Authors: Anne Bennett
At the farmhouse they found Enid using the treadle sewing machine, making curtains for the windows that didn’t have shutters, using the horrible black material she had put by and hoped she’d never have to use.
‘It’s a two-hundred-pound fine if you let a chink of light show, they say, so I can’t bury my head in the sand any longer,’ she said. ‘But I must admit it will depress me totally to have black curtains covering the windows.’
Neither Meg nor Joy blamed her one bit. ‘Still,’ Enid said, ‘that’s the way of it today and we have just got to get on with things.’
What everyone was really curious about was the gas masks, and a few minutes later, when Meg opened the box and hauled the mask out, she thought she had never seen anything so hideous in the whole of her life. When she fitted it over her face it was even worse, because she found it hard to breathe and the stench of rubber was overpowering. Joy felt the same.
‘God,’ she said, ‘if we all have to wear these things for long, Hitler won’t have any trouble invading us. No one will be able to stop him because we’ll all be asphyxiated.’
‘We may be glad of them if he uses poison gas,’ Will said.
‘I don’t know whether I wouldn’t rather take my chance with the gas.’
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Will and Stephen assured her.
‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that,’ Enid said soothingly. And she added, ‘Let’s not fight amongst ourselves. Hitler and his armies are what we have to focus our energies on. Mind you, the news just now is enough to make anyone tetchy.’
When they settled down to eat the steaming pie – which Will declared ‘champion’ – Enid said to Joy, ‘What religion are you, Joy? C of E?’
Joy shrugged. ‘Suppose so. Never really thought about it ’cos it’s not as if we went to church or anything.’
‘Would you like to go to St Michael’s?’ Enid asked. ‘We could take you in on the cart with us?’
It was on the tip of Joy’s tongue to say she wouldn’t bother going anywhere, but with the world situation as it was, she thought a few prayers and church attendance couldn’t hurt. She knew, though, that she would feel nervous of going to a strange church where she knew no one so, accepting the fact that one church was very like another, and that all Christian churches worshipped the same God, she said that she would like to go with them to Mass at St Mary’s.
Later that day, now the girls were staying with them, Enid asked about the rates the land girls were paid and learned that Joy was to be paid thirty-two shillings because she was eighteen but Meg only twenty-eight shillings because she was younger.
Enid was annoyed. ‘We paid our two male farm hands thirty-eight shillings a week and you two will be doing the work of three,’ she said. ‘And you must pay keep out of that.’
The girls nodded. ‘Well, I’ve never heard the like,’ Enid went on.
‘The farm hands, because they were young, single chaps, used to sleep in the rooms we had made for them above the barn. You could have slept there too because we made them right cosy and warm, with a Primus stove and all, but we just thought being young ladies you might be more comfortable in the house. But what I am saying is we never charged them for those rooms. It was part and parcel of their wages, for farm work in general isn’t well paid, but for you to get so much less and then to pay keep out of that doesn’t seem right, especially as you are doing us a favour.’
‘Have many hours a week are you expected to work for this princely sum?’ Will asked.
‘Fifty in the summer and forty-eight in the winter,’ Meg said. ‘And I think we must pay you something just for the inconvenience of us being here.’
‘I agree,’ Joy said. ‘It might even be one of the rules or something.’
‘Maybe,’ Enid said. ‘God knows, there are rules for every damned thing these days. So how about if I take a third of your money, that’s seven shillings from you, Meg, and eight shillings from you, Joy.’
‘Oh, are you sure that’s enough?’ Joy asked.
Enid never got to reply, however, because suddenly Will lifted his hand, crossed the room and turned up the wireless for the news. The newscaster was saying Poles were fighting for their lives although everyone knew that they had little chance against the disciplined German armies. Meg felt really dispirited as she went to bed that night.
Sunday morning before Mass there were clusters of people standing about all talking of the possibility of war. Enid did interrupt the talk to introduce the two girls to her sister, Lily, whom she’d told them about, and Meg was surprised when Lily said the three children she had with her – one girl and two younger boys – were her new evacuees, because she had understood that Lily never bothered with children other than Stephen. These three looked extremely malnourished and were stick-thin and scrawny, reminiscent of many children in the streets Meg had been born in.
