Alice's Girls (6 page)

Alice knew better than to question Roger about the accident and was left to speculate on the strange effect it had had on him. Gwennan Pringle told Alice that she had read in the paper that some men who had been injured in the war ‘came over funny’, like Mr Bayliss had.

‘It’s to do with that shell shock the Tommies got after the Great War, it said in the paper,’ she continued, watching
Alice ironing one of Edward John’s school shirts. ‘But Mr Bayliss has never fought in no war – so it couldn’t be that, could it!’ Alice slid the iron across the white cotton and it seemed to Gwennan that the warden was paying very little attention to what she was telling her. ‘Anyhow,’ she concluded, ‘that’s what it said in the paper.’ If Mrs Todd took no notice of her or even of what it said in the paper, what was the good of talking to her at all? ‘I’ll go to my bed now,’ she sighed. ‘I’m that tired … Goodnight Mrs Todd.’

‘Oh …’ Alice said, suddenly aware that Gwennan was speaking to her. ‘Sorry, Gwennan, I was—’

‘Miles away. Yes, you was, wasn’t you? ’Night, Mrs Todd.’

‘Goodnight, Gwennan.’

‘Mrs Todd … could I have a word?’ This phrase, or something very much like it, was a familiar one to Alice, and after almost two years as warden of the Post Stone hostel, there was hardly a girl who had not, at one time or another, made the request.

Today it was Hannah Maria Sorokova – whom everyone at the farm called Annie – who had tapped on the door marked ‘Warden’ and was waiting, respectfully, to be invited into Alice’s bed-sitting room.

‘I’m of Polish extraction,’ Annie had solemnly informed the other land girls on the day they had all arrived at Lower Post Stone.

‘Extraction?’ Marion had bellowed. ‘You make yourself sound like a tooth!’ And she and Winnie had howled with such ribald laughter that Rose Crocker, spooning out mashed potato, that first supper time, had pursed her lips in disapproval.

Apart from her name, her classic Jewish looks and the nationality of her antecedents, Annie was an East Ender, born, if not bred, in Duckett Street and – when she had arrived at the farm – had spoken with a broad, cockney accent. This, Alice noticed, had, over the past few months, become moderated. Possibly due to her friendship with the well-educated Georgina, or because of her association with Alice herself, Annie no longer dropped her aitches and now said ‘singing’ instead of ‘singin’, ‘I came home’ instead of ‘I come ’ome’, and ‘how d’you do’ rather than ‘pleased to meet you’. If she wanted to attract the attention of a waitress she did not attempt to summon one by calling her ‘miss’.

Winnie and Marion accused her of putting on airs.

‘First off she sets ’er cap at Georgina’s toffee-nosed brother and now she’s after this Hector fellow!’

While it was true that Annie’s intense but brief affair with Lionel Webster ended badly, it had, for both parties, been an innocent and mainly happy interlude. When Lionel had succumbed to the pressures of his middle-class upbringing and ended the relationship, Georgina had been ashamed of her brother’s snobbishness. Annie, however, accepted the situation, consigning it easily enough to the past, possibly because Lionel, although handsome and passionate, was
hardly more than a schoolboy in her eyes and no match for her lively mind and more mature temperament. Hector Conway, on the other hand, and rather to her surprise, suited her well.

The two of them had met when Hector, in his capacity as a researcher with the War Artists Scheme, had visited the farm to inspect the huge mural which a Jewish refugee had painted on a pair of barn doors shortly before taking his life. Hector’s interest in the painting, which represented the persecution of the Jewish community in Amsterdam at the time of the Nazi invasion, was genuine enough, but it was the mutual attraction between him and Annie Sorokova that had drawn him back to the farm on several occasions and had resulted in him being introduced to Annie’s Polish family during her brief Christmas leave.

‘It’s about Hector,’ Annie told Alice, who was unsurprised to hear it.

‘How is he?’ she asked, lightly. ‘You saw him at Christmas, didn’t you?’ Annie nodded.

