Land Girls (44 page)

Again they laughed.

‘I only wish,’ said Stella, ‘we had more time to ourselves, more time to talk. I want to talk to you all day long.’

‘We’ll just have to wait for lucky chances, like this. Store everything.’

Stella, used by now to the warm smell of Joe’s wind-dried cotton shirt, again longed to sleep.

‘There’s one thing we’ll have to talk about, though.’

‘I know.’

‘What will we do … about them?’

‘We have a valid reason for changing our minds. A real reason. The war. If it hadn’t been for the war, none of this would have happened.’

‘No. True.’

‘But there’ll be time to talk further, to make our plans.’ Joe clasped Stella more tightly. ‘I’m terrified of touching you.’

‘Me too. There’ll be a time for all that.’

‘God knows, I … But not here, at Hallows. Not the barn, or my bed, or Robert’s cottage, or even the woods. Not with you.’

‘No.’

‘So we’ll both wait – magnanimously.’ Smiling, they stood up. ‘I must go. A man’s coming to see about buying all the stuff in the dairy. Christ, to think: if it hadn’t been for the bombs we both might have kept our silence.’

‘I wonder if that would have been possible? Heavens, I miss the cows. I didn’t think I would, but I do already.’

‘We’ll have a new herd, one day,’ said Joe. ‘But Jerseys, not Friesians. I’ve never really liked Friesians.’ He picked up the basket, rubbed the back of one hand over her cheek, strode away.

Stella returned to her seat on the tractor. The sun was almost too hot by now. She calculated the vast amount of unrolled field left to finish by evening, started the engine with wild heart, and dreaming eyes, and no doubts that she would have it done by the evening.

Harrowing the stony ground of the hill meadow was a tough job, and Ag liked it. It was a great deal more interesting, working with a horse, than was the endless couching which had been her lot of late. And she knew that soon after she had finished this field it would not be long before she must start thinking about the fruit on the plum trees, a job she looked forward to. If potato planting by hand was the most physically exhausting thing she had ever done, harrowing came a close second. The back was spared, but arms and legs were battered. To keep straight, and to keep continually encouraging Noble – who was inclined to slow to a very slack pace – required intense concentration. This
concentration
was a merciful antidote to the melancholy cast of her mind. Lately, the odd sense of her lack of obvious attraction, appeal, whatever, had returned to haunt her. While the constant flaunting of Prue’s conquests caused Ag little more than an envious smile, the more serious state of Joe and Stella (so plain to a sharp eye, Ag could not believe the Lawrences had not observed it) accentuated her own bereft state.

While Stella rolled the wheat field in a state of high ecstasy, half a mile away Ag plodded behind Noble’s bay buttocks, lashed rhythmically by his black tail as flies settled, fled, settled again. Half-way up the hill, the horse suddenly stopped. Ag called encouragement. He did not move. Ag went impatiently to his head. What could she do, stranded in a field a long way from the farm, with a horse that refused to move? She took hold of his bridle, tried to urge him forward. Noble yawned, baring grass-stained teeth. Flies flew from round his eyes. Ag tugged again. Noble tossed his head, but still would not budge.

Despairing, Ag looked at the ground ahead. Perhaps there was something that the horse wanted to avoid. She saw that there was.

Just two yards away, right in their path, was a plover’s nest with a sitting hen bird. Ag gave Noble an apologetic pat, kept quite still. The bird shuffled slightly, its feathers glinting, its eye jolted by indecision about whether to flee or stay. Ag took the bridle again, guided the horse away from the nest, which they skirted round in a wide sweep. Pushed into this sensible solution, Noble moved eagerly.

Often, during the rest of the day, Ag glanced back at the plover and saw it still there, sometimes visited by its mate. While ruminating on the wisdom of letting broody birds lie
undisturbed
, some strange transference of thought wove into words what she saw as a signal: something to do with taking initiative, not letting a lifeless situation decay any further.
Doing something
.

