by Annie Groves
She paused in her work now, lifting her face towards the rain so that it would disguise the tears filling her eyes. ‘Oh Dad, Dad,’ she whispered brokenly. ‘Why did you have to be taken from me? I miss you so much.’
It finally stopped raining just before they were told to pack up for the day.
‘Ooooh, me back. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to walk straight again,’ Sheila complained, but typically, by the time they got back to the farmyard, she had recovered enough to nudge Rosie and say eagerly, ‘Look over there, at that lot. They must be them POWs. That one in the middle’s a real good-looker, an’ all.’
Rosie had looked over in the direction of the group of men standing on the opposite side of the yard, under the eagle eye of an armed soldier, to get into the waiting army lorry before she could stop herself. The man Sheila had referred to was the next in line to get into the lorry. Tall, and so broad-shouldered that he was straining the seams of the regulation army shirt he was wearing with its telltale insignia on the back to indicate his status, he had the warm-toned skin and thick dark hair Rosie immediately recognised as Italian.
As though he sensed her watching him, he suddenly turned his head and looked directly at her. An unfamiliar feeling seized her heart, squeezing it tightly. She felt out of breath and light-headed, she felt…
Somehow she managed to wrench her gaze away. She was trembling from head to foot – because she was cold and wet and because seeing him had brought back all the painful memories she wanted so much to forget, Rosie reassured herself.
The girls’ transport had arrived, and she was only too thankful to clamber into it. When the lorry containing the POWs rattled out of the yard she didn’t turn her head to look at it.
Sheila did, though, nudging Rosie to say in a loud whisper, ‘Rosie, that good-looking one is watching you. I think you’ve struck lucky there.’
The first thing Rosie looked for over the next few mornings, when they reached the farmyard, was the POWs – not because she wanted to see them, she assured herself, but quite the opposite. And it was a relief when she was able to reassure herself that they weren’t there.
By Thursday it had stopped raining and the sun had come out to greet the first day of May. Rosie noticed as they trudged down the lane to the potato fields that the fat green buds on the blackthorn hedges were ready to burst into leaf, and surely there was a warmth to the air that had not been there before.
‘Come on, you lot. You’re here to work, not gossip.’
‘I knew it was too good to last,’ Mary murmured to Rosie as George Duncan strode grimly up and down the line of assembled girls.
‘Bloody waste of time, the lot of you,’ he told them. ‘Farmin’s men’s work, not wimen’s, or bloody useless Eyeties’. You’re enough to turn the ruddy milk sour, you lot are. Now get to it. I want to see this field planted by dinner otherwise you’ll not be getting none.’
‘That’s not fair. You can’t do that,’ Jean protested indignantly.
Immediately he turned on her, his face dark purple with temper. ‘Who says I can’t, missie? I can do anything I like around here and you had better just remember that or it will be the worse for you.’
‘At least it’s not raining,’ Rosie tried to cheer Jean up when George Duncan had gone.
‘He’s got no right speaking to us like that,’ one of the other girls said angrily. ‘Someone should report him.’
‘Mebbe so but ’oo are we going to report him to, seeing as he’s the foreman, in charge of the job?’ Audrey asked drily. ‘Unless of course you was thinking of hitching a lift to the front in one of them RAF planes, and complaining to His Grace?’
‘Hitch a lift in one? I’d ruddy fly it meself if I had to if it meant getting the best of the likes of him,’ someone else offered.
Unlike the milking sheds, where the girls had often sung to the cows as they milked them, here in the field the only sounds they had the energy to make were those of complaint for their aching muscles.
‘Only another day and then we only have to work a half-day,’ Mary tried to cheer them all up. ‘There’s a pub down the village. How about we go down there Saturday afternoon to see what it’s like?’
‘One of them girls we was talking to the other night said that the vicar had said summat about having a bit of a dance down at the vicarage once the weather warms up a bit,’ said Sheila.
