With her son now serving in northern France, Rose found herself consumed with anxiety not only for him but, because he loved her, for Hester herself and for the child whom she had begun, almost without realising it, to regard as her granddaughter. ‘Matinee jackets is all very well, Thurza,’ she murmured to herself, knitting needles clicking as she cast on the required number of stitches, ‘but what a little girl needs this time of year is leggin’s! Nice, warm, woolly leggin’s!’ So she knitted leggings and the land girls, asking who the baby clothes were for, were amazed when she told them.
‘How on earth did you get there, Rose?’ Alice asked, one late afternoon a few weeks later, when Rose arrived back from her trek across the moor to the Tucker smallholding.
‘Got the early bus from Exeter to Bideford and started walkin’,’ she said. ‘Then a fellow in a milk truck give me a lift! Right to the Tuckers’ gate! And ’e said as ’e’d give a toot on his horn on his way back!’
‘And did you see Hester?’
‘I did,’ said Rose, crisply. ‘She come out the cottage and we stood in the yard with her ma peepin’ through the curtains at us! I give her the leggin’s and she were that pleased! She said to tell Dave she got his message at Christmas and thanked him for the doll, but when I asked her if Thurza liked it she looked away. She said her father can’t walk no more and Zeke was called up some time ago. Down the mines, they’ve sent ’im. In Wales. Bevin Boys, they’re called … I don’t know how they Tuckers live, Alice! Their place be that run-down! Then Hester said she must go back inside, but she come to the window with Thurza in her arms, so I could ’ave a look at ’er. She’s a bonny child. Golden curls, she’s got, just like her mother’s. And the same blue eyes! But she shouldn’t be there, Alice. Not in that house. Not with that man. Neither of ’em should be.’
With the twins thriving, their parents respectably married, Mabel now in charge of the dairy and the proud mistress of the newly installed milking machine, all should have been well in the Vallance household. But it was not so. Despite the fact that Germany was facing inevitable defeat, the V2 rocket assaults on the south-east of England continued, as, in consequence, did Mabel’s concern for her firstborn who, since his inappropriate birth, when she had been barely sixteen, had been virtually adopted by Mabel’s grandmother, a woman now in her early eighties and in declining health. Encouraged by the news that her granddaughter was now a married woman with not only a husband and a home of her own but also now with twin babies, Ada Hodges had written, in her laboured, cursive hand, to ask when she might expect to be relieved of the responsibility of raising her great-grandchild.
Ferdie’s assumed ignorance of Arthur’s true parentage overlooked the fact that although his mind might work in the same lurching, uncertain and hesitant way as his damaged leg, he nevertheless possessed the practical, slow-burning shrewdness common to Devonians. Without descending into artful cunning, Ferdie was astute and observant enough to have come to the conclusion that Mabel’s feelings for little Arthur were stronger than is usual between a girl and her baby brother. Where Arthur was concerned Mabel was not merely fond and affectionate, she was defensive, protective and passionate. More, in fact, like a mother than a big sister. Perhaps, possibly without being conscious of it, Ferdie may have absorbed a half-heard piece of gossip, or caught the expressions on the faces of his wife’s fellow land girls when, on visits to the farm, they had observed the relationship between the plump and motherly girl and the little boy who so closely resembled her. Whichever way it had happened, Ferdie, possibly by a process of osmosis, found himself in possession of the fact that Arthur was Mabel’s child. Concerning a decision about how this fact should be addressed, Ferdie had made little or no progress and had failed to respond satisfactorily to Mabel’s increasingly frequent references to it.
‘Me Gran’s poorly,’ she told him one day, after carefully rereading the old lady’s most recent letter. ‘She reckons Arthur’d be better off here with me now I’m married. So what d’you reckon, Ferdie?’ She watched her husband consider this while he forked his way through a plate of baked beans which, with a solitary sausage and a pile of mashed swede, was all Mabel had managed to produce for his supper that evening. ‘Gran says that three kids is no more work than two.’
‘Do she now!’ he mumbled, with his mouth full. ‘An’ what about the dairy? The boss be payin’ you to run ’is milkin’ machine, Mabel, not to play sadie sadie, married lady!’
