Alice's Girls

by Julia Stoneham

  Then, on a thundery evening, not long after the VE Day celebrations, when the girls were polishing off their rice pudding, Evie screamed shrilly and pointed at something that was crawling clumsily across the kitchen floor.

  ‘It’s only a bat!’ Annie said. ‘Shut up, Evie, or you’ll scare it!’ Whether it was Evie’s scream or Annie’s approach, the little creature took fright, scurried across the slate floor and inserted itself into the tiny space between the dresser and the wall.

  ‘Best leave ’im,’ Rose said. ‘’E’ll come out when he sees fit.’

  ‘But ’e might get stuck!’

  ‘’E could die be’ind there!’

  ‘And then ’e’ll stink!’

  Gwennan watched as four of the girls heaved at the dresser and, struggling with its weight, managed to ease one end of it a few inches away from the wall. They craned forward, peering into the dark space.

  ‘Ooooh, there it is! Yuck!’

  ‘It’s horrible!’

  ‘Don’t go near it!’ Winnie shrieked. ‘It’s a vampire! They suck your blood, they do! And then you die! I saw it at the pictures!’

  The bat had crawled as far as it could from the looming, shouting faces and had wedged itself tightly into the sharp angle where the dresser touched the wainscot.

  ‘Out the way!’ Rose ordered. She’d show them how a true country woman deals with such things. With one firm stroke of her besom she drew the little creature towards her, lifted it off the floor in the folds of her apron and shook it out of the kitchen window where it flickered away into the twilight. ‘Don’t go moving the dresser back,’ she said, ‘’til I fetch me dustpan and brush and sweep be’ind it.’ The girls watched as Rose lowered herself onto her knees, reached forward and began to raise the dust, muttering virtuously about making a proper job of it whilst she was at it. ‘There be a comb behind ’ere,’ she announced, her voice muffled in the confined space. ‘And a pencil …’ She emerged, crawling breathlessly backwards and sat on her heels, a spider’s web caught in her greying hair, the comb and the pencil safely in her dustpan. ‘And there’s this!’ she said, brandishing a letter.

  The letter was thick with dust. Something had nibbled at one corner and the ink of the address was smudged.

  For one unguarded moment Gwennan’s eyes were locked onto the envelope. Then she gathered herself.

  ‘Who’s it for, then?’ she asked, as casually as she could. Rose peered at the scrawled address.

  ‘Can’t see without me specs,’ she said, handing the letter to Winnie.

  ‘Marion!’ Winnie read. ‘Miss Marion Grice!’ Her face was alight with excitement as she turned the letter over. The name and rank of the sender were printed on the reverse side. ‘Oh, Marion! It’s from the little sergeant! He didn’t die after all! And he’s wrote to you! I just knew he would! Oh, Marion! He’s wrote to you!’

  ‘Give it here, then!’ Marion said abruptly, and with her eyes lowered, took the letter and left the kitchen. They heard the creak of the stairs. The faces of the other girls were alive with curiosity and speculation. They remembered the stocky GI sergeant who had taken a shine to Marion and then vanished, as so many men had, lost, more often than not permanently, in the chaos of the war.

  ‘Fancy that!’ Gwennan said, experiencing a strange sensation of relief that her long deception had ended and even feeling that now the letter had at last reached its destination, she was perhaps, after all, innocent of causing its disappearance. Whatever the sensation was, it somehow reduced her defensiveness. ‘Stuck behind there!’ she exclaimed. ‘All that time!’

  ‘All what time?’ Winnie asked sharply. But Gwennan was ready for her, her latent shrewdness instantly back in place.

  ‘How should I know?’ she answered easily, shrugging her thin shoulders. ‘Long enough to get covered in cobwebs and chewed by a mouse, I s’pose.’ She turned to Alice, and with an expression which came as close to innocence as she ever achieved, asked for an aspirin. ‘’Cos I feel like I might be comin’ down with something, Mrs Todd.’

