The Carhullan Army (17 page)

I began to wear the yellow tunic as an undershirt, with my heaviest jumper and a waterproof over it when I worked outside. I still did not want to discard it and the warp and weft of it was tight and warming. As soon as I was well enough to do more than clear the plates and help prepare meals I volunteered to work, and I was placed with a contingent of women shifting and storing peat bricks. Swathes of turf had been cut and were drying under long canvasses stretched on the fells. With the weather turning it needed to be brought inside, to be burned slowly and aromatically through the winter months along with wood from the willow copse. There were even plans to heat tar out of a portion of it, and refine the distillation into paraffin oil. It was amazing to me that so much could be culled from our surroundings, and that such knowledge was put into practice by the women as a matter of course.

I was happy to help move the fuel but it had not been my first choice. I had asked Jackie if I could join her unit. After our talk before the meeting I felt sure that she would agree. The day I was deemed fit to join the others sleeping out in the converted barns, I went looking for her. I found her feeding the dogs in the courtyard, and told her I had decided that this was what I wanted to do at Carhullan. As usual her smile was crooked, pulling the unmarked side of her face upwards. She shook her head. ‘No, Sister.’

Naively, I had expected her to be pleased. She had given the impression of beckoning me to her those past weeks. And, as if to keep my interest piqued, she had left another book on my bed, Lawrence’s
Seven Pillars
. I had read it quickly and left it propped against her bedroom door. Instead she seemed amused by my offer. ‘Ask me again in spring,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re ready to walk through fire just yet. Not while you think you’ve still got scores to settle. Besides, they’re going to want to see you pulling your weight here first. And I can’t use someone who isn’t built up. I can’t afford any accidents.’

In her hand was a plastic tub. The dogs writhed around her legs, yapping for the food. She emptied the red chunks out of the container into a trough and they butted heads over the scraps. I was taken aback. ‘Jackie,’ I said, ‘I understand what you did to me and why you did it. And I swear I’m not harbouring any bad feeling. I feel great.’ She looked at me, through me. ‘I don’t mean up here, Sister. I mean back down there. There’s no room for vendettas in what we’re doing. You’d be a liability. Chloe could do with some help at the gullies. You know where they are.’ I went away disappointed and confused.

The cutters looked up from the black trench when I arrived. They had scarves wound round their faces or hoods gathered into small openings to keep out the strong wind, and it was hard to see them properly. ‘Need some help?’ I called out. They were quiet for a moment and then one of them came forward. Under the wrappings of her head I saw her eyes, a rich sorrel, and the skin surrounding them was dark. ‘Sit,’ she said. ‘No, really, I’m fine to help you,’ I told her, ‘I’d like to. I’ve been doing nothing for weeks.’ Her eyes shone. She seemed amused. ‘Sit down. I need to wrap up your feet. Otherwise you’ll get trench foot.’ I glanced down at her legs and the legs of the others. All of them had plastic sheeting over their boots. I sat down on the coarse moorland.

She walked to a barrow that was half filled with slabs, and took out two old carrier bags from the canvas satchel hanging on it. She came back and knelt beside me, lifted one of my legs onto her knee and slipped the bag over my boot. She tied the handles at my ankle. Then she repeated the procedure for my other leg. ‘Got to look after your footwear,’ she said. ‘It’s like a bog out here when it rains.’ She reached into the pocket of her coat, fetched out a spare pair of gloves and passed them to me. ‘I’m Shruti. This is Chloe, Katrina, Fish, Lillian, and Maud. They’re all imbeciles. Just ignore them.’ The women cawed with laughter, shouted a few expletives, and started lifting the squares again. Shruti picked up a spade and passed it to me. She held her hands apart. ‘About this big,’ she said. Then she pointed to a row of dun slabs under a tent of canvas. ‘When you get bored you can help turn those ones.’ I couldn’t see her mouth under the tassels of her scarf, but I could see from her eyes that she was smiling.