‘Mrs Jack and Mrs Fred’ll keep an eye on Arthur, you knows that. And the twins is good as gold – so long as me milk holds out. And by the look of me,’ she said, glancing down confidently at her impressive breasts, ‘these’ll keep ’em quiet for a good few months yet!’
But Ferdie would not commit himself, and tension grew in the tiny cottage which always seemed to smell of something. Washing. Tom cats. Dirty nappies. Ferdie’s pipe. Mabel’s milk …
Until, one morning, Margery Brewster, driving between hostels on her usual rounds, saw, ahead of her in the lane, a familiar figure. She was surprised to recognise Mabel Hodges or rather Mrs Ferdinand Vallance as Mabel had recently become. Mabel, striding strongly towards the railway station, had, tucked under each of her arms, a baby.
The village registrar slowed her car to walking pace beside Mabel, wound down her window and asked her what on earth she thought she was doing. Mabel kept walking.
‘If he won’t ’ave all of us, ’e’s not ’avin’ none of us!’ she announced with breathless emphasis.
Margery Brewster knew the facts of Mabel’s irregular history and that the small boy whom she had at first insisted was her brother was, in fact, her son, but it took her some time to understand that Mabel, exasperated by her husband’s prevarication, had decided to deprive him of her presence and that of their twins until he agreed to absorb little Arthur into his family. ‘It’s no good your sayin’ nothin’, Mrs Brewster! I’ve been that patient with Ferdie you wouldn’t believe! Now me mind’s made up!’ Mabel had stopped walking and was standing, breathing heavily. The weight of her two robust babies was considerable, and tired of being jolted along and clutched too tightly, both were now writhing noisily. ‘I’m off to me gran’s,’ Mabel announced, shouting above the clamour of the twins. ‘If he wants us he’ll have to come and get us! And if I stands ’ere talkin’ I’m gonna miss me flippin’ train!’ She strode on, staggering slightly, under the weight of her wailing babies.
Margery hesitated briefly and then, almost as much to her own surprise as to Mabel’s, moved alongside her.
‘Get in the car, Mabel!’ she said. ‘Quickly!’
After depositing Mabel on the station platform, Margery drove back to the farm to find Ferdie standing in the centre of the yard, a look of total devastation on his usually placid face.
‘It’s me Mabel!’ he told her. ‘Me Mabel’s gone! And she’s took me twins wiv ’er!’
Three hours later, after a long and serious discussion with Margery Brewster, which was followed by a shorter one, involving Roger Bayliss and Alice Todd, and which focused on the needs of the farm as opposed to the drama within the Vallance household, Ferdie capitulated. He wanted his twins and his wife back, and having been encouraged to regard little Arthur as his stepson, promised to be a proper father to him. Ferdie put on his wedding suit, and with Mabel’s London address on a piece of paper in his breast pocket, boarded the next London train.
‘But how on earth will he find her?’ Alice wondered, as she and Roger stood on the platform at Ledburton Halt and waved goodbye to Ferdie whose face, as he was borne away, wore the look of a man delivered neck and crop to the will of God. ‘He’s never been to London before!’
Ferdie found a seat in the smoky compartment in which four dishevelled soldiers were already sprawled, two asleep and two playing cards for matchsticks.
‘Got wounded, did yer?’ one asked, having noticed Ferdie’s limp as he lurched into the carriage.
‘In a manner of speakin’,’ Ferdie told him, ‘
but not in the war. A rollin’ tractor did for me. I works on the land, see.’ The soldier inhaled the last fumes from his roll-up and narrowed his eyes against the smoke.
‘So where’re you off to now, then?’ he asked, and Ferdie paused before replying that he was going to London to fetch home his wife and kids who were visiting her family. He produced the scrap of paper on which the warden had printed the address of Mabel’s grandmother.
‘Over to some place called Deptford, she be,’ he added, vaguely. The soldier ground his fag end into the littered floor.
‘That’s where our Charlie’s headin’, innit, mate!’ he said, nudging his companion’s shin with the toe of his boot.
