by Annie Groves
She hadn’t been sleeping anyway, what with worrying about Liverpool being bombed and trying not to think about the handsome young Italian POW. It made her feel both afraid and angry with herself that she should have let him creep into her thoughts the moment she left them unguarded. She didn’t know why she had done, either. He was Italian, after all, and if that hadn’t been enough to put her off him, the fact that he was too good-looking for his own good should surely have done. Aldo had been good-looking, or so people had said – she had never seen the appeal. She had to get Italian men right out of her head – all of them – but especially that young man she had seen working in the field, she warned herself fiercely. There was no place for them in her life – or in her heart – and that was the way things were going to stay.
And then just when she’d thought she put everything to do with Italians right to the back of her mind, Peggy went and got her worrying all over again when she commented innocently, ‘You know, Rosie, you have a bit of a look of them Italians,’ after Sheila had complained that they were working with only a couple of elderly cowmen for male company whilst the POWs were working on another farm.
‘No I haven’t,’ Rosie retorted so angrily that she could see that she had startled Peggy. ‘I’m as British as anyone else here.’
‘Well, of course you are, Rosie,’ said Mary soothingly. ‘And no one’s saying any different.’
‘I didn’t mean to cause any offence, Rosie, I’m sure,’ Peggy offered a bit stiffly, looking hurt. ‘I only meant that you are so lucky to have such pretty dark curly hair, just like them Italian lads.’ She sighed enviously. ‘Mine’s that thin and it won’t curl no matter what I do to it.’
‘Me dad’s hair was curly,’ Rosie told her truthfully. ‘Mine’s nothing special, not really.’ She felt guilty now for having been so sharp with Peggy, who was always so sweet-natured.
At the first opportunity she got, which was when they all left the milking shed to go for their dinner, she caught up with Peggy and slipped her arm through hers, saying quietly, ‘I’m really sorry, Peggy, about how I was earlier. I hope I didn’t upset you. I didn’t mean to snap at you like that.’
‘It’s all right, Rosie. You don’t have to explain,’ Peggy told her generously. ‘I should have thought before I spoke, knowing what you must be feeling, what with your mum and dad and all the trouble you’ve had.’
Rosie stood as still and stiff as though she had become rooted to the milking shed floor. How could Peggy possibly know about her parents’ marriage? She hadn’t told a soul about her background since leaving Liverpool. She felt cold and sick with shock.
‘Rosie, are you all right?’ Peggy asked her timidly. ‘Only you’ve gone ever such a funny colour. Mind you, I’ve bin lying awake meself at night worrying about them lads having to fly into Liverpool so I can understand how you must feel, you being from there, and having lost your mam and dad on account of Hitler.’
The release from her dreadful fear felt like blood returning to ice-cold limbs, bringing with its release an aching physical pain, Rosie recognised as the tension left her body. She realised that Peggy hadn’t been talking about her parents’ marriage or her own birth after all, but simply about Liverpool being bombed and her mother and father’s deaths. Now Rosie felt doubly guilty. She reached out and squeezed the other girl’s hand.
‘I have been worrying,’ she admitted. ‘It’s horrible, Peggy, seeing houses and buildings and even whole streets ending up just a pile of rubble, or sometimes gone altogether. There’s craters in the roads you could lose a bus in, and people with no homes to go to any more. When your house has been bombed you just can’t take it in, somehow; you just stand there, thinking that it’s like something on the newsreels, that it isn’t real and that if you close your eyes and then open them again your house will be standing there, just like it should be.’
‘Oh, Rosie, you are brave. I don’t know as how I’d go on if that happened to me,’ Peggy shivered. ‘I feel that scared just listening to you talking about it.’
‘Well I won’t do then,’ Rosie told her firmly, forcing a reassuring smile, as she added, ‘There’s no need to, after all, because we needn’t worry about being bombed out here. The country is the safest place to be.’
Peggy’s anxious look gave way to relief. ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ she agreed. ‘And I’m going to stay here until the war’s over, Rosie, and never go back to live anywhere where there’s going to be bombs. It makes me feel sick wi’ nerves just thinking about what it must be like being in one of them buildings when a bomb gets dropped on them.’
