of her!’

  ‘But ’e was on’y lookin’!’ Mabel wailed. ‘He never would of touched ’er!’

  ‘Hang on…how could you have seen him from your window, Taff?’ Annie asked. ‘It’s rainin’ stair rods!’ She peered out of the low window. ‘You can’t hardly see your hand in front of your face out there.’

  ‘You calling me a liar, then?’ Gwennan snarled back at her.

  Leaving the girls, Alice and Gwennan went up the stairs and into Gwennan’s bedroom, where Alice stooped down and peered out through the small, low window. At first she could see almost nothing. The landscape was lost in the drifting rain and fading daylight. Then, as her eyes adjusted to the poor light, Alice could just make out the place where the footpath emerged from the trees. It was several hundred yards away and as Annie had suggested, heavily shrouded in murky rain – but it was just visible.