Was it wrong to be so happy, when the world was in such a horrible mess? The thought sobered her and she sat up, flicking back the thick mass of curly black hair from her shoulders. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, especially when in the newspapers last week it was reported that the Nazis had murdered more than one million Jews to date. It had said that in Poland the Nazis weren’t bothering to send the Jews to concentration camps; instead they had special vans fitted as poisonous gas chambers, and they would herd up to ninety men, women and children into them, while other Jewish men would dig the graves. It was unbelievable, but true. And in the Warsaw ghetto, where 600,000 people were dying from starvation and disease, medical supplies were being denied to children under five. How would their poor mothers cope with such inhumane treatment? It would send you mad.
She shut her eyes, and other dreadful stories – like the Nazis’ slaughter of a whole Czech village, in reprisal for two members of the Free Czech forces killing Reinhard Heydrich, the Hangman of Europe and architect of the Final Solution – crowded her mind. But she didn’t want to think of such things today, not on this one special day.
Jumping up again, she walked over to the dress, fingering the folds of lace and satin and imagining Monty’s face when he saw her walking down the aisle. She loved him so much, and with life being so precarious – especially for him, as a fighter pilot – she longed to be his wife. They would make the most of his leave and the one-week holiday she was allowed from the farm. Her work-roughened hands caught on the soft material, and she grimaced as she looked at her red skin and broken nails. The work that she, as a volunteer in the Women’s Land Army, had to tackle was as varied as agriculture itself. Hand-milking cows, lifting potatoes, helping with land reclamation and drainage, operating heavy earth-moving machinery or driving a tractor, mucking out pigs, thatching ricks, hedging, hay-making, harvesting, planting, weeding, muck-spreading – she had done it all, and would no doubt do so again. It was a far cry from the country-house parties and tennis tournaments, the London Season and delightful social whirl that would have been her lot, had Adolf Hitler not forced Britain to declare war on Germany on a sunny September Sunday three years ago.
But – and she couldn’t have discussed this with anyone, not even Monty, close though they were – she was glad she had been removed from the life she would have been expected to live, as the daughter of her parents. Not glad about the war; never that. She shuddered. But glad that she could actually do something: be useful, productive – not just a fancy adornment on a man’s arm. Even her darling Monty’s arm.
Oh, what was she thinking? She shook her head at herself. This was her trouble: thinking too much. Her dear mother had always said so. And it was certainly this attribute that had caused her to be at loggerheads with her father, from as long ago as she could remember. They’d had a blazing row on her seventeenth birthday when she’d declared that, now she was old enough, she was joining the Women’s Land Army. She had read an article in the newspaper stating that two decades of rural depopulation, followed by an intensive army recruitment campaign in the spring of 1939 and then by conscription, had left a deficit of more than 50,000 farm workers. Once they were over twenty-one, farm workers were considered to be in a reserved occupation and were thus exempt from conscription, but the 20,000 who had joined the Territorial Army were nevertheless called up. The paper had also declared that the priority to increase the production of food crops by ploughing up permanent pasture meant that the number of farm workers required was increasing, rather than remaining the same, and that it was time for women to play their part in the war and get ‘breeched, booted and cropped’, as they had done in the First World War. She’d known immediately that’s what she wanted to do.
Her father had been furious that a daughter of his could consider what he called ‘menial work’, rather than something in an office or the WAAF, or other occupations suitable for a refined young lady, and had been adamant that Esther would not join the WLA. She had been just as adamant that she would. After two weeks of bitter arguments, she had gone over his head and attended an interview, whereupon she had found that the WLA couldn’t get enough people and there was no training at all – there simply wasn’t time for it.
‘You’ll get all the experience you need on the job,’ a sturdy matron had told her. ‘Just remember the golden rule: don’t fraternize with anyone; and remember that noisy or flirtatious behaviour brings discredit on the uniform and the whole Women’s Land Army.’ Esther had been issued with a pair of jodhpurs, two green jerseys, five beige T-shirts, a green tie, four pairs of dungarees of the bib-and-brace type, two pairs of heavy shoes that she could hardly walk in at first, a pair of wellington boots and several pairs of Boy-Scout style, knee-length socks, and dispatched to a farm in Yorkshire within the week.
