Land Girls (27 page)

She had been looking forward to a day freeing a gate from a tangle of brambles. Yesterday, she had begun the job armed with thick gloves and powerful secateurs. Surprised by her own skill in disentangling the thorny mass, she was eager to finish. Also, it was a solitary task – one of the occasions on which, without inhibition, she could sing as she worked.

‘I’d positively
like
a day indoors,’ volunteered Ag. ‘I’ve been watching Mrs Lawrence making bread day after day – I’d like to have a go.’

‘Ag it is, then,’ said Mr Lawrence. ‘Up you go for instructions from Faith, and we’ll be expecting lunch at the usual time, two courses.’ He smiled at her nicely.

‘
At least
two courses,’ giggled Prue. ‘Canary pudding and syrup, if you can manage it.’

Prue found she needed especially large lunches the days of Barry’s visits, to keep out the cold, and to give her strength for the acrobatics in their bed of leaves under the trees.

When they had all gone, and Ag had cleared and washed up after breakfast, she allowed herself a few moments by the stove, hands resting on the dogs’ heads, to accustom herself to the strangeness of staying indoors. She was by now so used to spending most of each day outside, it seemed very curious, tame, to be left to the world of the housework. But this is what it must be like every day for Mrs Lawrence, she thought: sudden silence, the looming of domestic plans, lists of tasks to be accomplished by nightfall. There was no freedom from the discipline of deadlines: food must be on the table by midday, no matter how much ironing. The pile of socks to be darned must be kept under control; the grading of eggs, in the stone-chill of the scullery, was necessary before sending them off twice a week. For the first time, Ag began to reflect on the life of a housewife, doubly hard if you were married to a farmer. She wondered how it would be, how she would like it, when her time came – if, that was, she was not left entirely to Nature.

Stirring herself with a sigh, Ag went up the dark stairs to the Lawrences’ bedroom – a side of the house she had never visited before. Mrs Lawrence called to her to come in.

Ag took a moment or so to adjust to the duskiness of the light in the bedroom, with its beamed ceiling and small windows. Then a few objects, touched by the grey sky outside, began like just-lit lamps to burn into view – a set of silver-backed brushes on the dressing-table, a framed sepia photograph of a girls’ lacrosse team, a jug of dried thistles. Mrs Lawrence lay propped up on pillows in a high bed made of dark wood. Her hair was bound in a plait that lay over one shoulder; her face was flushed the colour of a bruise. She wore a long-sleeved calico nightdress, folded hands emerging from frilled cuffs and lying on the bedspread, stony as the hands of an effigy. The sight of her was a reminder of mortality: death from illness and old age, not just death from slaughter in the war.

There was a faint smell of cough sweets and honey. Despite a one-bar electric fire, it was very cold. Mrs Lawrence stirred.

‘Do you mind, Ag? So silly, this. But John insisted …’ Her voice was painfully hoarse. Shadows under her eyes scoured the drawn cheeks. Ag wondered whether she was seriously ill, or suffering from exhaustion, or both. What age was she? Probably early fifties, but she looked sixty. Affection for this contained woman, with her silent strengths, swept over Ag with renewed force.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Just tell me what there is to do, then I’ll bring you a cup of tea.’

‘Sausages and mash for lunch, stewed apples and custard. Corned beef hash tonight, perhaps – whatever’s there. I’m not thinking very clearly.’

She gave a small, self-despising smile, shut her eyes.
Tired eyelids upon tired eyes
… Pith-white skin stretched over the deep eyeballs. Open, the lids were crinkled as aged tissue paper. Closed, an illusion of youth clung to Mrs Lawrence’s strong features.

‘I’ll have a go at making some bread,’ said Ag.

‘There’s enough left from yesterday.’

‘I’d like to try.’

‘Very well. Don’t overdo the salt. John doesn’t like much salt.’

Their quiet voices chimed, church-like, in the soft brownness of the room. Then Ag crept away, leaving her employer to sleep.

It was the strangest morning since she had been at Hallows Farm, Ag later told the others. Working in the cold and silent house, her main anxiety was that she would not have done all the normal morning tasks, besides cooking the lunch, by twelve o’clock. Where was the Hoover, the dusters? What should be polished? Was it the day to scrub the stone flags of the kitchen floor? What rewards were there in doing such things
every day
? Guiltily she realized, as she buffed up the bannister rails in the icy hall, rewards did not come into it: Mrs Lawrence would never think in terms of rewards. Keeping house was merely a job to be done.

