Once a Land Girl
Angela Huth
has written eleven novels, four collections of short stories as well as plays for radio, TV and the stage.
Land Girls
was made into a 1998 feature
film starring Rachel Weisz and Anna Friel. She is also a well-known freelance journalist, critic and broadcaster. Angela is married to an Oxford don, lives in Warwickshire and has two
daughters.
Also by Angela Huth
FICTION
Nowhere Girl
Virginia Fly is Drowning
Sun Child
South of the Lights
Monday Lunch in Fairyland and other stories
Wanting
Such Visitors and other stories
Invitation to the Married Life
Another Kind of Cinderella and other stories
Land Girls
Wives of the Fisherman
Easy Silence
Of Love and Slaughter
The Collected Stories of Angela Huth
NON-FICTION
The English Woman’s Wardrobe
Well Remembered Friends, an anthology (ed.)
FOR CHILDREN
Eugenie in Cloud Cuckoo Land
Island of the Children (ed.)
Casting a Spell (ed.)
PLAYS
The Understanding
The Trouble with Old Lovers
Angela Huth
Constable · London
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2010
Copyright © Angela Huth, 2010
The right of Angela Huth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-84901-275-1
Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
For Sally and John
‘H
ow much longer do you want to be starting at an empty field?’ said a voice behind her. ‘Nothing to see, is there?’
Prue stood on the third rung of the gate, the gate she remembered for its soggy wood, which was gentle against her knees as it always used to be. She stared at Lower Pasture, empty now of
animals. No crops had been sown this year. Its hedges were no longer as trimmed to the neatness Mr Lawrence had always required. The long grass bent carelessly in the wind. In the far corner she
could see the haystack in flames, the petrified cows leaping away from its heat, so strong that the air quivered like a mirage. She could hear the cows screaming and the smaller voices of Stella
and Ag, sticks in hand, trying to urge them into the clover field across the lane. She could feel again the piercing sweat beneath her arms as she ran on clumsy legs to join them.
‘Come along. We’d best be getting back.’
Prue did not move. She needed a moment longer. The hedge that ran along the west side of Lower Pasture was now so overgrown it would have been impossible to see what she had seen that day
– Stella in Joe’s arms, their two bodies sagging with relief that the fire was finally under control, but tense with the thrill of their first embrace. They had left the scene of
devastation a few moments before she and Ag had linked arms, swiped at their tears, and taken a last look at the sickening remains of Nancy, the one cow that had taken a direct hit from a bomb: the
one cow Mr Lawrence had agreed not to sell. Once in the clover field, Prue remembered, the rest of the herd still roared their fear – oddly high-pitched squeals from such hefty animals. They
still bucked and reared, their black and white jagged skins making a mad pattern that snagged Prue’s streaming eyes. The incendiary flames had been colours of terrifying beauty, but the smoke
they left behind was a vast black rock in the sky. It showed no sign of evaporating. Its vile smell was in Prue’s nostrils – even now, today, four years after some German had dropped
the bomb on his way home.
‘I said, come on. We’ve been here long enough. Beats me what you’re staring at.’
Prue climbed down from the gate, ignoring her husband’s offered hand. Even though he had heard something of her days as a land girl, he did not seem to understand that she was able to get
off a gate without help. He knew nothing of the country. Rural life was of no interest to him though he professed he was proud that his wife had served her country as a land girl. On their
honeymoon he had made a promise that one day he would drive her back to Hallows Farm, take a look at the place if it would give her pleasure. Four years later, here he was, carrying out his
promise, and a god-awful day, in his opinion, it had been too, manoeuvring the Humber along narrow lanes, mud and worse splashing its pristine paint. He hoped this visit would be a once and for
all: he didn’t fancy any more such journeys down these rotten little memory lanes. The only blessing was that he’d decided to bring the Humber rather than the Daimler: God knew what the
country would have done to the Daimler.
The parked Humber blocked the lane.
‘Lucky no tractors wanting to come down this way.’
Barry took off an orange pigskin glove, holes punched on its knuckles, and stroked the bonnet of his car. He then gave a more cursory pat to his wife’s shoulder. He opened the passenger
door for her with the flourish of one who has observed many a hotel doorman. By now Prue had become used to travelling in this huge, comfortable vehicle with its fabric seats and mahogany
dashboard. Barry, so proud of his car, urged her to observe its finer details on almost every occasion they travelled together. Prue climbed in, wriggled her back against the seat. She had hoped
that Barry would show some interest in the country round Hallows Farm, but the comfort of the car eased her disappointment. She wound down the window to try to reduce the permanent smell of cigar
smoke.
‘I should close that,’ said Barry, pressing the starter button with the kind of reverence that Mr Lawrence, the farmer she had worked for during the war, had never shown to his old
Wolseley. ‘Don’t want to let your country smells into a car like this.’
Prue wound up the window. Whatever Barry asked of her, today, she would do without argument. Nothing mattered to her. She was in another time, another place – startled, shaken once again
by the remembrance of it all.
‘So, what now? Do you want us to drive up to the farmhouse?’ Barry glanced at his watch.