But she knew in the care of Enid’s sister, Lily, they would be all right. She had been taken with the older woman straight away. She was a little on the plump side, like Enid, and had the same lovely, kind face, with twinkling blue eyes and round rosy cheeks. Her hair was cut much shorter than Enid’s and worn loose, so dark curls peeped out from under the bonnet she wore for Mass. She had a beautiful smile, a soft voice, and a sort of goodness seemed to ooze out of her.
They went into the church as the strains of the organ could be heard. Meg thought the inside of the church matched the outside for it too was rather plain. Around the walls were the carved figures of the Stations of the Cross and it had a simple high altar and the only ornamentation on it was a Lamb and a Flag etched in a recess underneath the altar table. There was a very old statue of the Virgin Mary that Enid whispered came from the Benedictine friars when their convent was ransacked by Parliamentarians in the civil war.
When the Mass began though Meg was impressed by the priest, who said that there might be testing times ahead and that they had to pray for courage to meet the challenges. She prayed earnestly for just that.
They didn’t linger after Mass. Meg, Will and Enid had taken communion and no one had eaten breakfast, so they were all famished. They wanted breakfast over and done so they could concentrate on the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain’s, wireless broadcast, which was due that morning.
It was almost a quarter past eleven when the sombre tones of Neville Chamberlain announced that because Hitler refused to withdraw his armies from Poland, Britain was at war with Germany. Although it was what they had all expected, for a few seconds no one spoke, stunned at the magnitude of the terrible reality.
‘Thank God the doctor is removing the plasters next week,’ Stephen said, breaking the silence. ‘He said the bones have knitted together nicely.’
‘So what happens now?’ Meg asked.
‘Back to camp,’ Stephen said. ‘A spot of physio will get me fully fit again and not a moment too soon I’d say.’
Immediately after the declaration of war, places of entertainment such as cinemas, theatres, concert halls – and any similar places where large numbers might gather – were closed, but that made little difference to life on the farm. The whole of the country was shocked, though, when the day after war was declared, news came in of a passenger ship, SS
Athenia
, carrying evacuated children and mothers to America, torpedoed and sunk with the loss of nearly 120 lives.
‘Shows what barbarians we are dealing with,’ Enid said fiercely, very agitated by the news. ‘Fancy attacking and sinking an unarmed ship filled with civilians.’
‘Well, maybe now you’ll realise why I felt I had to join in the fight,’ Stephen said. ‘This man and his fearsome armies have to be stopped.’
‘Yes, and it’s a fight we must win,’ Meg said.
‘Of course,’ Will said. ‘And our bit is to grow enough food to feed the nation, because what has been done to an unarmed passenger ship can be done to unarmed merchant ships just as easily. The more we are able to produce here, the less we have to import and the more sailors’ lives we can save.’
As the time drew near for Stephen to leave, he realised how much he would miss Meg, though he had known her for such a short space of time. He wanted to ask her to write to him, but she was only sixteen and so he asked his mother’s advice. Enid was a wise woman. She had seen the lovelorn way Stephen had looked at Meg in unguarded moments and knew what he thought of Meg, just as she knew that Meg liked Stephen a great deal, but in a brotherly way. So she said that she was sure that Meg wouldn’t mind writing to him but he shouldn’t read anything into it other than a young girl writing to a soldier. He couldn’t ask for what she wasn’t ready to give.
Meg was initially a little wary about writing to Stephen. ‘Doesn’t it signify some sort of relationship, a girl writing to a man like that?’
Stephen, who very much hoped that they might eventually have some sort of relationship, was mindful of his mother’s advice. ‘Not today, with so many men leaving. All soldiers value letters from home,’ he said.
‘Who else writes to you then?’
‘Mom and Aunt Lily.’
‘No girls?’
‘No,’ Stephen said. ‘I have never asked a girl to write to me until now.’
‘I can write as a friend.’
