Alice's Girls

by Julia Stoneham

  ‘But are you certain you wouldn’t mind me being away a lot of the time?’ she asked him after they had unravelled the plan.

  ‘My darling, I shall simply relish your company even more thoroughly when you are with me! What I could not have tolerated would have been for you to feel you had to choose between me and something you very much wanted to do! That you would, on my account, have felt obliged to withdraw from an experience you needed to enjoy. And you don’t have to deny yourself anything – you really don’t have to – provided you are happy with a semi-itinerant lifestyle.’ He was laughing at her.

  ‘It’s called commuting, Roger. I shall commute!’

  They decided on an absolutely private wedding at the registrar’s office in Exeter. This, they agreed, would take place just before Christopher and Georgina, who would act as their witnesses, embarked for New Zealand. The hostel would, by then, be empty, the two retained land girls, Gwennan and Evie, being billeted at the village pub. Alice and Edward John would move into Higher Post Stone where Roger proposed to give what he described to Alice as ‘a small celebration to establish your changed status’. To this, Rose and Dave Crocker, Mabel and Ferdie Vallance, Mr and Mrs Jack, Mr and Mrs Fred, Evie and Gwennan would all be invited. In the meantime, in view of the excitement over the VJ Day celebrations and Marion’s wedding, Alice and Roger would keep their plans to themselves.

  If the perceptive Rose or the inquisitive Georgina noticed that Alice seemed increasingly relaxed and happy over the following days, they attributed this to the easing of her responsibilities as warden and to the general mood of euphoria which pervaded the hostel and its inhabitants.

  Edward John, Alice knew, was becoming concerned about his own future. Like any normal twelve-year-old he was living from day to day through the weeks of freedom that the long summer holiday allowed him, occupying himself happily in Post Stone valley, while Roger Bayliss recognised and relished the boy’s sound instincts where farming was concerned. He was observant, identifying problems almost before Roger himself. His keen eyes had, on more than one occasion, forestalled complications in an ailing animal. It was he who spotted the breach in a hedge through which the sheep could have entered a field of brassicas, where they would have gorged themselves until they became dangerously bloated. On another occasion, when a calf had torn its shoulder on barbed wire, Edward John had applied pressure to the wound and maintained it while Mr Jack fetched the vet to cauterise it. Then, with the bleeding stopped and the danger of infection avoided, Edward John, before Roger Bayliss himself was even aware of the incident, had led the calf carefully back to the byre and released it into the safety of a loose box.

  ‘But what will you do when the hostel closes?’ he asked his mother. ‘Am I to go back to school in Exeter for my last year in prep school, or what?’

  ‘Things are working out nicely, darling,’ Alice told him, changing the subject so that he was prevented from asking for details. ‘I’m sure you’ll be pleased. Yes, you’ll be staying at Exeter for another year. Let’s just get Marion’s wedding and this VJ Day thing over and done with and then you and I will have a long talk about the details. Right?’

  ‘OK. As long as we aren’t going to have to live in London or anything foul like that,’ he said, trying to engage her eyes. ‘We aren’t, are we? Mother?’

  ‘Talk later,’ she said, retreating. ‘Promised Marion I’d go upstairs and help her sort out her veil! Time you were in bed, sweetheart. Chop-chop!’ and she was gone. He would not, he vowed to himself, go to London. If necessary he would leave home and work as a farmhand. Or he’d stow away on a ship and go to New Zealand where Christopher Bayliss would give him a job as a lumberjack. Or he’d go to Australia and be a jackeroo.

  Marion, waiting for her wedding dress to be finished, spent her evenings in front of her dressing table mirror, fretting over which hairstyle would be best suited to her headdress.

  Annie sent a postcard from Amsterdam.

  Dear everyone. It is wonderful here and Andreis’s mural is now on display in a museum. There was a ceremony with speeches and the curator thanked Georgie and me for taking care of it until the War Artists’ people fetched it from Lower Post Stone. Then Hector took a bow as it had been his project, and a little Dutch girl dressed in the national costume gave me a bunch of tulips. There is an art gallery here full of Van Gogh’s work and Hector and I spent a whole afternoon there. You would not believe how beautiful his paintings are but no one bought any when he was alive which is so sad. See you at the wedding. Lots of love. Annie Conway XXX.