Working in the fields was so exhausting that the girls were glad to get to bed at ten after an evening at the hostel spent playing cards, listening to the radio and, when they had the energy, putting on the gramophone and dancing. The dancing in particular was always good fun, especially when they improvised new steps for the popular dance tunes. Rosie had always loved dancing and was very light on her feet, with a natural sense of rhythm that always made her popular as a partner. Because there were no men available, some of the taller girls had to dance the man’s part, and one night when Sheila was dancing with a particularly buxom girl who was taking the part of her ‘partner’, she complained loudly.
‘Oi, Felicity, mind out what yer doing with that chest of yours, will yer? You nearly put me eye out.’
Sheila was a real case, and loved the limelight, acting daft when she had everyone’s attention and making out that she was dancing like the star of some film, all dressed up in silks and diamonds, even when she was wearing a pair of dungarees. She was a good mimic too and soon got them all laughing by taking off the warden.
Rosie was fast sleep when the German planes flew in low over Liverpool and the air-raid sirens screamed their warning. It was the sound of the defensive planes taking off from the nearby RAF airfield that woke her and the other girls.
‘What’s that?’ one of them demanded fearfully, as the first of the bombs exploded.
‘Bombs,’ Rosie told her, shivering. ‘The Germans are blitzing Liverpool. They’ll be aiming for the docks.’
None of the other girls in her dormitory was from Liverpool but she could sense in the darkness of the room their silent sympathy.
It was gone two in the morning when the bombing ceased, and later still when they heard the RAF planes returning to their base.
‘They’re all back,’ Peggy told them shakily. ‘I counted them going out.’
Over breakfast Rosie was still subdued, her thoughts on the previous Christmas and her mother. Whilst she could never condone what her mother had done, neither could she deny that she wished that her mother was still alive. Only now was it actually coming home to her slowly and painfully how bleak and empty her future was going to be without her parents. One day the war would be over and other girls would go out to celebrate with their families. Other girls would go out shopping again with their mothers, and share new happy times with them, but she would never be able to do that now. If she were ever to marry – not that she expected or wanted to, not now, what with all she would feel too ashamed to tell a lad and his family about herself – her mother wouldn’t be there to see her wed, or to see her children. No, she would never marry. Just thinking about the questions she could be asked by any potential in-laws made her feel sick inside. And yet at the same time Rosie felt so dreadfully alone, and the future, when she did allow herself to think about it, looked miserably bleak. Having the war to concentrate on was a blessing in disguise really. It kept her from thinking about other unhappy things. Most of the time anyway.
Given the mood she was in, the last thing she wanted to be confronted with when they reached the potato fields was the sight of a group of POWs and internees being marched into an adjacent field.
‘Your admirer’s with them, Rosie,’ Sheila whispered excitedly to her. ‘He was looking over here, an’ all. Why don’t you give him a bit of a smile?’
‘They are prisoners of war, Sheila; enemies to this country,’ Rosie reinforced so sharply that not only Sheila but several of the other girls who heard her also looked slightly taken aback. Rosie was normally so kind and good-natured.
‘There was a fair few
Italian families living round us at home and they was saying that they’d heard as how a lot of men back in Italy didn’t want to go fighting our boys,’ another girl commented determinedly.
Rosie flushed guiltily, remembering the Grenellis, but stood her ground. ‘You can think what you like. But I don’t want anything to do with them,’ she told the other girls fiercely. Her heart felt as if it was jumping around inside her chest on a piece of elastic, but she wasn’t going to let on to the others about how she felt every time she thought of the tall handsome Italian looking out for her. She didn’t even want to admit those feelings to herself. She was glad that the hard work of planting the potatoes meant that it was impossible for them to talk and even more glad that the Italians were set to work several fields away and out of sight. Not that she would have been tempted to look across to see if he was looking back at her if they had been working closer. Not for one minute.