Ag could never be quite sure at what point of that long, hot afternoon of the plover that she made her decision: the decision to take matters into her own hands, write to Desmond. There could be nothing untoward in a friendly letter. If there was no response – well, at least she would know where she was, and could give up the agony of hoping. It must be easier to accept nothing, she thought, than to toy with the endless possibility of something.

That evening, Ag began her letter. She wrote seventeen pages, carried away with her own descriptions of life at Hallows Farm.
Dear Desmond
, it began.
Yours, Agatha
, it ended. She posted it to his college in Cambridge.

T
he fine weather continued. Haymaking began. Mrs Lawrence had little time to join the others in the fields. With just six months before the move, every spare moment was spent with accounts books, calculations, lists.

One afternoon in late June, she carried the basket of washed sheets out to the line. It had been hot and sunny in the morning. Now, the sky was overcast and a strong breeze was blowing.

She began the job – which she seemed to have been doing weekly for as long as she could remember – and which, in fact, she found not without its pleasure. There was peculiar
satisfaction
in the whiteness of the coarse cotton, the wholesome smell of the soap which would be blown away by the wind and replaced with a scent of sun and earth. How many sheets, she wondered, should she take to Yorkshire? Should she reduce her linen cupboard, sell as much of everything as possible? Lately, a dozen such questions had besieged her mind each day.

There were six sheets on the line, now. In the increasing breeze they billowed like low sails. Their flapping noise, softer than canvas above waves, was more like the wings of a flock of large birds. One of the sheets wrapped itself round Mrs Lawrence. She felt its wetness through her apron, her dress. It enveloped her like a ghostly cloak. She stood there, a moment of sudden and unusual fatigue, letting it do with her as it liked. Each side of her, companion sheets were now swollen huge with air, tugging at their pegs. Mrs Lawrence dreaded their falling to the ground. She had no energy to rehang them. While they cooed at her, the free sheet still twisted round her, making her suddenly cold. The solid mass of grey sky, she saw, had been blown into a feathering of small cloud, like the breast of a guinea fowl. The dogs were barking in the yard. Mrs Lawrence’s misery was so acute that the familiar patch of garden in which she was imprisoned was contorted into a place she no longer recognized. She was aware only of a turmoil of blowing white all round her, agitated cloud above, the nagging of the breeze on her skin. She felt close to drowning.

Mr Lawrence, by chance returning to the farm for a new scythe, came round the corner to see his wife trapped in a sheet, the others blowing angrily on the line. He ran to her. Reaching her, he felt as if he was entering a surreal picture. Her misery reached out to him. He was alarmed by her face.

Quickly, he unwound her, took her icy hands. She leaned against him with so deep a sigh he could feel a shudder right through her thin body.

‘I don’t want to go, John,’ she said.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘None of us wants to go.’

For the first time Mr Lawrence could remember, his wife sobbed – briefly and quietly. He held her for a long time. They stood clasped together, waiting for her to recover, listening to the soughing of the sheets.

With the increased amount of physical labour, even Prue found herself more tired than before, and was forced to cut down her visits to Robert to two evenings a week. This caused her no great sorrow. Her earlier doubts had hardened into a definite
impasse
with Robert – the kind of
impasse
she often came to with a man of scant means. Although her respect for him remained intact – there was something mysterious about him which continued to intrigue her – the affair had withered into an unexciting routine which Prue recognized as a signal to its end. Meantime, Jamie Morton was limbering up as a possible successor – though, as Prue explained to the others, it was only lack of choice that forced her to consider him at all.

Jamie dutifully cycled over to the farm several weeks running to meet Prue in the woods on her afternoon off. On closer acquaintance, Prue discovered that similarities with Barry were few. In fact, the only two things they had in common were the RAF, and heavy smoking. Unlike Barry, he did not like Woodbines: Players were what he preferred. He talked about cigarettes at some length. Sometimes Prue – an accommodating girl in some respects, she had switched to Players to please him – felt she could not bear another conversation about the relative merits of various brands, and stories about how many packets Jamie had smoked on various occasions.