Her father hadn’t talked to her during the days before she left, which had actually been bliss, Esther thought now, deciding that she could do nothing with her hands and would have to try to keep them hidden under her bouquet for the walk up the aisle. Of course, once he had heard that Lady Rosaleen Hammond’s daughter (the Hammonds were connected to her mother’s family in some way) had joined the WLA, along with other socialites of the first order, his attitude had changed; and when Monty had proposed to her last year she had become the favoured daughter again. The Grants were very well connected.
Esther raised her chin, her large liquid-brown eyes with their thick fringe of long lashes narrowing as her full mouth curled in contempt. She had long since stopped feeling guilty that she didn’t like her own father – probably about the time she was ten or eleven years old and was able to perceive that her mother didn’t like him, either. He was a hateful man: belligerent and arrogant and so, so superior, when really he had nothing to be snobbish about. She remembered that in one of their more fiery arguments before she had left home, when he had criticized one of her friends, saying that the girl was beneath Esther because the family wasn’t in their own social circle, she had flung at him that all the breeding in their family was on her mother’s side, and not his. He had gone berserk, so much so that she had run to her bedroom and locked the door, which he had then proceeded to try and batter down with his bare fists.
But from this day forth she would be a married woman and no longer living under her father’s roof. She wouldn’t be living under her husband’s, either, come to that, she acknowledged with a rueful smile. But at least they would have a little time together before they had to part. Monty had taken care of the arrangements for a short honeymoon at a hotel in Hartlepool overlooking the bay, promising that they’d have a few weeks travelling around Europe once the war was over. She didn’t care about Europe; she just wanted the war over, and Monty to be safe. She was constantly tormented by reports of the carnage in the skies and of all the young men who would never see another dawn.
She continued to sit and muse until, an hour later, Rose tapped on the door and entered with Esther’s morning cup of tea. She adored Rose. That her mother did too had become evident when Esther had grown too old to warrant a nanny, whereupon Harriet had decided that, as her personal maid was in the process of leaving to get married, Rose would take that position and also be available to act as a personal maid for Esther, if the circumstances required it.
The three of them – her mother, Rose and herself – were very close, but she and her mother were careful to give no inkling of this to her father. He would have been furious that a ‘mere servant’ could be considered in any other light than as a paid menial, and would have been quite capable of dismissing Rose to teach them a lesson.
Now Esther sprang off the bed and, after taking the tea and putting it on the bedside cabinet, twirled Rose around the room, just as she’d danced earlier herself. ‘I’m going to be married, Rose! I’m going to be Mrs Grant and live happily ever after,’ she sang as she jigged.
Laughing, Rose extricated herself from the embrace of the girl she loved as a daughter, and sank down on a chair. ‘Enough,
Miss Esther. I’m not as young as I used to be and I can’t cope with your shenanigans,’ she panted. ‘And you’re a young lady now, don’t forget.’
‘A young lady who can drive a tractor and spread dung, and pull swedes or mangolds and load them. There’s not much clean or light work on a farm, Rose.’
‘Aye, and to my mind it’s all wrong you doing them sort of jobs, but you know what I think.’
Esther grinned. ‘Yes, I know what you think, but don’t forget the wonderful pay, Rose. Thirty-nine shillings and eightpence a week!’
Rose snorted. ‘Don’t get me started on that, Miss Esther. Disgusting, it is. And you working sixty or seventy hours a week.’
Esther shrugged. ‘There’s no fixed hours; we all work like mad till everything’s done – that’s the way it is. But Farmer Holden’s all right, Rose, and his wife’s lovely. We’re lots better off there than some of the girls on other farms. We’ve got one of the farm cottages, so we don’t have to bike miles every morning; some girls in the WLA are billeted miles away in awful digs, and are forever hungry. We get fed with the family, and Farmer Holden sees to it that we’ve always got plenty of logs for the fire, so the cottage’s warm even in the worst of the winter. It makes all the difference at the end of a long day, believe me.’ The last three winters had been exceptionally cold ones, with temperatures far below the average.