  Chapter Four

  Dear Marion, the sergeant’s letter began,

  I should have wrote you soon as I got your photo which I have carried with me next to my heart ever since. I would have done but a training exercise went wrong and I was the only guy in my section to survive. It was hushed up because of D-Day being only weeks away but it was a rough time for me and I felt like my luck had run out and what was the point of worrying you when I most likely would not come marching home like it says in the songs. But I never stopped thinking about you babe and after I came through the Normandy landings I started to feel lucky, so here I am, writing to my girl. It would be just great to hear from you but I guess that things might have moved on for you after all these months. Anyhow, like the man says here’s lookin’ at you kid.

  From your devoted and loving Marvin J. Kinski. Sergeant.

  ‘I dunno what to do, Mrs Todd!’ Marion sat in Alice’s room, her fingers pulling at the scrap of lace on the corner of her damp handkerchief. ‘I mean, I’m ever so glad to hear from ’im and that he’s alive and not wounded or nowt but I can’t let our Win down over the pub, can I? We swore an oath that we’d go it alone, Win and me! We didn’t want no men interfering with our plan, and we’ve been saving up our money and everything was in order … Then along comes Marvin!’ Alice looked at Marion’s anguished face, which today appeared somehow softened by her confused feelings. The crudely bleached hair had always contrasted too strongly with her hard, dark eyes and absurdly plucked brows. The thick mascara on her lashes, and the beetroot-red lipstick she wore when dressed for going out, had given her face the harsh, bandbox veneer of the film stars whose appearance she tried so hard to match. But today, in the diffused light of Alice’s room, her face devoid of make-up and her hair slightly tousled, the brown eyes soft and expressive, she looked, the warden realised, almost vulnerable. Alice had assumed that, being an American, what had attracted Sergeant Kinski to this flashy, north-country land girl was her boldness, the brash, shiny, ‘come hither’ quality of the style in which she presented herself. The face confronting Alice would never be a beautiful one, the nose was too long and the jaw too strong. But there was, Alice saw that day, an underlying sensitivity, almost a delicacy about the basic structure of it. Was it possible that Kinski, as well as enjoying her glamour, had seen through the veneer and identified in Marion other qualities that he valued?

  ‘What does Winnie think about all this?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ Marion replied, thoughtfully. ‘She likes Marvin. Always calls him “the little sergeant”, on account of he’s not that tall.’ Alice asked whether the two friends had ever discussed the possibility that one or the other of them might, for whatever reason, want to withdraw from their shared ambition to run a pub together. Marion considered this for a while. ‘Not really. We’d sort of got into the habit of it. Like it was fixed.’ She pointed into the air in front and slightly above her eyeline. ‘Like a star you follows. Like the three kings in the Bible.’ Then she caught Alice’s slightly baffled expression and laughed briefly. ‘We thought we might have to give up because of not ’avin’ enough money, but never because one of us might not want to do it no more. We never, ever, thought of that. P’raps we should ’ave … And anyhow it’s not like the sergeant’s asked me or anything, Mrs Todd. It’s months since he wrote that letter, and what with it getting lost … He most prob’ly thinks I’m not bothered.’

  ‘But you are bothered, aren’t you?’ Alice asked her. Marion sat in silence for a moment or two, considering this.

  ‘Yeah. I reckon I am,’ she said.

  ‘Then perhaps you should write to him.’

  ‘But what about Winnie?’

  ‘One thing at a time, Marion. It might help to start by sorting out how things stand between you and your sergeant, mmm?’

  ‘Yeah. I should of thought of that meself, Mrs Todd.’

  ‘You would have done, Marion.’

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nbsp; ‘Yes, I ’spect I would of done, on’y I was a bit took by surprise.’

  ‘Quite understandably.’

  ‘I feel like a marriage broker,’ Alice said, after explaining the situation to Roger Bayliss who, over the next days, used some military contacts to discover the whereabouts of Sergeant Marvin Kinski.

