Land Girls (43 page)

‘… the whole summer to talk.’

Stella heard, from a long way off, her own delirious echo. They parted to walk through the clover grass, sweet-smelling and full of bees. The cows were calm now, but wary-eyed.

‘I see this as a beginning,’ Joe said.

* * *

Edith was waiting for Ratty at her garden gate. Once again she had taken the precaution of putting on her own gas mask, and had brought Ratty’s with her so that he might benefit from its protection on the journey up the garden path.

When she saw he was escorted by two land girls she sniffed, inconveniently steaming up the window of her mask. But it was not the occasion for the full force of her indignation. Rather, here was a good chance to show how right she had been. She took off the mask.

‘What did I tell you, Ratty Tyler? War’s all about us now. Thought the bombs might have got you.’

In truth she had thought no such thing. Terrified by the screech of the plane and the shaking walls of the cottage, she had hurried upstairs and lain under the bed, choked by dust and fluff that had accumulated untouched for years.

‘That they didn’t,’ said Ratty.

He hadn’t enjoyed an afternoon so much for ages. Once the bloody noise of the enemy plane had died down … all the excitement of the fire, the cows leaping about as if the devil himself had got into them, lovely sight of the girls running about waving sticks, then showing the fire engine where to go … No wonder his old ticker was pitter-pattering a bit. But then the holy one and the floozie, bless their hearts, had come and given him an arm up the lane. He had privately leaned harder on the holy one than he had on the floozie, was able to smell her sweet sweat among the smoky smell. And here he was, able to pay back Edith’s horrible fright with a trick of his own: stop her in her tracks, it would, to see him on the arms of two pretty girls. Though, of course, he’d pay for it later. Last pan out of the window again, no doubt, but worth it.

‘Well, we must be going,’ said the holy one, so gentle, all smiles.

‘Take care, Ratty.’ The floozie gave him a kiss on the cheek, bless her heart, must have been reading his thoughts. Ratty had the pleasure of watching his wife’s face contort with disbelief.

‘None of that now,’ was all she managed. ‘Come along, Ratty … your tea’s on.’

A lie, of course, showing off to the girls. His tea was never on. Edith handed him a gas mask.

‘I’m not putting that thing on, not for anyone,’ he chuckled. He winked at the girls, not unnoticed by Edith.

They turned away, waved. Ratty, leaning on his stick, watched till they were out of sight, impervious to his wife’s calling. He chuckled to himself. Best afternoon for as long as he could remember, that’s what he thought.

When they had left Ratty, Prue and Ag felt in need of a walk before returning to the farmhouse. They took a long way round through fields far from the burnt-out rick, and met Stella coming up the lane. Ag felt a slight shakiness in her limbs – the memory of Nancy’s stiff corpse with its burst tongue would not leave her mind. Prue twittered on about having seen a ghost of Barry that turned out to be his friend. Ag was not fully concentrating on the story. But Stella, striding towards them, Ag noticed, was calm as ever: the only one who looked as if the events of the afternoon had cast no traumas.

Stella herself, a yard or so from the others, saw intuition in Ag’s eye. Ag never missed a thing.

‘Cows all right?’ Ag asked.

‘They seemed to have settled down. No injuries.’

‘Poor old Nancy,’ said Prue.

The girls linked arms, marched towards the farm in step. It was something they had never done before, something it would not normally have occurred to them to do. They laughed at their own silliness. They sang. Their relief flowed tangibly between them. Their fierce closeness was apparent to all three, comforting, binding: it had been growing over the months, and the evening of the bomb it was silently acknowledged.

* * *

Joe and his father took several hours to bury the dead cow. Joe dug the deep grave – the ground was hard and dry – with the energy of three men. It was twilight by the time they finished. Walking back up the lane, spades in hand, they heard the first nightingale of the year.

‘Don’t know what he’s celebrating,’ said Mr Lawrence, whose gaunt face was grey with fatigue.

Supper was waiting for them in the oven. They quickly ate it in the kitchen, then joined the others to listen to the nine o’clock news. There had been an unusual daytime raid on Exeter: about fifty bombers.

‘Lawks,’ said Prue, ‘they’re coming closer.’

She was right. A few days later there were attacks on Bath two nights running. The Nazi destruction of Baedeker towns had begun. A new feeling of unease, which even the hardest physical work could not quite obscure, affected everyone at Hallows Farm.

