Judy had told her that there had never been anyone else but Esme, and that she had made up her mind to marry him at the age of six, but Maud Somerton knew rather more about hard-pad, greasy-heel, and colic, than she knew about first-love and she had her doubts about ‘The Gel’ getting hurt again, as she had been so badly hurt over Tim.
It was a great pity, she thought, that this new man was a flier, for fliers did not seem to live very long nowadays, and she did not care to think what she would do with ‘The Gel’ if the little soul was unlucky enough to be widowed a second time. However, if she wanted to get married she should. After all, young people of her own generation had had their lives spoiled by one war and here it was, starting all over again. Perhaps it was best to do what these two intended doing, to grab what life had to offer day by day, and ignore the future, if indeed, there was any future in a world where crushed oats were the price they were asking, and good hay was unobtainable!
Almost as soon as she met Judy at the station Maud realised that ‘The poor Gel’ was finding it difficult to be philosophical about this wedding. She had always thought of Judy as a tranquil soul untroubled by jitters, even County-ring jitters, but clearly Judy had changed after more than two years out of the saddle, and was now morbidly preoccupied with hazards that had nothing whatever to do with spirited young geldings and traffic-shy mares.
“It’s like this, Miss Somerton,” Judy confessed to her, during the cross-country journey to the stables; “I’ve developed a kind of ‘thing’ about Esme and I lately. It’s silly, and it’s superstitious, but we’re all more or less superstitious in the R.A.F. We go in for signs, and mascots, and crossed fingers, and all that sort of thing! You see, I’ve been dreaming about marrying Esme ever since I was a child…twenty-three years in all, and that’s a hell of a long dream! Oh, I know there was Tim, and I loved Tim very dearly, but not in the same way, not in a well…not in a kind of ‘meant-to-be’ way, as I love Esme, and as I think Esme loves me!”
“He was a long time getting round to it,” grunted Maud Somerton. “Why didn’t he marry you in the first place?”
“Oh, that’s a long story,” laughed Judy, “and I don’t propose to tell it to you now or ever! The fact is, we do love each other, and we’ve always belonged to each other, but I wish…oh, how I wish, that we’d been able to run off and get married the day we realised it last Christmas leave! I’m sure then that everything would have been all right, I’m sure we’d have had some luck, but so many things have happened since and now it all seems…well…as if a kind of witch’s curse was on us, preventing us coming together, no matter how hard we try! First there was Elaine, the girl he married from over the road, and then there was my Tim, and then Esme went air-crew, because he didn’t care what happened to him, and then we met up again, just like a miracle when he brought his little girl to my camp, and now…well…every time we make plans something silly seems to happen, something always pops up and says: ‘Oh no you don’t, my beauties! Just wait until I’ve put a spoke in it!’”
“I’ve never heard such rubbish in my life,” exclaimed Maud, her matter-of-fact soul outraged by this kind of talk. “What you need my gel is a thundering good gallop, and fortunately you’re just in time to get one! We’re cubbing at six o’clock tomorrow, over at Woodbury Castle, and you can give Jason an airing. He’s about as stale as you seem to be!”
“Jason! You’ve still got my Jason!” exclaimed Judy delightedly, “but you wrote and told me you sold him!”
“So I did,” said Maud, “to a farmer over at Silverton, but I borrowed him back for a week the moment I heard you were coming, and he’s in the blue box right now, eating his head off at about two pounds a mouthful!”
“Oh, you’re a darling, an absolute old darling,” cried Judy, leaning over the steering wheel, and planting a kiss on Miss Somerton’s weatherbeaten cheek. “You planned it all, didn’t you? Just like you fixed up the wedding, and I might have known because you’ve always been nicer to me than anyone in the world!”
“Oh, don’t hand me out any of that slop,” muttered Maud, but she reminded herself once again that her original encounter with this warm little creature was certainly the most pleasant thing that had ever happened to her.
They rode out while it was still dark and picked their way over the common tracks, past the bustling Marine camp and up to the Castle that crowned the ridge above the valley of the Exe.