The group of cutters was friendly. The women were hard working and used to each other, and they did not mind having me along with them. I liked Shruti as soon as I met her. She was kind, sombre looking under her work gear. She put me at ease and had a serenity about her that gave way from time to time to a droll wit. The other women always called her by one of her nicknames, Shrooms or Titty, and they teased her accent, but she gave as good as she got. ‘If you bunch of white-bread bints have nothing better to do than stand around all day copying me that’s your problem,’ she would say to them. ‘Take your time. Sister and I will keep things running.’

It was the tamer end of the banter at Carhullan. At first the jokes among the group seemed shocking and vicious to me; little was taboo, too impolitic or too rude, and they called each other terrible names, referred to their gashes and snatches, as if it was nothing to them to use such language. They insulted each other about their sexual proclivities, but no one seemed to take offence. I had heard the harsh way Jackie talked about the women at the farm, describing them as bitches and twats, and I had thought it was just her rough policy, but it seemed endemic to the place.

Shruti was about my age, and had come to Carhullan when she was twenty. There was a shiny patch of skin on the right-hand side of her neck that I saw when she took her outdoor clothes off for dinner. She wasn’t in my dormitory, so I had never seen her undress, but Nnenna, whom I bunked next to, told me the disfigurement ran on down her shoulder and breast, all the way to her thigh. She’d had acid thrown over her by a member of her family, a brother, an uncle, for some cultural transgression – a marriage refusal or an illicit relationship. But this was not why she left her home and headed north. She had been standing trial for a revenge assault. The charge had been downgraded, taking into account the provocation and the state of her mind, but she was looking at fifteen years’ detention. The Ministry of Justice had not managed to track her. Now, like the rest of the women up here, she had ceased to exist altogether, and that was fine by her.

It was a good group to be on the fells with. They worked outdoors all year between the gullies, the willow copse and the orchard, and they were bronzed and lively. Because I was new to them, and curious, they seemed to enjoy the opportunity to retell their stories, discuss old war wounds, and boast about their early misadventures. There were fewer victims at Carhullan than I had imagined. Often it was the women themselves who had committed a crime or were misfits: they had been violent, outspoken, socially inept, promiscuous, drug-addicted, and aware they needed some kind of system to bring them in to line. They all agreed that Carhullan was the best thing to have happened to them. That coming there was the best decision they had ever made. Not that they weren’t sick of the sloppy hare stews, the arse rashes, stinking loos, nipple-pinching showers, and lack of tampons.

They were all in their thirties, but they had the frisky spirits of girls. They took up handfuls of the peat bog and threw it at each other, and got through the days of heavy manual labour in the half-light of winter with high morale.

I liked them, and I liked being with them. There was a camaraderie on the moors and in the dormitories that I had never experienced before. It went beyond tolerance or the absence of men. It was the sense of basic usefulness and dependence, feeling active and real and connected. Only half the girls were local to the county. The rest were from further afield: London, Glasgow, Birmingham. One woman, Katrina, had even come from Russia. If they had been raw or ragged when they arrived, abused or abusive, now, years later, they were older, reconciled, comfortable to be who they were. ‘There’s nothing like this place for rehabilitation,’ Shruti told me. ‘It’s working with the land that does it. Getting back to basics.’ The key to it, she said, was communing with the actual ground and not being divorced from reality any more. It was therapeutic; it gave a person perspective. ‘You’ll see, Sister,’ she said, and squeezed my arm.

By the end of the first day, after hours spent shovelling the black loamy earth, laying it out, and stacking the already hardened bricks, I felt more satisfied than I could recall feeling before. I did not mind the cold air and the rain. Working in the kitchen had not been as natural to me, and when I had helped Helen with Stella I had been slightly uncomfortable, as if my hands were the wrong shape to hold the baby. I rested more than the others, my arms and back aching, but I kept at it until dusk, until Shruti slapped me on the back and said it was time for food. ‘Think it’s mutton tonight,’ she said, pulling a face. The plastic wrapped round my feet was grotesque with mud, and the gloves I had been given wore a thick layer of black so stiff I could not bend my fingers. I looked back as we wheeled a final barrow load to the farm and admired the rich gaping seam in the earth that I had shovelled.