With one accord, and with great difficulty, Stella and Joe continued to act in public as they always had. They avoided glances, they avoided working together more than usual. Joe continued to share his time in the fields equally with all three girls. The day the cows were taken away in two lorries, he allowed Prue to cry on his shoulder. Ag and he would still spend an occasional evening in his room for ‘tutorials’. But the thing that he found hardest to conceal was the extraordinary energy that had come upon him. He worked harder, for longer hours, than he could ever remember. Strangely, he suffered no attacks of asthma, usual in early summer, and never felt tired.

But a profound charge between two people is impossible to conceal completely from a beady eye. To the keen observer, a couple attempting to disguise their state surrender many clues. There’s the over-careless tone of voice when addressing the loved one, glances slanting away just not fast enough to escape notice, dozens of small coincidences that result in proximity. Ag was aware of all these things. In one of their rare private moments Stella and Joe agreed Ag must know something, though her own suspicions were also carefully disguised; and they did not care. Indeed, it was a rewarding thought that someone else shared their secret: though they themselves, beyond their certainty, knew little of what that secret constituted.

So few and brief were their moments alone that there was no time to talk, to analyse, to make declarations, to try to explain to each other the mystery of what had happened. All they could do was acknowledge the crystallizing of their feelings in broken, inadequate words, marvel at the existence of one another each day – ‘waking alert with wonder every morning’, as Joe said. They kissed, sometimes, very gently, for fear of conflagration.
Strangely
, they found themselves possessed of a great calm when it came to physical embrace: as if they knew there was time.

One day in early June, Mr Lawrence set Stella the task of rolling a field of young wheat. It would be a long day, he said, but if she kept at it she might finish by the evening. Mrs Lawrence suggested that, to save time, she would send someone down with a basket of food and a thermos for lunch. Stella, who had become almost as expert at ploughing as Prue, looked forward to the day – hours in the field alone with her thoughts.

Despite the departure of the cows, and no milking, the girls continued to get up at five every morning. It had become a habit, and as the weather grew hotter they were glad to start work in the cool of the early morning. Stella and Prue were usually assigned to some job on the tractors. Mr Lawrence had bought a fine second-hand machine, an International. Ag discovered the knack of harrowing with Noble: she enjoyed her days tramping up and down, hands firmly guiding the ungainly machinery behind the patient horse.  It was still misty when Stella skilfully swung the tractor, trailing the roller, through the gate of the wheat field. The sky was a dull silver, gravid with more light than the human eye could discern, but proving its existence by making the emerald spokes of the young wheat shine. Stella looked up, warily. She no longer trusted clear, silent skies. She turned off the engine to plan her route. The cry of an early peewit came from the adjacent clover field. There was a powerful smell of clover (a single flower would, for the rest of her life, bring back that afternoon of the bombs, she knew), and hawthorn, and dew. Then, as she restarted the engine, these scents were joined by a strong whiff of paraffin.

The job of rolling was easy in comparison to that of ploughing a straight furrow. All the same, it required a certain concentration to make sure not a single green shoot went unpressed. The hours sped, as random thoughts of Joe danced in the landscape: the sky paled to a colourless sheen, and by mid-morning a brilliant sun was warming Stella’s bare arms.

Just as she was beginning to feel hungry – love, she had found, had increased rather than diminished her appetite – she saw Joe climbing over the gate, carrying a basket. She was surprised. She had expected one of the girls, or Mrs Lawrence herself, who, trapped in the house for so many hours, had a particular fondness for picnics. With the coming of the warm weather, she often made an excuse to take sandwiches to the girls in the fields, where she would join them for an hour on a rug under a hedge.

Joe waved, began to walk round the edge of the crop to the part of the hedge where Stella aimed to stop.

He helped her down from the tractor. She was stiff, sweating: dungarees were not much less hot than breeches. They sat under a single may tree, in the shadow of its pale crust of flowers. Joe unpacked the basket, spread out egg sandwiches, radishes, young lettuce and strawberries from the kitchen garden, a thermos of strong sweet tea.

‘Mother, in all her innocence, said as I was the least busy I should be the one to come. She even apologized!’

Stella laughed. ‘What are the others doing?’

