Alice's Girls

by Julia Stoneham

  ‘The facts are, Alice, that I can’t prevent her husband taking her home. What she does with her life after that is her own affair, but I have to say that I have some sympathy for the fellow. He has, after all, been fighting for his country, and while he’s been away his wife misbehaves with what, only a few months ago, was an enemy soldier!’

  ‘There’s more to it than that, Roger. Much more.’

  ‘If you say so, my dear. I’m sorry for the girl and I hope things turn out happily for her, but based on my obligations and Land Army protocol …’

  Evie packed up her belongings.

  ‘No point in takin’ me Land Army gear,’ she sighed, piling her uniform onto a chair. Then she sat down on the bed in which she would not sleep again, and dropping her head onto her knees, gave way to huge, silent sobs. Alice sat beside her and put her arm round the heaving shoulders.

  ‘Giorgio won’t know where I’ve gone, Mrs Todd!’ Evie moaned. ‘I can’t even say goodbye to ’im!’

  Roger put Evie and Norman into the back seat of the Riley, closed the boot on her small pieces of luggage, and without a word being spoken, drove them to Ledburton Halt and left them on the platform, standing side by side, staring soberly, as though into the bitter and unhappy lives which lay ahead of both of them.

  Two days later, just as the light was going, Marion knocked on Alice’s door, apologised for disturbing her and told her that she and Winnie had noticed a man lurking in the lane.

  ‘Only it don’t look like no one we knows, Mrs Todd, ’cept it could be Evie’s Eyetie fella, p’raps. Lookin’ for ’er.’

  He was walking aimlessly, head bent, back and forth in the lane. He wore a khaki dust coat over the fatigues which, in a better light, would have identified him as a POW. He pulled at his cigarette, exhaled the smoke in a long sigh, and was staring at the face of the farmhouse when Alice emerged from the porch and made her way down the path towards him. Seeing her, he dropped the cigarette stub onto the ground at his feet, trod it out and turned, uncertainly, to face her.

  ‘Are you Giorgio?’ Alice asked. He nodded vigorously.

  ‘Si, signora. Am Giorgio.’

  ‘Are you here to see Evie?’ His face was lean and the brown eyes were deeply set under a high forehead crowned by a tangle of dark curls. He was, Alice guessed, in his late thirties.

  ‘She all right?’ he asked. ‘Only she no come when she say she come. I not here for trouble, signora, but I worry she sick?’

  ‘No,’ Alice said. ‘She’s not sick.’ She hesitated, wondering how best to break it to him that Evie was no longer at the hostel. But he seemed to have guessed what had happened. He stared at Alice. He shook his head hopelessly and turned away.

  ‘Her husband come for her, I think,’ he said flatly, his face expressing the desolation he clearly felt. ‘She was feared he would do that. He come for her and he took her, no?’

  ‘Two days ago,’ Alice told him. ‘She was very upset that she couldn’t say goodbye to you.’

  ‘No!’ Giorgio said emphatically. ‘No goodbye for Evie and Giorgio! She come to Napoli for be mia sposa!’

  ‘Your wife? But Evie is married, Giorgio. And you? Surely a man of your—?’

  ‘I not now married!’ he interrupted her. ‘Mia sposa die when Napoli is bombed!’

  ‘But Evie has a husband, Giorgio! He has been serving in the British army!’

  ‘But they no love, signora! She tell me all how he treat her! She tell you too, I see in your face!’ He moved close to Alice, placing his palms together in a gesture of supplication, struggling to put his words into her language. ‘Please … you tell me where she go, signora!’ he asked desperately. ‘I write … letter! Tell me the … the … l’indirizzo … the address, signora … the place she live! Per favore, signora! Per favore!!’

  ‘I don’t know her address!’ Alice told him, truthfully. ‘They will have it in the office at the higher farm – or the Land Army will know … But I don’t. I’m sorry, but I don’t. And I’m afraid, in the circumstances, the people who do know may not agree to tell you.’ Alice was uncertain whether or not Giorgio had understood her. He turned away and sat down heavily on the low wall. Alice told him again how sorry she was that she couldn’t help him. He ignored her and after a moment she left him, went into the hostel and through to her room, where she tried to concentrate on the book she was reading. From time to time she glanced out of her low window and saw him, a blurred shape, still sitting motionless on the wall as the evening grew darker. Then she heard a rush of footsteps in the cross-passage and someone ran out through the porch and down the pathway to the farmhouse gate, approached Giorgio, thrust something into his hand, and moving fast, re-entered the hostel. Footsteps had been thudding up the stairs before Alice reached the cross-passage.

