The fair-haired girl held out her hand, which was vigorously shaken by both Dana and Vera. Then she turned to the two old men. ‘This is Mr Grundy; he’s a marvel with horses. The ground gets so boggy the tractor isn’t much use most of the time. And this is Mr Miller, who does just about everything. He milks the cows, tends the pigs, drives the tractor in summertime and is a master hedger. They’re both trying to teach me so’s I can be useful …’ she grinned shyly at the two old men, who
were grinning toothlessly back, ‘but it’s uphill work, isn’t it, chaps?’
Both grinned and nodded, the older of the two – Mr Grundy – saying placidly that she were a grand girl and doin’ her best, and then Elaine and the two old men sat themselves down at the table and Elaine beckoned the two newcomers to follow suit. ‘When we’re working a good distance from the farm, we take what they call a packed lunch,’ she whispered, ‘but often it’s just a cut off the loaf and an apple. So when we come in, ’cos it’s too dark to work out any longer, the missus – that’s what the fellers call her – is supposed to provide us with a high tea. We have to hand over our ration books, you see, and of course there’s no cooking facilities in the attic, which is where I sleep, so it’s Mrs Tullimore’s grub or nothing. Are you two in lodgings? They said I must live out, but the village is so far …’
‘No, we’re living in, for the same reason,’ Dana said quickly. She lowered her voice. ‘We’ve taken some furniture up there as well as camp beds and sleeping bags. We took up a washstand as well …’
‘Ooh, if she finds out she’ll go mad,’ Elaine whispered. ‘I’m supposed to wash in the kitchen, but of course it’s not ideal and an all-over wash is out of the question, unless you use the tin bath in the washhouse. You can fill the copper and light the fire underneath it but it’s awful difficult to get the temperature right; you come out either looking like a boiled prawn or shivering with cold. But with the three of us we ought to manage something.’
At this point the farmer’s wife approached them, slapped half a dozen plates down on the table and began
serving the boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage and boiled carrots, splash of gravy and tiny square of fatty bacon which was apparently their hostess’s idea of a sustaining meal. Dana stared at her plate, then around at the other diners. The old men were shovelling food into their mouths as fast as they could and for the first time it occurred to her that they must live somewhere; would it not have been possible for them to find room in their cottages for three not very large land girls? She whispered the comment to Elaine, who shook her head decidedly. ‘Their cottages are in a dreadful state: leaking roofs, earth floors and tiny,’ she said. ‘Mrs Grundy has a daughter with three or four young children all living in her cottage – no husband, of course – and Mr Miller’s wife suffers from chronic arthritis and spends a great deal of time in bed. They’re two room cottages: a live-in kitchen and a bedroom. So you see no one could possibly expect them to take in lodgers.’
‘Right,’ Dana said decidedly. She looked at the food on her own plate and those of her two companions, then considered Mrs Tullimore’s still empty dish and raised her voice to its normal level. ‘And what might you be having for high tea, Mrs Tullimore? I dare say it won’t just be vegetables and a square inch of fatty bacon.’
‘That’s no affair of yours, Miss Long Nose,’ Mrs Tullimore said sharply. ‘Eat what you’re give or you’ll get nothing, I’m warnin’ you.’
Dana sighed. She would have liked to pick up her plate and hurl it and its contents out into the yard, but the truth was she was hungry, really hungry, and the vegetables smelled good. ‘Very well; because you didn’t expect us we shall have to make do with what you’ve
provided, but in future we shall want to make sure we’re getting our fair share of anything that’s going,’ she said firmly. ‘We saw ducks and geese as we came past the pond and there were hens flapping and pecking all over the yard. I know most of your acres are turned over to sugar beet, but I’m not entirely ignorant of farming matters, you’ll be sorry to hear. I recognised plum, apple and pear trees in an orchard, you yourself referred to the cow byre and I heard pigs grunting as we crossed the yard, no doubt hoping they were about to be fed. So you see, I can tell you aren’t short of food, you just prefer to keep it for yourself.’