This chance encounter with Corporal Charlie Arnold proved to be a blessing to Ferdie, who otherwise might never have found his way out of Paddington station, let alone across London to the distant neighbourhood where Mabel had arrived some hours previously. He limped after Charlie as they crossed the city on an underground train, rode on one bus and then on another. Then, with Charlie’s instructions ringing in his confused ears, Ferdie had negotiated a final maze of grimy streets, checked the address against the scrap of paper Alice Todd had given him and knocked on a door which had been opened by Mabel. His Mabel.
Within three hours, his wife trotting beside him and towing Arthur by the hand, Ferdie Vallance, with a twin under each of his arms, had recrossed London and installed himself and his family in the overcrowded carriage of a train that was due to arrive at Ledburton Halt late that evening.
Ferdie was never quite the same after that. What he had undertaken and what he had achieved amazed him. He had followed Charlie down tunnels, ridden in strange trains that turned day into night, climbed on and off buses that had seats upstairs as well as down, the like of which he had seen only in cinema newsreels. He had made his way along streets where the brickwork was as black as the inside of a country chimney. He had found Mabel and his twins and fetched them home. It was true that he had been made to agree to give young Arthur his name and raise him as his own but that, he assured himself, had always been his intention. He just hadn’t got round to it as fast as Mabel had expected, that was all. He was a family man now. A man with responsibilities. He had even been to London. The thin, limping man, who, when Mabel first arrived at the Post Stone farms, had been living in a filthy hovel, his clothes unwashed and his cupboard, more often than not, bare, was now a husband and a father of three, with food in his pantry and a fire warming his kitchen.
Three weeks later and with Roger Bayliss’s solicitor handling the legal side of Arthur’s adoption, the little boy was christened, together with his infant half-brother and -sister. From that day on he became known as Arthur George (after the King) Vallance.
‘Lunnon?’ Ferdie would brag at every opportunity. ‘Bin to Lunnon? ’Course I ’as! Wouldn’t give ’e tuppence for it, though! Bain’t no place for my family! Fetched ’em home quick smart, I did!’
A mild, moist spring, followed in mid-April by warm sunshine, meant that an early crop of hay was almost ready for mowing by the first week in May, by which time the war in Europe was dragging through its final days. Although the news had not yet been made public, Adolf Hitler had already perished in his bunker. The land girls had pored over newspapers displaying gruesome and grainy photographs of Mussolini, his bullet-riddled body swinging by his heels above a crowd of jeering Italians.
‘I s’pose they’ll be sendin’ the Eyetie POWs ’ome now, won’t they, Mrs Todd?’ Evie asked, and Alice said yes, she supposed they would be.
The world seemed to hold its breath until, at one minute after midnight on Tuesday May the eighth, the end of the war with Germany was officially declared.
That day church bells rang. Special prayers were said in schools from which the children poured, allowed home early, to celebrate. The horns of vehicles blared through towns and villages. Trains roared across the countryside, the drivers sounding their whistles in a continuous, triumphant screech and waving out of their cabs at everyone – and everyone waved back.
At the higher farm, Roger Bayliss, defying regulations, had a pig slaughtered and set to roast above a fire supervised by Ferdie Vallance, Mr Jack and Mr Fred, whose wives, together with Eileen, Mabel and Rose, set about turning any food they could lay their hands on into buns and puddings and pies. Land girls from some of the other, smaller hostels in the neighbourhood were to join the Post Stone girls and bring with them their own contributions to the festivities, and by six o’clock, having rushed through their evening ablutions in record time, curled their hair, applied their make-up and put on their prettiest frocks, Alice’s girls had arrived at the higher farm, where they were joined by Margery Brewster and her groups of land girls from nearby hostels and where they had all been greeted by the intoxicating smell of pork, perfectly roasted over a fire which was now reduced to a shimmering pile of powdery, white-hot ashes, and were clustering round the barrel from which Mr Jack was filling glass after glass with cider.
Trestle tables covered in white sheets ran the length of the yard and would be lit, as the light faded, by a row of oil lamps and candles placed down the centre of each. Every chair, bench, milking stool and garden seat at Higher Post Stone and from the labourers’ cottages had been commandeered. Roger Bayliss presided at one end of the table, with Alice on his right and Margery Brewster on his left, Gordon, her beaming husband, beside her. Then came the farm workers and their wives and then the Post Stone land girls and their visitors.
