Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings (3 page)

In a corner of the public bar of the Ledburton Arms two young women were sitting over half-pints of shandy. Their skirts were short, their jumpers tight and their hair, which had spent the day in curlers under headscarves, was marvellously dressed in sausage curls in the front and long, unravelling tresses at the back. Their eyebrows were plucked
into carefully shaped crescents, their lashes were stiff with mascara, their lipstick was beetroot red and they sat smoking moodily. Marion, the taller of the two and who had dyed her mousey hair a rich plum colour, screwed her fag-end into the ashtray and sighed.

‘Sod Bayliss,’ she breathed.

‘Bugger hostels,’ echoed Winnie, blowing smoke. During the two years they had been deployed to work on the Bayliss farms, and while Roger had been able to retain the three labourers who had only recently been conscripted, Winnie and Marion had been billeted at the village pub. This had ideally suited them, for here, after work, when they could emerge from the chrysalis of dirty dungarees, rain-soaked coats and muddy boots and become the sort of creatures blokes buy drinks for, take to the flicks and to the dance halls in Exeter, they could meet whomever was on offer or had strayed in their direction from any of the several military and naval establishments in the area. Now it seemed that their boss was about to take on another eight girls and billet them in the disused farmhouse that he had acquired some years previously when he had bought out a neighbour. Once installed in the new ‘hostel’, which was over a mile from the village, Marion and Winnie knew how rarely they would encounter anyone but aged, groping farmhands or boys unfit or too young for the armed services and therefore too broke or immature for their purposes. Furthermore, the hostel would have rules. And
a warden to enforce them. And Mr Bayliss for her to report to if she was disobeyed. The news of this change in their circumstances had been broken to them earlier that evening on their arrival back from work when, in the kitchen of the pub and still clad in their working clothes, their landlady had set before them their plates of dinner which, as on most Thursdays, consisted of fried sausages, a pile of mashed potato and another of swede, all of it doused in thick Bisto gravy and followed by suet pudding under a spoonful of golden syrup. Then, just as they had drained their shandy, smoked the last of their fags and the future seemed bleak, the door of the bar burst open and a bunch of likely lads came stumbling in. They sported various uniforms: Fleet Air Arm, Navy and Army. On setting their eyes on Marion and Winnie they responded at once to the girls’ body language. Their bearing altering perceptibly, they slowed, regrouped and then, swaggering and grinning, approached their quarry.

‘Oh, aye!’ said Marion under her breath to her friend, baring her teeth in a wide smile, her Geordie accent warm in the thick air. ‘’Ere come the lads!’

Alice was at her dressing table smoothing cold cream into her skin when she became aware of Edward-John at her elbow. He was wearing his pyjamas and his hair was on end where he had lain on it.

‘You should be asleep,’ she said.

‘I woke up,’ he said. ‘I was worried.’

‘Try not to be.’

‘You are,’ he said. His eyes were huge, missing nothing. ‘Anyway, where were you when I got home from school?’ Alice had almost forgotten about the other disaster of the day.

‘I had to go out into the countryside,’ she told him. ‘And then wait ages for a bus back again.’

‘I didn’t know where you were and I don’t like not knowing where you are.’ His voice was thick and she knew he was close to tears, which she guessed had as much to do with his father’s visit as her own, earlier, absence.

‘I’m sorry, darling. Won’t do it again. Promise.’ Then she lightened her tone and asked him whether he had remembered to brush his teeth. He smiled sheepishly and she watched him go to the hand basin and squeeze paste onto his toothbrush.

‘But where did you go?’ he persisted, shoving the brush around his mouth.

‘To see about a job,’ she said. Impressed, Edward-John stopped brushing.

‘Gosh!’ he said. ‘Like a workman, you mean? What would you have to do?’ The memory of the unsatisfactory interview swept over Alice but she controlled her voice and almost cheerfully told her son that this particular job entailed looking after land girls. Cooking their meals and
supervising their hostel. ‘What’s a hostel?’ was his next question, between spitting and turning off the tap.

‘This particular hostel is a farmhouse,’ Alice answered, a vision of the crumbling, damp building solidifying as she spoke. But her son’s eyes were widening.

‘A farmhouse? A real farm? With animals?’ Alice had not noticed any animals.

‘I don’t remember seeing any,’ she said, discounting the chickens in the yard and the distant sheep. ‘But I suppose there must be animals there…’ Her son was transformed by this news.

