Somewhere Over England (33 page)

She rode to the farm, her dungarees clipped at the ankles, her old jacket buttoned tight against the wind. The farmer had told her last week where to leave her bike, pointing to the old barn.

As she approached the farmyard she dismounted and pushed at the gate, hauling the bike through mud, pushing it to the higher concrete where it was almost clear, then propped it inside the barn against an old mangle. The air was thick with the scent of hay. Already she was tired and it was only seven-thirty but maybe she would see Ed tonight and so what did it matter?

She stood in the entrance looking out on to the yard and then walked through the mud, hearing it squelch beneath her feet and splatter up her legs. There was a smell of manure and steam rose from a heap beyond the yard. Laura would love that for her garden. John met her then, coming round the edge of the long cow-shed which he had built just before the war, he told her as he led the way inside. It was limewashed and bright and he pointed to a Friesian which stood tethered to the manger.

‘Just get on and milk that one will you, me old girl, but wash your hands over in that basin first.’

The water was cold and the towel rough and full of holes. John stood watching, his face lined and weatherbeaten, his shoulders hunched from his thirty years on the farm. He had been born here, he had told her, and helped his old dad as long as he could remember.

‘Now you come on over and let’s get this old girl finished.’

Helen nodded and sat on the stool, waiting for him to leave, but he didn’t. The cow’s udders were milk-swollen. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what he had told her last week, then took hold of the two front teats, pulling gently together. Nothing happened. She pulled one at a time. Nothing, and John was still standing there, his shadow falling on her hands, his breathing audible.

This is ridiculous, Helen thought. For God’s sake, I’m a woman of thirty and I can’t even milk a cow. She leaned her head against the animal, feeling its quivering flank against her forehead.

‘That’s better,’ John said. ‘You get right in next to her, she likes to get the feel of a person, our Daisy does. You’re more than just a pair of hands to her, you know. She’s got to like you.’

Helen tried again but still nothing, she pushed her head deeper into the cow’s side. Like me, you stupid cow, just like me.

John moved then, bending down and yanking at the teats. ‘Naughty old girl’s holding back, give her a good pull like that. Don’t you go pussyfooting around.’

Helen watched the jets of milk flooding into the pail and then took the warm teats in her hands again and at last some milk shot out, but not much.

‘I’ll go and start in the other shed then, now you’ve got the hang of it.’

The evening seemed a long way away as Helen tried again. She had not got the hang of it. She pulled and squeezed, banging her head against the cow, feeling her hand cramping.

‘You damned old cow,’ she swore. ‘Holding back, how could you on my first day? How could you?’ She looked into the bucket. There was still very little.

John came back in thirty minutes. He had finished two cows. He laughed and took her place and she watched and listened to
the squirting jets, seeing the frothing milk, hating Daisy, hating the farm. All her fingers were red and sore.

She was sent out to help the men chopping out the sugar beets on the four-acre field. It was a long walk before she even reached the field and the hoe was hard against her shoulders and now she knew why John and the others wore folded sacks on their shoulders.

They did not look up as she arrived, but one shouted, ‘That row, six inches apart, then single by hand.’

He was pointing and so Helen nodded, ramming the hoe in as they were doing, again and again, hearing it click against stones, feeling her hands growing hot and sore. Row after row was hoed, and lunch was taken at the edge of the field, quietly eating sandwiches which were squashed from being in her dungaree pockets, drinking tea which was lukewarm from the flask which had been banging against her leg all morning. After half an hour they were up again, finishing the hoeing, just doing the last ten rows, and then it was singling the clumps which they had left by hand – a hand which was blistered on the palms by now.

They knelt when their backs felt as though they would break, and then the mud oozed up into her knees and they also became sore, and Helen wondered if this was any bloody way to win the bloody war. She didn’t just think it, she said it, again and again, her fingers cold and muddy from picking and then she heard the laughter from the man in the next row and looking up she saw his gap-toothed grin.

‘Well, my old girl, I reckon as how it has to be the bloody way to win the bloody war, and soon the blisters will go. You’ll toughen up.’