‘He came to tea,’ she said. ‘He met my family. Everyone liked him, Mrs Todd, and he talked to Grandfather for ages about Polish art, and he’d heard of my uncle who was a well-known engraver. He wants me to visit his family in Oxford and stay overnight so he can show me the colleges …’ Annie paused, watching Alice, who was very aware of the importance of her reaction to this news.

‘That sounds lovely, Annie. When d’you hope to go? You’ll need a couple of days’ leave, I expect? We’ll have
to sort it out with Mr Bayliss and he is a bit short-handed at the moment, what with Mabel only working part-time because of the twins … But we’ll manage something …’ She watched Annie’s delicate face cloud, the perfectly shaped lids were lowered over her expressive eyes. Alice asked if there was anything wrong.

‘Not exactly
wrong
, Mrs Todd, but … well … Hector’s father is a don, you see.’

‘Yes. I remember you telling me. But how does that affect …?’

‘They’re what’s called academics, Mrs Todd. All his family are. With letters after their names. Hector’s father, his brothers and even this Aunt Sybilla person who lives with them. They’re all scholars and that. His mother died, you see, when the boys were quite young and there’s a housekeeper and everything … I just think they might reckon I’m, you know, not …’

‘Not what, Annie?’

‘Not … not educated enough, Mrs Todd! And that I don’t speak like they do or think what they think or know about the things they know about. That I’m not … well … not good enough for them.’ Annie’s voice faltered into a doleful silence and Alice sighed.

‘Oh Annie! It’s this class thing, isn’t it?’ she said. Annie nodded and they sat without speaking for a moment or two. ‘We’ve talked about this before, haven’t we?’

‘Yes, we have. And you said it’s all nonsense and that what with the First World War and then the suffragettes
and now this war, society is changing and it’s not where you went to school or your accent or whether you say “serviette” or “napkin” that matters, it’s who you are and what you do!’ Although Annie had precisely remembered Alice’s comments, she repeated them without much conviction. Alice nodded and waited, guessing that Annie’s next word would be ‘but’. ‘But …’ she began, exactly on cue, adding, embarrassed, ‘You’re laughing at me, Mrs Todd! Am I being stupid?’

‘No. Not a bit stupid. A little predictable perhaps, but not stupid. The thing is, Annie, that most of the people who worry about what is correct or incorrect, and who look down their noses at people whose accents are different from theirs, and who either don’t know or don’t care about the so-called “rules”, do so because they’re insecure.’

‘Insecure? Are they?’

‘Conforming to the rules is a sort of protection.’

‘Is it?’

‘They feel safe and even smug, hiding behind all these meaningless conventions. You’re a clever girl, Annie! You got excellent marks in your Ministry of Agriculture exams! You’ve read all the books on that list Georgina left with you. You’re sensitive and you’re courteous and you’re very, very beautiful. Hector’s a lucky fellow! He is also, from what I’ve seen of him, a very nice one. What’s more,’ Alice added, laughing, ‘Rose approves of him!’

‘Does she?’ Annie was smiling now. ‘Well that’s good news, then!’ she laughed. ‘There can’t be nothing … I
mean anything … wrong with Hector if he passes muster with our Mrs Crocker!’

‘Go and visit him, Annie! He’ll look after you! He loves you! His family will probably surprise you. They won’t be like anyone you’ve ever met before, but nor was I when you and I first met, and we get on together pretty well, don’t we?’

The attraction between Annie and Hector had surprised everyone. Gawky and tall, his poor eyesight exempting him from conscription, the kindest description of Hector would be that he looked ‘bookish’. His forehead was high and his long hair flopped, except when he drove at speed about the countryside in the course of his work, the canvas hood of his bull-nosed Morris folded down. Then, with his hair whipping in the slipstream and his chin slightly lifted, Annie had seen a different Hector. A man of sensitivity and determination. A man who knew things. Who shared his knowledge with her and who encouraged her curiosity without patronising her. Who made her laugh and found her funny. A man who for a long time had done nothing more than hold her hand, but whose first kiss had expressed his feelings more eloquently than any words could have done.

