The Land Girl

by Allie Burns

  ‘I won’t be long,’ he said, before heading out.

  She waited for him by the fire, too close for comfort, but the intense heat scorching her skin was satisfying somehow. The flames dwindled after a while, and the room grew too cold for her to stay.

  A knock came at the parlour door, and she leapt out of her chair.

  ‘Why don’t you go up?’ It was Martha. ‘I’ve used my secret coal supply to light the fire in your room. Should I stay with the other girls tonight? Leave you two to have some privacy?’ she said. ‘Or perhaps I should stay, make sure he doesn’t get drunk and nasty again.’

  Emily chewed her lip. He was her husband. She wanted to give up on him, but she couldn’t.

  ‘Does he deserve a second chance?’ she asked. ‘What he did to Cecil, it was brutal.’ Her mind was a blank with no answer of what she should do.

  ‘Has he apologised?’

  She shook her head. It might make a difference if he did.

  Martha said she’d go next door then with the other girls, leave her bedroom window open, and she’d let Heinrich know Theo was there too. It wasn’t exactly the most optimistic of plans for a romantic reconciliation with her husband, but under the circumstances she didn’t have much choice. He’d be back, and if he could stand, he’d want his marital rights.

  Normally, Emily draped her clothes on the horse in front of the fire. It cost her half a crown a week to get her uniform laundered, and she’d get another few days out of it yet. Tonight, it was just her damp leather gaiters that dried out by the fire, the rest she left in a tired heap on the floor.

  The bed was lumpy, the sheets scratchy. Her pillow kept sinking too much in the middle. She tossed and turned, exposing herself to a sly draft that crept beneath the bedcovers, before eventually, she dozed off.

  She was certain she’d been sleeping for a week when Theo stumbled into the room.

  ‘Why did you come and visit me?’ She kept her voice steady. ‘If you were just going to sit in the public house?’

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’ He spoke as loudly as if it were daytime. She jumped as his belt buckle crashed to the floor. ‘The reason why I’ve been home.’

  Her eyes stung. She searched out his shape in the darkness. The room was so cold, the draft from Martha’s bedroom window seeping in. He tended the fire, but Martha’s coal had long since burnt through. She pulled the bedclothes tight, lit a candle beside the bed.

  He grew closer, sat in the pool of the light. The mattress dipped and the old springs creaked as he sat on the edge to peel off his socks. He’d taken off his own shirt and his braces hung loose. He tossed down his socks and faced her.

  ‘When I came home at Christmas my mother was very ill. She died, last week. I’ve been home to go to her funeral.’

  His face collapsed and his head flopped forwards as he fought and lost the battle with his tears. He was shivering now and looking at the bed, working out how he would fit in too.

  ‘I’m so sorry for you.’ He had his back to her and she tentatively slid an arm around his side. ‘Did you get to keep any of your mother’s artwork?’

  He stiffened. She held her breath.

  ‘Father burnt it all. I shan’t see him again. He’s as dead to me as my mother is now.’

  ‘Home is wherever you and I are,’ she said. She buried her head in his back and closed her eyes while she smoothed his hair.

  They could build a marriage out of this rubble, she was sure of it. The war had destroyed so much, but it had brought them together. She’d sensed something about him in those early letters and their day at the women’s march, something that was worth fighting for. In sickness and in health. For better and for worse. She’d not taken much notice of her vows at the time – she’d still been crying every day for John, and was excited about her training course, but she should have listened more closely to her doubts, waited until she knew him better.

  Her fingertips made long sweeping snake-like shapes from the nook of his shoulder blades right down to the small of his back and then up again. He tilted his head back on his neck, his eyes shut. His breath deepened and then seemed to stop altogether.

  He rolled over. ‘I’m going to London in the morning to visit my pal, Patch,’ he whispered.

  ‘How is he?’ she asked.

  ‘He had his legs blown off,’ Theo said with such defeat it made her heart ache. ‘I pulled him from the wire.’ He ran his fingers through her tresses. ‘I saved his life and he hates me for it, and now I have to face him.’ He rested his palm on her loose hair, pinning her head to the pillow.