‘Animals! And haystacks! And carts and tractors and things! Can we go there? Can we go tomorrow?’ His delight was infectious. She found herself smiling with him as he pleaded, climbing beguilingly onto her lap, hugging her, pressing his cheek against hers, engaging her eyes via the dressing-table mirror.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘It would be too far to get you to school each day… You’d have to board…except for the weekends…’ He was interrupting her, his keen eyes inches from hers.

‘I don’t care! I don’t! Let’s go there, Mother!’

In the pub, as the landlord called time, Marion and Winnie, closely pressed by several uniformed male bodies, were at the centre of a group clustered, singing, round the piano. The
chorus of ‘You’ll Never Know’ filled the smoky air and in Marion’s handbag were two lipsticks, a bottle of crimson nail varnish and several pairs of silk stockings.

Margery Brewster’s ‘office’ was a desk in the corner of a small ante-room in Exeter Town Hall. There was a sign that read ‘Women’s Land Army’, a telephone, an in-tray and an out-tray, stacks of papers, tidily clipped together, and an immaculate blotter. She invited Alice to sit in the chair opposite to her own and sent a girl for two cups of tea. She knew, from Roger Bayliss, that Alice had accepted the job and had been asked to report to the Land Army office to complete the formalities.

‘So your son’s needs made up your mind for you, did they?’ Margery Brewster asked when Alice had explained the reasons for her decision. ‘I was almost sure you would turn us down!’ Alice took the cup and saucer in her hands and declined sugar.

‘I’m hoping he will be happy on the farm,’ she said. Margery looked at her sharply.

‘And will you be?’ she asked, sliding Alice’s contract across the desk and indicating the places that required her signature. Alice felt that she was unlikely to be happy anywhere but she told Mrs Brewster that she thought she would be. The interview was obviously over. The tea was too hot so she left half of it in the cup, got to her feet and shook the proffered hand.

‘Monday week,’ Margery said. ‘At the farmhouse. As early as possible.’

A thin girl, dressed in a long dark coat, thick stockings, lace-up shoes and with her felt hat in her hand, approached Margery’s desk and stood uncertainly, her eyes on Margery’s face, as though awaiting a command. Her face looked scrubbed, the skin stretched and almost transparent. She wore no make-up. Her pale auburn hair was drawn back into a bun on the nape of her neck. Alice, as she moved away, heard Margery say ‘Next!’ and saw the girl creep forward.

‘Name?’ demanded Margery.

‘Tucker, Miss,’ whispered the girl. ‘Hester Tucker.’

Roger Bayliss sent a man in a truck to fetch Alice and her belongings. The man, Ferdinand Vallance, was a labourer who, in his late teens, had been injured in an accident on the farm. One leg, so badly crushed that it was barely saved, remained twisted. This gave Ferdie a weird, gyrating gait and prevented him from working as fast or as efficiently as he had done before the injury. It also made him unfit for active service. All this information was imparted to Alice when, after delivering Edward-John and his luggage to the preparatory school where he was to spend weekday nights, Ferdie drove the truck out through the suburbs of Exeter and onto a minor road which wound over the hills to Ledburton.

‘Baint that I doan wanna do me bit in the forces like
any other fella,’ he had told Alice, almost unintelligibly. ‘Mean, no one ud choose to ’obble ’bout the place like I ’as to do!’

Her leave-taking from Edward-John had been easier than Alice had expected, due in part to its rushed and peculiar circumstances. They had hugged. On Friday night he was to be put on a bus to Ledburton where he would be met. She promised him two whole days on the farm and left him smiling at the prospect.

Her few pieces of furniture were unloaded from the truck and installed in her room. Two threadbare Persian carpets had been spread, one in each of the floor areas and, as well as her mother’s desk and the two armchairs, there was a low rosewood table and a bookcase, presumably contributed by her employer. A fire was burning in the grate and another roared up the wide chimney of the recreation room.

‘Mr Bayliss says as we’re to keep ’em in day and night till the place dries out,’ Rose informed her. ‘These walls has got a dozen years of cold stored in ’em! Once they’m warm ’twill feel better, he says but ’twill take weeks, I reckon!’

In the kitchen the range had smoked sulkily, refusing to draw until Roger himself climbed to the chimney and removed the generations of jackdaw nests that were blocking it. After that the kitchen too began to heat up, steaming as the damp was drawn out of the walls, condensation misting the slate floor.