Alice seldom gave her girls direct advice, suggesting, instead, various ways of approaching whatever problem was worrying them. Having been more specific on this occasion, she was concerned that her optimism where Annie was concerned might backfire. That Hector’s family could, possibly unwittingly, make her feel inferior and destroy her
growing confidence. Nevertheless she encouraged Roger Bayliss to allow the girl the three days leave she requested, and when Mr Jack came to collect her and deliver her to Ledburton Halt, Alice was waving goodbye to her from the farmhouse gate.

‘It is one of those tall, thin houses, with a basement and then, on the floor above, a kitchen and a dining room and then, above that, on the next floor, an enormous room with windows in the front and at the back and then, further on upstairs there were bedrooms that the boys and Mr Conway and Miss Sybilla Conway use as their studies as well as to sleep in. Miss Conway said I was to call her Sib, like everyone else does!’

Annie, straight off the train and with her overnight bag beside her, had found Alice in the hostel kitchen, checking the boxes of groceries that had just arrived, and was keen to lay the details of her visit to Oxford before the warden, rather as a labrador delivers a pheasant to its master’s feet.

‘You were right about them being different, Mrs Todd, but they were lovely and not at all stuck-up! There was always someone laughing about something, and if I wasn’t sure what was funny, Hector explained! The Mrs Potter person, who looks after them, is a very good cook and they eat round the kitchen table – almost like we do here. One of Hector’s brothers – Howard, he’s called – had the books he’s studying propped open on the table beside his plate because he has to have his thesis finished by Tuesday.
He apologised for his terrible manners, but I thought it was nice that he felt I was sort of part of things and would understand, although Mrs Potter – Pottie, they call her – said he should be ashamed! Hector showed me round the colleges and we went into some of them! He explained about their history. They are so beautiful, Mrs Todd! We went to the Ashmolean Museum and there were things from Knossos and Troy! Then we walked along the river where they go punting, but it was too cold for that so we had cinnamon toast and a pot of tea in a café instead! Mr Conway asked me about the Land Army and the Blitz and about my family arriving from Poland in the Twenties and everything, and I asked him about Oxford and him being a don and he told me about his work and his students and the papers he’s had published. I enjoyed myself, Mrs Todd! I really did. It’s made me think about what I want to do when the war’s over. I don’t reckon I want to work on the land, even as a farm manager. And I don’t want to go back to our factory in London.’

‘But what about your family?’ Alice asked, encouraging Annie to face the decisions she was soon going to have to make. The Sorokova family were modestly successful and hard-working garment manufacturers in London’s East End and Annie, who had already proved herself to be useful, was expected to please her father and grandfather by working her way up through the ranks of first and second cousins into a responsible position. ‘Aren’t they expecting you to return to the family business?’

By mid February the weather had turned milder and Georgina, arriving at the farmhouse early one Saturday afternoon, had needed only a thick sweater and a woollen scarf to keep her warm when she rode over to Lower Post Stone on her brother’s motorbike.

The land girls, still sitting over their lunch and, except for those on weekend dairy duty, enjoying the prospect of freedom from work until Monday morning, were relaxed and planning trips to Exeter or, after a lazy afternoon, to the pub in Ledburton. Evie, as she often did, was planning a walk through the woods and up onto The Tops.

‘I like it up there,’ she would reply when the girls teased her about her long, solitary excursions into the surrounding countryside. ‘You can see for miles and miles.’

‘What’s up, Georgie?’ Marion asked when Georgina arrived in the kitchen. ‘Face like a cracked pisspot, you got!’ Georgina looked from one smiling face to another, sat down at the table and slowly unwound her thick scarf.

‘You haven’t heard about Dresden, then?’ she asked. For a moment everyone looked blank. Then Alice, who was struggling with the lid of the last jar of bottled plums, which she and Rose had preserved the previous summer and would use in a pie that evening, finally loosened it.

‘You mean the bombing?’ she asked, licking plum juice from her thumb.

‘Yes. The bombing,’ Georgina repeated, heavily.

‘What about it?’ Gwennan snapped back, her Welsh accent crisp, her tone self-righteous. ‘So Dresden got bombed. So what!’

