Once a Land Girl

by Angela Huth

  Barry gave Prue a large square diamond ring and the weeks before the wedding passed with alarming speed. During that time, when Prue was not making lists or comparing florists, she made herself think with great care about the forthcoming event. Not an introvert by nature – her mother’s advice had always been to get on with life rather than think about it – she found this exercise tedious and her concentration frayed quickly. But she knew she had finally to convince herself that Barry was the man for her.

  ‘Course I love you,’ he had said when she had asked if he loved her. What did that mean? Did it indicate he was suffused with the kind of love that might well be everlasting? Or did it mean he loved her a bit – just enough to take her as his wife? She remembered she had never said, ‘Course I love you,’ back – but, then, he had never asked her to measure her own love for him. The difficulty was to work out what, exactly, their love was made of. Certainly not the same thing as her love for Barry One, which had been so overpowering there had been no need to question it. Certainly not what she had felt for Joe, a high-spirited passion that had electrified her body through the long days of hard work at Hallows Farm.

  Her love for Barry Morton was, she supposed, closer to affection and gratitude than to an exhilarating feeling of wanting constantly to be together. The thought of him did not keep her awake at night. When he was absent during the day she did not long for his return, though she was always pleased to see him. They simply got on in a friendly way, exchanging snatches of news or reflecting on their particular interests – cars and farming. That was probably good enough, Prue told herself. Besides, love sometimes grows. There was a chance it would expand beyond her imaginings. And it was impossible to back away now – the cake, the hat, the flowers were all ordered. So while in her heart there were doubts and worries (surely normal in all brides-to-be?) she reckoned Barry was a pretty good bet. That was as far as her ruminations went. They ended, each time, as they had begun: she had made her decision and she would go through with it. The fact that she sometimes secretly cried at the thought of the more positive love she had once known would not deter her. Total love probably did not happen more than once in a lifetime. It was foolish to hope for it again. She would settle for a different kind, lucky to be Barry’s wife.

  They were married on a windy day in a register office. Prue wore a felt hat shaped like a plate that kept slipping down over one eye, and on her left breast a corsage of velvet roses. Her mother and Barry’s showroom manager were the witnesses, and joined them for lunch in the posh hotel where they had recently danced. Neither Stella nor Ag nor any of the Lawrences was able to come. They all sent cards, and good wishes, and hoped to meet Barry very soon: but Ag was off to Egypt with her husband, Stella could not leave Philip who was ill again, and the Lawrences had to deal with some farming crisis in Yorkshire. Prue cried one last time in her bed at home on the night before the wedding, but she also felt a strange sense of relief. She was not entirely sure what the people she loved most would think of Barry. She wanted their approval but could not be certain it would be forthcoming.

  After the wedding Mr and Mrs Barry Morton took various trains to Brighton where they were to stay at a hotel on the front. From their bedroom window they could see the pier. Room service provided their first dinner – very small helpings of fish and chips – and they talked of Prue learning to drive. They drank a bottle of champagne and soon the the outlines of the room, and Barry, began to dissolve: Prue realized this was the beginning of the kind of life she had always longed for. A woozy sort of gratitude to her husband rose in her, but she was very tired. The wedding hadn’t been as she imagined – no white dress, large church, choir – but Barry had been quite right to insist on nothing too showy in these hard post-war times. Barry, she appreciated, was a wise man. A wise, kind, very rich man. She undressed in the marble bathroom and slipped into the large bed still in her dressing-gown.

  Barry did not look up when she came in: he was reading the car-sales pages of the evening paper. When he had finished it he glanced over to his wife and saw that she was already asleep. This was not, he reflected with a smile, how the average wife would behave on the first night of the honeymoon, but he saw no point in waking her.

  Chapter 2

  In the first months of their marriage Prue struggled to find things to occupy the days. Barry had forbidden her to carry on working, which was no hardship for she was not a keen hairdresser, but she did want to see her mother regularly. Several times a week she took the long bus ride into the city and they would meet for a sandwich in the lunch-hour. Barry showed no sign of issuing an invitation for his mother-in-law to visit the house, but Prue assured her it would not be long in coming.