Helen laughed and looked at her hands. She’d bring gloves tomorrow, there was no way she wanted farmworker’s hands for the rest of her life. She continued swearing but in her head this time.

John had told her to return at four and so she levered herself up and walked back, feeling the blisters on her heels now, waving to the men, still swearing in her head.

She had to fetch the cows from the pasture.

‘Just call, they’ll come,’ he said.

She did call but they didn’t come. She walked up behind and waved her hands but still they continued chewing the cud and
now she was angry. Her feet hurt, her hands hurt, her knees hurt and Marian would never believe her when she wrote about this. She walked up to Daisy and shouted at her but she just slapped her tail against her sides and continued chewing without haste. Helen thought she looked like Mrs Vane and so she slapped her across the backside and now she moved and the others followed, walking sedately in single file and Helen shook her head at the feeling of success which coursed through her.

Dear God, she thought, a cow moves and it’s as though I’ve been given the crown jewels.

She had to try and milk Daisy again but it wasn’t until a week later that she achieved a frothing pail, stripping the udder, getting all the old milk out and milking slowly enough to draw out the fresh that Daisy was making at that moment. That evening she went home, her blisters drying and healing, and slept as though peace had been declared.

In April the Middle White sow had piglets and she brought Ed and the children up to see their short snouts. They stroked their floppy ears and soft skin, so unlike the mother’s. Chris asked when his pig, Helen, would have piglets and Helen laughed and said it depended when Mr Reynolds’s boar escaped into the orchard again. In April, the bombing missions began in earnest but Ed was safe. Grounded and safe but the shadows were in his eyes again.

In May he came to the farm and watched while she fed the calves in the small yard. They rushed up to her, pushing, mooing, and by now it seemed as though she had never done anything else but hoe, milk, weed, dig, feed calves. She put beet pulp and crushed oats into the trough, walking in deep straw, pumping up their water. She turned and pushed back her hair which was still curly but longer than it used to be and laughed. She was happy doing this work, loving this man, and she had not thought the war could ever bring anything but torment.

Helen forked hay into the racks, seeing some fall on the calves’ heads as they milled about, and then there was just the rustling as they ate. She walked back to Ed who was leaning on the wall, his arms crossed, his cap back, a piece of grass hanging from his smiling mouth and she kissed him, smelling the sun on his skin, feeling strong and fit. He pulled the grass
from his mouth and kissed her again and again and she wanted him as she had done for weeks but could never tell him.

That evening he pushed her bike back along the road, his arm around her, pointing out the Nymph and the Tortoiseshell and she was impressed with his knowledge of English nature until he told her that Chris had educated him, last year. She laughed then and he leaned down and kissed her open mouth and the laughter died in her throat and she clung to him.

Ed held her chin in his hand and looked into her face and she knew that her eyes said the same as his and there was no shame or restraint in her. He kissed her gently this time before pushing the bike through a gap in the hedge into the hayfield where cornflowers, daisies and poppies grew, and they lay on the warm grass and kissed, their mouths opening and then they loved, slowly, deeply, and without memories intruding. Afterwards Helen lay and watched the scudding clouds, and smelt the rich hay which had been crushed beneath their bodies. It had been strange to be touched by someone who was not Heine but it had been beautiful. It was as though they had known one another since the beginning of time.

That night as Helen undressed, grass fell to the floor and she thought of his hands, so firm on her body; of his chest, so smooth, so tanned. She remembered the power of him, the pleasure of him, the words which had come from his mouth and from hers. I love you, they had said as they kissed.

He came as often as he could and the summer was warm. They grew to know one another’s bodies and to love so much. In the long summer evenings Helen laughed as Chris and Ed pitched and batted in the garden and then let her and Mary try. One day the girls beat the boys and they sulked until Laura brought out the cricket bat and said that they would have to play with this next time if there were any more bad losers.

In June the hay was harvested and Ed brought some men from the base to help with the carting and the raking because, he told John, they needed to be reminded that something existed other than high-altitude bombing, ack-ack, fighters who ripped bullets into their planes, their bodies.