‘It wasn’t just bombed, Taff. It was obliterated!’ Winnie wasn’t sure what obliterated meant so Georgina told her, adding emphatically, ‘The whole city, Winnie! Acres of it. Hundreds of buildings gutted! Roofs gone! Just the walls standing! Thousands of people … Thousands! Incinerated in the fires!’

‘Like Liverpool!’ Gwennan announced, firmly. ‘Like Southampton and Bristol!’

‘And the London docks,’ Annie added and, thinking of Chrissie, ‘and Plymouth.’

‘That was different,’ Georgina countered. ‘They were military targets!’

‘Not all!’ Marion said. ‘Bath wasn’t!’

‘Nor was Exeter.’ Rose, sitting knitting, beside the range, remembered the night when the thuds of exploding bombs had been audible from the Post Stone farms, six miles away from the shuddering city.

‘Or Coventry!’ Evie added. She had gone with her mother to see the smouldering ruins that were all that remained of the cathedral, and had stood beside the pile of rubble in a nearby side street where her Auntie Gladys and two of her cousins had died. ‘Eight hours that blitz lasted!’ she said, her eyes narrowed and fixed accusingly on Georgina’s. ‘Wave after wave of bombers come over. You never saw so many planes. Incendiaries, they dropped! Then high explosives to spread the fires! On an’ on it went! People was lyin’ dead in the streets and by mornin’ there wasn’t nothin’ left but rubble as far as you could see!’ She paused, breathless, the other girls shocked and silent. ‘So ’ow come you’re so steamed up about this Dresden place, Georgina?’

‘Because it was the worst!’ Georgina said, quietly. She had been shown aerial photographs of the bomb damage inflicted on most of the cities the girls had listed but the air attack on Dresden was more extreme than any she had seen – worse, at that time, than any bomb damage that anyone had ever seen.

Reconnaissance photographs taken by the RAF, during and after the Dresden raid, had been passed around the mess at White Waltham where Georgina was based. Even 
here, there had been disagreement about the justification of the level of destruction wrought on the city. Georgina had sat with the pictures in her hands until Fitzie and Lucinda had removed them and passed them on to a group of fliers who were waiting to examine them, and whose reaction to what they saw was one of such unrestrained jubilation that Georgina, followed by Fitzie and Lucinda, had left the mess in tears.

‘They had it coming,’ Fitzie had said, gently. The three of them had wandered past the deserted hangars and out onto the grass strip beside the runway. The air was cold. Frost crackled under their feet. The sky was clear and starry.

For Georgina, the bombing of Dresden was to prove to be another turning point in her confused convictions about war. Before arriving at the farm that day she had called at the woodman’s cottage, expecting to be able to unburden herself to Christopher, knowing that he would understand and share her feelings. But all she found at the cottage was the note he had left for her in case she arrived unexpectedly. He was away on a week’s course with the Forestry Commission. She had ridden back down the track and then turned right, into Post Stone valley, vaguely hoping for tea and sympathy from Alice Todd. Now, with the eyes of everyone upon her, she got to her feet and began winding her scarf round her neck.

‘I’d better go,’ she said, tightly. ‘Sorry. I might have known how you’d all feel.’ Before Alice could dissuade her,
she left them. They heard the bike engine, loudly breaking the afternoon silence. Then, in the kitchen, the ticking of the clock and the click of Rose’s knitting needles were the only sounds.

‘See?’ Gwennan sighed, as though strangely satisfied by what had happened. ‘Once a conchie, always a conchie, I reckon!’ She turned and stared at Alice. ‘Don’t you think so, Mrs Todd?’ she demanded, her hard eyes delivering a challenge which the warden chose to ignore.

Georgina’s journey, from pacifism to ferry pilot for the RAF and now, it seemed, back to her earlier convictions, did not surprise Alice. Nor was she disposed to comment on it or debate it with Gwennan Pringle. Instead she turned to Rose and examined the small, white garment she was knitting.

‘Is that for one of Mabel’s twins?’ she asked, expecting an affirmative answer.

