‘Me too.’ But in her case, Esther thought, she knew exactly what she had been frightened of, and it wasn’t the war. Monty’s mother was the sort of woman who was capable of anything.
‘Really? You love me that much?’
‘You know I do.’ Smiling, she raised her hand to his face, feeling the stubble of his jaw under her fingers with a little thrill of pleasure. ‘Come for a walk,’ she said suddenly. ‘Just for a little while.’
‘Now?’ He looked at her in surprise. ‘But don’t you want to get to the hotel and settle in before it starts to get dark?’
‘We’ve bags of time.’ She reached up and kissed him. ‘And we haven’t had a chance to be together all day. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that’s how I feel. And it’s such a lovely evening. There’s the moor not far ahead. We could park and take a little walk, couldn’t we?’
‘Of course we could,’ he agreed, starting the engine while she snuggled into him, her head on his shoulder.
They pulled off the road onto a thin dirt track when they reached the moor, parking the car on a small incline. The still air was scented with the sweetness of the dog-rose bushes at the edge of the track, and the sky echoed with the cries of swallows as they wheeled above the wild briar, skimming the air with graceful movements as they hawked hundreds of airborne insects.
‘This is lovely,’ Esther breathed, holding Monty’s hand as they wandered towards a fallen tree, whereupon he lifted her onto the warm trunk and then stood with his arm around her as they watched the peacock butterflies sunning themselves in the evening sun and then flitting from bloom to bloom seeking the nectar. ‘Just us, and no one else in the whole world.’
‘You’re lovely.’ His voice was thick and husky, and when he took her in his arms again she returned his kiss with all her heart. The grass was dry and hay-like as he lowered her onto the ground, with foxgloves – tall and magnificent with their dappled bells – providing a natural screen to their hiding place. Esther didn’t feel shy as he undressed her and then himself, knowing that she wanted their first time to be here, alone in the open, with only the birds and butterflies and the odd little shrew witnessing their coming together.
In spite of his desire, he kissed and touched her for a long time, and when he finally entered her, the brief discomfort was soon forgotten in her readiness for him.
When they finally sat up her face was aglow, her long curly hair tumbling about her slim shoulders, having come loose from the elaborate style she had worn for the wedding. Monty put out his hand and touched her flushed face, his voice soft as he said, ‘I didn’t hurt you?’
Funnily enough, in view of the intimacies they had just shared, the question made her feel shy. ‘No, you didn’t hurt me. It . . . it was wonderful.’
‘And we have a whole week ahead of us.’
Esther smiled and then, high in the blue sky above them, they caught the low drone of aircraft. She felt a cold shiver snake down her spine. This war, this wretched war – how she hated Hitler and his Nazis. But Monty had come through the Battle of Britain, and he would come through the rest of the war. She had to believe that, along with Churchill’s promises that right would triumph over might.
Her face must have revealed what she was thinking, because Monty’s hand covered hers. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘No, no, I won’t,’ she lied, giving herself a mental shake. ‘And, like you said, we have a whole week together. That’s a lifetime, and we must make the most of every moment.’
‘Well, we’ve certainly made a good start.’ He grinned at her and, ridiculously, she blushed. ‘I’d planned a romantic dinner and champagne and roses to seduce you, not an al-fresco romp in the altogether. Not that I’ve any complaints, I hasten to add, except . . . ’
‘What?’
‘This took me by surprise. I wasn’t prepared.’
‘Prepared?’ And then she realized what he meant. ‘Oh, everyone knows a girl can’t fall for a baby the first time,’ she said blithely. ‘And we’ll be careful from now on.’ They both wanted children, but only when the war was over and the world was safe.
He pulled her to him, kissing her long and lingeringly, before standing up and pulling her up with him. ‘Get dressed, wench,’ he said ruefully, ‘before the temptation again proves too much.’ But, as she turned away, he swung her round, kissing her again and murmuring, ‘I shall love you to the day I die, and beyond – I can promise you that, in this uncertain world. You’re everything I ever dreamed of, and more, my darling.’
