Chapter Nine
Roger Bayliss was settling a log of wood onto the fire in his warm sitting room when Eileen, with the briefest of knocks on his door, burst in.
‘’Tis Fred,’ she said. ’E’s at the kitchen door and ’e’s froze!’
They brought him into the sitting room and sat him on a hard chair, which Eileen placed close to the fire. Melting ice pooled at his feet; his dripping coat, white with snow when he entered the room, was returning now to its original brownish colour. Blanched fingers protruded from wet, unravelling mittens as he clutched the tumbler of whiskey that his master had poured for him. He told how he had driven the land girls to Ledburton Halt only to find the railway closed and how he had returned them to the safety of the hostel and then, as he attempted to persuade the truck back up the hill towards the higher farm, it had slithered into a ditch and become firmly embedded in deep snow.
‘Varmint of a thing,’ he grumbled. ‘So I ’ad to bloomin’ walk, di’n I!’ He sipped noisily, eyeing his master. ‘Main thing is them girls is all accounted for – save for the Webster one. Went off earlier on the back of her brother’s motorbike, she did. Lord knows where they got to!’
‘Mrs Todd can telephone the parents to make sure the girl arrived safely.’
‘Well, that’s where you’m wrong, sir, with respect. ’Cos the lines be down. I seen the wires danglin’ as I come up the ’ill.’
Since Fred’s arrival Roger had been waiting for Alice’s phone call. He had been preparing what he would say to her. First he would have asked her to confirm that all the girls were safely with her and that she had enough fuel and food for the immediate requirements of the additional mouths she had to feed. Then he would have instructed her to make a list of everything she would need to see the inhabitants of Lower Post Stone through the days or possibly even weeks of virtual isolation which might lie ahead. He would have asked her to telephone him in the morning to give him the list and he would have assured her that the supplies would be delivered by tractor without delay. He would have arranged for extra paraffin and more logs so that the fires could be kept burning round the clock until the thaw. The warden would have confirmed her instructions. Now, with the news of the damaged telephone lines, this imagined conversation could not take place though Alice would almost certainly have tried, unsuccessfully, to contact him.
Outside, darkness had fallen. Thick snow-clouds diffused what little moonlight there was. To attempt to take the tractor down to the farm in these conditions would have been hazardous and if it, too, had become stuck in the icy snow, it would have reduced the chances of getting supplies through to the farm on the following day. Fred’s glass was empty.
‘By jim’ny, sir,’ he wheezed, ‘that be a powerful drop! I can feel the blood just startin’ to flow back into my frozen limbs!’ Eileen could see that Fred’s heavy hint had fallen on deaf ears.
‘You’re quite certain, Fred,’ Roger asked, ‘that all the girls are safely in the hostel?’
‘Oh yes, sir. I saw every one of ’em go up that path an’ in through the door afore I left ’em an’ tried to get meself ’ome!’
‘You best get back to Mrs Fred,’ Eileen suggested, relieving him of the empty tumbler. ‘’Er’ll think youm lost in the blizzard, else.’
Christmas morning, despite dazzling sunshine and a brilliant blue sky, was bitterly cold. The girls, having recovered from their disappointment, began to respond to the fact that this morning they were not obliged to pull on their cold, damp dungarees and face the elements. With fires blazing round the clock, the farmhouse, its thick walls and thatched roof retaining every joule of generated warmth, was positively cosy. Hot water gurgled dangerously in the pipes and the bathroom became a steamy, tropical delight. Some of the girls slept in, pottering down to the kitchen to toast slices of the dwindling supply of bread and brew pot after pot of tea. Others took it in turns to soak luxuriously in the bath until the skin on their fingers became wrinkled. With no rules to obey and no timetable to be adhered to, they wallowed in the freedom from the grinding routine of their work.
At Higher Post Stone Roger Bayliss, in the pitch-dark, icy cold of milking-time, had pulled on his working clothes and joined Fred and Ferdie in the byre where they relieved the cows of their milk, rolling the churns out into the snow, anxious about how long it would be before the milk-truck could get through to collect them.