  ‘Who was that?’ she called from the bottom of the two narrow flights of stairs that led up to the girls’ bedrooms. No one answered. Whoever it was had left the front door open. It was almost ten o’clock. None of the girls had gone out that night, so Alice closed the door and slid the bolt into place, noticing as she did so that Giorgio was gone.

  ‘I think one of our girls gave Giorgio Evie’s address,’ she told Roger. ‘I don’t know which one and I haven’t asked, but somebody ran out to him, gave him something and shot back upstairs before I could see who it was.’

  ‘And you didn’t pursue it?’ he asked, in surprise.

  ‘D’you think, in the circumstances, I should have done?’ Roger considered this for some moments.

  ‘Maybe not,’ he conceded. ‘But I can’t see a happy ending for them, can you? If he goes after her he’ll get arrested for breaching the terms of his status as a POW, which could mean gaol, whereas if he keeps his head down he’ll be repatriated pretty soon anyway.’

  ‘Not all of them want to go, though, do they?’ Alice said. ‘I heard that some of them, whose employers value them as farm labourers, are going to be allowed to stay here indefinitely.’ Roger smiled at her.

  ‘You’re such a romantic, my darling!’ he said. ‘You’d like to see this Giorgio chap track young Evie down, scoop her up and carry her off into the sunset, wouldn’t you? When in fact, by the look of that husband of hers, poor Giorgio would end up spattered all over Coventry or wherever it is the wretched couple live!’

  ‘It’s not funny, Roger. It’s actually very sad. For all of them.’

  ‘Yes it is,’ he agreed. ‘But I’m glad I was able to avoid involvement and it’s probably just as well you were not instrumental in passing on that address.’

  ‘I wonder if we’ll ever know what happens to them,’ Alice mused.

  ‘Probably not. He’ll get shipped home and given a hero’s welcome in Naples – they’re always a bit short on heroes, the Italians. Then he’ll find himself a nice new wife and live happily ever after.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘He might. And that’d be fine for him. But what about poor Evie?’

  September the second, the day of Marion’s wedding and the celebration of VJ Day, began at the lower farm with a delightful sense of broken routine. Apart from the milking which, overseen as usual by Mabel, fell that morning to Mr Jack, the work schedule for both the higher and the lower farms had been suspended. One by one the remaining residents at the hostel woke, yawned, stretched, rolled out of their beds and relished the fact that today was going to be different and special.

  The marriage ceremony would take place at the military chapel, and at the request of the Pathé film crew, apart from the bride and groom, only Rose, the Vallance family and Alice were to attend it. Everyone else would assemble at Higher Post Stone and be waiting to welcome the wedding party there. Here, Marion and Marvin would receive their guests, and after speeches from Roger Bayliss, Marvin’s commanding officer and a young, ginger-haired marine named Casey Murch who was Marvin’s best man, the cake would be cut and toasts would be drunk to the bride and groom and to the bridesmaid. A bugler from the camp would play ‘God Bless America’, after
which, in an adjoining barn and to the sound of the wind-up gramophone borrowed from the hostel recreation room, there would be dancing.

  In the Crocker cottage Rose was carefully pressing her best frock. The silk print was, in fact, a hand-me-down from one of the lady clients for whom Rose’s sister Enid sewed. On the previous day, with a neat pillbox hat, which pre-dated the outbreak of war by several years, on her greying head, and a pair of new white gloves on her hard-worked hands, Rose had inspected her reflection in her looking glass and been satisfied with what she saw.

  Her son, that morning, his hair tousled from sleep and wearing only the bottom half of his pyjamas, sat at the kitchen table, spooning up the porridge his mother had made for him.

  In the heat of the harvest fields Dave was in the habit of stripping off his shirt and exposing his well-muscled torso to the summer sun. Rose had seen the way the village girls looked at him. He could take his pick of any one of them. The eligible ones as well as those who, already married, were inclined to stray. The land girls, always aware of Dave’s unresolved relationship with Hester, regarded him as spoken for and therefore out of bounds, more like a brother or a member of the extended farm family.

  Leaving his empty porridge bowl on the table Dave slouched into the scullery which also served as a wash house. Rose could hear the running tap as he sluiced the cold water over his head and shoulders.

