The Land Girls

by Victoria Purman

  Flora had thought the same thing, had obsessed over it during each dark and frigid night since she’d been back at Waterloo Street, sobbing under the blankets in her old room, having tried too hard to hold on to her grief until she could be sure Jack in the next room was asleep.

  He would be alone now in this house full of memories, of ghosts. She would come back to him. Once the war was over, and her stint in the Land Army was complete, she would come back to Camberwell and be the family that he had lost.

  ‘Mrs Tilley left some biscuits,’ Jack said. ‘You want one?’

  Flora shook her head. ‘I’m not really hungry, to be honest.’

  Jack shrugged. ‘Me neither.’ And then he stood wearily, checking his watch. ‘I’m going down the pub for a pot or two before closing. You don’t mind do you? A few of the blokes from work said they’d be there.’

  Flora reached for his hand and squeezed it. ‘You go.’ It would do him good to spend some time with his friends after having spent four days with his sister, helping her see to the funeral arrangements.

  ‘Won’t be long,’ he said, before bundling himself into his heavy winter coat, jamming his flat cap on his head and closing the front door hard behind him.

  When the house was quiet again, Flora found her notepaper and a pencil and went to the kitchen to sit at the table. She glanced around at all that was so familiar. The china sugar bowl. Her father’s favourite teacup in the drainer on the kitchen sink. The floral curtains at the window. The Coolgardie safe that didn’t need ice in this weather. Her father’s map pinned to the back of the kitchen door that he’d marked with an X every time he’d heard news on the wireless about Frank’s regiment.

  Tears welled and she let them fall. She missed Charles. She missed the happiness that had bloomed inside her when she’d been at Two Rivers. She missed her mother and her father and her youngest brother.

  She pressed the pencil to the page and started.

  Camberwell

  August 4th, 1943

  Dear Charles,

  We are all grief-stricken here at Waterloo Street. Today Jack and I buried our father. It was sudden, which was a blessing, but that doesn’t make his loss any easier to bear, as I’m sure you understand.

  Jack and I have spent the past few days talking of our parents and our memories of the happy life they created for their children. There is some comfort in knowing that they are together once again. Jack will stay on in the family home in Camberwell and when I’m finished with my Land Army work, I shall come back to this house too. Frank’s room will always be here waiting for him, exactly as he left it, and the three of us will muddle along as best we can when things go back to the way they were before the war.

  I have one more week before my compassionate leave ends and I’m back to the Thompsons. I’m hoping the hard work will be a distraction from too many thoughts about those who are lost and far away.

  I was very sorry to hear the news about Mr Henwood’s grandson. It seems like death is stalking us all.

  Please pass on my kindest regards to Mrs Nettlefold and the girls. Tell them I wish I was there to taste all those new biscuits, which sound delicious.

  Charles, I wish you were here so I could borrow some of your strength. I need it now more than ever.

  With kindest regards,

  Flora

  P.S. I hope you find the enclosed useful. I had become quite proficient at knitting socks before the Land Army and I’ve had some time in the evenings since I’ve been home. It was comforting to take up my needles again. I apologise for the colour. All I have is khaki wool, I’m afraid.

  Two Rivers

  August 10th, 1943

  My dearest Flora,

  I received your letter today and I couldn’t wait a moment longer to write to you to express my most sincere sympathies to you and your brothers on the death of your beloved father. I wish I could offer more comfort to you than words scratched out in pencil on a page. I know, from the loss of my own dear father and my wife all those years ago, that you will come to a point where you will be able to think of them with a smile instead of tears. When you reminisce, you’ll remember their best moments, not their last. It’s an extra burden you bear being the oldest sibling, even more so because you have been like a mother to your two brothers. I don’t believe a man ever gets over the loss of his father. It will take a toll for the rest of their lives, but it will be a reassurance to them both that they have you. I’ve told my mother your sad news and she also sends her deepest condolences. He must have been a very proud man indeed to have two of his children serving their country.

