The Silent War (15 page)

The first thing she noticed was how warm it was. There was no doubt that the log fire burning in the grate had been warming the room all day.

The huge man moved behind his desk and sat down, before beckoning Sunday to do the same on a chair placed in front of it.

‘I want you to understand, young lady,’ he began, ‘that whilst you are on my land, you are my direct responsibility. Do you understand?’

Sunday didn’t understand, only because she couldn’t read the man’s lips, which seemed far too slight for his bloated face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘Would you mind repeating that again, please?’

Cloy looked irritated. He picked up a pen, scribbled something on a scrap of paper, then showed it to her.

Sunday looked at the message which read,
Do you understand what I am saying?

Sunday smiled back at him courteously, and answered, ‘If you speak slowly.’

Cloy tried again. ‘You are here to work, and to work hard. This country needs all the food we farmers can produce. Without us there is no bread, no vegetables, no milk, no meat. The Women’s Land Army have provided me with you girls so that my levels of food production are fully maintained.’

Whilst he was making his speech, Sunday’s eyes kept flicking up to look at the small but prominent veins on his ruddy cheeks. There was no doubt in her mind that Cloy liked his drink, for she had seen plenty of boozers with a complexion just like that back in The Eaglet pub in Seven Sisters Road.

‘I want you to remember that whilst you are resident on
my
land, you are on probation.’ Cloy was now exaggerating his style of speech even more than when he started. ‘During this time,’ he continued, ‘I expect
not
only a full day’s work for a full day’s pay, but the highest levels of behaviour.’

Sunday understood what he was saying all right. A full day’s work for a full day’s pay meant to her ninepence an hour, rising to a shilling when she reached nineteen. Slave labour in the name of maintaining food production, or rather
his
own standard of living.

Cloy put his hands on the desk, and leaned across at her. ‘Now I fully accept that you face particular difficulties with regard to – your disability. In which case I expect you to treat that disability with respect, and not involve me in unnecessary concern for your safety. Do you understand what I am saying?’

Sunday nodded. ‘Yes, Mr Cloy.’

‘Good. That’s all I have to say. Do you have any questions?’

Sunday looked down at her lap for a moment, then almost instantly looked up again. ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice barely audible. ‘What sort of work will I be doing?’

Cloy sat back in his chair, and crossed his arms. ‘You’ll be on milk call, tomorrow at five.’

Sunday’s eyes widened. ‘Five? You mean five o’clock – in the morning?’

Cloy was getting irritated. ‘That’s what you’re here for, young lady. We have to earn our living in the country.’

With that, he got up from his seat, went across to the fireplace and warmed his rump in front of it. It was his way of saying that Sunday’s first interview with him was now over.

For a brief moment Sunday sat where she was without moving. She watched Cloy as he collected a pipe from the mantelpiece behind him that was crowded with framed family portraits and snapshots. Only then in those few split seconds did she take in the cosy lifestyle this man had sustained for himself, with a fire in the grate, a half-eaten bar of American candy on his desk, and several bottles of liquor on a shelf above the wireless in the corner.

Finally, she got up and made her way to the door. But she turned briefly to look back at her new employer, who, from what she’d just seen, might well make Ma Briggs back at the Bagwash seem like a saint. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

That was all she said before leaving the room. She didn’t wait for a reply.

Even in the unlikely event that there might have been one.

By the time Sunday got back to the barn, it was already pitch-dark outside. But to her relief Jinx had lit the paraffin stove and the sharp cold she felt inside the place earlier was gradually capitulating to the cosy glow coming from the burning flame of the saturated wick. And as it was now after four o’clock, the electricity had been turned on, and two solitary low-watt light bulbs in faded yellow shades were dangling from each end of the beamed ceiling.

Jinx immediately introduced Sunday to the other girls, who had just returned from lifting potatoes out in the fields. Although she had been dreading this moment all the time she was on the bus, it turned out better than she expected. In fact, despite being dead on their feet, all the girls made Sunday feel welcome, with the exception of Sue from Brum, who was too tired to talk to anyone, let alone make the effort to communicate with a deaf girl.