  ‘I’ve managed to get a US army address Marion can write to, but apart from the fact that Kinski was involved in the invasion of Okinawa in April they can’t, or won’t, give any more information than that.’

  ‘Okinawa!’ Alice exclaimed. ‘Our lovers could hardly be further apart, then!’ She gave this news, together with the address, to Marion.

  ‘Okinawa!’ she echoed, her face falling. ‘That’s in China or somewhere, isn’ it?’

  ‘Japan, actually,’ Alice told her.

  ‘Well it might as well be China, mighten it?’ Marion muttered, depressed and then brightening slightly when Alice pointed out that at least this information confirmed that Marvin was alive and well.

  ‘He don’t half get around, your little sergeant!’ Winnie said, when Marion shared her news. Alice was uncertain whether or not the two friends were ready to address the problem of what was to become of their long-standing plans should the sergeant’s feelings for Marion have survived the intervening months.

  ‘He might ’ave gone off of her, after all this time,’ was Gwennan’s contribution to one of the land girls’ speculative discussions on the subject. She continued to experience a sense of relief that her own involvement in the situation was over, and resisted a desire to share her true opinion, which was that in view of Marion’s shady reputation, Sergeant Kinski would be better off without her.

  Over the next few evenings Marion wrote and rewrote her letter.

  Dear Marvin,

  In the kitchen there is a dresser where our letters get put ready for us when we come back from work of an evening. Only your letter must of slipped down the back because the other day a bat crawled behind it. We had to move it to get the bat out and there was your letter that you wrote to me last summer. It was in a bit of a mess and something had chewed off a corner but I knew straight off it was from you, dearest Marvin and I was that glad to hear you are OK and I’m pleased you like the snap of me in the river but it wasn’t me as sent it, see. It was my friend Winnie. I will explain why some time but it is complicated. Anyhow I didn’t know she had sent it til months later. Harvest time it was when she told me and I never got your answer because it were down behind the dresser by then and god knows where you was. We thought you must be dead because of so many GIs getting killed on D-Day. Poor Hester’s Reuben did. I never stopped thinking about you Marvin and lately I have been thinking about you more and more but now you are in blooming China. [She crossed out China and replaced it with Japan.] I hope you will get this letter, not like the one you sent to me. It says on the wireless that the Japs will give in soon so take care and come home safe to your ever loving Marion who is waiting for you because there is nobody like you, Marvin nor ever was.

  From M. Grice XXX.

  With the war in Europe over, everyone at the Post Stone farms was conscious of approaching change. For years it had been possible to accept the status quo, and the phrase ‘for the duration’ had been an easy way to avoid serious thought about a post-war future. The demobilisation of the armed forces would be a slow process, so there was no immediate threat to the survival of the hostel, but Roger Bayliss was aware that, with an increasing dependence on mechanisation and the eventual return to the farm of Rose Crocker’s Dave and of Mr and Mrs Jack’s son, Archie, an able seaman on minesweepers – both of whom had applied for early release on the grounds that their labour was needed on his farms – a time would come when the number of land girls whose labour he required would be too few to justify the use of the lower farmhouse as a hostel. What began to disturb Roger was not the prospect of losing the girls but of losing Alice. Although the warmth, even the intimacy of their friendship, was slowly increasing, he had not yet disclosed to her the depth of his feelings for her or his overwhelming desire to cease to be simply her affectionate friend and become her passionate lover and husband – though not necessarily in that order. When she spoke with enthusiasm of the likelihood of a future involving consultancy work in the catering industry, Roger was obliged to take a polite and even encouraging interest, although the tension this produced gave Alice the impression of a detachment on his part which was in direct contrast with his feelings. The fact that Alice was privy to Georgina and Christopher’s plans, not only to marry but to emigrate, on which subjects she was sworn to secrecy, made her guard her tongue in case she unwittingly revealed something which might rouse Roger’s suspicions.