Mrs Tullimore, red in the face and tight-lipped, was swelling up like a balloon when the back door opened and her husband entered. At least, Dana assumed it was her husband, but he was a very different kettle of fish from his wife. She thought he must be six foot five or six, and he was as broad as he was long. He hung up his tweed cap and oilskins and turned to stare at the newcomers. Although he was nothing like his wife in appearance, however, Dana soon realised that he was cut from the same cloth. He was greedy yet mean, seldom eating when the rest of them did but always sending the workers off about their business before he and his wife had their meal. Elaine told them that Mrs Tullimore would bring forth from the depths of the oven huge succulent joints of lamb or pork, great golden-crusted pies or delicious fruit crumbles, but none of these delicacies were ever offered – or indeed openly shown – to any of the farm workers. The old men took it for granted but Dana, Vera and Elaine realised they would have to grow both forceful and deceitful if they were ever to get
a decent meal, and that night the three of them sat up in their far from cosy camp beds and plotted. Before it was time to sleep, they had decided they would threaten the Tullimores with the authorities, and would if necessary tell tales to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, for it was perfectly obvious that the farmer and his wife did not declare half the food they produced.
‘Of course they’ll guess it’s us and will be even nastier as a result,’ Dana warned her companions. ‘But it’ll be worth it if we get some decent grub. After all, the work’s hard and pretty unrewarding, we’re icy cold in that bloody attic – no, I won’t apologise for swearing, Vera, it is a bloody attic – and we’re starving hungry and fed on kitchen scraps most of the time, whilst the Tullimores live on the fat of the land. If that’s justice then my name’s not McBride!’
In fact the mere threat of carrying tales to the Min of Ag was enough to change things to a certain extent. Grudgingly, and with many a bitter remark, Mrs Tullimore doled out a small amount of acceptable food to the girls each day, though it was always the fattiest part of the joint, the wing rather than the leg or breast of a bird and the sausages containing the most bread, having been made at the end of the batch.
‘It wouldn’t be so bad if she wasn’t such a good cook,’ Vera moaned one day, when the girls had been at the farm for fifteen months, and were growing used to the hard work, relieved only in that in the winter months at least they were free to go to any dances to which they were invited at nearby RAF stations, it being, despite double summertime, too dark for work after about four o’ clock. Every time they were told that a gharry would
pick them up in the village street at such and such an hour, Dana hoped desperately that on arrival at the RAF station she might see that familiar dark head, that whimsical lopsided smile, and know that she had caught up with Con at last. In fact, she saw Con everywhere. She went into Norwich with a crowd of girls to see a film at the Haymarket and saw him in profile sitting two rows ahead of them. But when the lights went up this Con was fair-haired, with eyes rather too close to his nose for good looks. At other times she saw him across the dance floor, or on a railway station waiting to board a train, but it was always a Con lookalike and never the real thing. She knew he was on a bomber station, knew that Feena would forward any letters she cared to send, but her mother had promised not to give her Con’s address and Dana would not ask her to break her word.
Often and often, particularly when she was hoeing sugar beet, a task much hated by everyone, Dana heard the roar of engines overhead and looked up to see the Wellingtons, Halifaxes, Hampdens and Blenheims on their way home from a night flight to Germany. The Americans had been in the war since December
1941
when the Japs had attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, but the Yanks flew day missions, leaving the night hours to the Brylcreem boys, so when she heard the bombers returning she would imagine Con sitting in the pilot’s seat and longing for the moment when he would land, go to headquarters for debriefing and then grab a meal of some sort at the cookhouse before falling, exhausted, into bed. Sometimes, she hoped that he might look down on the sea of beet and mud beneath him and wonder if one of the tiny stick figures toiling away below
could be his old playmate. She knew he knew she worked as a land girl, because she had asked Feena to tell him her whereabouts and what she was doing. Feena had promised to do so, and Dana knew her mother would keep her word. Occasionally Feena passed on some of Con’s news, though she was always careful never to reveal the name of his station. At first he had piloted Wellingtons – Wimpies, the men called them – and then had transferred to Manchesters for a short while, though now it seemed he was on Lancasters, regarding them as in a class by themselves.
When she had first gone to Tullimore’s, Dana had been as ignorant as either of the other land girls about the great planes which droned overhead, but because of Con she began to be interested, to read everything she could on the planes he flew, and, eventually, to recognise each one by its engine sound even when it was above the clouds, too high for a visual sighting.
It was a cold day in mid-November and Dana and Elaine were cutting sticks of sprouts to be sent to market the next day when Elaine came out with a curious question. ‘Dana, I’ve often wanted to ask you. What sent you into the Land Army and out to this godforsaken spot? Oh, I know the cinema you managed was destroyed in the blitz so you had no job, but that could happen to anyone. It sometimes seems to me you’re punishing yourself; surely you’re not feeling guilty because your friend Jake trusted you to keep his cinema safe? I mean, that’s absurd.’