‘No it bain’t!’ Rose said, sharply. ‘Mabel’s twins ’as got more’n enough woollies to last the pair o’em till kingdom come! Mrs Fred and Mrs Jack ’as been knittin’ fit to bust since the minute they was born!’

‘Who’s it for, then, Mrs Crocker?’ Annie asked.

‘’Tis for Thurza, that’s who!’ Rose was slightly flushed and her needles were flying so fast there was a danger of dropped stitches.

‘Thurza? Who’s Thurza?’ Winnie queried, turning to Marion, who shrugged.

‘Thurza be Hester’s child, that’s who!’ Rose announced firmly and everyone froze.

‘Hester’s child?’ Gwennan repeated incredulously. ‘You’re knittin’ clothes for Hester’s child?’

When Hester Tucker had climbed down from the lorry that had brought her from the bus stop in Ledburton, she stood out from the rest of the first intake of girls to arrive at the hostel that day. Unlike them, she was not wearing the Land Army uniform with which she had been issued at the recruitment centre and which remained, still in its cardboard box, at her feet and beside the carpet bag which contained the rest of her belongings. She stood, shivering, either from the cold February air or from the nervousness that overwhelmed her, and waited, miserably, to be told where to go and what to do. The other girls were sporting their dowdy uniforms with as much flair as was possible – hats on the backs of curly heads, belts tightly buckled round bulky jodhpurs, lips darkened with ruby-red lipstick and, in some cases, lashes stiff with mascara, while Hester’s pale and anxious face was bereft of make-up, her skin scrubbed and almost transparent over delicate bones, her mass of fine, golden-blond hair drawn tightly back into a bun. Her shapeless clothes were in shades of brown and grey, her thick, woollen stockings and laced-up shoes, black.

Befriended by Annie, with whom she shared a bedroom, Hester slowly grew to trust the girls into whose company the war had thrust her. As the weeks and then
months passed, the facts of her upbringing emerged.

She was the daughter of a religious zealot. A man who exerted an unhealthy dominance over his family and anyone who fell under his influence. The sect, in whose name he preached each Sabbath to a series of small, intimidated congregations who met in barns, deserted chapels and sometimes on the open cliff tops of the North Devon coast, had split, when Hester and her brother Zeke were still young children, from a less fanatical faith which was based in Plymouth.

Jonas Tucker spent most of his waking hours in prayer, working his smallholding only enough to provide a meagre living for his submissive wife and obedient children. He had been reluctant to deliver his elder child into the hands of the authorities when she turned eighteen and was required to do some form of war service, and had seen to it that she enrolled in the Women’s Land Army, considering it to be a better option than exposing Zeke to the risk of conscription when, in a year’s time, he would reach that age. A bit of farm work wouldn’t hurt her, Jonas reckoned, and it would be one less mouth for him to feed. He was, at that time, ignorant of the reputation Land Army girls were acquiring.

Hester, brought up to fear her maker, had left home for the hostel with her father’s harsh voice ringing in her ears, reminding her of his rules on modest apparel, no paint, and hair which must never be cut and should always be coiled out of sight. She knew better than to consort with
strangers, would say grace before she ate, and go down on her knees night and morning. On Sundays, her father told her, members of the Brethren would collect her from Post Stone farm and convey her to their nearest meeting place for prayer and supplication.

As the weeks passed, Alice had witnessed a change in Hester. When she had first arrived she had flinched at the language she heard at the supper table and at the raucous laughter that greeted jokes which she didn’t initially understand. But soon she began to respond to the warmth and good humour of her companions. Eventually she yielded to the temptation to try on the clothes they offered to lend her, and sometimes, when the girls were out dancing with soldiers or drinking with them in pubs, she experimented with the make-up which cluttered their dressing tables. Then, one Saturday afternoon she went into Exeter with Georgina, visited a hairdresser for the first time in her life and had returned to the hostel, transformed and almost unrecognisable, with her hair floating around her head like Lizzie Siddal’s in a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

‘You wouldn’t credit how that girl’s come on since ’er got yer!’ Rose exclaimed to Alice on the first occasion when, after a lot of persuasion, Hester finally agreed to go with the land girls to a local hop.

