Read Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings Online
Authors: Julia Stoneham
Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings
J
ULIA
S
TONEHAM
To my mother, who provided me with the blueprint for ‘Alice Todd’
The dressing-table mirror, like everything else in the boarding house, was old, of poor quality and dimly lit.
Alice Todd peered at her reflection and was disturbed. She still half expected to see the self-confident, pleasantly attractive face with which she was familiar and which, framed and in studio-portrait form, stood on one side of her husband’s desk at the Air Ministry, depicting the winsome, contented, middle-class young matron Alice was. Had been. But the eyes that now met hers bore traces of anxiety. The lips of the mouth in the mirror were compressed. The skin, possibly due to the poor quality of the looking glass, lacked lustre. Observing herself carefully, she rearranged her features, composing them as she watched and attempting to achieve the look of confidence and calm which today would demand of her.
The hat would not do. Its half-veil, softening the small, feathered pillbox, suited her but was, she decided, too pretty, too frivolous for the business in hand. She replaced it with a less becoming fawn felt with a heavy brim. The effect reminded her of Celia Johnson in a film that she had recently seen and through which her young son had fidgeted. He appeared now at her elbow, neat in his school uniform, gas mask over shoulder, cap – embellished with his prep school’s insignia – slipping slightly to one side on his crisp, curly hair.
‘I’ll be late for prayers,’ he said, searching her face in the mirror, watching it soften as she smiled at him. Snatching up handbag and gloves, she propelled him towards the door, turned off the low-wattage, overhead light and left the room. As they descended the stairs a door opened below them.
‘Good morning, Mrs Bowden,’ the boy said cheerfully, moving forward to the front door.
‘’Mornun’, Edward-John.’ Mrs Bowden edged out into the hallway, effectively blocking it. She had an apron over her frock, a scarf over her curlers, a duster in one hand, a
half-smoked
Woodbine cigarette in the other. She spoke with the rounded accent and sharp tone of a true Devonian. ‘’Tis Friday, dear,’ she announced to Alice, making a pass at the banisters with her duster.
Alice, still unfamiliar with such approaches where money was concerned, looked blank.
‘The rent,’ said Mrs Bowden, lowering her voice.
‘Oh. Yes. Of course…’ Alice balanced her handbag on the
hall table, opened it and searched it hurriedly. ‘My cheque book’s here…somewhere…’
‘I’d rather have money…if it’s all the same to you.’
‘But a cheque is…’
‘Mr Todd always paid cash, dear.’ Mrs Bowden stood, implacable.
Edward-John was at the front door, holding it open, the cold February morning blowing in.
‘Very well. I’ll go to the bank.’
‘That’s it, dear,’ said Mrs Bowden, melting like an ogre in a fairytale into the shadows of her room.
‘Oh, Mrs Bowden?’ Alice called, her voice, she realised, sounding slightly shrill as Mrs Bowden’s face loomed back.
‘I should be here by the time Edward-John gets home from school, but if I’m delayed…’
‘I’ll see to ’im. Don’t fret yourself.’
‘You’re very kind…’ Alice smiled uncertainly.
As the front door closed behind the mother and son, Mrs Bowden exhaled, smoke wreathing about her curlered head.
‘Poor girl,’ she wheezed. ‘I dunno… These days…’
Alice withdrew money from the bank and somehow managed to arrive in Ledburton village square at the appointed time. Edward-John, delivered to the gates of his prep school, had hurried through them with the last of the latecomers.
The mid-morning bus from Exeter had been full of
village women returning from their regular excursion to the market. Laden with the week’s rations and struggling to control squalling babies and noisy toddlers, they had stared at Alice, the only stranger amongst the otherwise familiar faces. When the bus drew up at the Ledburton stop they watched her as she scanned the village square and saw her react to the beeped horn of a small saloon car, parked in front of the post office. She was seen to approach the car and speak to its occupant through the wound-down window.
‘Get in, Mrs Todd!’ The speaker was a solidly built woman, dressed severely in a grey coat and skirt. ‘If you are Mrs Todd!’ she added jovially, grasping the gear-stick as Alice settled into the passenger seat. ‘Margery Brewster,’ the woman announced. ‘Land Army rep for this neck of the woods! We’ll be seeing a lot of each other if you take this job!…Ye Gods!’ she added as the car protested. ‘Mind of its own, this beast!’ Then, as they moved erratically forward, she thrust a piece of paper at Alice. ‘Can you follow these directions? Not easy with all the signposts gone!’