Apart from Jinx, the girl Sunday took to most was the epileptic, Ruthie. Jinx had talked of her being a bit on the posh side, so as soon as Ruthie launched into conversation, Sunday imagined that she spoke with a plum in her mouth. She was not to know, of course, that it was quite the reverse, for although Ruthie came from a ‘good family’ down south, ever since she left school a few years earlier, she had worked hard for a living as a sales assistant in a shoe shop.

‘You chose a good night to arrive,’ called Ruthie, who was a few years older than the other girls, with a full
mane
of naturally curly brown hair, which just touched the shoulders of her sturdy, well-proportioned figure. Then she disappeared into the kitchen to start her stint as the evening’s cook. ‘Roast pork and crackling!’

‘What did she say?’ asked Sunday, who certainly couldn’t read lips on the far side of the room.

‘It’s her turn to cook,’ explained Jinx. ‘We take it in turns. Roast pork and crackling tonight.’

Sunday was flabbergasted. ‘Roast pork!’ she spluttered incredulously. ‘I haven’t had that since last Christmas. Where d’you get the coupons?’

There were a few sniggers around the room before Jinx explained again. ‘You’re on a farm now, girl. We may be livin’ in absolute ’ell, but at least we eat well!’ And to prove it, she cut herself a thick slice of bread, and started to toast it on a fork over the paraffin stove.

During the course of the evening, Sunday gradually got to know all the girls. Without any inhibitions, they told her about their lives back home, their boyfriends, their wartime experiences, and what they wanted to do when, as Jinx put it, they’d finished digging up bloody potatoes for ‘old fart-features’. With the place consumed by the succulent smell of pork roasting in the open kitchen range, everyone seemed to be telling Sunday the story of their life. But despite the hard work and bleak living conditions, none of them seemed to be particularly homesick. Sheil seemed the only really complicated one of the group, for she spent most of the evening combing the threadbare fur on Algie, and talking to it as though it were her child.

The meal itself was a dream come true for Sunday, for not only had Ruthie cooked the best roast pork and potatoes she had ever tasted, but Sue had made apple sauce from cornflour and saccharin tablets, with apples nicked only two weeks before from Cloy’s own orchard.

There was, however, one tense moment which very nearly ruined the warmth of the evening. It came soon
after
the meal was over, and Sheil was making everyone the last cup of tea of the day. The problem was caused, unwittingly, by Maureen, the deaf and dumb girl, who Sunday thought was the most attractive girl of the bunch, with her soft, light brown hair combed seductively behind her ears, and wearing only a slight suggestion of make-up. All through the meal Maureen had watched and admired every move that Sunday had made, so much so that she was impatient to communicate with her. Eventually, her moment came. Putting her hand on Sunday’s arm, she started to point first to her own mouth, and then Sunday’s. Then she used both her hands to convey some kind of a message.

Sunday’s expression changed immediately.

‘Mo’s askin’ you somethin’, girl,’ said Jinx, who turned back to try to work out what Maureen was trying to communicate. ‘Oh – that’s right, Mo,’ she said triumphantly. ‘’Ave a go, girl.’

‘What does she want?’ Sunday asked brusquely.

Ruthie turned to face Sunday. ‘She wants to know if you can read sign language.’

‘No!’ Sunday’s snapped reply took the girls by surprise.

Maureen looked puzzled, and turned to Ruthie for an explanation. Ruthie looked embarrassed, and by shaking her head towards Maureen indicated Sunday’s reply.

Maureen, looking most surprised, came back immediately. ‘Why not?’ she asked, using her hands in coordination with her lips to get across her question.

Ruthie turned back to Sunday to relay Maureen’s message.

But Sunday had understood only too well, and dismissed Maureen’s question with an angry wave of the hand. ‘It’s
my
business!’ she snapped, her voice raised again for the first time in several weeks. ‘Tell her I don’t need to learn sign language. Tell her I’m not deaf – not for ever. One day I’m going to hear again. All the doctors told me so. Go on, tell her!’

There was a tense silence around the table. The moment was only broken by Maureen, who smiled and gently put her hand on Sunday’s arm. She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t hurt at all, because she understood. More than anyone else in the room, she understood.