  She did not try to keep secret her visits to the salon. She did not mention them only because Barry, at the end of his busy days, did not question her about how she had spent hers. When she happened to say one evening that she had seen her mother – and, yes, she had gone there on the bus – Barry had been oddly annoyed. ‘No more going on a bus for you, my girl. I’m not having my wife travelling by bus. No. We’ll get you driving lessons, buy you a car. Then you’ll be free to go all over.’

  Prue was grateful for the lessons. They took up an hour or so of the day and Rod, her instructor, was a good-looking young man, keen for a laugh. She found herself putting on mascara on lesson mornings, and taking care over her lipstick. She enjoyed the driving, found it easy.

  ‘You’re a talented young lady,’ said Rod one day. They had pulled up in a quiet road to discuss the art of double-declutching. ‘There’s not many get the hang of it this well in so few lessons.’

  ‘Well, I drove a tractor for three years.’ Prue was warmed by his flattery. ‘As a matter of fact, though I shouldn’t say this, I was the best driver of us three girls. I could do a big field in a morning. Furrows straight as a die.’

  ‘Could you, now? I’m impressed.’ He turned to Prue, smiled. She fluttered her heavily-encrusted lashes, thinking that for her next lesson she would wear one of the bows in her hair that had caused the Lawrences’ disapproval until they had grown used to them. Prue put one hand, for half a second, on his thigh. ‘Thing is, you’re a great teacher.’

  ‘Thanks.’ There was a flash between them so powerful that Prue blushed and Rod, as if short of air, wound down his window. ‘I think we’ll do the double-declutching next week,’ he said. ‘Time’s up.’

  A few moments later when he drove away from the front door – ten minutes before their time was really up, Prue noticed – she blew him a kiss. The rest of the day, quite without guilt, she spent wondering. Funny to think a strange young man could still fancy her.

  Barry left home at seven every morning in the Daimler, returning in time for dinner. At least once a week he would bring her a present: there had been a gold watch, a scarf he swore was from Paris, a fountain pen with a gold nib, a leather, silk-lined case, which he called a ‘vanity case’, a name Prue failed to understand but did not like to ask – and a ruby brooch. They would come, these presents, in grand boxes and tissue paper. After dinner Prue and Barry would move into the sitting room, light the gas fire, switch on the Light Programme and there would be a ceremony of giving and receiving.

  The slower the unwrapping the better, Barry thought. He enjoyed watching his wife’s pink-cheeked delight, her struggle to find more and yet more adjectives to describe her wonder, amazement, gratitude. One evening the gift was a wallet of scarlet leather. It held five new five-pound notes. Prue burst into tears. ‘I can’t go on taking all these things from you,’ she said. ‘And as for all this money – I’ve never seen so much in my life. What can I do with it?’

  ‘You can spend, spend, spend, sweetheart,’ Barry said. His satisfaction at her response was faintly alarming in a way Prue could not explain to herself. ‘What better way for me to spend my money than on my wife?’

  ‘Well . . .’ A hidden part of Prue agreed. What she had always wanted she was now getting in abundance. It was both e
xciting and a little alarming.

  Once the present was unwrapped, and the last dregs of amazement plucked from it, Barry would say he had to be getting to bed for he had an early start. By the time she reached the bedroom, half an hour after him, Barry was asleep. Saturday nights were the exception. Prue dreaded Saturday nights. It was then Barry would ask her to undress completely, but throw her new scarf round her neck or hold up her new brooch to her chest. He then required her to walk across the room to where he lay on the bed. He would put on his glasses, scrutinize her, as if she was some kind of specimen, hold out a hand to her wrist and pull her down on top of him. The next part of the ritual was always very quick, but uncomfortable and passionless. His lovemaking bore no resemblance to anything Prue had ever known before: it simply had to be endured. He seemed to have no desire to ensure Prue’s enjoyment. His own fast satisfaction was his only aim.