  ‘Put your ’jamas in the copper while you’m there, Dave,’ she called to him. ‘And which shirt will I iron for you to wear for the weddin’?’ He came back into the kitchen. He had pulled on the old overalls he wore for his redecoration work. They were a faded blue, spattered now with white distemper. He stood, fastening the buttons. There was a tear across one knee.

  ‘I bain’t goin’ to no weddin’, Ma,’ he told his mother. ‘Marion’s no special friend o’ mine and I don’t reckon I knows ’er bloke from Adam.’

  ‘But ’tis VJ Day, son! That’s why Mr Bayliss be givin’ you a day off in the first place!’ She looked at his sulky face. ‘Well, then, if you don’t fancy a slice of the weddin’ cake at least come up after, for a drink of cider!’ He didn’t respond, fetched a can of distemper from the porch and was carrying it towards the staircase when his mother noticed the colour on its label. The other cans, most of which were now empty, had been labelled white. This one was pink. A soft pink. The colour of the palest apple blossom.

  ‘Pink?’ Rose exclaimed. ‘You’re usin’ pink?’

  The only room Dave had not yet redecorated was the tiny space, hardly more than a box room, under the eaves at the back of the cottage. He stood, looking at his mother, the can of pink distemper in his huge, capable hands. He was bashful. Half-smiling. Almost embarrassed. He shrugged his shoulders, knowing his mother had guessed where the pink paint was to be used and why.

  ‘Oh, my dear boy!’ Rose sighed, her flat iron going cool in her hand. ‘What am I goin’ to do with you? Whatever am I going to do?’

  In the hostel, everything that could go wrong that morning did. The boiler went out and Marion, who had promised herself a long, solitary bath, enriched with an expensively aromatic oil ‘liberated’ by the then Sergeant Kinski when he was relieving Paris, had to wait over an hour for the water to heat up, and even then it wasn’t warm enough for the extended soak that Marion had in mind and she was forced to climb out after only ten minutes, shivering and with her skin puckered with goosebumps. Then Winnie, practising walking in her bridesmaid shoes, caught a heel in the cobbles of the porch, sprawled full length and chipped a front tooth on the doorstep.

  ‘It don’t show, honest, Win,’ Marion tried to console her, while Gwennan insisted, less comfortingly, that no one would be looking at Winnie anyhow, because all eyes would be on the bride.

  In view of the volume and delicacy of Marion’s lacy dress it was decided that rather than risk snagging it on the rough timber of either of the two, steep staircases that led down from the girls’ sleeping quarters, Marion should be helped into it in the comparative safety of Alice’s room, from which she could move, through the recreation room, along the cross-passage and out to a waiting staff car, supplied by the US military, which would convey her to the camp where, in place of her absent father and properly attired, Roger Bayliss would be waiting to escort her to the altar.

  Roger’s involvement in the ceremony had been the result of Alice’s persuasion. He had reluctantly agreed to give Marion away, but the question of how he should be dressed for the occasion had proved to be a more formidable problem and one which his son had been instrumental in solving.

  On an evening when the newly married couple were having dinner at Higher Post Stone, Alice, who had also been invited, had raised the subject.

  ‘Top hat and a morning coat with tails, Pa,’ Christopher had announced, firmly. ‘Nothing less will do for Pathé or, indeed, for our Miss Grice, if this dress of hers is as grand as it sounds!’

  ‘Well, as I possess neither top hat nor tails you’d better think again,’ Roger laughed, pouring Châteauneuf-du-Pape into Alice’s glass.

  Eileen, who was in the dining room clearing their dinner plates, hesitated and then spoke.

  ‘Not meaning to intrude,’ she said. ‘but I couldn’t help hearing what you said …’ The faces round the dining table all turned in her direction. Encouraged by this attention, Eileen continued. ‘When Mrs Jack and I was in the attic getting bits and pieces together for Mabel Vallance’s twins, we come across a trunk of Mister Bayliss senior’s clothes and there was these pinstriped trousers and a jacket with tails. Morning ones, they call ’em, not the evening sort. And there was a white silk shirt and a cravat thing. All folded, they was, neat as ninepence, between sheets of tissue paper that was as white as snow still. Bit of a smell of mothballs but that’s only to be expected. There was a top hat an’ all! And a pair of shammy leather gloves – light as feathers they was …’

  ‘No!’ Roger said firmly. But as he looked from Alice to his son and then to his daughter-in-law he knew that to protest would be useless.

  ‘Don’t sulk, my darling!’ Alice teased him while Georgina and Christopher, led by Eileen, clattered upstairs to the attic to retrieve the morning suit, the top hat and the gloves.