Jamie’s alternative line of conversation was hardly more endearing. He would describe to her the nature of his fantasies – such coarse dreams, it turned out, that even Prue was shocked. He did not, however, lay a hand upon her. Although she might have conceded, if the moment had come, Prue felt no great desire to be pummelled by the hefty red hands with their swollen fingers and bitten nails. There was a certain simple charm in his face – Prue still admired his teeth – and she had always fancied the blue of the RAF uniform. But to be quite honest, as she told the others, the weekly appointment to smoke in the woods with Jamie Morton was not the sort of thing that would keep her interest alive for long.

For once in her life, there were two things that preoccupied Prue’s thoughts, that early summer, more than men. One was the departure of the sheep and lambs, the other was the invitation to Buckingham Palace.

When she was able to get a word in edgeways, she tried to tell Jamie about the day she had to spend helping Mr Lawrence go through the ewes’ wool looking for maggots – he wanted to sell a clean flock. She had found some. The bugs had made red patches of sour raw flesh at the roots of the wool, which had to be treated. The little buggers, Mr Lawrence had said, could get right down into a sheep’s bones, drive it mad. Prue had to give two bloody great tablets to each ewe. Persuading it to open its yellow teeth, and swallow the things, was one of the worst jobs she could remember, she said. All the same, she was fond of the sheep, and loved the lambs. When they were finally hustled aboard a convoy of vans, she sobbed her eyes out, she didn’t mind admitting. She’d never heard such a noise in her life. The baaing and bleating would haunt her for years.

Jamie conveyed little interest in Prue’s stories of the sheep. The invitation to meet their Majesties, though – that was another matter. While Prue described the difficulty she was having in finding bluebell artificial silk, and the picture in her mind of the King and Queen in their crowns on a golden throne,
jewel-studded
, Jamie puffed faster at his cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew beautiful smoke rings that flew high into the trees before they broke – a man full of wonder and awe.

‘Good heavens, Prue,’ he said, when her imagination finally ran out one afternoon in the woods, ‘that’ll be quite something. Not believable, really.’ He stubbed the butt of his seventh Players into a patch of virgin moss. ‘I’ve never shagged with a girl who’s been to Buckingham Palace. Know that? Don’t suppose any of my mates have, either.’

‘Don’t suppose they have,’ said Prue.

Distracted by her thoughts of the Palace, more real to her than the present scene, Prue noticed Jamie had clamped one of his terracotta hands on her knee. She allowed it to stay there, just for a moment, before encouraging him to engage in the whole studied business of lighting the next cigarette.

* * *

The weeks of high summer passed with astonishing speed. There were long days of hay-making in hot sun. There was the cultivating, and spreading the sheep and cow dung left in the fields so that it should not sour small patches. To ensure the successful transformation of Hallows Farm into a good arable holding that would attract buyers in the autumn, the jobs seemed never-ending. Prue, to show her gratitude for the privilege of being the chosen one to go to the tea party, worked with extraordinary energy by day – by night, too, there was so much to be done in preparation. A week before the great event, she refused Robert any favours, saying she had to get her beauty sleep, do her finger nails, her toe nails, try out hair styles, choose her hat, generally pull out all stops so as not to let down the honour of the Women’s Land Army at her meeting with their Majesties. Robert was understanding about everything except the toe nails.

And suddenly there she was on the platform of the station, a July morning, Mrs Poodle rounding up a herd of other land girls from the district. In their brightly coloured silks and crêpes, with rouged cheeks and waved hair, they jittered about, all shy smiles and nervous giggles.

Joe had paid Prue no compliments on the journey to the station: his silence was unnerving. But when he whispered to her, on the platform, before leaving, that she looked the best by far, Prue’s confidence returned.

Glancing about, she could not but immodestly agree with him. But then, she had taken so much trouble:
weeks
of effort and consultation to achieve the final picture. Her dress, though not quite the bluebell she had in mind, was at least a dazzling blue, with a sweetheart neckline copied from her winter red, and a flirty skirt, though, God forbid, nothing that could possibly cause a frown from the King. Her mum had dyed some old shoes an almost matching blue, and to cover her hay-scratched hands she wore a pair of white cotton gloves which Mrs Lawrence had kindly embroidered with small patches of forget-me-nots.