There were only three or four other riders, the Master, Whip, and a couple of red-faced farmer’s lads, riding unclipped cobs.
Judy was exhilarated by the occasion and by the sharp morning air that carried the first nip of autumn, and whipped the colour into her cheeks as she settled herself on Jason and drew his steamy warmth into her calves.
“Let’s make it a cracking day, Jason,” she whispered, patting the sleek neck, “because Esme’s coming today, and tomorrow’s my wedding day.”
The big horse threw his head about.
“He’ll prove a handful, mark my words,” said Maud Somerton, watching her. “That fellow, Cotley never took him above a hand-gallop, and he’s been lazing about on grass ever since April!”
“Jason and I are on top of the world,” Judy told her gaily, “Come on up, old boy,” as the little group of horses filed down from the knoll towards Woodbury Wood, “let’s find straight away, and then show ’em what the W.A.A.F. can do!”
They found on the edge of the covert, and away they went, over springy grass and dry, stony tracks, with the Whip in the lead, and Judy a length or so behind, shouting for joy as they crashed through flat brakes of yellow gorse, and then galloped across the main road towards the camp.
Half-dressed marines tumbled out of their tents to watch them thunder by, as they followed their line towards Crook’s Wood, and a pair of farm-workers, harrowing a long-rested ground beyond Yettington, paused in their work and shouted directions as the pack scrambled through hedges, overran scent, found a new line, and finally poured across the stubble towards the sea.
It was a fast point, as fast as she remembered, and Jason skimmed the banks without seeming to touch them. In the glorious excitement of the moment Judy forgot Esme, the war, the convoys, and the bombing offensive, leaning far over Jason’s mane, and nursing him through the gaps with a sure, steady touch and never a thought to the kind of ground she was likely to jump down upon beyond.
Thus she never saw or suspected the taut strand of pig-wire stretched a yard from the hedge, on the far side of the fifth bank.
The Whip, riding a fleet grey, cat-jumped the obstacle, clearing it by inches, but his wild cry of, “’Ware wire!” startled Jason, less than two yards behind, and the horse faltered, slithering from the crest of the bank and getting his hind legs between wire and hedge. The wire held and he jammed his forelegs into the turf. Judy went over his head and down, face foremost, on to a harrow that was lying at the edge of the field.
She missed the metal, but her shoulder struck the shaft with a sickening jar, breaking her collar-bone, and ripping her hacking jacket from sleeve to collar as she somersaulted across the grass.
Maud Somerton shouted from the far side of the hedge and the Whip reined in and circled back to her.
“You hurt, Miss? Did you hit that blasted harrow?”
Judy struggled to her feet, hugging her right shoulder. Jason was struggling madly against the hedge.
“I don’t know…damned wire…see to the horse, he’s caught by the hind legs!”
They freed Jason with clippers and bent to examine his trembling legs. The strand of wire had scored two deep weals above the hocks and for a moment they forgot Judy, busying themselves, as hunting people will, with the distressed animal.
When Maud Somerton crossed over she found that Judy had fainted. Despatching the Whip to stop a car on the main road, she lifted her up and carefully examined the shoulder, remembering as she did so, Judy’s half-serious talk of a witch’s curse.
“Poor gel,” she moaned, “poo
r, poor gel! She was getting married tomorrow!”
They drove her to the hospital, where the bone was set and then Maud hired a taxi and took her home, sitting holding her in the back, and thanking God over and over again that ‘the poor gel’ had escaped with a comparatively minor injury.
Judy was very quiet during the short journey, leaning heavily on Maud’s shoulder and looking, Maud thought, to be badly shaken by the toss. Her face was still smeared with mud where she had glissaded across the field, and as the taxi pulled up in courtyard Maud noticed that she was weeping.
“Poor Esme,” was all she said however, when they put her to bed.
“Never mind about Esme,” Maud told her shortly, “get some sleep until he gets here! Then I’ll bring you some tea and broth, after I’ve dealt with the horses and that idiot, Coombes!”