It was a Saturday evening and Edward John was sitting at the kitchen table dipping fingers of bread into the yolk of the boiled egg that was his favourite supper. Rose had
brought Alice a snapshot she had just received in which her son Dave was the centre of a group of khaki-clad conscripts who were peeling their way through a mound of potatoes.

‘I’m that glad he’s in the caterin’ corps! Be worried sick if they’d given ’im a gun! It’s his feet, see, too flat for the marchin’ they said!’ Rose paused, sliding the snapshot back into its already dog-eared envelope and comforted by the thought of Dave’s comparative safety. ‘You reckon young Hester’ll be all right, do you? Gaddin’ about with our lot?’

Alice was well aware of the influences that were affecting Hester but she had confidence in the common sense of most of the other girls who, she rightly believed, would make sure the youngest and least experienced of the group came to no harm. They would keep an eye on her much as they would have protected a younger sister from unwelcome advances.

Over the preceding months, on the evenings when Hester had refused to go out and about with the other girls, she had begun to confide in the warden. Often confused, and even occasionally shocked, by the land girls’ behaviour, she had confessed that her father, given the chance, would have consigned them all to the everlasting flames. But Hester soon came to understand that her fellows were, despite their sometimes brash manners, both good and kind, and that they were innocent of most of the evils her father had warned her of. She began to question his rules.
Why was cutting her hair and wearing coloured frocks a sin? Whether or not her frock was blue and her hair floated prettily around her head, she knew right from wrong and would behave herself accordingly. When she asked Alice if she should go to the hop with the girls, Alice, knowing that both Georgina and Annie would be with her, had encouraged her to. She left, having been astonished and slightly disconcerted by her reflection, in a dress borrowed from Annie and shoes borrowed from Evie. She had even been persuaded to wear a trace of lipstick.

Then, at a cricket match – a light-hearted fraternisation between Alice’s girls and a group of infantrymen training at a nearby army base – Hester had met Reuben Westerfeldt, an American GI who was as young and inexperienced as she. It had been love at first sight for both of them and had possessed all the overwhelming passion of a first infatuation, heightened by the war and the threat of looming separation. Rose’s Dave, who, during a brief leave, had encountered Hester, carried the image of her back to his barracks and found himself unable to think of anyone else, had stood little chance against Reuben Westerfeldt who proposed to Hester, was accepted and, despite her father’s refusal to approve the engagement or attend the wedding ceremony, married her.

Rose, observing her son, had from the beginning been aware of the intensity of his feelings for Hester Tucker and had warned him that she was already spoken for. Nevertheless she felt then, as she was increasingly to feel,
that fate had somehow failed not only her boy but the girl he wanted so much. The two of them were, Rose felt, suited. More than suited. They were destined. Both were Devonian born and bred. Both spoke with the same soft accent and, before the advent of Reuben, there had been, Rose was certain, an attraction between the two of them at their first, brief meeting.

‘But you can’t ’ave ’er, son!’ she told Dave, when, on leave shortly after the wedding, he slouched aimlessly about her cottage and refused to socialise with his village friends. ‘She’m a married lady now and that’s that!’ Dave sat, looking, his mother noticed, and despite his low spirits, a picture of health and strength. His robust frame, the shock of thick, chestnut hair and lustrous, dark eyes still reminded her of the chubby baby she had suckled. But sometime between his sixteenth and seventeenth birthdays, and following the unexpected death of his father, Dave had become a man, and now, at almost twenty and despite his flat feet, was approaching his prime. ‘’Tis no good you sulkin’ like a spoilt brat, Dave! I know’s you spotted ’er afore Reuben come on the scene but ’twas Reuben she wanted and Reuben she got and there’s an end to it!’ Her words, she knew, were falling on deaf ears, yet she persisted. ‘Eileen says as ’er niece Albertine were askin’ after you las’ week. ’Er works as barmaid over to The Anchor at Lower Bowden these days. Ever such a nice girl she be. Alus liked you, Albertine did. You should go see her, Dave. Better nor broodin’ about
the place sighin’ after some girl you can’t ’ave!’