A Girl Can Dream (23 page)

‘Is he good?’

‘Better than the bloke on the wireless,’ Mrs Warburton said.

‘Has he ever been wrong?’ Meg asked, and Rita shook her head.

‘So,’ Meg said. ‘There is going to be a storm.’ She didn’t see what a problem that could be.

‘This could be catastrophic for the farmers at the moment,’ Rita said. ‘A storm now would ruin the hay. Many were late cutting it anyway after the young men were all called up. It has dried lovely in the hot summer we’ve had, but rain now we can do without.’

‘Silas has been round the farms already and they’re taking it seriously,’ Mrs Warburton said.

‘And so must we,’ Rita said. ‘How long did Silas say before this storm breaks?’

‘Eight hours or thereabouts, but that was mid-morning.’

‘Dear God!’

‘Some of the women from the village have already set off to lend a hand.’

‘Girls,’ Rita said, ‘I’m afraid I must throw you in at the deep end. Come with me quickly and I will give out your summer uniforms for now because there is no time to waste.’

They trooped behind Rita into what Meg imagined was the dining room, and on the beautiful shiny wooden dining table were piles of clothes. From each pile Rita selected a short-sleeved beige Aertex shirt, a green jumper, a pair of dungarees, one pair of Land Army issue socks, one pair of boots and a hat.

Meg changed in the room she was going to share with Joy and wrinkled her nose when she caught sight of herself in the mirror on the outside of the wardrobe. ‘Not the most elegant of uniforms,’ Meg said. ‘But I suppose it’s practical enough.’

‘Well, I joined up to make a difference,’ Joy said. ‘So I’m not that bothered what the clothes look like as long as they are suitable for the job.’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ Meg said. ‘And if this Silas is right in his predictions and we can get the hay undercover before the storm breaks, then it will make a difference.’

‘I’ll say – and I don’t think we have long, and being new to it we’re bound to be a bit slow and clumsy,’ Joy said.

‘We’ll soon see,’ Meg said. ‘I can hear Rita calling us.’

However, Meg was not the only one who found it difficult to hurry in the heavy, cumbersome and very stiff boots; they all were complaining about them. One girl said, ‘If you wee in the boots and leave them overnight, they soften up lovely.’

There was a combined cry of disgust. ‘Ugh!’

‘I’m not doing that,’ Meg said, and there was a mumble of agreement from many of the others, but the girl was unabashed.

‘Please yourselves,’ she said. ‘I thought that too at first, but my brother was one of the young ones called up and he got blisters on top of blisters at first, until an old hand gave him that tip and he had no trouble after.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re going to try it?’

‘Why not?’ the girl said. ‘I’ve got nothing to lose.’

‘Get a move on girls, do,’ Rita said. ‘You can discuss your boots later.’

Outside, although it was still warm, it was muggy heat. Clouds had begun to drift across the blue sky, and in every hay field the truck passed the land girls saw people – old men and women and even children – working feverishly.

Eventually, Rita stopped at the top of one lane and said, ‘Oakhurst Farm. This is where you will be, Meg and Joy. They have lost their son and two farm hands to the Forces, but we can only give them two Land Army girls, so I’d say you’ll have your work cut out. Name of Will and Enid Heppleswaite. Just do your best.’

‘Are you dropping us here?’

‘Yes,’ Rita said. ‘I can’t risk the truck down the lane. I might get down and not get back up. Here’s Will come to meet you now.’

Will Heppleswaite was in his early fifties, though he looked older, for his hair was white, bleached by the sun, and his face was wrinkled and weather-beaten. But his brown eyes were kind and Meg felt herself relax.

‘Here you are, Mr Heppleswaite,’ Rita said, as she climbed back into the truck. ‘I’ll leave them in your capable hands.’

Will smiled, crinkling all the skin around his eyes as he waved to Rita, but really he was dismayed at the sight of Joy and Meg. They wouldn’t have known this initially, for his smile was warm and welcoming and his handshake firm.

‘Now, as Rita told you, my name is Will, so we’ll get the names out of the way first.’

‘Meg Hallett,’ Meg told him, shaking the proffered hand.

‘Joy Tranter,’ Joy said, doing the same.

‘Well, I am very pleased to have the two of you here,’ Will said. ‘And never doubt that for a moment. ‘It’s just … well, you’re such slight things. Do you think you are up to this sort of work?’