  ‘Fancy!’ Mabel exclaimed when the girls took the postcard up to the higher farm to show her. ‘Just fancy our Annie being Mrs Hector Conway!’

  ‘No more special than you bein’ Mrs Ferdie Vallance, be it?’ her husband wanted to know. ‘And anyhow, who wants to spend their ’oneymoon lookin’ at bloomin’ pictures?’ But Mabel had the last word, pointing out that a honeymoon spent looking at pictures was better than no honeymoon at all – which was what she’d had.

  ‘Considerin’ the state you was in,’ Gwennan’s strident Welsh voice intruded sharply through the chatter, ‘you was lucky to ’ave a weddin’ at all, madam! Let alone an ’oneymoon!’

  Chapter Ten

  Dave, having redecorated his mother’s café, now, and rather to her surprise, turned his attention to the cottage which had recently passed from her tenancy into his.

  ‘’E’s fixin’ it up lovely!’ she told Alice, proudly. ‘Proper distemper, ’e be usin’! None of your old whitewash!’ For several weeks Dave was to be seen, in the evenings and on Sundays, wearing paint-spattered overalls, washing his buckets and brushes at the yard pump. Rose had asked him, late one evening in the kitchen that smelt unpleasantly of drying paint, if he was still hoping that Hester would come to him. Dave had shrugged his shoulders and avoided his mother’s eyes.

  ‘Will I pop over to the Tuckers’ place for to see ’ow she be?’ Rose offered, as casually as she could, putting a mug of Horlicks in front of him.

  ‘Leave off, Mother,’ he mumbled. ‘Like I told you, ’tis up to ’er now. She knows where I be to and ’ow I feels about ’er. I don’t reckon it’d be proper for me – or you, come to that – to go pokin’ round up there.’

  ‘But maybe she thinks things ’ave changed, son! And you doesn’t want ’er no more! Thought of that, ’ave you?’ Dave had thought of that, and although he declined to discuss it with his mother, this, together with several other disturbing possibilities, haunted him. Someone new might, even now, be courting Hester. Her demon father might have forced her into a vow of celibacy or she might, after all, have decided to sail to America and live out her life in Bismarck, North Dakota, with Reuben’s family who were, after all, her family now – and Thurza’s. Despite the fact that these and other unattractive scenarios disturbed Dave’s sleep on a regular basis, something in his logical, practical, proud, Devonian soul kept his resolve intact. He had told Hester, not once but several times, how much he loved her, and if that meant nothing to her or she did not believe it and know, without doubt, that it would always be true, then she was not the girl he thought she was. Not, perhaps, the girl he loved and wanted. And so he waited. Not hopefully, but with a resignation and determination that would continue until the day he died. His mother, aware of this, feared for him.

  The value, in terms of good public relations, between the departing American troops and a British civilian population which had welcomed, befriended, entertained and, in cases such as Marion’s, even gone so far as to marry them, had not escaped the US authorities, who identified and began to actively draw attention to the forthcoming marriage between a Miss Marion Grice, a British land girl, and one of their own soldiers, the recently promoted Lieutenant Marvin Kinski. Interest from local and national press offices and news agencies, both here and across the United States, was encouraged. News cameramen arrived at the farm, together with official US military photographers, and took pictures of Marion and Winnie at wor
k. For this occasion both girls dressed themselves, not in their usual, workaday dungarees, but in a curiously glamorised version of their official Land Army uniforms. They curled their hair, applied their make-up, and with their hats perched ridiculously on the backs of their heads, went smilingly through the motions of milking cows, heaving forkloads of straw onto wagons, biting into rosy apples and driving livestock through the most picturesque of the farm’s gateways.

  Before long this project had escalated astonishingly. The romance and subsequent wedding of an attractive land girl to a serving GI Joe, who had fought on the beaches of Normandy and later in Okinawa, was perceived as the perfect human interest story to splash across the cinema screens of the globe, and it was decided that the Pathé News corporation would shoot the event and screen it as part of their worldwide coverage of the VJ Day celebrations.