‘Punishing myself? What on earth do you mean?’ Dana asked, genuinely puzzled. ‘If you ask me, we’re all punished by the perishing Tullimores!’
‘Well, perhaps that was a bit strong,’ Elaine admitted, colouring slightly. ‘But when a good-looking bloke asks you to dance … well, you sort of hold yourself away from him, and hardly open your mouth. There’s that dark chap with the shrapnel wound on his forehead who always makes a point of dancing with you, but you freeze him off …’
‘I do not,’ Dana said, now annoyed as well as puzzled. To be sure, she had no desire to ‘get involved’ as she put it to herself, but other than that …
‘You do,’ Elaine insisted. ‘And you don’t make the best of yourself, you know you don’t. Why, Vera’s a first-class hairdresser, got paid a huge wage in a big London salon when she was in civvy street. But though she’s offered to cut and shape your hair a dozen times, you’ve always said it wasn’t worth her trouble. And then there’s your clothes …’
‘Oh, don’t start,’ Dana said wearily. ‘There’s a war on and we can’t pick and choose. It’s number ones or dungarees.’
‘Yes, but when the rest of us go to a dance we’re all turned out neat as new pins. If we’ve got any makeup we wear it, we iron our clothes so that we look as well turned out as any WAAF or Wren, and we wear our own decent shoes rather than those great clodhoppers provided by the Land Army. But you simply refuse to make the effort, and if that’s not punishing yourself I don’t know what is.’
‘I hear what you’re saying, but you must have heard the expression “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”,’ Dana said, grinning. ‘Do try and get it into your thick head, Ellie, that I’m not on the catch for a feller.
When the war’s over I’m going home to Ireland; there are plenty of blokes over there who won’t care if I wear wellies to bed! And until then I’m quite happy to sit back and watch you women fighting over any chap that’s going.’
There was a short silence. Dana cut three more sticks in rapid succession and chucked them into the big basket which, when it was full, she and Elaine would carry back to the edge of the field so that old Mr Miller might add the sticks to the ones already aboard the farm cart and return with his load to Tullimore’s. As Dana turned back to her work, Elaine took a deep breath and spoke again. ‘What about that fellow you’ve mentioned once or twice? Con, isn’t it? I know he’s in the air force and I suppose he must be abroad since you never arrange to meet, but why don’t you write to him, Dana? Oh, I know you do write letters, but why doesn’t he write back? Most of your post – in fact all of it, come to think – is internal.’ She waited for a moment, but Dana said nothing. ‘Look, I know it’s none of my business, but you aren’t very happy, are you? And if you are punishing yourself, it’s about time you stopped. I guess this guy, this Con, has found himself a girlfriend, and you’re hurt, naturally, but it happens to all of us, you know. Fellows discover a girl they prefer to the original one, or they get killed, which is worse. Their girlfriends stop caring about their looks, they think their lives are over, but after some weeks, or even months, they begin to pick up the pieces, to live again. They get out the old warpaint – if they’re lucky enough to have lipstick, powder and that – and tidy up, go to the dances, find another boyfriend …’
‘Well, I don’t want
any
boyfriend,’ Dana said, chopping
at a particularly obstinate stalk and wiping the rain off her face with the back of a muddy hand. ‘I don’t even want Con any more.’ She straightened and looked Elaine in the eye. ‘Con dropped me ages ago; we mean nothing to each other now.’
‘Then if that’s true, it’s about time you pulled yourself together and forgot him,’ Elaine said bluntly. ‘You’re both Irish, I take it? From the same village, or the same area at any rate? Well, what will happen after the war, when the two of you go home? He’ll probably have a nice little popsie, but what will you have? Nothing. Not even your looks, unless you get your finger out and start trying.’
Dana stared at her companion, eyes widening with horror. ‘Do you know, I’ve never thought of it like that,’ she said slowly. ‘And you’re right, Elaine. Con’s most awfully attractive; he still writes to my mother and has actually gone home a couple of times, though of course it has to be on the sly and out of uniform. Mum tells me he’s had a good few girlfriends but seems to have settled for one called Mirabelle.’ She sniffed disdainfully, ‘A stupid name for a stupid girl, but if that’s what Con wants …’