  You are a caring and generous woman, Flora, and I know you will recover too. Will you allow me to distract you from your grief with some news from Two Rivers? It was my birthday last week and Mother and the girls baked a sultana cake. I have a piece of it, spread with a thick slice of butter, on the plate next to me while I write this letter to you.

  I am in the kitchen, alone. Everyone else is long in bed. I enjoy the solitude, I must admit, when the rest of the house is asleep and I have time to think. Rain is loud on the roof overhead, such a welcome sound, and when I close my eyes I imagine it to be the percussion of a New York jazz band, the very one I last heard with you in the sitting room here at Two Rivers. The fire from the wood stove is warming and I’m not too far away from the kettle for a cup of tea, or the cake in the event I feel like another slice. The socks you sent with your last letter are warm and a perfect fit. You can’t imagine my surprise when I opened the package and found them inside. You really are very generous.

  My birthday, and indeed your sad news, has given me pause to look back and reflect on my life, which I have been doing in earnest these past few months. I have turned thirty-six years old, which is an age my father never had the good fortune to reach. It is a sobering thought. I do feel very fortunate to still have my mother and my daughters even though we feel his absence regularly, my mother especially.

  Daisy celebrated her seventh birthday yesterday. Her grandmother knitted her a new cardigan, in the brightest of autumn grapevine orange with matching buttons, and Daisy didn’t take it off, even for bed.

  Flora, Daisy’s birthday is also the anniversary of the death of my wife, Harriet. We spoke only briefly of her when you were here back in February, but tonight I’m of a mind to talk to someone about her and I apologise that it is you I am telling. I know you will understand.

  As you might imagine, it is a day filled with both happiness and grief for me. She was very much loved and we had a very happy marriage. The girls, sadly, don’t remember her at all. Violet was only eighteen months old when her mother died. As you would have seen for yourself, my mother has been their mother since then, a role she has carried out with the deepest love and affection. I don’t know what we would have done without her.

  I suppose what I’m trying to say is that life goes on, Flora. We have to bounce back after tragedy because there’s no other choice, is there?

  Things with the war are looking more positive, it seems, with the Allies making headway in the Pacific, island by island, but sadly there seems to be no end in immediate sight. This of course means your dedicated work with the Land Army will go on for the time being and your brother will continue to serve. I think of Frank often and feel very sad that he received such tragic news while he was so far away from home. You told me once that he is a cheeky young man. I hope his strength, courage and good humour stand him in good stead for a safe return. I should like to meet him when the war is over. From all you’ve told me about him, I’m sure we would be the best of mates.

  Flora, my thoughts are with you always, especially at such a time.

  I know you’ll be returning to Geelong soon (you may already be there when you receive this letter) and to your farm work, but I hope you find the time to reply. I anticipate the post perhaps more than I ever have done before, in hope that every trip I make into Mildura delivers an envelope bearing your name.

  Please kn
ow that any news, no matter how much delayed, can be a reassurance and very much appreciated and treasured by its recipient.

  With fondest regards,

  Charles

  P.S. The pressed flower with this letter is from the front garden at Two Rivers. The roses continue to bloom, even in the drought. I hope it reminds you that life goes on, even when times are the toughest.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  January 1944

  Flora peered through the dust-streaked window of the train to check that she was only two stops from Mildura. She studied the timetable in her hands. This was Red Cliffs and there was only Irymple to go before she would be back.

  It had been eleven months since she’d seen Charles and she was nervous and excited and cautious all at once. He had promised in his most recent letter that he would be waiting for her at the station and she didn’t doubt his word. They had written to each other faithfully since she’d left Two Rivers the previous summer. Letters from Frank abroad were sporadic, and Jack wrote occasionally, but Charles had been a regular and faithful correspondent. Sometimes their letters to each other had been quick notes filled with good wishes; at other times, there had been pages and pages of sincere outpourings of sadness and grief. Flora had kept every single letter from Charles. They were packed in her suitcase in the baggage carriage; she hadn’t cared about sacrificing a couple of books to fit them in. It had been worth it to carry Charles with her as she’d travelled the country.