‘We’re stronger than we look, honestly,’ Meg said. ‘But we will do our best and work as hard as we know how, and surely any help is better than none.’

‘Indeed it is,’ Will said. ‘And I have no time for arguing the toss either. Come on, Enid and I will work alongside you and show you what to do. Between us all, and with God’s help, we may save most of the hay.’

The mown hay had been made up into little hay cocks to dry thoroughly and Will told them these had to made into stacks, which he secured with ropes made out of straw. These tied stacks could then be transferred to the trailer that the farm horse they called Dobbin would pull down to the barn. They had already built one stack and it was in the barn, and they were halfway through another. Meg was assigned to work alongside Enid and found there was an art to getting hay to stay on a pitchfork so that she could throw it up to the top of the stack, as Enid did with such ease.

However, she was in the same mould as Will and unfailingly kind and patient. They had similar eyes, but Enid’s face was plumper. In fact, she was plumper all over, and her brown hair, which was scraped back into a bun, was liberally streaked with grey.

As they worked Enid spoke of the difficulties of running a farm without help, and what a blow it had been when their son, Stephen, had been called up.

‘He wasn’t on his own, of course, because the other two young farm hands we took on were called up too. They joined the regular army. I mean, Stephen came and told us that he felt that’s what he had to do. Well, now he’s home again for a bit.

‘Is he? Meg said, wondering why he wasn’t out in the fields helping them if he was home. She didn’t say this, but Enid must have guessed she was curious.

She said, ‘And we are lucky to have him home in one piece because he was run over at the camp a month ago now. He hadn’t signed to go into the regular army that long before this accident. The brakes failed on the truck one of the chaps was driving and Stephen wasn’t able to get out of the way quick enough.’

‘Goodness,’ Meg said. ‘Was he badly injured?’

‘Nothing that won’t fix, praise God,’ said Will. ‘He had some internal injuries but the camp doctor sorted those out. But he needs time for them to heal properly, we were told. His body is a mass of cuts and bruises and he also had a badly broken ankle and arm, and dislocated shoulder, and feels bad that he isn’t able to help more. Enid and I think he was lucky that the injuries were not worse and I just tell him to be patient. Now he can be seen as an outpatient he has been allowed to come home for a bit.’

‘And “patient” is not a word Stephen thinks much of,’ Enid put in.and Will replied with a wheezy laugh, ‘No indeed he does not.’

‘We’ll try and make up for the loss of the help you had,’ Joy promised, and the two girls threw themselves into the work with even more vigour as the clouds gathered above them. The drop in temperature was welcome – Meg and Joy had already been forced to remove their jumpers – but the breeze that sprang up wasn’t, because it scattered the little hay cocks and the hay had to be gathered up again.

When they could no longer throw up the hay from the ground, Will produced a small ladder to lean against the stack, and Meg and Joy laboured on. Meg was very glad that she had got the hang of keeping hay on the pitchfork at last. But as fast as they worked, they knew time was against them, especially as Will had to leave them to do the milking just as the third stack was completed.

The dark, dense, purple-fringed clouds that now filled the sky were so low that they turned the afternoon prematurely dark. It was difficult to see but they couldn’t afford to stop, so Enid went down to the house and came back with two hurricane lamps, which helped a bit.

Sometime later, when Will returned, he was in time to tie down the fourth stack, which was then hitched to Dobbin. Enid led him down the lanes as fast as the horse was prepared to go.

The two girls and Will bent to their task again, but they had only made a smallish mound when the first large drops of water fell. ‘Oh, bugger!’ Will cried, and then the sky was rent open by forked lightning, cracking across it from one side to the other. Will leaped to his feet as the lightning was followed almost immediately by the extremely loud, rolling crash of thunder.

‘Must give Enid a hand,’ Will said. ‘Damned horse can’t abide thunder. If Enid can’t handle him and he rears up, he might do himself a mischief, hitched to the trailer as he is. And we also risk losing the whole stack of hay.’

‘Go,’ Meg said to Will as the rain began to fall like solid sheets of water. They collected up the ladder, the pitchforks, the kerosene lamps and their jumpers, and made for the farmhouse. The lane was already filling with mud, and slippery, but it was hard to be careful, for with the dense, dark clouds and relentless, torrential rain, they could scarcely see where they were going. And then the lightning crackled and flamed, throwing everything into sharp relief for a second, and then the evening plunged back into darkness while the rumble and boom of thunder filled the air.