‘Prue’s discovered a natural affinity for the mechanical potato planter. She’s roaring up and down West Field, planting at the rate of knots. Any luck, there’ll be no more sowing by hand. Your back better?’ He put a hand on her shoulder blade for no more than a second. Stella nodded. ‘Ag’s got a hard job harrowing: lot of stone. But she seems to enjoy it, all the walking. Dad’s gone off to fetch a load of clover seed. That’s got to be planted among the young corn—’

‘– to come up later,’ said Stella.

‘You’re learning. You’re not doing a bad job, either, by the looks of it.’ He glanced round the field. ‘A third done, I should say. You could be finished by seven.’

‘What I can’t understand,’ said Stella, lying back in the long grass, head on her arm, ‘is the whole
point
of rolling. Why aren’t the shoots damaged?’

‘Rolling firms up the earth, giving them more support to grow from. They’re so feeble, so malleable, at this stage, they just rise up again soon after the roller’s passed.’

‘I’ve noticed that.’ Stella yawned, longing to sleep. ‘I think I’d rather enjoy learning more about farming.’ She screwed up her eyes against the pinpoints of sun that crinkled through the may.

‘I never intended to follow the family footsteps. I suppose I shall have to, now. Still, it’s not without its interests. I won’t mind that much.’

‘Yorkshire?’

‘Yorkshire.’

‘With Janet?’

‘No.’

‘What?’ Stella sat up, faced him.

He sucked at a long stem of wiry grass.

‘I’m not going to marry Janet. How could I, now? It would be a travesty. How could I marry Janet now there’s you, there’s us?
He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty
. Dr Johnson.’

Stella smiled, her mind a turmoil. They were silent for a while. Then Joe took her hand.

‘Are you going to marry Philip?’

Deliberately, Stella gave herself no time to think. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course not. For the same reasons as you’re not going to marry Janet.’

The fluttering shadows, the brilliant haze of the young wheat behind them, the cloudless sky – all trembled, mirage-like, in Stella’s eyes. Joe pulled her to him, kissed her, then lowered her head to the security of his chest, arms about her.

‘I know that love is begun by time,
’ he said. ‘See? I know my
Hamlet
as well as my Johnson.’

Stella laughed, pushing back the tears. ‘Ag must be a good teacher.’

‘Ag’s a very good teacher. An original brain behind all that awkwardness.’

‘I love Ag and Prue. And your parents.’

‘I do, too.’ Joe looked at her, half solemn. ‘
I love you
: that’s the hardest line to say. Must be. For everyone, mustn’t it?’

‘I only said it politely to Philip – unconvincingly.’

‘I hope this isn’t unconvincing.’ He kissed her hair. ‘Stella? Did you hear? I said it to you. I shall go on saying it from this day forth, for the rest of our lives.’

‘
Joe
. I must get back – I love you too – on the tractor.’

‘Hear that? A peewit. I love you, I love you, I love you: three times. How about that?’

‘I heard it this morning. God, I love you too. I keep saying thank you to God. He must be absolutely sure, by now, of my gratitude. How did it happen, Joe? How did it creep up on us?’

‘Time. From the safety of mere friendship, just observing. Being near. Liking. Liking more and more. Then, one day, the transformation scene. The magic.’

‘You saw first. I just kept on being puzzled by things: not understanding why I was put out if I hadn’t seen you for half a day.’

Joe laughed. ‘The intimations were all too easy to see. No: they’re subtle as the traces of a rat’s tail, to use Ratty language. Can so easily be missed by the untuned eye. When, I want to know, my Stella, was the precise moment, for you, that you realized …?’

‘I think …’ Stella hesitated. ‘It must have been when you held up the dead lamb, and skinned it.’

‘Fastest skinning I’ve ever done.’ Joe laughed again. ‘I was showing off, of course.’

‘Of course. And when, for you?’

‘I was teetering on the edge during
They Can’t Black Out the Moon
. When it came to
Falling in Love Again
– well, there was no further hope. Wings irreparably burned. It was like no experience I’d ever known. A kind of rebirth. I’m surprised you didn’t notice my peculiar state on the way home. I was terrified of touching so much as the sleeve of your coat. And the funny thing was, of course, what you never knew, was that
you
were falling in love again, too. Only differently from all those false alarms before.
Properly
.’