‘That idiot, Coombes’ was the farmer who owned the field surrounded by pig-wire, and from her room above the hall, where the telephone was installed, Judy heard Maud Somerton railing at him for daring to fence his own property.
In spite of the ceaseless throb of her shoulder, and the wretchedness in her heart, she could not help smiling at the note of protest in Maud’s harsh voice. Then she drifted off into an uncomfortable doze that lasted, at intervals, until noon, when her door opened and Esme was standing beside her, holding a tray of tea.
“Well,” he said, “if this doesn’t beat all! For crying out loud, Judy, this takes the entire, bloody biscuit!”
“Yes,” she said, abjectly, “it does rather, doesn’t it?” and then, fearfully: “How long have you got, Esme darling? I daresay I could be up and about by Monday.”
He looked away, out of the window and across the beech-ringed orchard to the moor.
“Twenty-four hours, Judy! We could have made it, if everything had gone according to plan, but we can’t make it now—not a hope—I’m bound to start back in the small hours!”
She understood very well what he was trying to say.
“You mean there’s something special on?”
“A flap, and a pretty big one I should say. I had the Devil’s own job to get down here at all!”
She was silent for a moment while he poured the tea.
Presently she said: “I’m a Jonah, Esme, just a plain, honest-to-goodness Jonah!”
“We’re a couple of Jonahs, Judy and it’s beginning to look as if we’ve always been!”
“I ought to have known that something like this would happen. Now we’ll never be married.”
He set down the teapot and took both her hands in his.
“Don’t talk like that, Judy! Of course we’ll be married! You know how long a flap lasts! Damn it, it isn’t as if I’d been posted abroad, or was likely to be! As long as I’m flying Lancs I’m here for the duration and you know that as well as I do!”
Suddenly she began to cry again and he forgot the tea tray, kneeling beside her, stroking her hair, and struggling to find words of comfort and reassurance.
“What’s so damned important about getting married, Judy? The thing is that we’ve got one another! That’s all that’s important to me!”
But it was not, as she was now fully aware, all that was damned important to her; Judy’s dream was older than Esme’s, reaching back into the long, dry summers of the ‘twenties’, when they had fished for tadpoles in Keston Ponds, but she knew it was not yet possible to make him understand this, not until they were man and wife, and she could live her devotion instead of dreaming it. She stopped crying and asked him for her handbag, complaining that ‘she must look a mess’, and apologising again for the accident that had shattered their arrangements.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever been hurt in the hunting field,” she told him. “I must have been crazy to chance it today, but it was just that I felt…well…so terribly excited, and so wildly happy this morning!”
“You and that dear, old fossil downstairs might as well be married to horses!” he teased her. “Here, get some of this soup down you; I’ll feed it to you with a spoon, and show you how domesticated I am!”
She was unable to move her right arm, so he balanced the tray on her knees and she steadied it while he fed her a bowl of Maud’s vegetable soup. She smiled wanly as she swallowed, and when the bowl was empty he fetched a flannel and washed her face and hands, gaily but tenderly, so that her despondency lifted and they were calm enough to discuss the future.
“I’ll desert and come up to the airfield the minute I can struggle into some civvies’,” she told him.
“The redcaps would pick you up before you got word to me that you were outside the wire!”
“They don’t do anything to deserters in my outfit! They just sack us, as ‘non-amenable to discipline’!”
“We can do a lot better than that the minute you’re operational,” he joked, “I’ll oblige you with a ‘Clause Eleven’ pregnancy discharged!”
“Now that really is an idea,” she said, “quite the best yet!” and they both laughed, and talked on for a few moments in the ironic idiom which they had used in the camps over the last two years.
Presently they grew serious again, and he got up and looked out into the gathering dusk.
“All this means much more to you than the Avenue now, doesn’t it, Judy?”
“Yes,” she admitted, “I suppose it does, but I don’t think I should have learned to love it so much if it hadn’t been for the Avenue. That never seemed to belong to a suburb to me, it was like a piece of Devon that had strayed, and lost itself while playing near London.”