Rosie didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to upset Peggy by talking about her own ordeal trapped in the bombed-out Technical College. She would never forget it, though; sometimes she dreamed about it and about her mother being trapped and her trying to reach her, but these were things she could never tell anyone else. And after all, Rosie reminded herself stoically, a lot of people went through worse. There had been those in Liverpool who had been bombed out more than once and who still gamely got on with their lives as best they could. Everyone was different, though. There were some folk like that and some like Peggy. She thought she came somewhere in between. She didn’t think of herself as being brave in any way but neither did her fears torment her in the way that Peggy’s seemed to do.
To Rosie’s disappointment they were only at the dairy farm for two days, whilst they filled in for another gang, and on the Wednesday morning they discovered that they were being sent to a different farm, to do some weeding.
To make matters even worse, when they arrived at the farm they discovered that George Duncan was in even more of a foul temper than usual. When one of the girls from another gang asked to be excused because she wasn’t feeling well, he stepped up to her and yelled at her in such a loud voice that everyone including the lorryload of POWs that had just arrived, could hear. ‘No you can’t. Bloody women and their ruddy women’s problems.’
The poor girl looked close to tears and Rosie really felt for her. She gave the foreman an indignant look on the poor girl’s behalf as he strode past them on his way back across the yard towards the lorry, and then had to hold her breath as he saw her and stopped to glare at her.
‘That was brave of you, Rosie,’ Peggy breathed admiringly. ‘The way he looked at you just then would have scared me to death.’
‘You’ll have to watch your step now, Rosie,’ Mary cautioned her. ‘He’s a bully and no mistake, and if you want my advice you don’t want to be falling foul of him.’
Rosie knew that she was right, but it was too late to regret what she had done now. The arrival of the POWs had caught her off guard after so many days of not seeing them. They looked so dejected, with their bowed shoulders and general air of defeat, that she felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for them.
Immediately she tried to distance herself from her feelings and to focus on something that would stiffen her spine. Like him, for instance. He certainly had had a bit of an air about him that said he thought a lot of himself. Not that she had noticed him that much, of course, but you could tell when a lad was a bit on the arrogant side with just one look. And she certainly wasn’t going to look across at the men again just to check to see if he was there with them, and she hadn’t noticed.
But thanks to Sheila she discovered that she didn’t have to, because the other girl had obviously already had a good look at the men, and was able to tell her teasingly, ‘That good-looking lad as fancies you isn’t here, Rosie. Shame.’
‘Will you stop going on about him?’ Rosie hissed back to her. ‘He doesn’t fancy me, and even if he did, I don’t fancy him.’
‘Can I have him then? He’s a smashing-looking lad, with a lovely smile, and them big brown eyes of his! Oooh, it makes me insides go all funny just thinking about them,’ Sheila giggled.
Rosie certainly wasn’t going to respond to Sheila’s silliness. Why, she hadn’t even been close enough to him to see if his eyes were brown! They
probably would be, though – that warm gorgeous brown that could melt your heart with a single glance. And Italian men learned young how to give that adoring amorous look that turned girls’ heads. They were nothing more than flirts, the lot of them, and she would certainly never be taken in by one of them. Sheila was welcome to him.
It was a long walk to the field they had to work, carrying their hoes and the buckets for the weeds that had to be buried deep in a trench at the bottom of the field the foreman had set the POWs to dig.
‘I’m going to go over and have a chat with them lads,’ Sheila announced as soon as the foreman had disappeared.
‘Sheila, you can’t,’ Rosie protested. ‘We’re not supposed to have anything to do with them, and if the foreman catches you—’
‘He won’t! Anyway, what’s wrong? Don’t you want to know where your chap is?’
‘No I do not,’ Rosie replied fiercely, ‘and he is not my chap.’
But it was too late. Sheila was already taking advantage of the foreman’s absence and edging her way round to where the men were working.