  The filmed sequence was to be brief and would be shot, following the wedding ceremony, outside the entrance to the chapel of the military establishment where the groom was based. In it, the newly married couple, the uniformed lieutenant and his bride, who would be clad in priceless imported lace, the provenance of which would not be questioned, and attended by her equally extravagantly attired bridesmaid, would be seen to emerge into a storm of confetti thrown by a couple of uniformed land girls and a buxom matron, a Mrs Rose Crocker, and a family of farm labourers, including their infant twins, the name of their daughter – Scarlet O’Hara – having been particularly well received by the American film crew. The bride and groom would then process between a guard of honour, and after this brief but glorious moment of celebrity, be returned to Higher Post Stone farm for a private and more modest celebration of their union.

  Marion’s reaction to the unveiling of this plan built from modest excitement to a state of euphoria which, had she not been blessed with a strong constitution, may well have killed her. Here was she, Marion Grice, born and raised in the back streets of Leeds, neither clever nor even slightly beautiful, whose behaviour, as she grew from scrawny kid to feisty young woman, had been less than impeccable; who had sat, chewing her fingernails, watching her heroines, the stars of the 1930s cinema, as they simpered and shimmied across the crackling, silver screen of the local fleapit. Here she had succumbed to most of the common childhood ailments, been repeatedly infested with headlice and contaminated with impetigo. She had scuttled home through the freezing Yorkshire rain to a tiny, cold, overcrowded house, attended a school where very little had been properly taught and even less properly learnt, and had accepted all of this as her lot. It had been something of a miracle when, as a result of the war, she had escaped the rigours of her childhood, even if only to exchange them for the rigours of labouring on the land. Another miracle, in the form of a Christmas snowstorm, had brought Marvin Kinski into her life, and despite the hazards of the war they had been both lucky enough to survive it, and smart enough to recognise how important that first encounter had been to their future happiness. And now, by another miracle, she was, however briefly, to be a film star! Millions of faces across the world would be raised towards the screens of a thousand cinemas. A trillion eyes would see her, Marion Grice, radiant and glamorous! She would be on Marvin’s arm, wearing a dress of priceless lace, with a veil and a bouquet! She would be a married lady. Marvin’s married lady! She could barely breathe. She would, she thought, as the amazing occasion grew closer, most probably die of sheer happiness. But not, she decided, before the wedding and the filming and the reception and the voyage to America and Marvin, there on the dock at Hoboken to meet her and then to live happily ever after with her. Definitely not before all of that.

  ‘But I thought you was going to Canada to live with your cousin there?’ Evie queried, with her mouth full, during supper one night. The number of land girls gathered round the familiar table had, by now, dwindled to four and conversation turned, more often than not, to the future.

  ‘Yes, I was thinking of that,’ Gwennan said, vaguely. ‘Before …’

  ‘Before what?’ Winnie wanted to know but Gwennan declined to answer. No one knew or would ever know about the terrible fear she had felt when she discovered a lump in her breast shortly after her sister died and how, only days after she had performed an uncharacteristic act of kindness in concealing the real circumstances of Margery Brewster’s fatal accident, she herself had been assured that she was not, as she had feared, about to die of cancer. It had seemed to her that the two events were in some way connected. That her reprieve was a reward for the single charitable act in her mean-spirited life. She had, at the time, surprised the warden by asking her whether or not she believed in miracles.

  ‘Before my uncle asked me to become a partner in his business,’ she said, tartly and with some pride, in answer to Evie’s question.

  Alice, Marion and Winnie recalled that on the night when the original intake of land girls sat down to their first meal together, they had taken it in turn, moving clockwise round the table, to introduce themselves to each other. When her turn came, Gwennan had primly informed them, her pronounced Welsh accent unfamiliar to them, that she had been brought up by her uncle who was an undertaker in Builth Wells. The girls, particularly Marion and Winnie, had, for some reason, found this amusing. Gwennan had been insulted by this reaction and the angrier she became the more the girls had laughed at her. It had been the first of many incidents which had established, and over the years maintained, the cool and frequently waspish relationship between Gwennan and the rest of the Post Stone land girls.

