Land Girls (45 page)

But the real inspiration was the hair. Having made a hat with a piece of the dress material, Prue had abandoned it at the dress rehearsal the night before and had replaced it with real cornflowers. She had run out into the warm night, frantically gathered cornflowers from tangled beds and long grass, preserved them in water by her bed. At dawn this morning she had, with Ag’s help, pinned them randomly among her blonde curls, and prayed very hard that they would not wilt before five o’clock. And indeed the cornflowers were causing something of a stir. The other girls in their stiff and elderly hats admired Prue’s great style. While they bobbed up and down practising their curtsies, at Mrs Poodle’s insistence, while waiting for the train, they paid Prue many a generous compliment. All the way to London in the train, warm bristly stuff of the seat prickling her thighs through the artificial silk, Prue basked modestly in their admiration. She could not remember a happier day.

Mrs Poodle had had the idea of taking the girls to the Albert Memorial for their picnic lunch. She thought they would enjoy sitting on the steps in the sun, beneath the gaze of the marble sages as well as Prince Albert, and then stroll in Kensington Gardens before returning to the coach that was to take them to the Palace.

Prue, who had not been to London before, was enchanted by the drive from the station. She had not expected to see so many trees, the lushness of Hyde Park, people lying on the grass impervious to the war or the possibility of a raid. She saw only one devastated building: blackened stone, piles of still uncleared rubble, shreds of once private wallpaper exposed to the world. But nothing could detract from her excitement.

At the Albert Memorial, she sat on a step a little apart from the others. She wanted to be alone, to take it all in: if only Stella and Ag had been here – but still, she thought she would try to be a good reporter. She opened her paper bag of lunch, unwrapped the sandwiches from their greaseproof paper, then threw them to the sparrows. No chance of eating till she was
there
. Their Majesties would hardly be impressed by smudged lipstick.

The sun shone warmly down on Prue. The cornflowers, she checked, were still perky in her hair. She stood up, impatient – half an hour before they had to reboard the coach. She smoothed the creases from her skirt, wandered round the side of the Memorial. There, the ground had been turned into allotments. Amazed, Prue stood looking down upon a man who was bent over a row of peas supported by twigs. The sight of such country labour in the middle of London reminded her that Stella and Ag, at this very moment, would be working in the fields. She shut her eyes, imagining the afternoon at Hallows Farm, a place by now light years away, a dream … But no! This, surely, was the dream: Prue Lumley, land girl, in artificial silk on the steps of the Albert Memorial, about to be presented to the King and Queen.

Prue’s imaginings of activities at the farm were not quite accurate. Stella and Joe were supposed to be cutting the clover field: Joe on the new International, Stella on the Fordson, with which she was now familiar. But the old machine, increasingly cantankerous, refused to start. Stella fiddled with the choke, topped it up with paraffin, finally banged the bonnet in exasperation, but to no avail. Eventually, not wishing to waste more time, she was forced to interrupt Joe, needing his help.

He solved the problem at once: dirty plugs. He removed them one by one, held them up, cleaned them on a piece of rag. The simple solution made Stella feel foolish.

‘I didn’t know about the plugs,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I’d have known where to find them.’

‘I haven’t fallen in love with a mechanic, thank God,’ said Joe. It was hot in the barn. No breeze stirred the broody shadows. There was a smell of chaff and sacking. In the rafters, drowsy pigeons barely cooed. Outside, sun blazed down on the yard. Stella was glad of a time in the shade before facing the heat of the field.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Joe. ‘I’m not going to say a word to Janet until you girls have left, just before we move to Yorkshire. Weighing up everything – it’s a difficult decision to make – that would be the kindest thing. Postponing her anguish, perhaps: but I must tell her to her face.’

Stella, leaning up against the warm metal of a mudguard, watched him carefully.

‘I think I should do the same. With Philip. Face him, too. Do you think they’ll accept our reasons? Vicissitudes of the war?’

‘They’ll have to. It’s the truth. Can’t say I look forward to the announcement, though I don’t suppose Janet will be altogether surprised. She must have some idea our so-called engagement is a ghastly mistake. Poor girl: she doesn’t have much in her life. Sparking plug tester—’ he held up the last clean plug – ‘little hope of promotion. I presume she’s calculated that marrying the wrong person is better than not marrying at all. I’ll have to persuade her she’s mistaken.’