Two hours later, when everyone had eaten all the food, drunk all the cider and sung all the songs, Roger Bayliss got to his feet, and followed by Margery Brewster, spoke solemnly about the ending of the war with Germany and of the land girls’ contribution to the victory. Then they all charged their glasses, rose to their feet and drank two toasts, one to the King and one to Winston Churchill.
‘’Ere’s to Winnie!’ the girls roared. ‘Good ol’ Winnie!’ This was followed by ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ and the national anthem.
Edward John, who had been fetched home from boarding school, was given the honour of putting a taper to the towering bonfire which had been assembled that afternoon and stood in an adjacent field, safely downwind of the farmhouse. He could only dimly remember the pre-war firework parties, the last of which he had been taken to at the age of six. He stood back from the growing heat of the fire, watching, round-eyed, as the flames took hold, curling towards a pale sky. The bells in Ledburton church tower were ringing again but their sound was soon drowned by the roar of the bonfire and the shouts of laughter as everyone joined hands, and with glowing faces and shining eyes, moved round it in a wide, noisy circle.
That day Christopher had caught, borne on the wind and from various distances, the sound of church bells pealing in the belfries of the steeples scattered across the valley his woodland overlooked. For five years the ringing of bells would have announced an invasion by the German army, something which, during the early years of the war, had seemed inevitable. Today, with that army routed and its leaders captured or dead, the bells confirmed that the news everyone had been waiting for had finally broken. Hoping that Georgina might have snatched a few hours leave in order to join her parents to celebrate it, Christopher drove the truck, cross-country, to their farm.
‘She telephoned,’ her mother told him and was touched by the disappointment in his face. ‘But there was some official celebration at the base at White Waltham which she had to attend. She hopes to be home in a day or so and I’m sure she’ll come and see you then. I believe she has some news for you,’ she added, smiling. ‘Don’t ask me what. I’m sure she wants to tell you herself.’
Christopher was struck, forcefully but not for the first time, by how closely Isabel Webster resembled her daughter. She was regarding him now with the same direct eyes and the same quizzical expression that Georgina often wore. She caught his look.
‘What?’ she asked, smiling.
‘Nothing! I mean … I hadn’t
noticed before how incredibly alike you and Georgie are.’
‘That is because,’ Georgina’s father said, his pipe clenched between his teeth, ‘when my daughter is here your eyes are on her and not on her mother! Which is, of course, just as it should be!’
Two days later the sound of Lionel’s motorbike broke the silence of the woodland and Georgina was dismounting, unwinding her scarf and welcoming Christopher’s kiss.
‘You are looking at a person who has just resigned their commission!’ she announced, stepping back from him and executing a neat RAF salute. ‘In four weeks’ time I’ll be in Civvy Street!’
He led her through a stand of beech trees where new foliage, which would darken as the summer proceeded, was still a fragile lettuce green above drifts of bluebells. They lay down together on a rustling pile of last year’s fallen leaves. Their lovemaking had become a sequence of enchanting encounters. They treasured the privacy of the woodman’s cottage but once, on her father’s land, a thunderstorm had driven them into a barn where a pile of hay had proved irresistible. On another rainy occasion, on the way back from a farm sale where Christopher had bought some equipment, they had been suddenly so overcome that Christopher had driven the truck up a green lane and they had made love with the rain drumming on the cab roof. Days became weeks and then a month had passed and they had not told either her parents or his father their plans.
Since the day, many months previously, when Gwennan, self-diagnosed with the cancer that would surely kill her, had spitefully deprived Marion of a letter intended for her from her GI admirer, she had frequently experienced a frisson of shame. But, she persuaded herself, what was done was done. How could she undo it, even if she wanted to? The letter lay where it had fallen when she had deliberately let it slip from the shelf of the kitchen dresser where the land girls’ mail was always propped, ready for them to claim when they arrived back from work. It had lain now for many months, undetected amongst the dusty cobwebs caught between the massive piece of furniture and the wall against which it stood. What possible reason was there to pull the dresser away from the wall? How, otherwise, would the letter ever be discovered? After six months or so had passed, Gwennan had half-hoped that Rose, while spring cleaning the kitchen, might have found it but, probably because of the weight of the dresser, she obviously had not attempted to sweep behind it.
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