The Girl at the Farmhouse Gate

by Julia Stoneham

  It was Edward John who located Arthur. He had crawled into the bull’s pen and was sitting, sucking his thumb, under the manger that ran the length of one side of it, while Sherman – a massive Devon Red, already sire of many excellent heifers and bullocks and named by Christopher Bayliss after the American General who routed the Confederate troops and whose name was subsequently given to a tank – regarded him suspiciously, swaying his head in increasing irritation and pawing at the straw with huge, uncompromising hooves. Seeing Edward John, Arthur removed his thumb and announced, shakily, that he didn’t like the gee-gee.

  ‘No, I don’t much, either,’ Edward John told him. ‘You just keep quiet, Arthur, and don’t move.’ He instructed Alice to attract Sherman’s attention by offering him a handful of fresh hay. ‘I shall crawl round and try to pull Arthur through the gap where he got in.’

  Alice did as she was told and held the hay out to the bull, and although he made no move to eat it, he extended his massive neck towards her and blew his warm, fragrant breath in her direction, meeting her eyes in a way that she found slightly disconcerting.

  ‘That’s right, Mum! Now he’s watching you and I’m going to…’ Moving carefully, so that he did not startle the bull, Edward John lowered himself slowly into the straw and reached through the heavy timber framing of the pen.

  ‘You take care, Edward John,’ Ferdie warned, under his breath. ‘He’m a nasty-tempered bugger, that one!’

  Getting a firm grip on Arthur’s jumper, Edward John hauled him quickly out. Arthur protested noisily and Sherman swung round, lowered his head, and ripped his horns through the straw that covered the floor of his stall.

  Mabel seized her son and shook him hard, telling him he was a wicked child, before bursting into noisy tears, the pair of them howling in unison.

  Roger Bayliss, who had arrived in time to witness the last seconds of the rescue, shook Edward John’s hand and warmly congratulated him.

  ‘Well done, that boy!’ he said. ‘Very well done indeed!’

  When James Todd wrote to Alice suggesting that their son should spend part of his summer holidays with him and his new wife, Alice was uncertain of his motivation. Did he miss the boy? Was this invitation designed to repair the damaged relationship between father and son? Was James requesting the boy’s company merely out of a sense of duty, or was this request nothing less than a thinly disguised attempt to impose his will on his ex-wife?

  Whichever it was, Edward John firmly refused to go. When Alice explained that she didn’t want him to lose touch with his father he asked her why not. A question she found it hard to answer.

  ‘He is your father, Edward John, and I expect he misses you.’

  ‘He should have thought of that before he left us,’ Edward John stated sullenly. ‘Tell him I won’t go.’

  Alice wrote to James, tactfully explaining that Edward John was very happy on the farm and planned to spend his summer holidays helping out where he could by working in the harvest fields, and that she felt that this was a sensible, healthy and patriotic thing for a young boy to want to do. She suggested that perhaps he could visit his father in the Christmas holidays instead. James Todd wrote back and said no. He had booked rooms at a seaside boarding house in Norfolk and on the following Saturday, Edward John was to be put on the morning train to Paddington where he would be met.

  ‘He’s flatly refusing to go!’ Alice confided to Roger Bayliss. ‘What do I do? What would you do if it was Christopher?’ Roger considered this and then said that he had heard that children of divorced parents sometimes played off one against the other.

  ‘Having lost his mother,’ he added vaguely, ‘Christopher had no opportunity to do that, of course… I really can’t advise you, Alice. I don’t feel competent to make a judgement. Sorry to let you down!’

  ‘But if you were in James’s position? How would you feel, d’you think, if your son didn’t want to spend time with you and clearly, well, disapproved of you? Would you persist in seeing him and try to win him over? Or would you leave him be for a while and let him adjust to the new status quo – I mean, in Edward John’s case, to his stepmother, the coming child and the fact that he feels his father has…rather let us down? What would you do?’ Roger looked disconcerted. He shook his head as though he was trying to clear it.

  ‘D’you know, Alice, I’m really no good at these complicated issues. It’s been so long since I had to deal with anything like this that I seem to have somehow lost the knack!’