Prue knew they were in no hurry, but she had no desire to go to the house, the yard, the barn, in the company of someone whose impatience was almost tangible. This whole outing, she could see,
was not Barry’s idea of fun. Besides, unknown to him, this was not the first time she had returned to the farm. Just a few weeks ago, sick of waiting for his invitation, she had come here on
another visit which she thought prudent not to mention. ‘I don’t think we’ll bother,’ she said. ‘It’ll be dark soon. We’d better be getting
back.’
Such generosity of understanding spurred Barry’s particular kind of benignity. ‘There’s my girl. We’ll stop somewhere for a drink. Treat ourselves to something bubbly.
How about that?’
‘Fine.’ Prue didn’t care where they stopped or what they drank. She wanted desperately to take a further look at the outside of the farmhouse, the bleak yard, the barn. But she
wanted to go on her own, or with Stella and Ag. Not with Barry.
The car moved slowly forward. Barry was unused to the hazards of lanes and he had no intention of further soiling the immaculate Humber. They passed the cottage where Ratty, the single labourer
on the farm, used to live with his sometimes mad wife Edith. It had clearly been improved by new owners: window frames painted, front door a garish green that clashed with the garden. No lights in
the windows. Prue wondered if the new inhabitants, despite their renovations, could sense a shadow of the misery that had soured the place when Ratty and Edith lived there.
‘Must be hard for you,’ Barry said, ‘coming back. Myself, I wouldn’t want to return to a place that had meant . . . whatever all this meant to you.’
Prue shrugged. ‘Curiosity,’ she said.
They passed the wood where she and Joe had so often made love. After Joe, Prue and Barry One had gone there for the same reason. It was a hidden place, safe. The moss had been beneath them.
Birdsong, from birds they were too busy to notice, was the only sound. With Barry One, as Prue recognized at the time, it was real love in the undergrowth. When he was killed and his friend Jamie
had come to console her, she had eventually agreed to sessions in the same place – out of habit, she supposed. But it hadn’t been the same with Jamie.
Barry tightened his grip on the huge steering-wheel and accelerated gently. Prue was revolted by the pigskin gloves, which meant so much to him. They made her think of Sly, the Lawrences’
querulous old sow who had endeared herself to all three land girls. The idea of Sly or any pig turned into gloves was so horrible that—
‘Tell you what,’ Barry was saying, ‘I’ll run you up one of my special salmon-paste sandwiches when we get home. Lots of paste, a sprinkling of cress. How about
that?’
‘Lovely.’
It was dark by now so Barry could not see the tears that ran down her cheeks. She wanted to scream at him, ‘Stop! It’s left here. Mrs Lawrence will be waiting for us with a huge stew
and turnips and a suet pudding.’ But in the confusion of past and present she dared not speak a word lest she broke down, and Barry’s moment of kindness would turn to impatience.
They turned into the wider road that led from the farmhouse to the village. For a moment Prue fancied the shadows from the overhanging trees were the flock of bumbling sheep that she had so
often driven down this road, and felt herself smile. Then she saw that her mind was playing tricks. There were no sheep. ‘Stupid,’ she said to herself.
‘I was thinking,’ said Barry, ‘that what we should go for next is a Sunbeam Talbot. How does that strike you? Lovely red machine, leather seats. Turn heads, a Sunbeam Talbot
would.’
‘Why not?’ said Prue. She was trying to remember how many times she and Joe had shagged in the wood, and if it was more than she and Jamie had, and if they were added together they
would come to more than the occasions with Barry One, whom she had loved more than either of them.
At the end of the war, while her fellow land girls Stella and Ag went off to get married, Prue had gone back to live in Manchester with her mother in whose hairdressing shop
they both worked. It was not a happy arrangement. Before the war Prue had enjoyed it, and at Hallows Farm she had kept up her skills on Stella and Ag, often surprising them with her experimental
cutting and bleaching. But her years as a land girl seemed to have destroyed her enthusiasm for working all day in a small shop that smelt of shampoo and peroxide, and clumps of hair mistakenly
burnt by curling tongs. She never managed to accomplish a permanent wave to her mother’s satisfaction, and now she didn’t care if she never became a skilled hairdresser, let alone
under-manager in the business, which once had been her ambition.
She spent the days dreaming of a husband who could take her away from this narrow life and provide her with money, luxury. Even though Stella and Ag had teased her over her desire for gold taps,
she still hankered for them. But there were few signs of available young men, let alone those seeking matrimony. Some of the boys she had known as a child had been killed. Others had returned
wounded. She would go to the pub by herself most nights, survey the gathering of old men, and return to her mother’s claustrophobic little house in a state of acute dejection.
One day after work mother and daughter walked to the bus stop in a downpour. At the best of times buses were infrequent and when it rained they seemed to give up altogether. They stood there for
half an hour, drenched. Then a large car pulled up, sloshing water from the gutter onto their feet. Mrs Lumley gave a long and noisy sigh against the rain. ‘A Daimler!’ she cooed.
‘A wedding car. Whatever can it want?’
A man leant across the empty passenger seat and wound down the window. ‘You look like drowned rats,’ he said. ‘Can I give you a lift somewhere?’
‘You certainly can. Much more of this and we’ll melt.’ Mrs Lumley was breathless with the wonder of such a car pulling up beside them, its driver proposing to rescue them from
the rain.