Eileen, unable to return to the village on the previous night, had made up a bed in the room in which the servants used to sleep, risen early, helped with the milking and then cooked a robust breakfast for the men.
A dozen miles away at the Fleet Air Arm training camp, Oliver Maynard was experiencing a situation not unlike Alice’s. While most of the men under his command had been given seventy-two-hour passes and had got away before the snow had closed in, he was left with a dozen or so of his own men and a similar number of Americans who, after a Christmas dinner which they would eat at noon, had been planning to head off for Exeter or Taunton to find what pleasures they could in pubs and dance halls. This, because of the snow, had now become impossible. It was suggested that their Adjutant might make a Bren-gun carrier available to them but Oliver Maynard refused to permit the use of the military equipment under his immediate command for anything other than training purposes. It was this fact that gave him the idea that, within three hours, he had implemented and which was to transform Christmas day for everyone who became involved in it.
Underlying Oliver’s plan was his increasing ambitions where Alice Todd was concerned. His own domestic situation had, over recent weeks, worsened. When, soon after the outbreak of the war, his wife Diana had miscarried, it had been decided that, because his postings were taking him further afield and for longer periods of time, they should postpone any immediate attempts to achieve a second pregnancy until after the war and that, in order to fill her time constructively, Diana should join the WRNS, where she soon became a busy and consequently happier young woman. The enforced separation took its toll on the relationship and Diana had recently written to her husband, apologising for various infidelities on her part and suggesting that he should consider their marriage over.
By ten in the morning and at approximately the same time as the goose went into the oven at Lower Post Stone and the succulent smell of it began to permeate the farmhouse, Oliver Maynard gave his men their instructions and began masterminding what he would later refer to, in the report he would submit to his commanding officer, as Operation Snowman.
In the silent cottage in the forest Christopher was woken when a shaft of low morning sunlight moved across his closed lids, penetrating a dream in which he was in the cockpit of a Spitfire and blinded by the beam of a searchlight. He woke gratefully and lay, while his pulse slowed, comfortably cradled by the undulating contours of the old sofa. The sheepskins over and under him were warm and his fire, well stoked at midnight, was still alight. He dismissed the dream and for a while let his mind drift back to the Christmases at Higher Post Stone when his mother was alive and cousins came to stay. Eileen’s father, now long dead, would arrive on a farm cart, dressed as Father Christmas. The children would humour their parents by pretending not to recognise him. For a few minutes Christopher considered making the slippery journey down to his father’s farm. But who, he asked himself, would it please if he did? Not him. He would rather be alone until Georgina came. She would come. Maybe not today. Or for some time. But one day she would. And not his father, whose eyes he could no longer meet because of the strange look in them, which he interpreted as accusation and disappointment but which, as he would one day discover, was something more complex and more forgivable. Eileen would be pleased if he arrived at the farm in time to enjoy the Christmas dinner she would undoubtedly be preparing. He did not know that, were it not for the blizzard, Eileen would have been alone in her cottage while his father ate roast goose with Alice Todd at Lower Post Stone.
The hamper of Christmas food which Fred had delivered to Chri
stopher early on the previous morning, and just before the threatening snow had begun to fall, contained an impressive array of festive food. Eileen, despite the rationing, had excelled herself. There was a game pie, a Christmas pudding and a pot of brandy sauce, an apple tart, a jar of pickled herrings, a Christmas cake, and a large jug of chicken soup together with his usual supply of milk, vegetables, eggs and bread. Christopher had shot a pheasant, plucked it, stuffed it with sweet chestnuts that he picked up from the forest floor and wrapped it in rind from the ham, a section of which still hung from a hook above his fire. At midday he would flatten the embers and set the bird to roast. He broke the ice in the well and refilled his water pots and kettle. He carried in an armful or two of split logs. He had discovered an old hip-bath in an outbuilding and had hauled it into the cottage. A couple of buckets of water, heated on the wood burner and tipped into the bath, met his needs. He shaved, lathered his hair, sluiced himself with the warmed water, towelled himself down and dressed in the clean clothes that Eileen had sent up with his groceries.
