by Annie Groves
‘That’d be all right providing there’s someone to dance with,’ Sheila joined in.
‘There’s an RAF camp a few miles away on the other side of the village,’ their informant grinned, seeing Sheila’s huge smile.
Rosie grimaced at her wellingtons, which were a size too large but she knew that she was lucky to have them. Only dairy workers were guaranteed their wellington boots because of the rubber shortage, and last night over supper some of the girls who had been working in other parts of the country had had horror stories to tell of having to borrow boots from the old farm hands they were working with.
‘I tell you, talk about waiting for dead men’s shoes,’ one girl, Nelly, a Londoner with a sharp cockney accent, had grimaced.
Right now, though, struggling to walk through mud so thick her boots were nearly sucked off her feet with every step she took, as she staggered behind a herd of cows she was supposed to be helping the ancient cowman deliver to the milking sheds, Rosie didn’t feel particularly fortunate. The vicious slicing rain had already soaked through the waterproof cape she had been given to wear, and the mud had slurped up over the tops of her wellingtons, where her leggings were now so wet that they felt as though they were rubbing her skin raw. Every time she lifted her gaze from the backsides of the cows in front of her, all she could see was an endless panorama of grey-green emptiness. Somewhere ahead, one of the cows had stopped, causing the others to follow suit. Rosie, engrossed in simply trying to put one foot in front of the other, bumped into the nearest cow and almost lost her balance, her feet squelching in the mud.
‘Your legs are younger than mine; get yourself up there and get that cow moving,’ the cowman yelled in Rosie’s ear.
They had been warned not to provoke the hostility of the elderly farm hands they would be working with, whom they had been told would be set in their ways and unused to working with young women, so Rosie dutifully made her way along the line of cows until she reached the gate, which instead of being open to let the cows through into the yard, was still closed.
With the cows pressing against her, Rosie had to struggle to unlatch the gate and then lift it so that the bottom bar could swing free of the mud so that she could open it.
As she did so, the cows, no doubt sensing the warmth of the milking shed, pushed so eagerly through the narrow opening of the gate that Rosie was afraid she would be knocked off her feet and crushed. The only way she had of getting clear of them was to scramble up the gate as she swung it open, but in order to do so she had to leave her wellingtons firmly entrenched in the mud, much to the amusement of the cowman and the other farm hands, who had mysteriously appeared in the yard to watch the show.
‘Old Harry played exactly the same trick on me,’ one of the other girls comforted Rosie half an hour later as they sat side by side on their milking stools, milking the hosed-down and cleaned cows.
‘It’s a pity someone doesn’t give him a taste of his own medicine and plays a joke on him,’ Mary spoke up determinedly.
Rosie sighed and shook her head, making herself focus on the comforting rhythm of milking and the satisfying squirt of the fresh warm milk into the pail.
She had had to wait until all the cows were through the gate before she could retrieve her boots and then she had had to wash them out under the pump in the yard, standing there in her wet stockings, her feet so cold she could quite easily have cried. Now her feet were still cold and both the insides of her wellies and her stockings were soaking wet.
‘You mind you wash and dry them feet of yours properly first chance you get,’ the farmer warned Rosie when they had finished milking, ‘otherwise you’ll be getting bad feet.’
Trudging back down the lane, returning the herd to the field, was even more wet and unpleasant than bringing them in, but not as unpleasant as cleaning out the pigsties, Rosie decided. Despite the clothes peg she had put on her nose, her eyes were streaming from the stink, and the back of her throat felt raw from breathing through her mouth.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ the farmer told the girls not unkindly when he came to check up on them, and saw their clothes-pegged noses. ‘There’s nothing like a bit of pig muck for good manure, as you’ll find out if you’re here long enough. Frost’s broken up the ground now, so I reckon you’ll be able to go out and spread this onto the fields next week. Missus wants you to go and collect the eggs now, and think on, you’ll need to get down under the henhouses on account of some of them buggers going there to lay. Daft they are, when the ruddy foxes go under there as well.’
The girls ate their sandwiches in one of the hay barns, taking advantage of the protective warmth of the hay to shelter them from the draught as they munched hungrily on their food and drank the hot tea the farmer’s wife had provided.
‘I’m that tired I can’t even be bothered to think of a way to get back at old Harry,’ Mary complained at six o’clock that evening when the girls hauled themselves gratefully into the lorry that had come to take them back to the hostel.
There couldn’t be anything better than this, Rosie decided, as she soaped her exhausted and filthy body and then rinsed herself off under the thin trickle of a welcome hot shower, unless it was already being tucked up in bed. She smothered a yawn, and then yelped as the hot water stopped flowing and she was doused in icy cold.
‘Sorry, we should have warned you about that,’ a girl from one of the other gangs yelled out from the other side of the partition. ‘The rule is two minutes of hot water and no more.’
They were lucky in their warden, Mrs Johnson, who was a kindly motherly woman. She clucked sympathetically when Rosie nearly fell asleep whilst she was eating the hearty soup that was their supper.
‘You’ll get used to it, lass,’ she offered comfortingly.
‘Maybe, but will her wellies?’ someone joked, causing everyone, even Rosie, to laugh.