  Weeks passed in which the farmer and his warden continued to see each other socially as well as professionally. She, wearing a sleek, black velvet dress that almost stopped Roger’s breath, partnered him at a Farmers’ Union celebration during the victory celebrations. As they danced, the closeness of Roger’s embrace had pleased both of them, but although their eye contact had expressed an unashamed intimacy, their conversation had failed to match it.

  Margery Brewster took it upon herself to counsel the land girls about their post-war plans and prospects, interviewing them, one at a time, on a Sunday morning in the recreation room at Lower Post Stone.

  She was an observant woman where the girls in her charge were concerned and it had not escaped her that Gwennan Pringle was looking thinner and more gaunt than usual.

  ‘And how are you, Miss Pringle?’ she asked her. The registrar always referred to the Welsh girl as ‘Miss Pringle’ rather than as Gwennan, or Taffy, which was how the other land girls addressed her. Gwennan enjoyed the distinction but was uncertain of the registrar’s motives. Was she ‘Miss Pringle’ because she was the senior girl at the hostel and as such deserved respect? Or was it some sort of joke? Despite the possibility of it being a joke, Gwennan liked Margery Brewster. She had been sympathetic when Gwennan’s sister had died and, occasionally, when the other girls’ behaviour threatened to bring the Land Army into disrepute, Mrs Brewster’s disapproval matched Gwennan’s, bolstering her sense of self-righteousness.

  ‘I’m quite all right, thank you, Mrs Brewster,’ she lied. When asked if she had made any plans for the peacetime life which Mrs Brewster assumed lay ahead of her, Gwennan had replied, coolly, that she had a sister in Vancouver and had thought of settling there. In fact, she had no intention of emigrating, being convinced that her illness, if nothing else, would prevent her. Margery, clearly excluded from the details of Gwennan’s plans and feeling put down by her lack of response to what was, after all, a kindly interest, wished her well and hoped she would be happy in Canada.

  Margery had assumed that Annie Sorokova, having done so well in her Ministry of Agriculture exams, was likely to apply for a job as a farm manager and was surprised to hear that this was not the case.

  ‘I want to be a librarian,’ Annie told her, and went on to expand on her plan, which was to return to London, enrol in evening classes and work as an assistant librarian until she was fully qualified. ‘It’s all arranged,’ she told the registrar. ‘My friend Hector helped me with the application forms, and his father, who is a don at Oxford, wrote me a reference. You look ever so surprised, Mrs Brewster!’ Margery had known of Georgina’s interest in Annie’s education, but not that Roger Bayliss had given her access to his modest library, where she had diligently made her way through the books on Georgina’s list of required reading, and which had introduced her not only to Dickens and Thackeray but to Thomas Hardy, Scott Fitzgerald and H.G. Wells.

  ‘Well done, Hannah Maria,’ Margery said, reverting to the name on Annie’s enrolment form and recalling the young Jewess who had arrived at Lower Post Stone farm with no experience of the countryside and a background confined to the East End garment factory owned by her family, where, had it not been for the war, she would probably have spent her life. ‘Very well done indeed, my dear!
’

  While Margery quizzed first one and then another of the land girls about their plans, some of which were as simple as a desire to ‘go ’ome and stay ’ome, thanks very much!’, Margery herself faced the unappealing prospect of resuming her own pre-war existence. She would explore the possibility of making herself available to various local charities, but she knew that none of them would offer the responsibility, the status or the sense of achievement that being a village registrar in Lady Denham’s Women’s Land Army had brought her. She would miss the contact not only with Alice but with several of the other hostel wardens in the Ledburton area, and the satisfaction of being useful and sometimes important amongst her colleagues and to the young women in her charge. There were girls she had been able to help with personal problems when they had turned to her for advice. On several occasions she had been instrumental in averting disasters and, as she had once revealed to Alice, she was ashamed of the fact that she actually dreaded the end of the war and her inevitable return to the humdrum existence she had endured before it.