  He pushed himself on top of her and kissed her. It was all teeth and the stench of alcohol again, just like the time in the hotel corridor in Bournemouth. She wanted him to stop, but how could she push him away now after everything he’d told her?

  ‘Theo …’

  ‘I’m sorry about Cecil,’ he said, as he edged himself between her legs. ‘I wasn’t myself.’

  The cast-iron bed creaked. She was glad Martha had slept with the other girls after all. She closed her eyes and wished he would move his hand so her head would be free. Her hair pulled at her scalp every now and again. She held on to him tight, until he grunted and the bed sighed. He moved over to the side she’d warmed up. Her hair was free now. But he’d left her with the cold, narrow strip. She clung to the edge.

  He sniffed. And sniffed again. The bed was too narrow, the mattress too thin; they’d never get a decent night’s sleep like this, and he’d had a terrible day, and another awful one lay ahead of him. She lifted his trench coat and she lay down on the floor.

  Chapter Twenty

  November 1918

  Dearest Emily,

  You didn’t seem so very pleased to see me when I came on leave, and that has weighed heavily on a mind that is already low from my terribly sad visit to Patch. He told me he wished I’d left him on the wire – what a thing for him to say, and now I have to live with that. I didn’t save him at all; I consigned him to a life of misery.

  There are times when I’m so close to death that I feel its breath on my collar. I can’t close my eyes at night to sleep because a beast awaits me with white eyes and a dark coat and fearsome, yellow teeth.

  You most probably don’t want to hear all of this from me. The way you looked at me that last night, it was as if you were staring into the eyes of a stranger. You looked so very afraid. Perhaps you expected a husband to look after you and now you’re feeling disappointed with your lot.

  Yours

  Theo

  Rumours of peace filtered in from the Front, though the war had gone on long enough now it was hard to fathom an end to it. The allied troops were worn out, and things could just as easily go the other way. One faltering step and the Hun would strike.

  Emily was on the Sunnyside Orchard with the Bramley Battalion, armed with their pruning secateurs and spread around the bare-branched apple trees, the sheep resting by the trunks.

  An end to the war was what they all wanted, and of course that meant her too, but they were pocketed away here. She was needed, she wore breeches, and played cards, set her own timetable and worked every hour she had the strength to work. Peace meant the end to tragedy and death and the loss of so many, of rationing. But could peace also mean that she could keep on doing all this? Peace meant Mother, it meant moving back to HopBine House, it meant Cecil, it meant being a wife to Theo. She’d cried when she’d read his last letter. He hadn’t written to her again.

  She finished her tree and moved her ladder along to the other side of Martha. The tune to ‘Tipperary’ came to her as she propped the ladder so that she could reach a high branch. Martha joined in and the song soon caught like a wave. The trees grew alive with their voices and her jaw loosened. The singing nudged everything else aside.

  The women’s voices still floated through the air. The branches were bare, the final yellowed leaves thrown to the ground by high winds they’d had three nights previously, before the rain
had come. The elegant tree with its wide-open arms had the open centre that would let the light in and allow the crop to blush in the sunshine. Emily imagined throwing a hat through the tree’s torso, just like Mr Tipton had shown her; there were a few light-impeding branches that would snag its journey.

  At the top, she rested her shins against the highest rung. Canker crusted the joint of a branch that came towards her. She grasped the spear tip, with the young fresh buds of growth from 1918, and slid her hand back along to 1917’s darker, thicker wood; then came a short section for 1916, longer again for 1915 and then at 1914’s growth the branch crooked like an elbow where the canker had set in.

  As one of the girls burst into ‘Pack up your Troubles’, she unhitched her saw from her belt. The hay-coloured dust rained from the branch. The infected branch dropped to the base of the ladder. She warbled the high notes of the song.

  ‘All gone,’ she whispered to the golden scar. The tiny black cankerous dot that ran through the heart of the branch was gone.