TWENTY-ONE
‘I couldn’t sleep for them bombs last night. Scared me half to death, they did. They reminded me of what happened to me family, an’ all.’ Sheila shuddered, and wiped the tears from her eyes as the ten girls, scrubbed and spruced up in their civvies, walked slowly down the lane that led to the small village.
Rosie reached for Sheila’s hand and gave it a comforting squeeze.
‘Still, at least I’m still alive and I reckon I have to do their living for them now as well as me own for meself.’ Ere, Pam, are you sure you painted them seams straight on me legs?’ she demanded, craning her neck to look at the backs of her legs.
‘Of course I did. Although just ’oo you’re expecting to meet who’s going to notice if I hadn’t, out here in the middle of nowhere, I don’t know.’
Pam had barely finished speaking when a truck came racing round the bend towards them, before skidding to a halt.
‘Wow, real live girls. Hello there, girls. Please stop and talk to us poor lonely airmen.’
The truck had been stopped strategically so that it almost blocked the width of the lane, leaving the girls no option but to halt. That this was a tactic the truck’s driver had used to good effect before wasn’t lost on the girls, especially Mary, who fixed the driver with a scornful look.
However, before she could say anything the RAF-uniformed boys in the back of the truck, who had been calling out to them, jumped out and came over.
‘Sorry about our driver. He hasn’t seen a girl in so long he’s forgotten his manners,’ one of them, tall, brown-haired and with a soft voice and a warm smile, apologised. ‘I’m Ian Wilton, by the way, and these other chaps are Tom Walker, Charlie Soames, Dick Renfrew, Pete Sayers and Neil Kearns.’
A sharp nudge from Sheila pushed Mary into reluctantly responding with their own names.
‘So what are a stunning-looking bunch of beauties like you doing out here?’ Neil, the driver of the truck, teased them.
‘We’re in the Land Army,’ Sheila answered him, giving him a bold look. ‘And since it’s Saturday afternoon we thought we’d walk down to the village to see what’s going on.’
‘Well, there’s nothing. So why don’t you climb aboard and we’ll all go and look for some fun together?’ Neil suggested promptly.
‘We aren’t that sort, thank you very much,’ Mary answered him sternly. ‘You’ll be based at Hack Green, I suppose.’
‘Yes. That’s right.’
This time it was the quiet one – Ian Wilton – who answered her and who, Rosie noticed, had moved considerably closer to Mary.
‘Luftwaffe’s having a go at Liverpool and it’s our job to see him off,’ Ian told them.
‘We’ve heard the planes going out these last two nights,’ Peggy was informing a shy-looking young man who Rosie remembered had been introduced as Charlie. ‘I counted them going out and coming back in again.’
Charlie blushed and told her fervently, ‘That’s the spirit. I’ll think about you counting us now every time I fly out on a mission.’
‘You were gone a lot longer last night than you were the night before.’
‘Jerry sent over a hell of a lot more bombers last night,’ Ian told them. ‘A hell of a lot more. At one stage it looked as though the whole ruddy city was burning. We did our best but…’
Rosie wanted to know more too but was afraid to ask. In her mind’s eye she could see the city, with its docks and narrow dock-side streets packed tight with homes – homes like her own. She knew what it felt like to see those homes flattened and to know that loved ones had been lost.
‘Well, girls, seein’ as you won’t jump in and let us take you somewhere exciting like Nantwich, how about we all go into the village and have a drink at the pub?’
Mary looked at the other girls and then nodded. ‘But we’ll walk there, thank you very much,’ she told them firmly.
Rosie doubted the village pub, with its thatched roof and low beams, had ever had so many people in it at one time. The shepherd standing at the bar with his dog at his feet eyed them all suspiciously, muttering under his breath as the landlord served them.
‘I don’t think they’re used to girls going into pubs round here,’ Mary laughed, when Ian and the other boys had insisted that they wanted to pay for their drinks.
‘I don’t think they’re used to girls, full stop,’ Ian responded.