  ‘I’m not sulking! It’s just too ridiculous! Anyway, I am more heavily built than my father was, so even if the thing’s not full of moth holes it won’t fit me, thank God!’ But it did fit. The jacket sat easily on Roger’s broad shoulders, and although the waist was what Eileen called ‘a bit on the snug side’, the length of the trousers and the sleeves of the jacket were perfect. ‘Could of bin made for you!’ she sighed, approvingly.

  ‘It would only be for half an hour!’ Alice pleaded, taken with Roger’s elegant appearance. ‘Just for the Pathé cameras! You could change out of it for the reception at Higher Post Stone … Oh, please, Roger! It would mean such a lot to Marion and you do look so incredibly handsome!’

  A compromise was reached. Roger would wear the outfit only briefly, changing into and out of it at the camp, appearing in it only before the cameras and carrying the top hat, which was, admittedly, too small for him, rather than wearing it. The whole exercise would, Alice assured him, be over in minutes.

  Eileen was astonished. Having finished her work at the higher farm she bicycled back to the village, bursting with the news.

  ‘All the years I’ve known that man I would never of guessed ’e’d do such a thing!’ she told her neighbours. ‘’E’s always bin a bit of what they call a stuffed shirt, ’as Mr Roger. Like ’is dad was afore ’im! It’s that Mrs Todd!’ she continued. ‘Brought ’im out somethin’ amazin’, she ’as. Reckon he’d do anythin’ for her, ’e would!’

  ‘’Cept marry her!’ someone said.

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that, neither!’ Eileen concluded, watching the widening of the eyes around her.

  After the departure of the wedding party from Lower Post Stone – which had created a chaotic scene caused by the simultaneous arriv
al of Roger Bayliss’s Riley and two US military staff cars, all of which had to load their various passengers before confronting the difficulty of reversing in the narrow lane in order to move off in an organised convoy – a silence descended on the lower farm. The geese and ducks on the pond, who had watched, fascinated, the antics of the humans, now resumed the waddling, feeding and preening which normally occupied them at this time of day.

  Dave, having applied a first coat of the pale-pink distemper to the walls of the tiny room at the rear of the Crocker cottage, and with that colour appearing now on his overalls, along with the splashes of white which had accumulated as he had painted the rest of the cottage, decided, while it dried, to eat the sandwiches his mother had prepared for his lunch.

  He clattered down the staircase, noticing how much lighter and brighter it seemed with white distemper where the yellowish brown of the old paint had been for as long as he could remember. He peered between the thick slices of bread at the filling in his two sandwiches. Cheese and his mother’s home-made pickle in one. Sliced beetroot in the other. He chewed as he moved about the kitchen, spooning tea into the pot and fetching the can of milk from the cool of the larder. He didn’t pay much attention to the sound of a vehicle pulling up and standing, its idling motor rattling, at the farmhouse gate. After a moment or two he heard the sound dwindling as whatever it was moved off, down the lane. Then, just as he was about to fill his cup with the freshly brewed tea, a shadow fell across the step of the open door.

  The scene outside the military chapel was bathed in arc lights. Marion and Marvin stood, posed and smiling, while a make-up girl tweaked Marion’s hair and adjusted her dress to maximise the effect of its glorious lacy froth. The bride’s smile was stunning. Not because they had told her to say ‘cheese’ but because she was so happy that not to smile would have been an impossibility. Marvin stood to attention beside her, her arm through his, his face tight with pride. Grouped precisely around them were Roger Bayliss, immaculate, if slightly self-conscious, in his coattails, standing to attention, the top hat in his hand, Alice, laughing, Winnie, resplendent in her own dress of snow-white lace. Then, posed artfully round them, were Rose Crocker, Mabel – in her Land Army uniform, next to Ferdie Vallance who was clad in a shepherd’s smock which had hung, unworn, from a hook in the byre for the last twenty years and was now topped by his favourite floppy-brimmed felt hat. Scarlet O’Hara was tucked under one of his arms and Winston under the other. Bulbs flashed and cameras rolled and then – after small adjustments were made when someone or other was either too visible or not visible enough, and ‘would the gentleman in the morning suit please smile?’ and ‘could you pull down the baby girl’s dress, Mr Vallance, because we’re getting rather a lot of diaper?’ – the bulbs flashed again and the cameras rolled until someone shouted ‘cut!’ and it was all over.