To celebrate my first official day of labour, the cutters arranged for a musical session after dinner. They took a bottle of Jackie’s whisky from one of the storerooms and passed the dusty decanter around, letting everyone take a tug on it. ‘You thieving mutts,’ she said dryly when she came into the room, but then she waved them off. I had never liked whisky but I drank from the bottle with them. It was a little sour, and the smoke and soil notes brought to mind the earth I had shifted that day.

The accordion was brought out and a violin, and the women sang an old prison ballad. I had never heard it before but the tune was similar to the Border songs I had sometimes listened to in the pubs after walking with my father. It was lovely to hear and I felt moved by it, and I didn’t want them to stop singing. Some of them sang solo verses. Toward the end of the song Jackie stood up. She was unabashed and she sang confidently, her voice strong and melodious, and for some reason I was surprised by it, not thinking her capable perhaps.

The lyrics of the verses had begun to bleed together, there were so many of them, but, perhaps because it was Jackie singing, or perhaps because the accordion and fiddle suddenly let up and allowed her to sing unaccompanied, I remember the words of hers: ‘In a female prison, there are sixty-five women, and I wish it was among them that I did dwell.’

My sleep that night was as deep and as restful as it had ever been, and I dreamt of nothing. The next day I woke up so stiff I could not bend my legs. But I got up and got dressed. It was like that every day for the first month. I hobbled to the kitchen and took a place on the bench with the others and I ate the bread and eggs, the black pudding or oatmeal, ravenously. The days passed by the same, and only the weather changed, from filthy rain and heron-grey skies to cloudlessness and the white abeyance of frost. One day, on the way out to the gullies, Shruti passed me a handful of walnuts and dried fruit from the bowl on the dresser, and told me it was Christmas.

*

For all their differences of opinion and different roles, the women at the farm were a tight community, respectful of each other and mutually helpful. Within the work groups there were firm friendships. But those in Jackie’s unit seemed locked together in a way the others were not. They had an almost unspoken bond, and they could often anticipate each other’s moves, arriving in the kitchen at the same time, laughing privately about something. Even in the biting wind and rain, the flurries of hail and the squalls, there was no let-up in their training. As I stacked the dark, charred-smelling squares on the agricultural barrow, I could see the women running the ridge carrying heavy bergens, their hair and clothes drenched, mud caking their legs and sprayed up their backs. On the steep ascent some of them would turn and vomit, or stumble and fall, but they never stopped. They got up or were lifted by another and carried on. And Jackie was always with them, not beasting them as a drill sergeant would, or shouting slogans, but simply running alongside the last woman in the pack.

Sometimes the unit went missing for a few days. We would see them rounding the summit and then they would disappear. By dark, if none of them were back at the farm, Ruthie knew not to waste their servings. In the bitterest spells they camped out in the stone bothies on the top of the mountain range. They would choose the worst days to decamp, always in gales, mist, ice, or in pouring rain. The masochism of their regime was alarming. It was as if any hardship or obstacle was useful to them. It could be harnessed, turned to their advantage, used to build resilience, and they always met it head on.

The others working in the gullies told me that what the unit got up to while away from Carhullan was more extreme and depraved than the behaviour of the old British Army Specials. That what they did out there amounted to torture, either to themselves or to the livestock. They would often come back covered in gore, carrying deer heads and pelts. They liked to parade the trophies around in front of the others. ‘How long have they been training?’ I asked Shruti. ‘Oh, maybe three years,’ she said. ‘That’s when Jackie got serious about everything. You know, if they weren’t on our side I’d really worry. But since they are, I sleep much better in my bed. Doesn’t mean they’re not complete maniacs though. You’ve got to be crazy to put yourself through that.’

It was true. When the unit returned after a few days away many of them were bleeding, dirty, and blood-poisoned. Lorry stitched them back up, and they would be given extra rations of food. There was a subtle rift between the unit and the workers. It was not expressed in hostile terms, but in small separatist gestures – a line at the dinner table, a preference for drinking alone in the parlour room. I supposed it was typical of any community. I saw less of Megan while I was out loading the fuel. In her mind I was probably in another set now. I wore her necklace, only taking it off to shower. Other than my wedding ring it was the only piece of jewellery I possessed. She teased me when we saw one another in the kitchen, saying I’d gone for the soft option, but otherwise she left me to those I was stationed with.