He said such wonderful things and she was so lucky. The luckiest girl in the world.
Chapter Six
‘There’s no doubt, m’dear, no doubt at all.’ Dr Boyce surveyed Esther over the top of his glasses. ‘You’re expecting a baby and, from the dates you’ve given me, you can expect the happy arrival any time from the middle of April. One can never be too sure of the exact day – babies come when they are ready.’
Esther stared at the smiling face of the village doctor. She’d suspected for a while that she might be pregnant, but had held onto the faint hope that the constant tiredness and absence of her monthlies could be put down to the hay-making, which had begun on the day she’d returned from her honeymoon, followed a few weeks later by the harvest. It had been an exhausting time. ‘But I haven’t felt sick once, Doctor.’
‘Not everyone does.’
‘But . . . ’ She stopped, faintly embarrassed.
‘Yes?’
‘We only did it once without . . . without taking precautions.’
‘Once is enough, m’dear, more than enough.’ Dr Boyce paused. He understood this young woman’s husband was a fighter pilot, and the RAF was taking a hell of a hammering in this damned war. Gently he said, ‘You are young and healthy, and a baby is always a blessing, child.’
Esther nodded, but in truth she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She wanted Monty’s babies, of course she did, but they had thought children would be in the future – not now. Not when they were apart and Monty was in constant danger, and a madman was centre-stage in the world. But a new life was growing inside her. A little thrill, deep inside, caused her heart to race. Part of her, and part of Monty; a unique little being, their own tiny miracle. Her hand covered her stomach protectively as she murmured, ‘It’s just not a good time to bring a baby into the world.’
‘Our twin girls were born a few months after I left for France in 1914,’ Dr Boyce said quietly, ‘and my wife felt exactly as you are feeling now. But our girls proved to be a great comfort to her, as this baby will be to you. The older one becomes, the more one realizes that life doesn’t come in neat packages wrapped exactly the way we’d wish. I was badly injured in France and there were to be no more children for us, so our twins were a double blessing. One we’ve thanked God for every day. Don’t try and understand or predict the future, Mrs Wynford-Grant. Take what you are given, and be grateful for it.’
It was exactly what she needed to hear. Esther’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much, Doctor.’
Priscilla was waiting for her when she came out of the doctor’s house, where he held his daily surgery in the front room. ‘Well?’ she asked, as Esther made her way out of the front garden along the thin concrete path, which had neat rows of vegetables on either side of it. These had replaced the flowers that had formerly been the doctor’s wife’s pride and joy, but this same lady had taken ‘Dig for victory’ to heart. ‘What did he say?’
Esther opened the wooden gate and joined her friend. ‘You were right,’ she said quietly, taking her bicycle from Priscilla. ‘I’m expecting a baby.’ It had been the worldly-wise Priscilla who had urged her to go and see the doctor, when the time for Esther’s second monthly had come and gone with no bleeding.
They walked a few yards pushing their bicycles, before Priscilla said softly, ‘I know it wasn’t what you and Monty had planned right now, but it’ll work out for the best, Est.’
‘That’s what Dr Boyce
said too.’ Now that it was sinking in, she wanted this baby desperately.
‘What are you going to do? I mean, about carrying on here? When I think what we did during the hay-making and harvest . . . ’ Priscilla shook her head. ‘That baby must be very firmly entrenched and determined to stay put, that’s all I can say.’ In the agricultural year, hay-making occurs before the harvest and is even more of a nail-biter. When Farmer Holden had said that a weather-window of dry, breezy and sunny days had made it perfect for hay-making, Esther and the others, and three Italian prisoners-of-war who had been ‘borrowed’ from a neighbouring farm, had worked from eight in the morning until late twilight, to make good hay. Due to the lack of petrol because of the war, Farmer Holden had gone back to basics, with a couple of the men scything a swathe all around the outside of a field of standing grass, and then two horses harnessed to the mowing machine taking over.