Rose was working at speed. Unlike Alice, she knew where everything was, which of the deliveries of furniture had already been made and when others were expected. She had decided where the pots and pans would be stored and which drawers would contain the cutlery and which the ladles, kitchen knives, potato peelers and sieves. This, she was well aware, gave her advantages over Alice. She could show off her efficiency and her energy to Mr Bayliss and did so, literally running rings round Alice as the cold of the house seeped through the thin soles of Alice’s shoes from stone floors still barely above freezing point.

They had less than three days before the first intake of girls was due and, as Rose eagerly pointed out, still had no chairs, no saucepans, no mattresses and only half the required linen.

‘And this is a list of their next of kin,’ Margery had begun, sitting beside Alice on one of two packing cases and spreading her paperwork on the kitchen table. ‘Put it in your file and don’t lose it whatever you do. There’ll be eight to start with; another couple later in the season.’ She produced a second sheaf of papers. ‘Ah…here are the travelling arrangements. One copy for me and one for you… Winnie Spriggs and Marion what’s-her-name will be fetched from their billet after work. One girl…Tucker, Hester Tucker, is coming over by bus from Bideford. She’ll need meeting at Ledburton at three-thirty. There’ll be a couple – a Mabel Hodges and an HM something or other – on the London
train and two more coming via Bristol. This one…Georgina Webster…is being driven over by her parents. So we can cross her off our lists of worries.’

In her warm and sunny bedroom, Georgina was, at that moment, trying on her Land Army uniform. The corduroy breeches fitted well and did not displease her. The fawn aertex shirt was very like the white ones she wore for tennis and although the green jumper was thick enough to flatten her breasts, her figure was too lithe, athletic and, where appropriate, rounded for any garment to significantly diminish its charm. She looked, in fact, very much like the girl on the posters advertising the Land Army, which were, that year, widely displayed up and down the country. Georgina’s hair was straight, thick, dark and silky. She wore it in an almost 1920s bob, which not only accentuated her good bones and compelling, grey eyes but was easy to dry after swimming in the summers and after riding in the rain during the winters. She laced up the heavy shoes. The khaki socks felt rough against her skin but were thick and would keep her warm. She reeled under the weight of the greatcoat with its ugly, wide lapels and buttoned it, barely able to breathe, across her chest. But the hat! The hat she could not, would not, tolerate. She went noisily down the polished wooden stairs and into the dining room where her parents and her brother were finishing breakfast. They stared, laughed as she clowned with the hat, then fell silent,
their smiles fixed. Her mother rose from the table and began gathering the dishes.

‘It rather suits you, darling!’ she said gamely. ‘I feel as though I’m packing you off to boarding school again! Uniform and all!’ She was not happy about her daughter’s virtual conscription into the Land Army but there was a war on and people were having to make sacrifices. Hers, she knew, were less irksome than most. Her husband got to his feet, tucked his folded newspaper under one arm, held his daughter at arm’s length and told her, not for the first time, that she was a good girl and that he was proud of her. Both mother and father left the room while the brother and sister remained, looking at one another, she, smiling, he, increasingly downcast.

‘What’s the matter, little brother?’ Georgina asked. ‘Come on. Tell.’

‘I’m embarrassed, Georgie,’ he said. ‘I don’t like what’s happening.’

She laughed, removing the hat and sending it skimming through the air to land on the window-seat.

‘Well, neither do I but who cares!’ she said breezily. But Lionel was not to be cheered.

‘I don’t mean the bloody hat,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be going.’

As a condition of war, exemption from military service was permitted to one son in each farming family. Second and successive siblings, male or female, were required to do
war work of some description. Georgina, at twenty and able to avoid combat by enlisting in the Women’s Land Army, had done so willingly, not only to protect her
nineteen-year-old
brother but because she herself, influenced by the convictions of her parents, was a pacifist. While not enthusiastic about the prospect of the Land Army, she found it tolerable and was pleased that she would be allowed to continue with a correspondence course, run by the Ministry of Agriculture, which would, if she was successful, give her recognised qualifications and develop the skills she might one day need in order to farm either her own land, or someone else’s. Lionel, whose interests lay elsewhere, would replace one of his father’s men until the war ended and then go to university. Although logical, the plan left Lionel with a nagging conscience, which neither his sister nor his parents could ease.