Helen and the farm workers had cut and turned the hay in the early part of the week and now she and Ed and Mario led the carts, each holding four GIs and the farm workers. They moved from the farm across a field of beet and down the long
lane leading to the hayfields where Helen had first lain with Ed, and she wondered if he remembered.

Above the clopping of the hoofs she heard him call, ‘It sure is a shame to see that grass go. I got kinda fond of it.’

Helen flushed and turned, shaking her head at his grin but laughing back. Rocket was slapping his tail at the flies and nodding his head, and Helen tightened her grip on his harness, leaning back into his shoulder.

‘Steady, old man,’ she breathed and hoped that Chris and Mary would be able to get out here after school.

They turned sharp left, calling ‘Here now’ to the horses as Helen had instructed and they were safely into the field, but Mario had to back Satin up and try again and on the third attempt he made it and his crew cheered, yelling that they hoped he was a better flyer than a cart driver, for Christ’s sake.

All morning they tossed hay up into the carts with forks while Helen stood in one cart, Mario and John in the others. She loaded from the outside first so that it would not overbalance when she took it back. Ed tossed hay up to her, his bare back glistening in the sun, his shoulders reddening. Her arms were bare and she felt the sun on them, on her head. There was a hay seed in her eye and he leaped up into the cart, pulling her lid down, easing the seed out with his handkerchief. She felt his breath on her face and his lips were so close but they did not need to kiss. They just smiled and he jumped down again and continued to pitch up the hay.

They carted their loads back at lunchtime but brought the wagons straight out again, eating a picnic the Americans brought from the base; chicken legs, hard-boiled eggs, cakes and beer, and John winked at her and said, ‘I’m glad you came to us, my old girl. Nice to have this manpower around, not forgetting the chicken legs.’

Helen laughed as the men cheered but she knew that on many farms the Americans were helping, glad to work on the land, glad to be free of the war for a moment. She watched as the GIs eased themselves up from the ground, throwing a baseball to and fro, leaping and falling to catch it. There was laughter and shouting and they were like children but of course they were men, young men who could die tomorrow.

She lay down, her arm under her head, hearing the bees in the hedgerows behind them. The sun was bright on her lids,
there was the smell of hay all around and she thought how much she loved England, its beauty, its smallness, its sameness, because she couldn’t bear to think of the war.

They worked all that day and the next but there was a different crew this time because the others had gone out on a dawn flight. She had heard them leave but knew each morning that it would not be Ed because the CO had kept his grounding official.

When the hay harvest was finished she limewashed the old cow-shed, now stained green and brown. She scrubbed the walls and then John gave her a bag of dry limewash and pails. She carried a small spray under her arm and mixed the lime with water. It puffed up into her eyes and caught in her throat and as she sprayed one wall her arm felt as though it was on fire from the pumping. But then Ed came and took over and they were both covered in lime, and Chris too when he came with Mary. He only sprayed half the wall because he was still not absolutely strong, and Helen watched him work and smiled.

In August they began the oat harvest and the wheat but Mario was not with them because he had not returned from a mission in July. The men laughed as before but there were deeper lines because the daylight raids were still not escorted deep into Germany and now there were so many and the losses were too great. ‘Too damn great,’ Ed said as they toiled home from the fields, their faces flecked with chaff.

In late August they went to Cambridge when he had a forty-eight-hour pass. Helen had asked Chris if he would mind but he had shaken his head and laughed.

They stayed in an old inn, climbing up twisting stairs, Ed having to lower his head beneath the beams. Their room had an old marble wash-stand with a rose-painted bowl and jug. There were floral curtains and a big bed and Helen was nervous because this was the first time she had been in a bedroom with Ed.

She watched as he unpacked, hanging his trousers in the wardrobe, his shirts too. She had always put Heine’s in the drawer. Helen walked to the window, peering out on to the narrow street. She mustn’t think of Heine, not here, not now. Heine had gone.