‘I still call it slave labour, but as long as you’re happy, Miss Esther.’
Esther smiled. ‘Yes, I am, Rose. I am happy.’ Even in the winter when there had been five feet of snow and the water bowls in the cow stalls had been frozen solid every morning, and she’d had to take a horse and cart with eight churns onto a frozen pond, break three inches of ice to fill the churns with water and then struggle back to the farm, she hadn’t regretted joining the Land Army. The work was incredibly tough and tiring, but she and the other girls found time for fun, and food had never tasted so good. Her favourite meal was breakfast. Having been up since five o’clock to see to the milking, by six-thirty, when they all trooped into the huge farmhouse kitchen, she was always ready for Mrs Holden’s feast of three home-cured rashers, a one-inch-thick slice of fried bread with two duck eggs on top, mushrooms in season and any potatoes left over from the previous day; plus cereal or porridge to start, toast and home-made marmalade or jam to finish – all washed down with gallons of steaming hot tea. She had never thought much about food before she joined the WLA; it was something that appeared on the table at home, served by the housemaids, who were overseen by the watchful figure of Osborne, the butler. Within days of living on the farm, however, the hard outdoor work had increased her appetite to the point where each mealtime had been anticipated with a watering mouth and a growling stomach.
‘Your mother misses you, Miss Esther.’
The words were soft, and Esther answered just as softly, ‘I know, Rose. I know.’ And because she knew Rose would understand, she whispered, ‘But I could never have come back under his roof, even if Monty hadn’t asked me to marry him and the war was finished.’
Rose nodded, the memory of the awful rows between father and daughter, which had increased with each year that the girl had grown, vivid in her mind. And it wasn’t altogether the master’s fault, she thought sadly. If only Miss Esther could sidestep the occasional confrontation with her father; but no, she would challenge him at every turn. It had always been that way. It wasn’t in her nature to avoid or evade him when he was being difficult, as the rest of the household did. In a nutshell, Miss Esther wasn’t frightened of him like everyone else; and much as she admired the girl for her bravery, it would have made for a much more peaceful existence over the years if Miss Esther had been a little more like her mother. But then she wouldn’t be Miss Esther, Rose told herself, and in truth she wouldn’t want to change a hair of her head.
Standing up, Rose took one of Esther’s hands between her own, stroking it as she said quietly, ‘Whatever he says or does today – and he might say or do nothing untoward, of course – whatever happens, will you try to let it pass, for your mother’s sake? She deserves a happy day, Miss Esther.’
Impulsively now, in one of the bursts of emotion that had been evident since she was a small child, Esther leaned forward and, dropping her head on Rose’s shoulder, murmured, ‘I promise, Rose. He can do his worst, and I’ll be a perfect angel of sweetness and light. Really, I mean it.’
‘Oh, Miss Esther.’ They were both laughing now, but tears were only a breath away as they clung together for a moment. Then Rose straightened, patting Esther’s cheek softly as she whispered, ‘Be happy. That’s all your mother wants for you: to be happy.’
‘I know.’
‘Now drink your tea and I’ll see to it that a nice hot bath is waiting for you, with some of that rose essence you like so much, by the time you’ve finished.’
‘A scented bath before breakfast? How decadent, Rose. The only perfume I’m used to these days is the delicate essence of cow dung.’
‘Oh, Miss Esther, don’t let your father hear you say anything like that.’ Rose was smiling as she bustled out of the room, but there had been a note of admonition in her voice, and Esther’s own smile faded once she was alone. She knew that Rose disapproved of her joining the WLA almost as much as her father had done. Rose was old-school; and to her mind, well-brought-up young ladies didn’t dirty their hands doing physical work, especially not the sort of work expected of a farmhand. What Rose would say if she ever visited Yew Tree Farm, Esther didn’t dare contemplate. Especially the farmhouse, for it was nothing like the one on her father’s estate, which had been modernized in recent years.