  Alice looked at him. It occurred to her that perhaps he never had possessed ‘the knack’, as he called it. Certainly he had, since Alice had known him, demonstrated very little emotional involvement in his own son’s troubles, allowing him to go through the trauma of his breakdown and subsequent dismissal from the RAF without the impulsive attempts to support him which, Alice had thought at the time, would have come naturally to most fathers.

  Roger had, it was true, made Christopher as comfortable as was possible in the woodsman’s cottage where he had chosen to live in self-imposed exile, although, to Alice, Roger’s actions, where Christopher was concerned, always appeared to stem from a sense of duty rather than from parental affection. Perhaps this was all he should be expected to do, or was capable of doing. But it seemed to Alice not to be enough. He was looking at her.

  ‘Have I…have I disappointed you?’ he asked, and was relieved when she laughed and shook her head.

  ‘I think I shall insist that he goes,’ she said after further thought. ‘It’s only for two weeks. The experience can’t do him any harm and he may even enjoy it.’

  Edward John, on the days leading up to his departure, made it clear to Alice that he had no intention of enjoying his enforced holiday and parted coolly from her on the station platform.

  Four hours later, the clamour of the bell mounted on the wall of the barn that housed the telephone, filled the yard.

  ‘Where is he?’ James Todd demanded angrily. ‘We were supposed to meet under the clock, but he’s not there!’

  ‘Go and look for him!’ Alice shouted into the receiver. ‘He must be there! I put him on the train myself!’ She stood in the gloom of the barn, her pulse racing. Rose crossed the yard and suggested that Alice should go back into the farmhouse and have a nice, steadying cup of tea while she waited for news, but Alice refused and stood, rigid, on the stone step at the entrance to the barn, ready to snatch the receiver from its cradle as soon as the bell rang. Five minutes became ten and then twenty before the silence was broken.

  ‘He was on the train,’ James said, sounding as nervous now as Alice herself felt. ‘The guard remembers seeing him. But we’ve searched the station and there’s no sign of him and we’re about to involve the police… Are you there, Alice?’ James asked, when there seemed to be nothing but silence at the end of the telephone line.

  ‘I shouldn’t have made him go,’ she said desperately. ‘He didn’t want to and I insisted!’ It was James’s turn to be silent. Then he told her he was going to hang up and join the search. He would telephone her as soon as there was any news at all.

  Rose, a great believer in the soothing and sustaining power of tea, brought a cup of it across the yard to Alice, sat her down on the stone step and encouraged her to drink it while she waited for James’s next call.

  ‘’E’ll be all right!’ Rose soothed. ‘’E’s no fool, that boy! ’E knows how to watch out for ’imself! Prob’ly he just got the place they were supposed to meet mixed up, you know what kids are! ’E’ll be standin’ waitin’ somewhere, with ’is little suitcase beside ’im, good as gold, you’ll see!’

  After twenty more minutes, Alice began to pace up and down the yard, clenching and unclenching her fists and deaf to all Rose’s attempts to allay her fears. When the telephone bell rang both women were equally startled.

  Alice seized the receiver.

  ‘James!’ she shouted, ‘what’s happened?’ Rose saw a look of astonishment spread across Alice’s face. ‘Who…?’ s
he asked. Then she asked again who the caller was and then said ‘Ruth?’ Rose watched as Alice listened. Ruth, she knew, was Alice’s friend, the woman she had been staying with when she’d almost been killed by a doodlebug. ‘With you?’ Alice was demanding. ‘What’s he doing with…? In a what? A taxi? Oh my God, Ruth! Thank heaven!’ Alice was suddenly overcome with laughter and was briefly unable to stop. ‘No, no’ she managed, gulping back the inappropriate sound. ‘I’m not laughing because it’s funny! No! Of course it isn’t a bit funny! Yes! Very naughty indeed! Tell him I am extremely angry with him and I’ll telephone you as soon as I’ve contacted James and put him out of his misery!’ She cut the call and turned to Rose. ‘He’s all right! He arrived ten minutes ago at Ruth’s, in a taxi! She said he reminded her that she is his godmother and asked her to invite him to stay with her because he doesn’t want to go on holiday with his father! That is so naughty! What am I going to do with him, Rose?’