Despite his near normal appearance, Christopher was not fully recovered from his breakdown or from the trauma that had induced it. He still had nightmares and far from addressing the future in the way most people would, even when recovering from a disastrous experience, he blotted it out, living his days one at a time and contriving to be so physically tired at the end of them that he would fall asleep, curled up on the old sofa amongst his pile of sheepskins, before provocative thoughts could form. When the nightmares woke him he would light a lamp, brew a pot of tea and focus his mind on the pages of one or other of the books he had brought with him, reading until sleep overtook him or dawn broke, whichever happened first.
At Lower Post Stone, Hester Tucker dolefully set the kitchen table for Christmas dinner. Reuben, currently stationed at a training camp on Salisbury Plain, had been expected to arrive by noon but because of the snow it seemed unlikely that he would arrive at all.
‘This is my Dave,’ said Rose, who, anxious to show off her son to Alice Todd, had encouraged him to cross the yard with her. In fact, Dave, now rested and full of his mother’s good food, needed little persuasion and was anxious to meet the bevy of girls who, so promisingly for a young soldier on his first home leave, had been conveniently deposited across the yard from the cottage in which he had been born and bred.
Hester was the first girl he saw and, for him, she was more than enough. He stood transfixed, smiling into her wide blue eyes and lost in the curve of her unpainted mouth. She was the right height, the right width and her accent, when she said, ‘Pleased to meet you, Dave,’ was as familiar to him as his own. His mother did not for one moment miss her son’s reaction to the girl. She had seen his eyes light up and something like a blush deepen the colour of his ruddy Devonian complexion. When Hester went out to the pantry to fetch the platter on which the roasted goose was to be carved, Rose leant close to her son and whispered urgently to him.
‘’Tis no good you lookin’ in that direction, Dave! Hester be spoke for!’ Dave seemed not to hear her. Even when Annie, Gwennan and Winnie joined them in the kitchen his eyes remained on Hester, or, when he sensed that his admiration was attracting attention, on the slate pavings of the kitchen floor, while he racked his brain for something to say to her.
‘Bin a land girl long, then?’ he managed at last.
‘Feb’ry, weren’t it, when you come ’ere, Hester?’ Rose answered, butting in. Hester smiled and nodded.
‘Like it, do you?’ Dave tried again. This time it was Gwennan who took the question.
‘Oh, yeah!’ she said. ‘It’s great being up to your middle in mud, with rain runnin’ down your neck!’
Marion, in the bedroom she shared with Winnie, was still wearing a powder-blue rayon dressing gown which she had recently persuaded a young naval rating to buy for her in Exeter when, from the low window, she saw the Bren-gun carrier. It was, at that point, a quarter of a mile away from the snowbound farmhouse and was making a lurching descent into the valley. Marion had never seen anything like it before. She could see that it had tracks like a tank, which was why it was able to negotiate the deep snow. She could see the barrel of a gun and behind that the heads of a dozen men. Thinking that they might be Germans and that this was an invasion, she anxiously scanned the paintwork for a Swastika and was relieved not to find one. As it grew closer, Marion saw that the vehicle was towing a trailer and that on the trailer were more men. It was the fact that the vehicle itself was camouflaged with curious shapes in various shades of brown and green and that the men aboard it were wearing khaki that finally plunged Marion into action. By the time the Bren-gun carrier was idling outside the farmhouse gate, Marion was not only dressed in her most flamboyant frock, but had rouge on her cheeks, mascara on her lashes and lipstick on her mouth. She was rapidly fixing her hair as Oliver Maynard made his way up the path and knocked loudly on the door.
He had thought of everything. The turkey and the ham were both cooked to perfection and, being well wrapped, had, together with the roasted vegetables, remained piping hot during the half-hour transfer from the cookhouse at the camp to the farmhouse kitchen. Puddings, cakes and pastries were unloaded from the trailer together with kegs of beer, bottles of port, ginger ale and Coca-Cola. They had brought plates, glasses, knives, forks, spoons and tablecloths.