Esther pictured the old Yorkshire farmhouse, which dated back to the thirteenth century. There were rough, uneven brick floors in all the ground rooms, with steps down into the enormous dairy, which still housed all the old equipment, such as big pans for making cream. The cottage where she and the other four Land Girls lived was equally primitive, but perhaps the most remarkable thing that she’d had to get used to was the garden privy, which was in a massive hollow yew tree. All Farmer Holden had done years before was cover the top with wood, put in a big square box with a seat, and fix a door to the front. When you sat in the privy at night, you could see the stars twinkling through the gaps in the wood, and chickens and owls roosting in the branches above. In summer it could be, if not exactly charming, then droll and somewhat whimsical. In winter it was a different kettle of fish.
But she had spoken the truth when she had said she was happy. Esther nodded mentally at the thought. Land Girls came from all classes – among their five was the Honourable Priscilla Crisford, the daughter of a viscount, who spoke with a plum in her mouth and had arrived at the farm in four-inch heels and wearing bright crimson nail-varnish, but who’d soon won the respect of everyone when Big Billy, the bull, had got free and she had single-handedly persuaded the huge animal back into its pen. Then there was Beryl Ash, a vicar’s daughter, who wasn’t nearly as prim and proper as you’d expect; and Vera Porter and Lydia Hutchinson, who had been born in the slums of London’s East End and could tell stories to make your hair curl. But the five of them got on like a house on fire most of the time, and had a special camaraderie that Esther had never experienced before, having no siblings. They’d all cried together when Vera’s whole family had been wiped out by a German bomb falling directly on their house; and when Beryl had caught ringworm from the cattle, they’d kept her spirits up, along with watching that she didn’t scratch the circular itchy patches and make them worse.
Walking over to her portmanteau in a corner of the bedroom, Esther opened it and took out the card and present the girls had given her, with strict instructions that she open it on the morning of her wedding. The card was handmade and featured a drawing of her in her Land Army uniform with an incongruous floaty veil, hanging on the arm of – presumably – Monty, who was in his RAF uniform. Inside it read:
Back to the land, we must all lend a hand,
&nb
sp; To the farms and the fields we go.
There’s a job to be done,
Though we can’t fire a gun,
We can still do our bit with a hoe.
And Esther our bride, true, tested and tried,
Is marrying the love of her life.
The honeymoon’s short,
But she’s a jolly good sort,
And at least she’ll come back a wife!
Written in Priscilla’s flowing hand, which was all extravagant curls and loops, this was followed by: ‘Have a wonderful wedding, old girl, and don’t spare us poor workers a thought! Do everything we’d do and more, and we expect you to come back thoroughly exhausted!’ Each of them had signed their name, with lots of love.
Giggling to herself, Esther placed the card on her bedside cabinet and opened the present wrapped in brown paper. A pair of real silk stockings and a positively risqué suspender belt and set of lingerie were inside, naughty enough to bring a hot blush to her cheeks. Priscilla! Esther knew who’d organized the thoroughly improper undies, even before she read the little note, which said: ‘Give him something to remember that will keep him warm when he’s back at base. We dare you! Or I do, at least. Priscilla.’ Beryl had written: ‘Nothing to do with me, Est – all Cilla’s idea’, and Vera and Lydia had put: ‘We’ve had our eyes opened to what you society girls get up to, believe me!’
How on earth had Priscilla got hold of these? The wisps of satin and black lace were tiny, but Esther could imagine they’d cost a fortune. And silk stockings! For the last few months the five of them had been putting gravy browning over their legs, and then one of them would stand behind another and mark a seam on bare legs with a black pen or eyebrow pencil. Of course this fooled no one at the village dances they went to – the only entertainment that came their way. Children would amuse themselves by shouting, ‘Hello, Oxo-legs!’ and if it was raining when they left the church hall – as it often was in Yorkshire – the dogs for miles around would come sniffing their legs.
The Colours of Love Page 4