  Rose was smiling with relief. ‘A good wallopin’ is what ’e deserves, puttin’ you through that! But I doubt ’e’ll get one, ’cos ’tis my belief, though you’d never admit it, that you’re rather pleased with him!’

  ‘Operator?’ Alice was saying into the telephone receiver, ‘could you very kindly put me through to the stationmaster at Paddington? That’s right. Paddington Station in London… Yes, it is an emergency, a small boy has been lost. Thank you. Yes, I’ll hold.’

  If they were honest, everyone, from Roger Bayliss through Margery Brewster to the land girls themselves, who knew of Edward John’s reluctance to spend time with the man of whom, because of their loyalty to his ex-wife, they disapproved, applauded Edward John’s act of defiance.

  James Todd, when Alice managed to reach him by telephone, had been in the stationmaster’s office giving a full description of his missing son to a young police constable. Humiliated and angered by the boy’s behaviour, he suggested, when the situation had been explained to him, that Ruth should put Edward John on the next train back to Ledburton. He told Alice, curtly, that he himself was leaving immediately for his holiday in Norfolk.

  Aware that Edward John was regarded as something of a hero, Alice asked the girls not to show any sign of approval of what he had done.

  ‘It was discourteous of him and very embarrassing and worrying for his father,’ she told them.

  ‘I reckon ’e showed a lot of spunk!’ Marion muttered and Winnie agreed. ‘Fancy ’im gettin’ in a taxi and goin’ halfway across London all by ’imself! And ’e’s on’y a tiddler!’

  ‘If ’e was mine I’d be that proud of ’im!’ Mabel said warmly to Alice, ‘after the way ’is father treated you!’

  ‘If you ask me,’ Gwennan announced, although no one had asked her, her clipped accent cutting the air and her manner sententious, even by her standards, ‘Mrs Todd’s quite right to be worried. What he done was deceitful and if he was my son I’d punish him severely!’

  ‘I’ll bet you would, Taff!’ Annie said. ‘Beat ’im to within an inch of ’is life and enjoy every minute of it!’ The girls laughed derisively at Gwennan until Alice told them sharply to stop.

  ‘Gwennan is right,’ she said. ‘It was very wrong of him and he will be punished. But I’d ask you all to leave it to me and not to discuss it with him, all right?’

  Roger Bayliss, who took Alice to the station to meet her son, lectured the boy quietly as they drove back to the farm.

  ‘I don’t suppose you had any idea how worried your mother was,’ he said, taking the car smoothly through the familiar lanes. ‘I don’t believe that if you had thought about it carefully you would have acted as you did. Your father, too, was most concerned. Your behaviour was both churlish and thoughtless, Edward John. I had expected rather more of you than that.’

  To his eleven-year-old mind, Edward John’s plan had seemed to be a good one. It was true that he hadn’t appreciated the effect his virtual disappearance from the face of the earth would have on his parents. He believed that as soon as he arrived at his godmother’s home she would telephone his mother to tell her where he was and, as he did not value his father’s feelings, he failed to consider them. It had not occurred to him that Ruth might have been away from home when he rang her doorbell and he had failed to take into account the hour it would take him to find a cab and cross London in it. An hour during which his father, after a fruitless search of Paddington Station, had given Alice the alarming news that her son was missing.

  The light was fading as Roger brought his car to a halt at the farmhouse gate. It had been a long day. Edward John was tired, hungry and ashamed. However hard he tried to prevent them, the hot tears that had welled up in his eyes began to spill down his cheeks.

  ‘I honestly don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about there,’ Roger murmured to Alice as he left her at the gate.

  Edward John wiped his eyes on his sleeve, spooned up the thick vegetable broth that Rose had saved for him and then went, contritely, to bed. The next morning Alice told her son what his punishment was to be.

  ‘For a week you will not go up to the higher farm and if you leave this building you will stay where I can see you. You will write a letter to your father apologising to him for your very bad behaviour and to your godmother to say how sorry you are for involving her in an embarrassing family matter.’

  ‘I thought that was what godmothers were for!’

  He was challenging her. Alice met his quizzical eyes with a cold stare and told him that if he was going to answer back he could spend the morning in her sitting room and think about his poor conduct until he was ready to apologise properly for it.