They were a cheerful bunch, laughing and joking amongst themselves and making light of the danger of what they were doing, and Rosie could see how taken Mary was with Ian. By the end of the afternoon the two of them were sitting together deep in conversation whilst Peggy and Charlie were openly gazing at one another with stars in their eyes.
When it was time for them to leave, there was no hesitation at all from Mary about accepting a lift for them all in the lorry back to their hostel.
That evening when they heard the planes going overhead, Rosie suspected that Peggy wasn’t alone in counting them.
Later on, lying in bed, Rosie couldn’t stop thinking about Liverpool and those she knew who lived there. The look on Ian’s face when he had mentioned the Luftwaffe’s attack on her home city had told her far more than any words or protective assurances could have done about the severity of the situation. She might have parted with her aunt on bad terms, but Rosie still couldn’t help thinking how her dad would have wanted to know if his sister was all right. She was guiltily aware that although she had left her aunt the details of how she could get in touch with her, she hadn’t written to her. Perhaps now she ought to do so, if only because she knew it would be what her father would want her to do.
And then there was Rob. She might not have loved him enough to want to marry him but she had cared about him, and naturally now she was anxious about him, wondering if he was safe, especially knowing that as a fireman he would be exposed to a great deal of danger during the bombing raids. She couldn’t ask for time off to go home to Liverpool, and she certainly hadn’t got enough money to afford her train fare there and back, but she would write to her aunt and to Rob. It wouldn’t do any harm to get in touch with them to ask how they were, Rosie admitted.
On Sunday morning the girls, dressed in their ‘formal’ uniform, marched down to the village church to attend the service.
The vicar greeted them, whilst his parishioners eyed them uncertainly. During their training they had been warned that farming communities were cautious about accepting strangers, especially when those ‘strangers’ were young women. Rosie’s eyes stung with tears when the vicar prayed especially for the city of Liverpool and all those in it.
After church they were invited back to the vicarage, where the vicar’s wife welcomed them with home-made carrot cake and very weak tea.
Most of the girls who had been at the hostel when they arrived had gone home on Saturday, as they were allowed to, if they could afford to do so, so that Rosie and the others virtually had the hostel to themselves.
The warden served them a roast dinner, laughing when she heard one of the girls exclaiming, ‘Potatoes. Boy, am I going to enjoy them
after this last week.’
‘If you think working potato fields is bad, just wait until you’ve spent a week in winter hedging and ditching,’ she warned them.
Nudging Peggy, Mary took advantage of the warden’s good humour to ask her if it would be all right for them to invite some RAF ‘friends’ round one weekend.
‘If you’re talking about boyfriends…’ the warden began disapprovingly.
‘It’s just a group of young RAF lads we met up with in the village,’ Mary told her hastily. ‘They said as how they missed having a bit of female company, being so far away from home and their mums and sisters, like, that we thought…’
The warden gave her a beady-eyed look. ‘Well, just so long as there’s no funny business I suppose it will be all right. But that means no going into any dormitories, and you all staying down in the recreation room where I can keep an eye on you. I’ve heard of these hostels that have got a bad name for themselves with the girls getting up to all sorts, and I can tell you that this hostel is not going to become one of them. His Grace wouldn’t approve of that at all.’
‘And nor would we,’ Mary told her promptly, causing Sheila to stifle a giggle, which earned her a killing look from Mary once the warden had gone.
‘Trust you to nearly go and spoil everything,’ Mary complained.
‘Well, seeing as His Grace has five kiddies he must have got up to a bit of you-know-what in the bedroom himself,’ Sheila defended herself airily.
‘You can’t go saying things like that,’ Mary protested, scandalised. ‘He’s a married man!’
On Monday morning Rosie was delighted to discover that her group of land girls were being taken off working in the potato fields and sent to another farm to do the milking, even though that meant an earlier start and no proper breakfast until after the milking was done.