  ‘And what’s ’is line of business, then?’ Evie, who had not been present on the earlier occasion, enquired conversationally as she helped herself to more carrots.

  ‘He is a funeral director,’ Gwennan announced, relishing the upmarket phrase which was, in fact, fairly new to her. ‘His partner is to retire and I am to become his assistant.’

  ‘Oooh!’ Marion exclaimed, unable, even in her current magnanimous state of mind, to resist an opportunity to tease Gwennan. ‘So, what d’you ’ave to do, then, Taff? Walk be’ind the ’earse wearin’ a top ’at?’ Winnie, responding as Marion intended, giggled into her teacup.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Gwennan snapped, dismissively. ‘My duties will consist of the running of the funeral parlour, booking the chapel of rest and making the appointments at the crematorium. I shall liaise with the gravediggers and—’

  ‘Liaise with the gravediggers!’ Winnie echoed.

  ‘Streuth, Taff! That sounds like a barrel o’ laughs!’ While Gwennan told the girls that they had no proper respect for anyone, dead or alive, and should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves, Alice looked at Gwennan’s hard, humourless face and visualised her, soberly dressed, discussing with the recently bereaved, and possibly in Welsh, the choice of coffin handles and the composition of wreaths.

  One evening, as the girls were sitting over cups of tea after their evening meal, someone knocked loudly on the open door to the cross-passage.

  ‘Anyone expectin’ a visitor?’ Gwennan wanted to know. Heads, except for Evie’s, were shaken. She, Alice noticed, looked suddenly stricken, the colour draining from her face, and when a voice called loudly, demanding to know if anyone was at home, she got to her feet.

  ‘It’s Norman,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Me ’usband.’

  The kitchen was hushed as Alice and the remaining girls tried to make sense of the muted conversation which was taking place in the porch. Minutes passed. The words were inaudible. First his, then hers. Then his again, and after a moment’s silence, hers. Then Evie was standing in the kitchen doorway, her eyes on Alice’s, the girls staring.

  ‘I’m to go with ’im, Mrs Todd,’ she said, and when Alice failed to react, repeated the words, adding, ‘Now, ’e says. I’m to fetch me things and go with ’im, this instant.’

  ‘But you can’t,’ Alice told her, calmly. ‘I am responsible for you and you can’t leave here without permission from the Ministry of Agriculture or from Mr Bayliss. It’s against the law.’ Alice was
moving towards the door. ‘You sit down, Evie, and I’ll go and explain things to your husband.’ But Evie was shaking her head.

  ‘It won’t do no good, Mrs Todd. Norman’s bin to see Mr Bayliss. ’E’s shown ’im the papers – the wedding certificate and everything – and Mr Bayliss said I’m to go!’

  Winnie, peering through the kitchen window, saw the man who was Evie’s husband leaning against the stone pillar of the farmhouse gate. He was heavily built with thinning, Brylcreemed hair and a thick, flushed neck. As he shook a Woodbine out of a crumpled packet and was searching his pockets for matches, Roger Bayliss’s Riley came quietly to a halt in the lane.

  ‘Ooh! Mr Bayliss ’as come!’ Winnie reported to Alice and the girls in the kitchen.

  ‘What d’you make of this?’ Roger asked Alice when they had withdrawn into the privacy of her room. ‘This husband of hers seems a pretty unpleasant sort of fellow, so despite the proof that he and Evelyn are married, I thought I’d come down to see what you think about it. What do you reckon?’ he asked, correctly sensing a complication.

  ‘Sit down,’ Alice suggested and she gave him the details of Evie’s unhappy marriage and her relationship with Giorgio. Roger sighed when he understood that the ‘local bloke’ that Evie’s husband had suspected was ‘paying attention’ to his wife was one of the Italian prisoners of war who worked on his neighbour’s farm.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ he said. ‘I thought we’d avoided that particular scenario!’

  ‘I thought so too,’ Alice told him. ‘I have discussed it with the girls from time to time and warned about the complications of getting involved with the POWs but … poor Evie … She’s terribly in love, Roger …’ They sat in silence for a while and then Roger delivered his verdict.