  Edward John wrote his letters – Sorry, Father; Sorry, Aunt Ruth – printed the addresses onto their envelopes and, while the land girls were assembling hungrily in the kitchen for their suppers that night, stood them on the dresser, ready for the postman.

  ‘What a good boy!’ Marion whispered, winking heavily at him and nudging Winnie.

  On the following morning the BBC announced that Paris had been liberated and that French and Allied troops were marching triumphantly up the Champs Élysées. That evening Roger and Alice were invited to celebrate the good news over drinks with some acquaintances of his.

  ‘Why have you got on your best frock?’ Edward John asked his mother when, after supervising the girls’ supper, she prepared herself.

  ‘It’s not “best” exactly…’ She was aware of her son’s eyes, registering every detail of her appearance as she leant towards the oval mirror above the mantelpiece to check her hair and her lipstick.

  ‘You haven’t done your hair like that for ages.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You look pretty.’ ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Someone might want to marry you.’

  ‘Oh…?’ She smiled. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘But you could, couldn’t you? Marry someone, I mean. Now that you and Father are divorced.’

  ‘In theory, yes, I could. But I don’t plan to.’

  She was dressed in cornflower blue linen. The frock, which she had hardly worn since the war had so radically changed her life, still fitted perfectly, despite the intervening years. Edward John watched as she smoothed the skirt over her hips and settled the narrow leather belt at her waist.

  ‘People do though,’ her son said, thoughtfully regarding her. She was ready to go. At any moment Roger would arrive to drive her to the party.

  ‘I shan’t be late, darling,’ she said. ‘Get ready for bed at about eight, right?’ Her son nodded and offered her his cheek to kiss. ‘Lights out at half past nine. Promise?’

  ‘All right… Mum? Why did Marion wink at me when I put my “sorry” letters on the dresser?’

  ‘Did she? I’ve no idea why.’

  ‘And what’s an old heave-ho?’ Alice looked at him in surprise. ‘Winnie said, rather quietly, so you wouldn’t hear her, “Well done, our kid! Giving your dad the old heave-ho!”’ He pronounced the words precisely, clearly mystified by them.


  ‘Did she? I really don’t know what she meant by that. I think she was probably not minding her own business. I have told you before that sometimes the girls say things they shouldn’t and that it’s best to ignore them.’

  ‘Is it because they were badly brought up?’ he asked innocently. Alice sat down beside him and looked into his face. How she loved him.

  ‘Not necessarily “badly”, darling. But differently. They’re dear girls and we respect them, don’t we? But that doesn’t mean we have to behave exactly as they do.’

  ‘Do we behave better than they do?’ he asked. Alice saw the golden opportunity and seized it.

  ‘Not always, Edward John. I doubt whether any of them would have upset their parents as much as you upset yours yesterday!’ She heard Roger’s car arriving at the farmhouse gate. ‘Think about it, sweetheart.’

  As Edward John watched Roger hold open the car door for his mother, it occurred to him that if she ever did remarry, Mr Bayliss would make an acceptable new husband for her. But people were supposed to be in love when they got married and he wasn’t sure whether his mother and Mr Bayliss were in love, although they were always very nice to each other and laughed a lot when they were together. Perhaps the being in love bit wasn’t so important at their age. He decided to read Swallows and Amazons and maybe not switch off the light until he heard the sound of Mr Bayliss’s car, bringing his mother back to the farm.

  It was towards the end of September that Gwennan Pringle committed an act that she later came to regret. What she did was a direct result, possibly little more than a knee-jerk reaction, to something that happened to her and which not only delivered a cold clench of fear but provoked a violent surge of anger against her destiny and at the unfairness of life. She was overwhelmed by a sense of injustice. Why should she be the victim of a cruel fate while others, whom she felt were less deserving than she of good fortune, seemed to be enjoying it in abundance?

  What had happened to her was that, one night, as she dried herself after washing in bathwater already pink and soapy from Marion and Winnie’s use of it, she glanced at her reflection in the steamy mirror. The sight of her taut and angular body was, of course, familiar to her. What was unfamiliar was the slightly puckered appearance of her left nipple. It was the same puckering that her sister Olwen had displayed to Gwennan two years previously, and which had been an early symptom of the cancer that had recently killed her.