  At first Prue, willing to be a good sport, found Saturday night requirements bearable but disappointing. They soon became boring. Once she tried hurrying across the room, instead of progressing at a languid pace. But that had caused a cry of impatient fury: ‘Go back and come here again,’ Barry shouted, maroon in the face, ‘slower.’

  ‘At least he doesn’t tie me up or thrash me,’ Prue wrote to Ag, some time later, ‘but I think he’s a bit weird. Still, perhaps it’s a small price to pay for all this . . . stuff.’

  To her own amazement she grew less enchanted by the presents, too. She begged Barry to stop buying her things, but he impatiently waved away her protest. ‘You’re a good wife,’ he said. ‘You deserve a lot.’

  ‘Not every week, Barry, please.’

  ‘Whenever I want. Up to me.’

  ‘It’s almost as if they were a substitute for – well, love.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’ Prue could not tell whether his look was one of surprise or indignation. ‘Why don’t you just say to yourself, sweetheart, that you’re lucky enough to be married to a very generous man?’ This was a melancholy voice Prue had not heard before.

  ‘Oh, I am,’ said Prue, quickly. She felt there was a kind of madness in the stuffy air of the room, silence only frazzled by the hiss of the gas fire. She wanted to run across Lower Pasture, meet Barry One in the wood on a summer evening: not kneel on the floor admiring three pairs of kid gloves she would never wear.

  When it wasn’t one of his very early starts, Barry liked Prue to be at breakfast with him, and sometimes she joined him. It was a simple way of pleasing him, though she failed to see exactly how her presence was rewarding. He read the paper while he ate his porridge. Bowl empty, he would light his first cigar of the day, then run from the room in unfailing hurry. Sometimes Prue wondered where he went, and how his day was spent. His answers to her questions were always perfunctory. She could never imagine what he was doing, or how he was, when he was gone.

  One morning after he had left the dining room Prue went to the window and opened it. She hated the smell of cigars. The open window drew out a single thread of smoke, but years of it had blighted the air in a way that was impossible entirely to extinguish. Prue looked at the large, bleak square of lawn surrounded by dark bushes and ivy-covered brick walls. It occurred to her that bulbs should be showing, trees blossoming. But there wasn’t a single tree in this part of the garden, not a single flower. So dispiriting was this realization that Prue went into the kitchen to ask Bertha if she knew if Barry had any plans for planting.

  Prue had not been able to make friends with Bertha. She had run the house satisfactorily for several years and did not want any interference. In a taciturn way she made it clear she would rather Prue did not visit the kitchen and, no, she had no need of help of any kind. Prue had offered to iron, to shop, to clear away: all such offers were almost politely rejected. Bertha lived in a flat over the garage. As far as Prue could make out she spent all her time there when she was not engaged in cooking and cleaning in the house. She was something of a mystery, Bertha, but when Prue asked Barry about her, he gave one of his reticent responses. She’d had a hard life, he said, and he’d been able to rescue her. No other details were forthcoming and Prue knew better than to press him with questions he did not want to answer.

  On this particular morning Bertha was standing at the kitchen table polishing silver spoons. She looked up as Prue came in. Just perceptibly, her mouth tightened. ‘Good morning, Mrs Morton,’ she said, concentrating on a spoon.

  ‘Good morning, Bertha.’ Prue regarded the thin, tense woman in her wrap-over pinafore, hair in a single roll round her neck a little in the fashion of Mrs Lawrence’s. She wore carpet slippers and a thin gold band on her wedding finger. She was both hostile and sad, bitter but resigned. Prue did not know how to begin. ‘You’ve got a wonderful kitchen,’ she said at last. ‘All these modern things. At the farmhouse where I was billeted as a land girl there was nothing like this. It was very rough. Vegetables and dead pigeons scattered about . . . You know.’

  ‘Really.’ Bertha picked up another spoon. ‘And no, I don’t know and I’m not that much interested.’

  Prue joined the silence. She was determined not to leave the room before she had asked about the garden. Bertha was not going to intimidate her. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ she said at last, ‘but I just wanted to ask if you knew whether my husband has any plans for the garden.’

  Bertha gave Prue a look that suggested some kind of mark had been overstepped. Such inquisitiveness was an affront.