‘That’s all I am asking you to do.’
‘Then I would be pleased to write to you, Stephen.’
‘He’s sweet on you,’ Joy said, when Meg told her this as they undressed for bed.
‘No,’ Meg said. ‘I am just writing as a friend. He says the soldiers get lonely and like to know they not forgotten by those at home.’
‘He’s sweet on you,’ Joy said again. ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face, but if you can’t see it then you can’t see it.’
Meg knew Joy must be seeing things that weren’t there because Stephen had never displayed anything but friendship towards her, and that was all she wanted as well, so she treated Stephen the same way as she had since she first met him.
His ankle and arm were very stiff when the plaster casts were removed and he spent the next two days striding about the farm, swinging his sore arm. Meg was often inveigled into going with him. She didn’t mind because she found him so easy to talk to. They discussed everything under the sun but the war he was returning to.
On the third day after Stephen’s plaster casts were removed a military vehicle drew up before the farmhouse to take him back to camp. After embracing his parents he took Meg in his arms for the first time and kissed her chastely on her forehead and then he did the same to Joy.
The land girls and the Heppleswaites settled back into the rhythm of farm life again once Stephen had returned to camp. Meg was really enjoying her work on the farm and knowing it was so essential was an added bonus. She no longer thought five a.m. was the middle of the night, and though she was always ready to seek her bed, she didn’t fall into it with the black exhaustion that had felled her originally. Because she was always so busy she was happy, but she felt guilty for feeling that way when there was a war on, a war that had already claimed lives and would claim many more before it was over.
The unfolding of the seasons was more apparent to Meg and Joy now they were living rural lives, and the daylight hours were so important to their work. Now the nights were really drawing in and there was a definite nip in the air most mornings. Winter wasn’t that far away, but what was bothering Meg far more than that prospect was a lack of letters. She had written to all the children and asked Doris to pass the letters on to them. She eagerly awaited their replies so that she could write to them direct. Nothing came, though. She had also written to Kate via Richard Flatterly’s office and got no reply from her either. Terry wrote spasmodically, and in fact the only one who wrote regularly was Stephen. Meg eagerly looked forward to those and just hoped she would hear something from the others by Christmas.
One week was very like another, but every Saturday Enid would go to Penkridge, where she visited the market, chatted with friends and neighbours, and called to see her sister. She took Meg and Joy with her, as she said they needed to get away from their farm work now and again.
Meg and Joy really appreciated this, for once they reached Penkridge they were left to their own devices. They would explore the town and would often met with other land girls, many of whom still lived at the hostel. It was soon obvious to the two girls that living with the Heppleswaites had been a good decision to make, for many of the other girls had a tougher life than they, sometimes due to the attitude of the farmers they were sent to. In contrast, Will and Enid were very kind and Meg and Joy were treated like members of the family. A real closeness had begun to develop between them, and this in turn made the girls work even harder.
However, it wasn’t only the countryside that was quiet; so, according to the letters Joy’s mother wrote, were the towns and cities; sometimes the absence of men and the dreaded blackout were the only signs that there was a war on. There were no bombs dropped, as the Government had indicated there would be, and many were questioning the wisdom of sending children all over the country away from their parents.
‘Mind you, it opened the eyes of some in the village, taking in those evacuees,’ Enid said one Saturday night as they sat round the table. Penkridge had taken in a great number of children. ‘Our Lily said she doubted many of the townsfolk had ever seen such poverty and deprivation. She was no better, mind, for she hadn’t seen it either.’
‘Where were the children from?’ Meg asked.
‘Liverpool,’ Enid said. ‘Lily didn’t put herself down to take evacuees, as she never has much to do with children if she can help it, so she didn’t go down to the village hall the day they arrived. She was surprised to get a knock on her door later that evening and opened it to find the billeting officer there. All the children had been taken by their prospective foster parents, except these three. The billeting officer had trailed them all around the village, but nobody would or could have all three of them and the girl had promised her mother that they wouldn’t be parted. Someone suggested they try Lily because she has this three-bedroomed house with only her in it.