‘Philip, I think,’ said Stella, ‘will be very shocked. Devastated. He’s no idea of my change of heart. He won’t believe it. His pride …’

‘Christ! We’re going to be making a bit of a bloody mess,’ said Joe, wiping the sweat from his face, ‘but I think our plan is the best one. We’ll only be postponing the evil day – for them – by a few months. As for us … I’ve been thinking. It wouldn’t be easy, your coming with us to Yorkshire as a land girl, my having broken off with Janet. My parents …’

‘I realize that. I thought I could join my mother driving ambulances in London. In my spare time, go back to the piano. But at the end of the war, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t come to Yorkshire.’

‘There’s a small cottage belonging to the farm, up in the dales. Needs complete renovation. I’ve often imagined …’ He climbed up into the driving seat, pushed the starter button. The engine growled into life. ‘You’d like it there.’ He climbed down again, gave Stella a hand. ‘Tractor awaits you, my love.’

‘Thank you! I’ll know next time.’

‘Any luck, this time next year, we’ll be harvesting Yorkshire fields, and bloody Hitler’ll be dead.’

Ag and Mrs Lawrence, at adjacent trees in the orchard, were thinning the near-ripe plums. There were several filled baskets on the ground. Ag enjoyed the job, as she did most jobs involving hedges, trees, fruit. She enjoyed the warmth of the sun on her bare arms. She enjoyed thinking, for the thousandth time, of Desmond reading her letter. It was – she could privately admit to herself – a work of such vivid description that it could hardly fail to give pleasure. And there were still two weeks in which she would carry on hoping for a reply. Beyond that, to presume the worst would be the only sensible thing. At that moment she would have to banish dreams, brace herself for a solitary future. But there were fourteen days before she might have to face that trauma, still a modicum of hope in the summer air. Her optimism among the branches, heavy with warm plums, was not in doubt.

‘It was
in
credible. I still can’t believe it. The red carpet. Honestly. A deep ruby red.
Acres
of it, all up these great wide stairs, all over this grand entrance hall. I mean, you could’ve carpeted Lower Pasture, easy, with all that red …’

Prue had the full attention of her audience. It was past ten at night, the darkness just light enough to see by, so the windows of the sitting-room were still open, the blackout had not been drawn. Scent from a few surviving tobacco plants came into the room, at odds with the heavy scent of Prue’s
Nuits de Paris
, which she had been applying extravagantly to her wrists and neck all day. She was slumped on the sofa, artificial silk crumpled, cornflowers wilting in the curls, blue shoes slung off,
dreamy-eyed
.

‘
So
. We go in, up these stairs, like walking on velvet. There’s a huge crowd of us by now, from all over. More than three hundred. Mostly in reds and florals – no blues like this, I’m glad to say.’ She patted the weary skirt. ‘There’s a bit of trouble, you can imagine, getting the counties into alphabetical order. Very smart men in tail coats bossing about, very politely.
Ooh
, and the footmen, just like in
Cinderella
… Anyway, at last we’re in this great room, the Bow Room, overlooking the gardens. Pillars and so on. There’s a band playing. My legs were aching to dance. Then the word sort of went round, despite the music, and suddenly there they were, coming in,
the Royal Family
. Me near them –
me
! King and Queen, two princesses. A path cleared for them. They walked down, smiling this way and that. The whole crowd of us went down in a wobbly curtsy, we were that nervous. Actually, I didn’t wobble as much as some. And it was the first of about twenty-nine curtsies I did, I tell you. Every time I saw one of
them
nearby, down I went, just in case. Once, I found myself curtsying to a girl from Derbyshire – she got in my line of vision, didn’t half laugh, vulgar bit. Anyway, you could see these gentlemen in charge taking up quite a few of the WLA bigwigs to meet the King and Queen. And some land girls. Not me, actually, though I gave them the nod, several times.
Equerries
, I think they’re called. Still, I got very near. Especially to the princesses. They were walking about, almost ordinary. I couldn’t believe it. Me, myself, within two feet of Princess Elizabeth in a lovely flowered dress.