  The singing had faded. The girls were quiet again. She left Martha to check on them. She slowed to listen in on a couple of girls talking about the munitions workers’ marches the night before in London and Glasgow. Hundreds of factory girls had been laid off overnight.

  ‘Do you think they could do the same to us?’ Hen said. The others had spotted Emily coming and fell quiet, concentrating on their pruning, as if Hen hadn’t asked the question at all. The old order and the pre-war divisions were reappearing before it was even over.

  She drifted away from the girls in their trees, and walked towards the stream that ran along the orchard’s boundary. A traction engine filled up at the stream next to the old paper mill. Disused for nearly a hundred years, the mill crumbled on the banks on the other side. The horizon was broken by the line of cedar trees that pointed towards HopBine House.

  The breeze buffeted her ears. A skylark’s reedy whistle. The stream rushed over rocks in the shallows. Saws gnawed through branches in the orchard. Life as usual, but at the same time an ominous sense in the air that they were on the verge of something momentous.

  It wasn’t just the changes that the end of war would bring. Her life was changing, war or not, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She’d been sick the last three mornings in a row. Martha was the oldest of six. She’d heard her retching, spied her chamber pot before she’d been able to throw the contents out.

  ‘You need to keep busy,’ the disembodied voice of Martha called from behind the branches back in the orchard.

  ‘I’ll just check there isn’t anyone on their way with news,’ Emily replied.

  She stood on the toes of her boots in case there was a bicycle on New Lane bringing news from a London train, or a cart coming back from town, but the hedgerow was too high. She’d need to climb the hill for a better view. But then news might not come today. It might be tomorrow. It might not come for weeks, months, years. She might be pushing thirty before Theo came home, and Cecil was released from prison.

  She was grateful to the farm for that. The cows’ udders still swelled each day; the blossom would frill along the branches each springtime, no matter what the Kaiser, or Fate, had in store.

  *

  It was nine a.m. and the land girls had gone into the farmhouse for their breakfast.

  ‘I’ll wait out in the fresh air,’ Emily said.

  She didn’t have the stomach for bacon and eggs, not even for a cup of tea. She had to take deep breaths when the saliva started to rise, but it didn’t always work and she didn’t want anyone else to know.

  A flock of hungry fieldfares and redwings clouded over and descended onto the low hawthorn hedgerow that formed a wall between the field and the farmhouse. Three birds, with grey-crested heads, blue-grey backs and speckled chests hopped along the base of the hedge, stabbing haw berries from low-lying branchesThe rest, perhaps as many as twenty, dissolved in amongst the thorns to feast, chuckling and chattering away as they did.

  The farmhouse door opened. Like a cork from a bottle the musty air was set free. Breakfast was over. Mrs Tipton, hair escaping from its knot, hands fisted on her hips, emerged onto the yard. The birds flapped their wings in unison and took off. Emily’s stomach cramped as she made her way down the last of the field towards the stile, while the other girls filed their way out of the cramped kitchen.

  Lifting a leg over the stile, Mrs Tipton pointed up towards her and she waved back, but they all continued to point up the paddock.

  It was Mr Flitwick, the gardener at HopBine, stumbling across the field towards them. He lost his footing on the ground, spat-less boots gathering mud, scattering a small murder of rooks feasting on the grass, as he staggered forwards, his palm in front of him ready to land first. She joined the others.

  His furrowed brow was intense and determined, and he was panting. He took his cloth cap from his head and waved it at them. ‘What is it, Mr Flitwick?’ Mrs Tipton called. They all waited for Mr Flitwick to answer. There wasn’t any sign of anguish in his expression, but it wasn’t joy either, it was something in between.

  ‘I’ve come to tell you.’ He wiped his forehead with his cap and rested his hands on his thighs to catch his breath.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ said Mrs Tipton. ‘Out with it, out with it.’

  ‘The war,’ he panted. Emily leant in. ‘They’ve signed the Armistice. The Germans are defeated. Peace,’ he panted. ‘Peace!’ He threw his hat high into the air and let it fly.