Luckily, the incident passed quickly and by the time the girls turned in for the night, Jinx had gone through her entire repertoire of dirty jokes, which caused uproar and gales of laughter right round the ancient beams in the high ceiling.

At nine o’clock on the dot, Farmer Cloy turned off the electricity, and apart from the light from a torch which Sue always used to read a magazine before turning in, the place was plunged into darkness.

For the first hour or so, Sunday didn’t sleep too well. Her bed was as uncomfortable as hell, and the solitary pillow felt like concrete. So she just lay there, wondering why she’d come to such a place, and what her mum and Aunt Louie were doing now back home in ‘the Buildings’. If she wasn’t exactly homesick, she was certainly bewildered. Bewildered to be sharing her bedroom with five other girls, with no privacy, and no sense of belonging to anyone. But as her eyelids gradually began to feel dry and heavy, her mind started to race. She thought of everything that had happened to her that day, about the massive silver plane swooping down low across the hedgerows just above her head, about Jinx and the girls, about Ronnie Cloy and his butterflies. For a moment or so she also remembered the flying bomb, and Pearl, and Ma Briggs. She could see them – and hear them. But as her eyelids flickered just one more time, those images soon disappeared.

By the time she fell into a deep sleep, she remembered nothing. Absolutely nothing.

During November, the Allied invasion of France was gaining momentum. Despite heavy opposition, there were advances on all fronts, and speculation was growing that by the New Year a heavy battle would be taking place well inside Germany itself. Unfortunately, however, the Allied success had not yet stemmed the daily onslaught on London by Hitler’s latest secret weapon, the V-2 rocket, and Prime Minister Churchill’s statement to Parliament that ‘the casualties and damage had so far not been heavy’, was far from the truth. Islington had been one of the first of the London boroughs to be hit, when a rocket came down on a residential back street causing devastation and the loss of many innocent lives. After the D-Day landings in Normandy back in June, the initial euphoria that the war was almost over had vanished. Even in ‘the Buildings’ the mood of fear and depression had returned, and like all the rest of their neighbours, Madge Collins and her sister Louie never knew from one day to the next whether they would survive an explosion caused by one of the giant rockets crashing down on them from the sky.

In North Essex, too, the skies were constantly streaked with the trails of rocket vapour. Ever since September, there had been rumours of V-2s dropping on Chelmsford and Clacton, of others that had exploded in midair or in the sea off the Essex coast, and many more tearing their way across the skies to wreak even more havoc on London.

By the end of her first week at Cloy’s Farm, Sunday had seen very little of the lethal rockets that were passing over
the
stubble fields each day. Because she had received no formal training for her duties from the War Agricultural Committee, she had to learn the hard way. That meant getting up at four every morning, waiting until the cold bathroom was free, swallowing a quick cup of tea and a slice of bread and marge, and rushing out to the cowsheds where Farmer Cloy’s wife, Angela, was waiting to show her the rituals of milking. To her surprise, Sunday took an immediate liking to Angela Cloy, who not only had a beautiful outdoor complexion, but who seemed to work just as hard as the rest of the girls. Once the milking was done, Sunday then helped out in the grain sheds, before going on to join her Land Army pals who were still lifting potatoes from the heavy clay, a tedious and freezing-cold job that had been badly delayed by the shortage of farm labour.

Although she adapted to the hard working conditions much quicker than she had imagined, the one great obstacle she found difficult to overcome was the sight of dozens of American bomber planes taking off night and day from the runways of the US Air Force Base at Ridgewell. The base was within easy sight of the farm, and hardly a day went by without a crippled plane swerving low over the field in which she was working. Sometimes the huge plane was flying in on one engine, other times it had lost either one or both the wheels from its undercarriage, which usually resulted in an emergency landing, sometimes with fatal casualties amongst the crew. There were also times when dozens of planes took off, one after another, with hardly a moment’s interval between them. Every time Sunday watched the huge birdlike machines rise up gracefully into the air, she felt a strange feeling in her stomach, not only because she couldn’t hear the roar of their powerful engines, but because the whole spectacle brought back so vividly her memories of the Blitz at home in ‘the Buildings’, and that one deadly flying bomb that had changed her life so dramatically.