  Was she surprised to still be working in the Land Army? Unfortunately not. Progress in the war seemed to be glacial and to Flora it seemed everyone had become more reluctant than ever to wish it over for fear of being disappointed once again. All she could allow herself was the wish that the world was one year closer to the end of the war. Along with the ‘Happy New Years’ people had called to each other, there was a fervent wish to be strong, to carry on, with more perseverance and courage than they’d ever known.

  She continued to wish for a victorious peace, for a time when the war was won, when Frank and so many other boys would be home, when order would be restored to her world.

  When the war was won.

  Flora had found herself looking both backwards and forwards since the New Year celebrations; back with a sense of pride in her work and grief at the loss of her father, but forwards with tremulous hope. When she’d arrived in Mildura the year before, she’d harboured naive expectations that the war would be over by now, and that she wouldn’t be needed at Two Rivers again. But no one had come home from New Guinea, unless they were dead. Australian troops were still held in prisoner-of-war camps in Europe and through South-East Asia. And even though the Russians were driving the Germans out of the Ukraine and Italy had fallen and the Allies were closing in on the Axis powers, no one dared yet predict an Allied victory.

  Flora had left the Thompsons’ farm the week before Christmas to be home in Melbourne with Jack. She wouldn’t be going back to Geelong. Mr Thompson had died suddenly of influenza in early November and Mrs Thompson had decided to sell up and move to Traralgon to live with one of her daughters. Flora had stayed until all the chickens had been sold off and she had written to Charles to let him know she’d be back at Two Rivers in early January if she was needed. His reply had been swift. ‘Your room is waiting,’ he’d written. ‘As I am, with great anticipation.’

  Christmas in Camberwell had been a sombre evening with a roast chicken and a dull-tasting Christmas pudding with no custard. She and Jack had exchanged presents, books and biscuits, and talked of their father and brother. They’d listened to the king’s Christmas message and carols on the wireless with a glass of sherry and a toast to absent friends. There had been nothing fancy or generous about their gifts to each other. They’d had an unspoken understanding that they would be frugal, that they could only truly celebrate Christmas when Frank was home for good.

  Flora had spent the week between Christmas and New Year scrubbing the house from top to bottom and clearing out the last of their father’s clothes, something Jack had promised he would do but hadn’t been able to face. She’d tidied up the long-dead Victory Garden and had visited Mrs Jones next door for afternoon tea, and the older woman talked for a long time about how much she missed Flora and Jack’s father and then cried into her neatly pressed handkerchief.

  New Year’s Eve was hot and Flora and Jack had celebrated the passing of the year with a trip to St Kilda on crowded trams to eat an ice-cream and dip their feet in the ocean. Flora had refused to ride the Big Dipper at Luna Park, despite Jack’s urging, and could barely watch it shoot into the sky and then plunge back down without feeling sick. Jack teased her about it good-naturedly, and after he’d ridden it twice he took off into the city to meet his latest sweetheart, Doreen. Flora hadn’t minded going home on her own. It was only when she’d turned the key in the front door and walked into the empty house, still smelling of her father’s tobacco, that she felt the urge to run to Two Rivers and all that was familiar there. The Camberwell house she’d grown up in didn’t feel like home any more. Her father wouldn’t be sitting in the kitchen with his newspaper when she got home from work. He would never sit in his favourite chair again, smoking into the evening, listening to the latest news from the war. And most heartbreaking of all, he would never know the fate of his youngest child.

  When Flora opened her eyes in the mornings, she’d fought the sense of sad disappointment that she wasn’t seeing the ceiling in the sleep-out at the Nettlefolds’ house in Two Rivers. It had a hold on her now, that place, with its red dirt and its blue skies and its vines and its freedoms.