In the sitting-room, a forlorn place in the daylight, Ag turned on the wireless. The jaunty tunes on
Music While You Work
spurred her to polish the brass fender in time to the music, trying to keep herself warm. Then she listened to the news. It was announced that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

Ag sat back on her knees, twisting a duster – slash of yellow in the dull light – in her hands. She tried to imagine the distant carnage, the destruction, the horror, the terrible suffering and pointless loss of life. She felt impotent anger, fear. This was followed by feelings of equally impotent guilt at her own lot, which was comparatively safe. There was never a day she could take for granted her luck in being here, a place where the war scarcely touched them, but there was also never a day when she did not wonder if she should not volunteer for some less protected field of action. Should she not join the Red Cross, or drive ambulances in the Blitz, rather than milk cows and feed off Mrs Lawrence’s secure stews? Should her courage not be tested? And yet, while the men were fighting, girls to work on the land were vital: she had chosen the job, she loved it. But when news came of disasters, Ag was racked by the thought she should be helping the wounded rather than sweeping a safe yard or tending to the sheep.

She turned off the news, returned to work. Dully she set about preparing the lunch – at least the kitchen was warm. She was haunted by imaginings. Never having seen a photograph of Pearl Harbor, she had no idea of its scale. Visions came to her of gentle harbours on the East Anglian coast, crowded with pretty sailing boats. She tried to swap the familiar scenes for a more massive place, with destroyers at anchor. The paucity of mental pictures caused tears in her eyes.

When the others came in to eat they found her kneading a large lump of dough at the kitchen table. They wondered at the fierceness of her thumping, but made no comment. Ag’s first loaf, which later rose magnificently in the oven, was filled with the stupidity of mankind, the futility of war, the helplessness of one individual such as herself to enable the world to come to its senses.

Ratty, too, heard the news on the wireless. It was one of his days off from the farm – never a good time, the hours would stick to him like mud, nothing would shake them off – petty chores in the house or woodshed were useless at accelerating the long minutes. What Ratty missed, in this state of semi-retirement, was the discipline of long hours at work in the open air. Alone in the front room, tapping his pipe against the grate, the news increased his restless state.

‘Poor buggers,’ he muttered. ‘More trouble to come.’

He needed to be with someone. Anyone. Even Edith.

The kitchen was unusually welcoming: warm from baking, and filled with the sweet smell of dough. Edith, at the table, was regimenting troops of scones into neat lines on wire racks. Ratty was suddenly, piercingly, hungry.

‘Will you spare me one?’

‘That I won’t.’

Ratty shuffled a little nearer the table, watched his wife’s floury hand whisk among the crinkled edges of the beautiful scones, moving them into pure lines.

‘Japanese buggers have bombed Pearl Harbor,’ he said.

‘Ah.’

Edith, devoid of all imaginings beyond the confines of her own life, was immune to most of the horrors of the war. She could only believe in what she read in the papers – her faith in the printed word had always puzzled Ratty – and then only if there was a photograph to prove the story. Thus it was a picture of Beaverbrook waving an armful of saucepans that had fired her own wartime effort, and she conceded the Blitz took its toll because the photographs ‘said so’. Any wider understanding of the war, particularly ‘abroad’, was beyond her. Of late, Ratty had begun to wonder whether her lack of interest in the state of the world, affecting millions of lives, was some kind of disease. But then it occurred to him that solution was merely a figment of his own vivid imagination, and the real answer was that Edith’s professed ignorance was a defence against intense, private fear.

‘One thing after another. They’re for tea, then, are they?’ Again Ratty looked longingly at the scones.

‘They’re not for tea. They’re for the shop. Got to keep the customers happy. Got to make a living.’

A new tack to deny Ratty the odd luxury, he thought. Usually, her concern was to cause unhappiness among the customers in their fight for her few loaves. Ratty looked at his wife carefully. Sighed.

‘What’s for dinner, then?’

‘Thought I’d boil up a couple of parsnips.’

On such a grey day, so full of bad news, Ratty did not feel like boiled parsnips.