Esther nodded. ‘And that hateful mowing machine during the hay-making, too.’ The girls had all taken a turn with the mowing machine, and it had been a bone-shaking job sitting on the seat; there were no springs and certainly no cushions, simply a hessian bag folded and laid in the big metal ‘pan’ seat. The continual jolting had been almost unbearable, and the girls had had to keep their wits about them every moment, and the horses on the move at the right pace. Fortunately old Dora and Barney – Farmer Holden’s horses – were placid, docile creatures, which was just as well, because at the corners of the fields there was a particular manoeuvre that involved reining back, and without the horses’ cooperation, the girls would never have managed it.
It hadn’t helped that Farmer Holden had been adamant about not letting the Italian prisoners-of-war on the mowing machine, saying that he didn’t trust them. As Priscilla had said, what on earth did he expect the men to do, for goodness’ sake! Gallop away into the sunset on the horrible thing? All the girls had agreed that handing the Italians the fearsome scythes with their lethal blades was far more of a danger, but the farmer hadn’t seen it that way, and so the mowing machine had had to be endured.
Then there had been the laborious process of turning the hay by hand during the field-drying part of the work, after which (when Farmer Holden was happy it was sufficiently dry) they had piled it up into haycocks, which were then loaded onto carts and taken off to be made into hayricks. The business of getting the hay into the cart, and from the cart up onto the stack, by means of pitchforks was a strenuous one, and required a certain amount of brawn as well as skill. Esther and the other girls had fallen into bed without washing or getting undressed, night after night, too exhausted even to say goodnight to each other.
And her baby had survived all that, Esther thought now with a thread of wonder. It was meant to be, Dr Boyce was right. Thank you, God, I didn’t lose it, she prayed silently. Thank you for sparing me such heartache.
‘So, what are you going to do?’ Priscilla asked again as they climbed on their bicycles. ‘You could leave straight away, you know, in your condition.’
‘I don’t want to leave.’ Esther was sure about that. She had no wish whatsoever to go home and be under her father’s roof; and her in-laws were even worse. ‘Do you think Farmer Holden would let me stay? I’m sure there are things I could do to help. There’s the dairy work, for example. I could help Mrs Holden with that, and other things. It’s only really heavy work that might be a problem. But having said that, I managed the hay-making and then the harvest too.’ The corn harvest hadn’t exactly been a walk in the park, either. Before she had become a Land Girl she’d always thought the fields of golden corn one of the quintessential English sights, but in the last couple of years she had learned that although England had one of the best climates for growing crops, it had one of the worse for harvesting them. The deep-blue sunlit skies could be notoriously fickle.
‘The hay-making and harvest were different – you didn’t know about the baby then.’
Priscilla was right, Esther thought, as they began to pedal away from the village. She wouldn’t dare risk her own and Monty’s baby by undertaking anything like that now.
‘Have a word with Mrs Holden first, before you tell him,’ Priscilla said, after a minute or two. ‘You know how she loves having us around, with them never having had children, and she’s a motherly sort. She’ll like being able to fuss over you a bit – you mark my words. Get her on your side and you’ll be home and dry, old bean.’
‘Do you think so?’ She would have to leave sooner or later, she knew that, but she didn’t want to go until she absolutely had to. The five of them – herself, Priscilla, Beryl, Vera and Lydia – had formed a bond that was precious, all the more so now that she knew her time with them was short.
Coming to a halt at the top of the hill that led down to the village, Esther gazed across the fields rolling away in the distance, most of which were newly ploughed. It was September already, she thought; the summer was all but over, even though the last few days had been unseasonably hot. The winter was in front of them, and in the spring her child would be born – her baby. She would be a mother, and Monty would be a father, and they were bringing a child into a world of terrible turmoil. And all because of a walk on their wedding day, which had ended in them making love under a blue sky with the scent of roses in the air.