Their first day set the pattern for the next two weeks, with early mornings so that they could be at the farm for milking and early nights when the girls were so exhausted they were glad to get to bed at ten.
When they woke up at the beginning of their third week, it was to discover that the rain had stopped and the sun was actually shining.
‘You won’t be so pleased when you realise what sunshine means to farming folk,’ they were warned by the more experienced girls. ‘You wait, a week of this and you’ll be out planting potatoes. Backbreaking, it is.’
‘Hey, Rosie,’ Alice, a girl from one of the other groups called out, ‘I forgot to tell you last night but we think we’ve found a way you can teach old Harry a bit of a lesson. Seems that him and one of the cows don’t get on. Took a dislike to Harry, she did, and she lets him know about it. She might not have any horns but apparently she gave him a kick in the you-know-wots last year that sent him flying across the milking shed, and the milk bucket with him. Since then he’s kept out of her way and won’t go near her. It’s me that milks her – and I reckon I could persuade her easily enough to swap places with one of the other cows. Old Harry’s that cocky he won’t think nothing of it if I call out to him, all frightened, like, that summat’s gone wrong and he’s bound to come to see what it is. I can’t wait to see his face when he realises that I’m milking Ruby.’ She laughed. ‘I owe him one for the way he tricked me like he did you when I first arrived, only I wasn’t quick enough to make the gate like you was, Rosie, and I ended up flat on me arse in cow muck. We’re all moving on come the end of this week and I reckon if we give him a big enough fright and warn him that we’ll be telling all the new girls about him, that should put an end to his tricks. So how about it? Will you swap places with me at milking time in the morning?’
‘Go on, Rosie,’ Sheila urged her.
Rosie agreed. She had grown quite fond of the cows, who were in the main easy-going beasts, and she had seen how old Harry tried to skimp their care when he thought he could get away with it. It wouldn’t do any harm to give him a reason to treat his charges, both human and animal, wi
th a bit more respect, Rosie quietened her overactive conscience.
Mrs Johnson, the warden, innocently put the girls’ high spirits at breakfast down to the fact that it was another sunny day, smiling approvingly on them all as they hurried through their breakfast and rushed out to the waiting lorry with unusual speed.
Even the smell of the pig muck they had been spreading on the fields no longer seemed as unpleasant as it had done at first, Rosie decided, as one of the girls burst into song and the others enthusiastically joined in.
‘Give over, will you, girls?’ the driver shouted back to them. ‘You’ll turn the milk with that caterwauling!’
There was no mud in the lane now – the sunshine had dried it up – and the cows were now so familiar to Rosie that she knew them all individually. Clicking her tongue, she urged them down the track, humming under her breath as she did so, and then laughing as one of them – Buttercup, with her big brown eyes and determination to slow things down whilst she enjoyed another mouthful of grass – turned to look at her.
‘Up, up,’ Rosie encouraged them. Old Harry used a nasty thin whippy stick on them but Rosie and the other girls preferred to coax them rather than bully them.
The new grass meant that their milk yield was up and that milking took longer.
Rosie could see Harry standing in the yard, chewing on a piece of grass and looking sour.
‘Come on, get them beasts in and stop dawdling,’ he yelled bad-temperedly.
Deftly Rosie persuaded her part of the herd to move away from him so that the stick he had raised to thwack them missed its target.
When they got into the milking shed, Alice was already there; she winked at Rosie and whispered to her, ‘Down there, third from the bottom.’
Nodding, Rosie guided Buttercup towards the waiting space. Of course the cow, well aware that this wasn’t her normal milking station, wanted to object but Rosie stood firm and coaxed her, and eventually Buttercup moved down the line, allowing Alice and Ruby to take their places.
Rosie had just got herself settled on her stool, her head leaning against Buttercup’s warm flank as she worked, when she heard Alice scream – loudly. She had to scream a second time though, before old Harry appeared in the doorway, by which time Alice, whom Rosie reckoned must have missed her calling as an actress, was standing up on her stool yelling, ‘A rat! I’ve just seen a rat! It was in me milk bucket…’
The big grin on old Harry’s face changed to a look of anger at the mention of the milk bucket. A soft townie girl screaming because she had seen a rat was one thing; risking the wrath of the farmer because the milk was contaminated was another.
‘Get down off there and stop yer bawling,’ he yelled, running towards them.
Alice waited until he was right up alongside Ruby before reaching out to grab hold of his arm and say tearfully, ‘Oh, I was that scared and it’s set poor Ruby here all of a twitch. Nearly kicked me, she did…’
The entire milking shed had gone quiet now. Even the cows seemed to be watching and listening, Rosie thought. Ruby was certainly aware that the enemy was at hand because she let out a bellow and dropped her head, charging old Harry and nearly pinning him against the wall. As he wriggled out and fled, running out of the milking shed as fast as he could, the whole place erupted into laughter.
‘That’ll teach him,’ Alice declared with satisfaction later. ‘I reckon we weren’t the only ones who had a laugh neither. The other men saw him.’
‘I think the cows enjoyed it too.’
‘Rosie Price, you’re a right soft one, that you are,’ Alice teased her.