‘Don’t think I want any,’ he said, knowing his rejection would cause a disproportionate measure of offence.

‘Get yourself a sandwich, then. It’s not the Ritz here, you know. I’m not bothered.’

Ratty had expected worse. But Edith’s concentration on her scones, he noticed, was out of the ordinary.

He cut two slices from the loaf of hard, dark bread, and spread it thinly with shrimp paste scraped from a small ribbed jar. He knew better than to ask for butter: Edith had obviously availed herself of his carefully hoarded ration for her scones, and was in no mood to be confronted with her thieving.
Yes
, said Ratty savagely to himself, he would definitely call it
thieving
. If the point came he would, in all honesty, have to call his wife a thief.

‘Think I’ll take my dinner out,’ he said. ‘Sky’s clearing.’

‘Up to you if you catch your death,’ said Edith.

Ratty pottered about making himself strong tea which he poured into a thermos. Edith, so preoccupied, failed to notice his stirring in two forbidden spoonfuls of sugar: that was at least one triumph. He wrapped the leaden sandwich in greaseproof paper.

‘Mind you fold it up carefully, bring it back; it can be used again,’ Edith snapped. She had been listening to the crackling of the paper, though she had not bothered to raise her eyes to check how much Ratty had taken.

‘It’s only a scrap, for Lord’s sake.’

‘Every scrap counts in a war.’ When it came to the petty necessities of war, her perverse mind worked well enough. She raised her eyes. ‘I suppose you’re going off to join those girls.’

‘That I’m not.’

‘One of them, anyway.’

‘No.’

‘That’s not what I’ve heard.’

‘What d’you mean, Edith? Whatever are you talking about?’

‘I keep my ear to the ground.’

Guilt seized Ratty’s heart. Despite his innocence, and knowing he had never uttered a word to anyone, or made any kind of untoward gesture, he wondered how his wife could have guessed at the admiration, the secret
esteem
in which he held the holy one. In a moment of panic, he thought that maybe he had confessed this to Edith, and amnesia had blotted out the occasion. But no, that was mad. Surely … the mere sense of wistfulness – for that is what it was – he felt about Ag, was an absolute secret between Ratty and his God, and would always remain so.

‘You’re being ridiculous, woman,’ he said. ‘You know you are. You know those girls mean nothing to me. We’re just fellow workers.’

‘Huh. And since they’ve come, your working hours are almost back to full time, aren’t they? That’s what everyone’s noticed. That’s what they’re all saying to me.’

There was a long, incredulous silence. Then Edith began to brush flour from the bosom of her apron. It fell in a light dust on the cracked linoleum floor. If her snappish movements indicated a nefarious imagination could be called upon by his wife when necessary, Ratty did not notice.

‘You’re a wicked woman, Edith, that’s what you are,’ he said at last. He picked up his stick from the corner and thrust the thermos into his free pocket. Then he left the kitchen before she could answer, moving faster than he had for several years.

The heavy lunch and a strong cup of tea left Ag feeling calmer. She longed to do the afternoon milk, clean out the pig, anything rather than face the huge pile of ironing, but praise for her cooking had given her heart to face the domestic afternoon, and as soon as the lunch was cleared she went to the laundry room and set up the cumbersome ironing board.

Ag was an unpractised, unskilled ironer. It took her a long time to negotiate the difficult points of collars and spaces between buttons: compared with them, the stretches of sheets and tablecloths were easy, though the ancient iron was heavy. Within an hour her arm ached and her feet were icy on the stone floor. She began to recite to herself every long narrative poem she could remember, and was pleased to find there were few blanks. By the end of
Lycidas
, there was a pile of neatly folded clothes on the table – very professional-looking, she thought, and could not decide which gave her more satisfaction: remembering the long poem, or finishing the first basket of laundry.

The window of the laundry room was misted with
condensation
, but she could see the vague figures of Prue and Stella in the yard, driving the cows back to the field. She could hear the beasts’ lowing – a different, deeper sound of relief, once they had been milked – and the squelching of dozens of hoofs in mud. Ag looked at her watch. Amazingly, two hours had passed. She finished the last of Mr Lawrence’s shirts, allowed herself a brief image of ironing shirts for Desmond in some eternal future, then decided to pause for a while. Here she was, mind on
ironing
, when Pearl Harbor had been bombed …