It seemed to Monty that he’d hardly put on his pyjamas and lain down before the harsh shrill of the telephone had rung throughout the hut that night. Discipline had overcome the longing to turn over and bury his head under his pillow, and he’d been sitting up in bed when the orderly who’d answered the telephone had come running in, shouting for them to scramble.
There had been much cursing and swearing as everyone had climbed into their flying kit, half-asleep, fatigue clogging their exhausted brains, but then they’d poured out into the airfield and had run towards their planes, going through on autopilot the ritual of getting strapped in and starting the engine. As night turned to dawn, one by one they roared into the clouds. And now here they were, searching out the enemy, as they had countless times before.
It was a hell of a way to start a day, Monty thought wryly. But then, as the plane emerged from cloud at 10,000 feet and he found that the night had departed and a new day had arrived in light washed blue at the higher altitude, the thrill of flying took over.
This was what he had been born for, he thought, not for the first time. From a small boy he’d had an avid interest in aeroplanes, much to the disappointment of his father, who had made no bones about the fact that he had expected his only son to follow in his footsteps and join the army, as his father and his father’s father before him had done. But it had been the Royal Air Force that had excited Monty, which had led to many acrimonious and tense conversations with his parents as he had got older. Public school followed by university had not dimmed his determination to fly, and when he had discovered at university that free RAF training was available to anyone who could pass the rigorous medical examination for admission to the university air squadron, he had somehow persuaded his father to sign the parental-authority papers that would enable him to fly.
He had taken to flying like a duck to water, and with his parents finally having admitted defeat about the army idea, he had literally found his wings. Because the university air squadrons were intended to do two things – encourage undergraduates to take up the Royal Air Force as a career, and create a reserve of partially trained officer pilots, who could quickly be brought to operational standards in the event of war – once Hitler had marched on Poland, Monty had received his call-up papers. Then it had been off to the newly opened Aircrew Receiving Centre at Hastings, the Sussex seaside holiday resort, where he had joined several hundred other human products of Oxford, Cambridge and London universities, all resplendent in new officers’ uniforms bought with Air Ministry allowances.
Monty smiled to himself. The Air Ministry had requisitioned all the suitable hotels and apartment blocks to lodge their charges in, and to knock their wet-behind-the-ears flock into sh
ape for the dispersed flying schools they were to attend, but it had been no holiday. The NCO physical-training and drill instructors assigned to each squad had seen to that. They hadn’t bothered to hide their contempt for the new commissioned breed, but really – looking back – Monty couldn’t blame them. Most of the greenhorns, like him, had left the protective shelter of wealth and a privileged upbringing for the first time and barely knew their left feet from their elbows. But they’d learned fast. They’d had to.
He smiled again, somewhat grimly this time, as he thought back to the sarcasm, insults and sheer physical torture of the parade ground that they’d endured, each diatribe by one of the instructors ending with the regulation acknowledgement of the King’s commission.
‘When I say march, I mean Air Force march, not some fancy university shuffle . . . SIR!’
‘Right turn, right – don’t you know your damned left from your right, for crying out loud . . . ? SIR!’
‘Put some backbone into those press-ups, you’re not taking tea with Lord and Lady Muck now . . . SIR!’
But they’d survived; postings to flying schools had been announced, and with twenty-five other airmen Monty had made the train journey to RAF Cranwell on an overcast, grey day, arriving at Sleaford station on a coal-black evening that the blackout did little to alleviate. And, in the Christmas break, he had met Esther. Sweet, passionate, wonderful Esther.
Suddenly the reason for the scramble to the skies became clear, as a twin-engined Junkers 88 dived out of the cloud layer above. Now there was nothing on his mind but chasing his quarry, along with his comrades ahead and to one side of him. They tore after the enemy plane, which, realizing its mistake, was diving towards the haven of cloud layer some distance below. Machine guns rattled, there was smoke, and then the German plane was spiralling out of control, and their squadron leader, Salty Fiennes, called over the R/T, confirming the hit and ordering them to return to base.
The Colours of Love Page 6