Instead of just working on one farm, they would now be moving around working on several farms in the area, all owned by the Duke of Aston, they were informed by the warden.
‘Ooh, I’ve never met a real live duke,’ Sheila giggled.
‘Well, you won’t be meeting this one either,’ the warden told her firmly. ‘His Grace is in the RAF and his squadron is on active duty at the minute.’
It was left to the other girls at the hostel who had been there for some time to give them the lowdown on what they could expect.
One of them, a Manchester girl named Pauline, told them warningly, ‘Mostly it’s not too bad just so long as you don’t fall foul of George Duncan. He’s one of the foremen wot manage the farm hands for His Grace, and a right nasty old piece of work he is, and no mistake. If ’e starts picking on yer then you have to stand up to him and give it him back, otherwise he’ll mek your life a real misery. We haven’t seen that wife of his wi’out a black eye yet.’
Rosie and the others exchanged anxious looks.
‘Oh ho, he’s that kind, is he?’ said Mary. ‘Well, we won’t stand no nonsense from him.’
‘Don’t let him get too close, if you know what I mean. Mind you, it’s them poor POWs and internees that gets the worst of it from him. Treats them something shocking, he does. Them as knows him say that he’s got a real mean streak.’
Rosie stiffened at the mention of POWs and internees, remembering how the Italian men from her old neighbourhood had been interned at Huyton and put into a camp originally planned to hold POWs. She had such mixed feelings now about the old days and the people who had shared them with her. Originally she had felt so very protective and angry on behalf of Liverpool’s Italians, but now her fear that she might after all be Aldo’s child had made her want to distance herself from Italians in every way that she could. Her hand had started to tremble slightly, and so she put down her mug of tea in case anyone else noticed. The last thing she wanted was to have to work with Italian internees and POWs. It would make her think too much about things she would prefer to forget. She had never particularly liked Aldo, and now she felt that she hated him. Somehow it was easier to blame him for her mother’s dreadful betrayal of her husband and her best friend than it was to blame her mother. Rosie’s feelings were so difficult to bear at times and she was afraid that working with Italians would make that even harder. But, of course, she couldn’t say anything of this to her new friends, not if she wanted them to go on thinking of her as a respectable girl who had come from a decent family.
‘So we’ll be working with some chaps at last, will we?’ Sheila asked, unabashed by the reproving look Mary gave her. ‘What are they like then, these POWs?’
‘They’re a decent bunch – but the POWs can’t speak any English. They haven’t bin here that long. The internees are better; you can have a bit of a laugh wi’ them,’ Pauline told them.
‘Yes,’ another girl chipped in. ‘I feel sorry for them, I do. But if it’s chaps you want then there’s an RAF squadron based a few miles away at Hack Green.’
‘Typical,’ Sheila grumbled on their first morning when they woke up to rain, but worse was to come when they discovered that they would not be working with the cows, as they had expected, but instead were going to be put to planting potato fields.
‘That’s gangers’ work,’ Sheila complained. ‘We’re milkers.’
‘Try telling that to ’im,’ Brenda muttered, giving a small nod in the direction of the sour-faced man watching them clamber out of the lorry. ‘Trust us to get the very foreman we’ve bin warned against, on our first day.’
George Duncan looked like a bull, Rosie admitted. He might only be of average height but he was a big heavily built man with small mean eyes and the kind of high colour that warned of a bad temper. Rosie had smelled the stale beer on his breath when they had to march past him.
Planting potatoes was back-breaking work, which left them with soil-blackened hands and nails.
‘I’ll never eat another tattie after this,’ one of the girls moaned, straightening her back to wipe the rain out of her eyes and leaving a smear of mud on her cheek.
‘You’d never catch me saying no to a nice two pennyworth of chips,’ another girl told her.
‘Who’s talking about chips?’ the first girl scoffed. ‘These are tatties.’
‘And where do you think chips come from,
you daft thing?’
The good-natured banter the girls exchanged lightened the hours of hard physical work. Liverpool and the life Rosie had lived seemed a lifetime ago now, she admitted, as she tried not to think about how much she was longing for a hot bath and some hot food. Not that she didn’t have her low moments. There was hardly a night went by without her dreaming about her mother or her father and sometimes both of them, arguing and falling out with one another, whilst she cried out to them in her dream not to hurt one another with their cruel words. She dreamed about the Grenellis too, her sleep tormented by her images of Maria, sobbing and accusing her mother of stealing her husband. But during the daytime at least she could keep her mind locked against such images, even if she couldn’t close her heart to her pain. She could pretend that she was in the same boat as Sheila, and that all she needed to grieve for was her dead parents and not her own identity as well. Not that she didn’t grieve for her mother and her father. She missed them desperately, even her mother, for all her bad ways. Rosie would find that her memories of Christine would creep up on her and catch her unawares, so that it almost felt as though she could turn her head and her mother would be standing there, coaxing her into lending her her last pair of stockings, or putting on her favourite bright red lipstick.
And as for her father, she would never cease mourning him, Rosie knew. She couldn’t have stayed in Liverpool, with the docks and their seafaring men always there reminding her that he wouldn’t be coming back.