Rosie refused to watch her, concentrating instead on her weeding. Sheila was going to get them all into serious trouble if the foreman came back, and Rosie didn’t want to be dragged into her mischief any more than she had to be. Angrily, Rosie jabbed her hoe at the weeds, slicing them off and throwing them into the bucket.
When Sheila finally came back, Rosie pretended not to have noticed, but Sheila wasn’t the kind to keep quiet.
She gave a gusty sigh and announced with obvious disappointment, ‘Well, that were a waste of time. There’s not one of them can speak a word of English. It turned out that they’re not the same lot that were around the other day.’
Rosie couldn’t avoid the Italians completely, even though she would have preferred to do so, because the girls had to take their buckets of weeds over to the trench the men were digging to throw them in.
The foreman was back now and bullying them dreadfully, and the POWs had a crushed, exhausted look about them. Brief snatches of their conversation reached Rosie and a wave of nostalgia swept over her, as those fragments of the familiar language of her old friends took her back to her childhood. Just hearing Italian being spoken overwhelmed her with sadness, leaving her feeling miserable and forlorn.
‘It’s no wonder them poor lads look the way they do with that foreman treating them like that,’ Mary said sympathetically when she came back from getting rid of her own weeds. ‘There’s one down there that doesn’t look much older than me own kid brother, poor little thing.’
Rosie had seen the young boy she meant, but whilst the other girls were expressing their sympathy, instead of joining in, Rosie shook her head and said fiercely, ‘Well, I don’t feel sorry for them. They’re the enemy, after all, and if it wasn’t for the likes of them then there wouldn’t be a war.’
She could see from their faces that she had shocked the other girls.
‘That’s a bit hard, isn’t it, Rosie?’ Jean protested. ‘I’ve heard as how that Mussolini was forcing men to fight by threatening their families. There’s a lot of Italians who don’t agree with that Fascism stuff. And as for them lads down there, that poor kid looks half scared to death of the foreman already and he’s got a bruise the size of an egg on his forehead. If you ask me we should show them a bit of sympathy, just like we were told at Reaseheath.’
‘You can if you like, but I’m not going to,’ Rosie answered doggedly, but she knew that her face was burning bright red with a mixture of chagrin and defiance.
‘Fine. Well, you go and have your dinner with the foreman then, ’cos the rest of us are going to have ours with the POWs,’ Jean told her smartly.
Rosie watched them as they walked away. She felt as though a huge uncomfortable lump of misery had taken root inside her chest. But she wasn’t going to swallow her pride and run after the other girls. She wasn’t going to have anything to do with any Italians, no matter what anyone else said. Italians had brought her nothing but heartbreak and misery. First Bella turning against her, and then Maria and la Nonna abandoning her, and finally the news that Aldo had been her mother’s lover. And if her supposed new friends preferred their company to hers, well then, that was their loss, wasn’t it? Her throat prickled and her eyes were smarting but Rosie wasn’t going to let herself admit that it was her own fault that she felt hurt and left out. It was the Italians that were to blame, just as an Italian had been to blame for causing her father so much pain. Just look at the trouble her mother had brought on their small family, thanks to getting herself involved with one of them. Rosie didn’t want to be tarred with the same brush as her mother but, more importantly, she didn’t want to betray her father’s memory by being friendly to members of a nationality that had caused him so much distress. The other girls could do what they liked. She wasn’t going to be budged.
Even so, as the afternoon wore on Rosie was miserably conscious of the way she was being excluded from her friends’ chatter. Once again she was all alone.
It was growing dusk before the foreman returned to tell them they could finish work.
‘’E certainly gets his ruddy pound of flesh,’ the girl hoeing next to Rosie grumbled. ‘I can hardly see me ruddy hoe, never mind the weeds. And to think they’re only paying us twenty-four shillings a week, and we have to pay for our own board out of that. I’m beginning to wish I’d stayed put and got meself a factory job. That foreman’s made us work all this time but his breath stank of beer and you can bet he knocked off ages ago and went off to the pub whilst we were still having to graft.’
Rosie didn’t say anything but she too had smelled the beer on the foreman’s breath.