Occupied by the navigation that took them away from the village into a network of lanes, Alice peered at the scribbled instructions.
‘Left at the big willow tree…then down the hill and through the ford…’ Margery Brewster crouched over her steering wheel, scanning the muddy surface of the lane in an attempt to avoid the worst of the potholes.
‘Understand you’ve been living in Exeter,’ she bellowed.
‘Yes,’ said Alice, wondering whether the thatched roof she could see on her right was the barn that was to be her next landmark.
‘To avoid the London blitz no doubt,’ Margery Brewster continued. ‘Wise of you. In the forces is he? Your chap?’ Had she been observing Alice, Margery would have seen a reaction to this assumption. As it was she missed it, her attention focused on negotiating the crossing of the shallow ford. She pursued her enquiries. ‘Which?’ she asked bluntly. Alice decided that the thatch was not a barn but a haystack.
‘He works at the Air Ministry,’ she said. ‘His department is being evacuated to Cambridge.’
‘Aren’t you going to join him there?’ Margery’s shrewd mind had homed in on something. A sideways glance at Alice’s face confirmed her suspicions. Here was an irregularity, a complication.
‘Things are…’ Alice hesitated miserably, ‘…a little uncertain.’
‘Well, I hope they’re not too uncertain, Mrs Todd! We like our hostel wardens to commit themselves for at least twelve months. The last thing Mr Bayliss wants is to find himself with ten land girls on his hands and a warden who goes off to Cambridge to join her husband!’ She emphasised this with an abrupt and noisy gear change which flung her passenger forward in her seat.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t!’ Alice said, her eyes scanning the wintry landscape for the elusive barn. ‘When I said uncertain,
I meant…well…my marriage…’ Margery, embarrassed, interrupted her.
‘My apologies,’ she said, almost gently. ‘Didn’t mean to pry or sound hard. But one must have ones priorities, you know. Oh, dear! This war! So many casualties, don’t you find?’
Alice was, she supposed, a casualty of the war, having, until recently, been happy enough with her life; for, although deprived of her parents at an early age, she had been cushioned from the hard facts of her loss by affectionate relatives. She remembered, or had been told that she remembered, waving goodbye to her mother and father when she had been left in the care of her Aunt Elizabeth while her parents set off to tour the Black Forest in their new motor car. After the accident she had been surrounded by grave-faced people who ensured that it was several years before the word ‘orphan’ had entered her vocabulary. When it did, time had blunted the fact of her parents’ absence and they had become mythical beings, endowed by her vague memories with invented virtues. It was not an unpleasant situation. Alice barely deserved the sympathy and compassion which her relatives lavished on her but she nevertheless enjoyed it and grew into a
well-adjusted
young woman with whom James Todd, in his final year at university whilst she was in her first at a domestic science college, had fallen in love. With his degree and his foot confidently on the first ladder of a career in the Civil
Service, he married her. A son, Edward-John, was born the year Adolf Hitler took power, a fact that, together with other signs of an approaching war, discouraged James from adding to his family. Alice had wanted more children and was prepared to take the risk but James had been firm and Edward-John remained an only child.
‘Left! Left here!’ Alice almost shouted as they passed a gateway through which the elusive barn had become briefly visible. Margery hauled the car round, inserted it into what was hardly more than a track between steep banks topped with hazel bushes and negotiated a slithering descent to the valley floor where the lane levelled and ran pleasantly north, beside a water meadow, for half a mile or so. Then, suddenly, they came upon a cluster of farm buildings.
Alice felt her heart lift. From a distance Lower Post Stone Farm looked idyllic. A classic Devon longhouse with a central porch, pale, pink-washed walls, small, square windows beneath an undulating thatched roof, all of it held protectively between two massive chimneys. The scene suggested a serenity which, since the onset of the war and the disruption it had caused in Alice’s previously pleasant life, she had thought had vanished from the world.
Margery Brewster glanced at her passenger’s rapt expression.
‘Don’t like the look of that thatch,’ she muttered, searching for firm ground on which to park her car. She
had been bogged in mud before now, when visiting remote farmhouses.