  Back in November, Jack had posted a Christmas parcel to Frank, filled with a fruit cake, new socks, a comb, a toothbrush and toothpaste, some new pencils and a notepad. Flora found herself obsessing over whether or not he’d received it. A distance seemed to be growing between them that was out of her control, and infuriating. Would he think his brother and sister had forgotten him? They’d exchanged quick telegrams to tell him about their father, but Frank’s letters had become more infrequent during the past year, and with every week that passed without any news, Flora had battled with her thoughts about why. And then a letter would arrive, filled with jolly details about the heat and the rain and the hijinks Frank had been up to with Shorty and Johnno and Westie, and Flora had cried with relief and let herself believe the lie that he wasn’t anywhere near the action. And then the wait would begin all over again.

  On the second of January, Jack had announced to Flora that he and Doreen were engaged. They’d met at a dance at the Rialto and she’d been dazzled by his jazz foxtrot. And clearly much more, judging by the way she barely uttered a word and simply gazed at him all through dinner.

  ‘But we’re going to wait until after the war to get married,’ Jack had told her as he’d reached across the table for Doreen’s hand. ‘I can’t marry this lass without Frank as my best man, can I?’

  To celebrate, the three of them had a special dinner at the Canton Tower Cafe on Bourke Street. Flora tasted dim sims and Chow Min for the first time and then cried with happiness for her brother and his fiancée.

  The train chugged to a stop at a siding to unload boxes of cargo. Flora stepped into the aisle, stretching, staring out to the hot distance, crops of wheat tall and still in the heat.

  As her destination grew closer, Flora thought over how much the war had changed her life in every conceivable way. What would she be doing right now if there was no war to fight, no enemy to defeat, no deaths to avenge, no country to protect? Frank wouldn’t be abroad and in danger. Jack wouldn’t have received the white feather and she would still be working at Mr McInerney’s. There would have been no need for the Land Army and she wouldn’t have met Charles. Guilt and happiness battled in her heart at the thought.

  She had barely been able to keep a straight thought in her mind the past week, in anticipation of returning to the place she loved. Two Rivers really had spoilt her for any other posting. How had Charles and his fa
mily celebrated Christmas and New Year? She had some presents for them all tucked in her suitcase and then worried that it was presumptuous. Was it wrong to feel so elated about going back to Two Rivers?

  The train slowed and pulled into Mildura station, its horn sounding as it screeched and came to a stop. She searched the crowd and her heart leapt when she saw Violet and Daisy shouting and waving at her and when she could focus through her sudden tears, she read the words on the piece of paper Daisy was holding above her head: Welcome back Miss Atkins. She replied with a happy wave and the girls hopped on the spot. Happiness bubbled up inside Flora and came out with a laugh and a cry. She gathered up her book and her handbag, set her Land Army hat on her head with a quick shove, and stepped off the carriage into a bustling crowd. A family was weeping over a soldier on crutches; postal staff unloaded bulky canvas bags onto a trolley; a pair of bosomy older ladies heaved their hold-alls along the platform; and a gaggle of Boy Scouts chatted excitedly about an adventure in the country.

  And then, two little girls’ spindly arms were around her waist, clutching at her, giggling into her skirt. She threw her arms around them, laughing and happy, surprised and overwhelmed by their reaction.

  ‘Look, Daddy. Here she is!’

  ‘Hello, girls. Oh, you look so well, both of you. And so grown-up! I can’t believe my eyes. Daisy, where are your plaits?’ Flora tugged at the little girl’s new bob cut.

  Daisy shook her head from side to side, flicking her hair out. ‘Nan cut them off. I was tired of having long hair. And it looks just like yours, Miss Atkins.’

  ‘Why, it does, too. And Violet. You’re almost as tall as me. It must be all this fresh air.’

  Violet peered up at Flora. ‘No, I’m not!’

  ‘You will be soon, I’m certain of it. Now, a little bird has told me that you’ve learnt to bake since I was last here. I can’t wait to try some of your biscuits.’