  She put her hand to her mouth, retched and ran across the yard, into the hay barn. The retching wouldn’t stop. Her stomach contracted, and up came the water she’d had for breakfast. Three chickens arrived, pecking about in the hay at her feet, scavenging for goodies. Again and again, she retched until there was nothing more to give.

  When she left the barn, Mrs Tipton was waiting for her. ‘It’s over.’ She flung her arms around her. ‘It’ll all change now,’ Mrs Tipton said. ‘This way of doing things had almost begun to feel like normal. Even the ole man has stopped complaining about all the women.’

  Emily stiffened. ‘Just because the war is over doesn’t mean I can give all this up,’ she said. ‘This is where I’m meant to be, and this is where I’ll stay.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  December 1918

  Dearest Emily,

  Did I tell you that Asquith has made a journalist of me? You’re looking at a lead reporter for the Canterbury Clinker. We write on toilet paper mostly, and the news is mostly fictitious. The irony eh? A reporter, with no education and a criminal record.

  Fondest wishes

  Cecil

  Martha was the dealer. She’d just won the hand and now collected up the cards.

  ‘Has your Theo written?’ Hen asked.

  Emily paused. ‘They sent him to Germany,’ she replied, with what was just a white lie. He hadn’t written once since the war had ended, which meant he could be anywhere: hospital, a demob camp or Germany. Or, he might be home here in England, and he hadn’t visited.

  ‘Germany, isn’t that were Olive’s son’s gone?’ Lottie asked.

  Emily nodded. It was just like Olive’s son. Of course! That was where she’d got the idea to say it. She would have to be more careful if she didn’t want to get caught out.

  She raised a hand to her stomach as the baby fluttered about. Martha had spied where she’d positioned her hand and winked. No one else knew and she wanted to keep it that way. The morning sickness had let her be by the end of November, around the same time as the doctor had confirmed she was pregnant. She would have a summertime baby, born in a time of peace and long, warm nights. And perhaps the baby would have a father too, if only he could come home a changed man.

  She yawned as Martha dealt out another hand.

  ‘Are you in?’ Martha asked.

  Emily hesitated. She’d had an early start and would love to turn in, but these nights with the girls wouldn’t last forever. The prisoners of war and the refugees had gone h
ome, but no men had yet returned to work on the farm.

  ‘I’m in,’ she said.

  She was to the left of Martha and so it was her turn to lay her first card.

  ‘And have you decided if you’ll all live at HopBine when he comes back?’ Lottie asked.

  They didn’t mean any harm; they were just being friendly. A circle of expectant faces waited for her answer. The army had already moved out of HopBine. Mother might know whether they would return to their home, but she still didn’t write. She’d not even written to her friend Norah Peters.

  ‘Do you know, I’m much more tired than I realised.’ She gave a big yawn, stretched her arms, and then pulled down her smock to prevent it from rising up. Her smock was baggy enough to not give the slight thickening of her waistline away, though she had loosened the belt by a notch.

  She threw in her hand.

  ‘Any news from the family?’ Mrs Tipton, drying her hands on her apron, intercepted Emily just before she could escape out of the kitchen door.

  ‘Cecil will be in prison until the spring.’

  Olive flinched at the very mention of her brother’s name.

  ‘They’re only letting the very ill out first.’

  ‘If you need help, just say. I’m sure your mother will see things differently now the war is over.’ Mrs Tipton whispered, ‘You’ve proven what we all knew you were capable of.’ She lifted the back of her skirts to warm her behind on the stove.

  ‘I hope so,’ Emily said. She’d been too engrossed in farm life to stop to think about Mother and her long silence. It had been convenient and suited her needs, but she would write to her again, and make enquiries about taking over the farm. She gave Sally a farewell rub and pulled the latch.

  ‘He’s back late, isn’t he?’ Mrs Tipton nodded at the clock on the mantelpiece. As she opened the door, Emily checked the clock. On Wednesdays, Mr Tipton went into West Malling to the market. He always went to The Swan and he was always back late, and Mrs Tipton always complained about it.