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Looks damp. And there are things growing on it. Always a bad sign.’ Margery brought the car to a stand and pulled hard on the handbrake. She was a worthy woman. Daughter of a clergyman, wife of a solicitor and mother of two girls, both grown up and gone from her, she had, at the outset of the war, offered herself for voluntary work. Shortly afterwards and rather to her surprise, she had found herself face to face with Lady Denman, director of the Women’s Land Army. An hour later she had accepted the role of local representative, known officially as a Village Registrar, for that organisation. Her husband, previously unaware of her organising skills, had been astonished to witness the transformation of his wife from docile partner into spruce, committed businesswoman and, although he joked to his friends about her newly discovered vocation, was secretly uneasy, feeling sometimes almost neglected. Margery had never in all her life been happier. From dutiful daughter she had, in her twenties, become a devoted wife and mother. Assuming that this should be enough she had put moments of restlessness down to various time-of-life difficulties. Now, to her surprise, she had discovered that she had a talent for organising and for delegation, for assessing skills, judging character and, as she had already demonstrated on more than one occasion, for dealing with a crisis. She was,
however, slightly ashamed of how much she was enjoying the war and tried to compensate for these feelings by being sensitive to those, like the young woman seated beside her now, whose experiences of it were less happy than her own. She switched off her engine and opened her door.
A scatter of clucking fowls approached the car, peering inquisitively at its unfamiliar occupants. More distantly, sheep bleated on the hills that rose behind the roofs of outbuildings visible beyond the farmhouse itself and from the inside of which the sound of hammering was audible. To one side of the farm buildings was a neat, stone cottage. Smoke drifted from its single chimney.
The farmhouse was, Alice could now see, in a neglected state. Great swags of honeysuckle, tangled with a leafless Albertine, swamped the porch and had hauled themselves up over the thatch and towards the chimneys. The
pink-wash
was sullied with a greenish mould and the window frames were dark with rot. The small, walled front garden was overgrown with rank grass, straggling lavender and unpruned roses, now bereft of leaves but still sporting last year’s hips, which shone red as blood in the thin February sunshine. The air in the sheltered valley felt almost warm. Margery heaved herself from her car, her rubber boots sinking a good inch into the mud. She reached into the back seat.
‘Better borrow these,’ she said, waving a spare pair of muddy boots at Alice.
The porch extended into the garden. It was floored with small cobbles, polished smooth by centuries of use. The disused nests of swallows and house martins clustered where the underside of the thatch butted onto crumbling walls. As Alice and Margery ducked their heads under the lintel of the low door the air inside the house struck cold and the sound of hammering intensified.
The wide hallway – known as a cross-passage – was, like the rest of the ground floor, paved with slate. From it, one on either side, narrow and dark staircases wound upwards. At the far end was a window beside a solid wooden door that, Alice correctly guessed, led into the yard. A door on the right stood open to a gloomy kitchen. Alice could make out the shape of a wooden table, stained with mould. On the other side of the cross-passage a third door revealed a large room, low-ceilinged and beamed, its windows set close to the slate floor. The interior of the farmhouse had been recently whitewashed by someone whose work appeared to have been rushed, for although there were splashes of paint on the beams and on the floors, corners remained cobwebby with signs of mould where the paintbrush had not quite reached.
Someone was descending the right-hand staircase. Someone in stout boots, thick lisle stockings, an apron over her dark, woollen dress and thick cardigan. Rose.
Her face, once pretty, was overlaid now with early
middle-age
and the strains that five years of widowhood had put
on her. The eyes were direct and steady. She had a hardness about her, inherited from her antecedents, generations of farmworkers whose lives had been little more than a losing battle against poor wages, rudimentary accommodation and relentless exposure to elements that were mostly less than kind and often cruel. She stood squarely before them, reddened hands smoothing her apron.
‘You’ll be Mrs Brewster,’ she said, eyeing Margery and ignoring Alice. Her accent was rounded, edged with a sharpness common to Devonians.
‘And you are?’ Margery asked imperiously.
‘Rose,’ said Rose. ‘Crocker. Mrs. Widowed. I lives in the cottage. My Will were cow-man here. Then my son Dave was. Till he were called up. There be girls doin’ ’is work now!’ she said derisively. ‘I’m to ’elp ’ere, Mr Bayliss says. With the domestic work. Assistant to the warden.’ She turned to Alice, ran her eyes over the good suit, the fine gloves held loosely in a well-shaped hand, the soft leather handbag and the diffident expression. ‘But you ain’t never the warden!’ she exclaimed. Alice blanched.