‘All we need,’ said a burly GI cook, settling his chef’s hat over his crew cut, ‘is a table! Can you guys manage that?’ Alice and the girls thought they could.
Sergeant Marvin Kinski, US Marines, bearing a barrel of beer, swaggered into the farmhouse kitchen, the stump of a cheroot clamped between his strong, white teeth. His stocky build had earnt him the nickname ‘Short-arse’. His beard grew so fast that within an hour of shaving he looked as though his chin had not made contact with a razor blade for many days. His deep-set, brooding brown eyes had a sharp, defensive look which conveyed an ‘OK, lady, so you don’t fancy me, well, guess what – who cares,’ approach to women. And he was right. Most women didn’t find him attractive. Except for Marion, who, much later and in the privacy of their room, confessed to Winnie that, although she didn’t know why, because, let’s face it, he wasn’t her type, she’d felt quite peculiar when she was dancing with Sergeant Kinski – which she had been, exclusively and almost continuously, from the moment Christmas dinner was finished until well after midnight, when Oliver Maynard had ordered his men to bid the girls goodnight.
‘’E asked me if I’d write to him, Win and I said I would. ’E said ’e’d write to me… Don’t suppose he will though. ’E’s being posted to somewhere over Dartmouth way for training. Slapton Sands I think ’e said. Funny, isn’t it! Usually I like ’em tall, don’t I!’
‘Yeah,’ said Winnie, ‘and dark and handsome!’
‘Well, he is dark.’
‘Yeah, he is dark… But not handsome, Marion.’
‘No… But he’s got something about him, Marvin has. If you’d spent all evening with ’im you’d know what I mean.’ Marion was wiping her make-up off and with it, Winnie reckoned, the face Sergeant Kinski had fallen for. ‘What was yours like, then, Win?’
‘He was OK,’ Winnie murmured vaguely. She had already almost forgotten the young corporal from Alabama who had attached himself to her for most of the evening. ‘Just a bloke,’ she said. ‘With pimples.’
Winnie had never considered the possibility that the burning ambition to open a pub that she and Marion had shared for almost as long as she could remember could be jeopardised by one or the other of them becoming seriously involved with a man, or that any man who would be interested in either of them would be able to offer them the things they wanted from life. To Winnie men were a faintly threatening necessity. A source of what she needed. First money for a down payment on a public house and then permission to assume responsibility for it. It was unlikely, she knew, that she and Marion would be granted a licence. When they applied for one it would be Marion’s uncle Ronald, a publican
himself, whom they would need to approach for legal, if not financial support. The idea of either of them losing interest in their plan sent a shudder down Winnie’s spine.
The kitchen table had been barely large enough for all the food. Everyone had loaded their plates more than once and carried them out into the cross-passage where a trestle-table, with every chair in the hostel, a couple of benches and even an old wicker seat from the porch, clustered round it, made an adequate dining table. When the meal was underway, with the gramophone blaring and thirty voices raised over it, no one heard the approach of the tractor.
Roger Bayliss had loaded sacks of potatoes and swedes, boxes of eggs and a churn of milk into a small trailer and carefully negotiated the slippery lane. He had guessed, as soon as he saw the Bren-gun carrier, that Oliver Maynard had seized the opportunity of the blizzard to further his obvious interest in Alice Todd. Roger experienced a pang of frustration that it had not been he who had arrived first with practical support for his warden.
Alice was sitting at the head of the table in a wicker chair that had once stood in his own conservatory. When, on the arrival of the servicemen, the land girls had put on their best frocks, Alice did the same. The garnet velvet of her dress suited her. Oliver Maynard was sitting on her right. As Roger ducked his head under the lintel and stood, amazed by the scene, Alice and Oliver were sharing a joke. As soon as she saw Roger, Alice rose and made her way round the crowded table to greet him.
Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings Page 22