“It won’t stay like that, Judy, not after the war. It’s changing, even now. They’ve got thousands of Yanks sculling about in our woods, and the old Manor is a Transport H.Q., thick with jeeps and lorries, and crawling with G.I.s all playing baseball! Sometimes I think even the Jerries wouldn’t have made such a mess of it!”
“Esme,” she said suddenly, as though his words had started a new train of thought, “after the war do you want to go back there? Wouldn’t you like to live somewhere else, somewhere in real country, like this?”
“That would depend on my job, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose so, but couldn’t you write anywhere, in a country cottage for instance?”
He was silent for a moment, then he said:
“I shan’t write at all after the war, Judy, I’ve quite made up my mind about that! You see, I’m not really a writer, and I’ve never convinced myself that I am! I’ve been kidding myself, right from the start. I told myself I wanted to be a writer, and because I had enough money to keep me from needing a real job I went right on kidding myself until after I joined up! That way wasted the time I might have been learning something. I’m through with all that now. After it’s over I’m going to farm and that isn’t just another dream, because I’ve got the capital to buy a farm and I’ve even talked it over with old Harold. He says it can easily be managed if I go the right way about it.”
He turned away from the window and came back to the bed.
“Does that scare you, Judy? Do you feel like marrying an amateur farmer, and watching him lose every penny he’s got?”
She felt at peace again. His admission had somehow advanced her another step towards fulfilment. It did not seem strange to her that he, who had never turned a spadeful of earth, or learned to milk a cow, should suddenly become obsessed with the idea of becoming a farmer, and earning a living from the soil and the care of animals. She imagined that he must have been drifting in this direction for a long time now, perhaps ever since the days when they had shared the excitement of the first hawthorn blossoms growing along the hedge in Shirley Rise. She remembered now that he had always possessed this deep and unconscious love of things growing. He had always been moved by the sight of the first foxgloves in Manor Wood, and the raw smell of turned soil in the plough-land beyond the wood. She had always admired his determination to become a writer, and had even been slightly awed by his limited successes with B.B.C. features, but she real
ised now that she could never have taken this work very seriously, and had always half-hoped that he would discover something to replace it.
She was happy too because his plan coincided exactly with her own desires, and with a deep, hidden wish to make a permanent home here in Devon. She wanted to have his children, and she wanted those children to grow up in an unspoiled countryside, where nobody carried umbrellas or caught regular trains, and the steep lanes possessed neither lampposts nor red pillar-boxes.
“I think that’s a lovely idea, Esme,” she said, “and I can’t think of anything I’d like better! I could be a real help to you on a farm, much more of a help than I could ever be as a housewife in the Avenue. I know about chickens, and I know about pigs, and Maud says there’ll be money in chickens and pigs after the war. We’ll have to learn about cows somewhere, but that ought to be easy for you; after all, you learned how to be an air-gunner, and it can’t be nearly as difficult as that!”
When it began to grow dusk Maud tapped on the door with supper for both of them.
“I’ve looked up your trains and ordered your taxi for eight,” she told Esme. “You can get the 8.45 from Exeter, and there’s a train from Euston to Grantham at 3.15 in the morning. I’ve cut you some sandwiches to eat in the train. They’re door-steps, I’m afraid but I’m not much good at sandwiches, am I, Gel?”
“It’s very good of you to bother, Miss Somerton,” he said. “How long have we got now?”
“About half an hour,” she told him, picking up the tea-tray and going out to the landing. “I’ll give you a call in plenty of time.”
The ‘flap’ Esme had mentioned was apparent as soon as he booked into camp.
He had travelled twelve hours through the night in crowded main-line trains, and most of the journey had been spent in corridors, huddled against kitbags and suitcases. He arrived back in his billet with an aching head, and the sour taste of too many cigarettes in his mouth, to find Snowball waiting with a message from Mac’, the skipper.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 31