As the girls were lining up to leave the field for the long walk back to the farm, the POWs were standing beside the trench, but the next moment, the foreman, who had been yelling at them to get in line, grabbed hold of the young lad the girls had felt so sorry for earlier and gave him such a shaking that he dropped his spade. The foreman swore at him and let go of him, bending to pick up the spade, which he then drove down hard into the ground at the boy’s feet.
They all heard the boy cry out when he didn’t jump back swiftly enough, and they saw the way the sharp spade sliced open the flesh on his leg as he fell over.
Rosie had to smother a horrified cry of her own whilst the other girls protested loudly against the foreman’s bullyboy behaviour.
‘Poor little sod. That must really have hurt him,’ Mary said angrily as the young man struggled to his feet, helped by his friends.
Several of the girls hurried forward, ignoring the foreman, to see if the boy was all right but he was so obviously embarrassed by their concern that they fell back again.
‘It doesn’t seem too bad,’ Audrey reported to Mary. ‘He wasn’t bleeding very much and he can walk.’
‘It was still a rotten thing to do,’ Jean objected.
‘The man’s a proper bully,’ Mary agreed as they all started to trudge wearily back to the farm. ‘I can’t bear that kind of behaviour.’
It was almost dark when they finally got back to the hostel.
‘You should have seen my bathwater,’ Mary grimaced later on in the evening when they were all in the common room. ‘You could grow potatoes in it, it was that thick with mud.’
‘Just as well George Duncan can’t hear you saying that, otherwise he’ll have us tekin’ it back to the field,’ Sheila groaned.
‘Shush!’ Mary demanded all of a sudden. ‘Listen.’
All the girls went quiet as they heard the now familiar sound of planes overhead.
‘That’s what you should be thinking about when you’re saying how sorry you are for the POWs,’ Rosie said bitterly once the planes had gone.
‘Italians aren’t the same as Germans, Rosie,’ Mary insisted firmly. ‘And I have to say that I was surprised at you for the way you acted today. I thought better of you than that. I really did.’
Red-faced, Rosie bent her head, he
r eyes burning with tears.
Half an hour later, after Rosie had gone up to the dormitory, feeling that her company wasn’t welcome in the common room, the door opened and Mary came in.
‘I’m sorry I was a bit sharp with you earlier, Rosie,’ she said quietly, ‘only I can’t help thinking about how it’s been on the newsreels – about the way some of Hitler’s men have been treating them as they’ve taken prisoner, and I wouldn’t want to think we was like that, in this country. I’d like to think we had some decency – war can’t strip you of that unless you let it.’
‘I don’t mean the Italians any harm,’ Rosie told her, relieved that she was being offered an olive branch. ‘I just don’t want to get too friendly with them, that’s all. And the way Sheila was going on about…well, I didn’t like it.’
Mary shook her head. ‘Well, I don’t know, Rosie; they seem a decent enough lot of lads to me. And the girls felt you was being a bit unkind.’
‘I have my reasons for what I’ve said,’ Rosie told her, ‘but…but I can’t talk about them.’
‘I can’t say that I understand, because I don’t, but you’re a good sort, Rosie, and I don’t want us to be bad friends. Why don’t you come down and get your supper before Jean eats it for you?’
Mary was smiling encouragingly at her and holding open the door. Jean was always hungry, so Rosie returned her smile and got up.
No one was smiling later on that night, though. They had all heard the noise of the bombing of Liverpool, and then had all listened to it dying away, and now, although none of them had said anything, Rosie knew that, like her, the others were straining their ears for the first sound of the planes returning to Hack Green.
‘Here they come,’ Peggy squeaked, her voice high with relief.
Everyone was counting silently and as they got to ten, the tension in the dormitory mounted. Everyone knew that two fewer planes had come back than had flown out, but no one dared say so. Rosie was holding her own breath along with everyone else, willing the engine noise of the two final planes to break the tension. The seconds became minutes, and still no one spoke. And then in the darkness someone gave a small muffled anguished sob. Rosie knew immediately that it would be Peggy. Pushing back her bedding, she slid her feet onto the cold lino and pattered quietly over to her bed, only to discover that most of the other girls had had the same thought.