‘We were urged to help ourselves to tea. Tea! Bloody banquet, more like. These huge great long tables covered in white damask cloths so bright they dazzled your eyes. A thousand cups and saucers, plates and plates of tiny sandwiches. And lashings of chocolate cake: you couldn’t taste the powdered egg at all. Perhaps they’d used real. I asked one of the footmen if they had a private supply of hens at the Palace, but he didn’t answer, just smiled, too discreet to say. Anyway, best of all were the teapots: enormous great silver things with little silver strainers hanging to their spouts – such a sensible idea, I thought. Truth to tell, I drank my tea – I’ll remember every sip of that royal tea – but had no appetite for the sandwiches. Just one bit of the chocolate cake, well, two bits – I thought: can’t pass up an opportunity like that. I wanted to bring some back but couldn’t think how … I took my plate over to the windows – tall as this house – to look out at the garden. Well, blow me down if it wasn’t all made over to vegetables, neat beds of vegetables between little paths without a weed. I turned round to say something to anyone who happened to be near, mouth full of chocolate cake, when Princess Margaret, in glorious pink, passed not one foot from me. Her eyes! I tell you, I’ve never seen such eyes. She smiled at me. At least, I think she did. Course, mouth full of chocolate cake it was a bit awkward – just my luck. By the time I’d cleared my teeth, she was gone. Still, I curtsied, just for safety. Hoped she didn’t think me unfriendly, but she caught me on the hop.

‘I still can’t quite believe it. I tell you, it was a dream. I only know it’s true because I got chocolate cake on my gloves. I shall never wash them. Never, ever. For the rest of my life the royal chocolate will stay on my white gloves, proof it happened, proof I, Prue, once went to the Palace …’

Stopped only by overwhelming tiredness, further details of Prue’s excursion came temporarily to an end that night. But next afternoon, at an assignation in the woods with Jamie Morton, she found no difficulty in retelling the story, refining here and there, guessing at the height of the magnificent ceilings, the yardage of silk curtain, the probable value of Her Majesty’s diamond brooch, and her pearls the size of goose eggs.

Jamie was impressed. Prue could see that by the way his cigarette went unusually slowly to his mouth. The inhaling was shallow, the smoke rings careless. He had probably never listened to anyone so long, so quietly, so completely enrapt, reckoned Prue. When she at last finished her story he put one of his wedge-like hands on her shoulder, fixed her with an intensity of eye.

‘By golly, Pruey,’ he said, ‘what a thing. Like I told you, I’ve never had a girl who’s been to Buckingham Palace. Could be my only chance. What do you think?’

In the slipstream of her exhilarated state, generosity of spirit further warmed by her unique experience, Prue was happy to concede. While Flight-Lieutenant Morton prepared to ravish the first girl in his life who had brushed with royalty, Prue lay back on the mossy ground and thought of Buckingham Palace.

The morning came when the threshing machine was stripped of its tarpaulin and introduced to the girls. At first they were bemused by the complicated-looking monster, felt they would never understand the intricacies of so many belts, shaking trays and cunningly placed holes all designed to divide each sheaf into separate pieces. But Mr Lawrence was diligent in his explanations, and managed to leave them with a feeling of admiration for the ingenuities of the machine.

Two middle-aged men from the village came to help with the threshing. The machine took a whole morning to set up on an area of flat ground between two ricks. Work began early one hot afternoon. It turned out to be a job the girls unanimously hated.

The rattling and noisy throbbing of the machine quickly gave them all headaches, exacerbated by the uncomfortable goggles they had to wear to protect their eyes. High on the rick, pitching sheaves required more skill than they had imagined. Frustrated by their own clumsiness, hot, itching all over from chaff and dust that penetrated everything, the few days of hard threshing were an endurance test. But none of them gave up or complained.

Looking back, years later, on those hard days, Ag remembered only a single afternoon with any clarity. She was, as usual, on top of the rick – more skilled by now at cutting the string from sheaves and tossing them on to the man who would drop them into the drum. It was a particularly hot afternoon: the shirts of all three girls were dark with sweat, their bare arms a deep brown. The landscape shimmered in a heat haze, doubly blurred behind the goggles. At some moment, watching her own hands mechanically repeat their mind-dulling actions, Ag remembered that Desmond’s time was up. No letter. No reply. Too many weeks for any possible excuse. Only thing to be done.
Forget
. Face a new kind of life.