By the time they got to the farmhouse, a whitewashed two-storeyed building with shuttered windows painted red like the front door, they were soaked through, but went straight to the stable where they found that Enid and Will still had their hands full with Dobbin. Will had managed to unhitch the trailer, but the horse was so unnerved by the storm that he couldn’t get near him to get the hitching harness or bridle or anything else off him. Meg could understand the horse’s agitation, because she thought herself unafraid of storms, but she had never seen such a ferocious one.

‘Can we help?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Will said. ‘Thanks anyway, but Dobbin is too spooked to have anyone here he doesn’t know. Every time he hears the thunder and lightning he rears up, and I’m afraid of him hurting himself. But it would help if you could put the hens away before the fox pays us a visit. That would really put the tin hat on it today. Oh, and the sow and piglets better be shut up safe in the sty. Old Reynard might fancy a bit of pork for a change.’

‘He might indeed,’ Enid said. ‘Cheek of the devil, foxes have. That would be such a help. Do you mind doing that?’

Meg minded very much going back out into the teeth of that storm and she could tell by Joy’s rueful expression that she did too. But they assured Enid they didn’t mind in the slightest, for as Joy said when they were again in the yard facing the elements, ‘It isn’t as if we can get any wetter.’

Joy was right, as the water was running off them, but the hens had also been disturbed by the storm and had scattered all over the farm. The two girls hadn’t any idea of how many there should be and so they had to delve under every hedge and bush and search every ditch while the relentless rain hammered at them as if they were being beaten with stair rods.

‘I’m sure if we get the rooster in, the hens will follow,’ Meg said. But the rooster proved the most awkward of all. In the end they each took a handful of chicken feed they’d found in the barn and, using that, they coaxed and cajoled the cantankerous old rooster in and the hens followed behind. Eventually all the fowl were locked up safe for the night.

The indolent sow was another matter; she was in no hurry to move anywhere. She was feeding her numerous offspring under the overhang of the pig pen, so was in some shelter, and she completely disregarded Meg and Joy’s efforts to move her into the sty, where there would be more shelter from the elements and where her brood would be safer from the attentions of the fox.

‘What shall we do?’ Meg said. ‘We can hardly haul her inside.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Joy. ‘Even with the two of us, we’d hardly manage it, and anyway she might not go without a fight. I think she could give you a hefty thump if she put her mind to it. Oh,’ she added suddenly, ‘I have an idea.’

‘What?’

‘You’ll see in a minute,’ Joy said. ‘Keep her attention.’

‘What?’ Meg said, staring at Joy incredulously. ‘What are you on about, “keep her attention”? She’s a flipping pig.’

‘I know what she is and I don’t want her to see me going to the back of her,’ Joy said, moving around as she spoke. And then once at the back of the pig pen, she lifted her leg over the wall and – quick as a flash – she plucked the last two piglets from the sow’s teats and they began to shriek lustily as she tossed them into the straw in the sty.

The sow moved surprisingly quickly for one so large, and Joy hastily pulled her foot back as, with a grunting roar, the sow got to her feet, spilling the piglets from her. She gave Joy a malevolent glare as she lumbered into the sty and the other piglets followed her.

Meg leaned over and shot the bolt, saying with a grin as she did so, ‘Made an enemy there, I’d say.’

‘Yeah,’ said Joy. ‘And do you think I’m worried? Now let’s get inside, out of this bloody rain, before both of us catch our deaths.’

Enid threw her hands in the air at the state of them as they stood at the doorway shivering in their saturated dungarees, Aertex shirts and their sodden, muddy boots but all Meg’s attention was taken by the young man beside the range, his plastered foot on a stool and his plastered arm in a sling. She thought Stephen Heppleswaite the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

It seemed odd to call a man beautiful but she couldn’t think of another word to describe a man with hair so blond it was almost white, a handsome yet kind face and lively dark blue eyes. But those eyes, indeed, his whole face, looked troubled as he watched his mother fussing over the girls. Girls he had never seen before, but his mother said they’d been assigned Land Girls and so he presumed that’s who they were for they had a uniform of sorts and they were so wet water was pooling at their feet