  ‘I mean, it’s a nice big garden, isn’t it? It cries out for – well, I don’t know. Trees and flowers and things . . .’

  ‘Mr Morton has never made any mention to me of plans for the garden,’ Bertha said, this time with a trace of triumph. ‘I’m sure I’ve no idea what he has in mind. It’s not my place to ask.’

  ‘No.’ Prue managed to give a small laugh. ‘Well, I won’t disturb you any more. By the way, the fish last night was lovely,’ she lied.

  ‘I should hope so. Mr Morton likes his fish.’ Bertha turned to put the spoons in a drawer, her thin shoulders hunched with general indignation.

  Prue ran upstairs to put on her mascara. It was a driving-lesson morning. She hoped concentrating on her three-point turn would deflect her from the encounter with Bertha, which had left her with shaking knees.

  That morning Rod was very silent, his usual friendliness evaporated. He gave her brief instructions, but no praise when she got something right. When finally they parked in their usual quiet street, Prue turned to him. She liked his profile. ‘What’s the matter, Rod?’

  He stared through the windscreen. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘No, really.’

  ‘Come on, out with it.’

  Rod turned to her. His eyes were the colour of slate. ‘If you really want to know, I feel a bit topsy-turvy. I was in half a mind to send another instructor.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Can’t quite put my finger on it. But you know how it is. Sometimes out of the blue, something hits you. You’re knocked off your perch. All you want. . . and I’m not a womanizer. Don’t see many girls except the plain bunch who want to learn to drive. First thing we’re warned in our training, of course, is never to get involved with one of our pupils. Never.’

  ‘Of course not.’ It was all Prue could do not to put a hand on his arm or his cheek.

  ‘So, this is no good. I’m going to have to pass you on to another instructor.’

  ‘No!’ Prue gave a small shriek. ‘Please don’t. I love our lessons. You’re a wonderful teacher.’

  ‘I love them too. That’s the trouble.’ Rod smiled. ‘Just my luck I get a beautiful young married woman. Happy as they come, I dare say. Socking great house, everything . . .’

  Their eyes locked in the moment before unexpected tears burst upon Prue. The encounter with Bertha must have shaken her more than she had realized, she thought, and now this handsome young man being sympathetic. She heard herself howling. As she rubbed at her chee
ks she could imagine the ragged black mess her mascara must have made of them. The thought turned the tears to laughter.

  Rod took out a handkerchief, dabbed at her face. Then he ran a finger along her top lip. ‘You are a surprise,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Prue sniffed, and blew her nose on his handkerchief. ‘It’s all just so odd,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He tried for a light note. ‘That’s why I don’t go for marriage. It’s always struck me as a weird business.’ He took back his handkerchief. They both laughed in a minor way. ‘Think our time’s up,’ he said. ‘Let’s see if you can reverse into the road.’

  When they got back to the house Rod shook her hand. ‘Good luck with the test,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ll do fine.’

  It was only once he had driven away that it occurred to Prue his wishes for success meant he had definitely decided it would be better to cease being her instructor.

  Despite driving lessons three times a week, now with an old and uncharismatic instructor, Prue was finding her days long and empty. Sometimes she went into the city on a bus – it took up time – to spend one of the five-pound notes, but there was little in the shops and nothing she wanted among the gloomy clothes. Sometimes she went to the salon, but felt herself in the way now she no longer worked there. She made lists of things she would like planted in the garden, and of the few friends she had had in Manchester before the war.

  But one small excitement, two months into her marriage, was finding the telephone – a heavy, dusty black thing with a long tangled brown lead – under a table in the hall. She had never known Barry to use it and she had never heard it ring. She spent an afternoon trying to get through to two girlfriends with whom she’d been at school. They had both moved away. No one knew where they were. It then occurred to Prue, who had never written more than a postcard in her life, that she could ring Stella and Ag. God, how she wanted to hear their voices, know about their lives. Since leaving the Lawrences the three had kept up their arrangement of lunching in London once a year, and it was six months since they had last met. Time to make another plan.