The Land Girls

by Victoria Purman

  ‘Let her enjoy the sleep of an innocent just a little longer.’ It was her mother but her voice was hoarse and rough. ‘Please.’

  Lily threw open the door. Her shocked parents turned to her and gasped. Her mother’s hand flew to her trembling mouth and she clutched at her husband’s arm.

  Her father cleared his throat. ‘Lily …’ he started and then stopped and his face contorted in a moan, his eyes filling with tears.

  He held a telegram in his hand.

  When he reached out a hand to pass it to his daughter, she stared at him, the buzzing of a thousand bees suddenly in her head.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR HUSBAND FLIGHT LIEUT DAVID WILLIAM HOGARTH IS REPORTED MISSING AS A RESULT AIR OPERATIONS ON 8TH JUNE 1944 STOP ANY FURTHER INFORMATION RECEIVED WILL BE IMMEDIATELY CONVEYED TO YOU … AIR BOARD

  For two days, Lily was mute. It hurt to talk. It hurt to cry. Her throat was raw and pain pricked all over, a physical pain that had struck her like lightning. Her mother and father had knocked on her door, gently trying to prise her from the dark, but she’d not answered. Davina had opened her door quietly and brought in soup and toast on a tray but it remained untouched.

  She was twenty years old but felt older. Was she already a widow? How could she hold on to her dreams for a life with David when she didn’t know if he was dead or alive? Would she always be Mrs Hogarth even if he was dead?

  She closed her eyes, tried to hear his voice. His laughter at her silly attempts to hit a tennis ball across the net at Memorial Drive. Calling out to her to go faster on their bike rides up in the hills. The sadness when he’d told her that his brother was missing. The desperation in it when he’d told her he was enlisting.

  And the love, the adoration, the joy in the words he’d spoken and the promises he’d made on their wedding night, for safe return, for a future together, for happiness, for children. For a time when duty and honour wouldn’t take him from her.

  In the dark, in her room, she could hold on to his voice and the press of his lips on hers and the weight of his limbs as he moved inside her.

  For the five days after that, Lily moved about the house half awake, weak from crying, her appetite having completely abandoned her. Her mother had arranged an appointment at their doctor’s surgery, and old Dr Carmichael had prescribed pills to help her sleep, and recommended she resign immediately from the Land Army.

  A week after receiving the telegram, Lily put on her uniform and went back to work.

  Kit was the first one to throw her arms around Lily, knocking her hat off in the rush, and she held on for what felt like hours. Lily had barely stepped out of the taxi at the farm in Athelstone when a group of girls in bib-and-brace overalls and woollen hats had run towards her, clomping across the paddock in their rubber boots. But her dear friend Kit got there first, her long legs able to outrun everyone.

  ‘Oh, Lil,’ she cried. ‘The matron told us the news about your husband. Your mother called her and we were all so devastated to hear it. I’m so, so sorry.’

  Lily clutched at Kit, her greatcoat crushed against her friend. ‘Thank you, Kit.’

  ‘He’ll come home, you’ll see,’ she whispered into Lily’s ear.

  ‘I’m trying to think the best. I truly am.’

  Lily was then engulfed in hugs and showered with whispered commiserations from the other women until she gave them a little smile of thanks. Together, they marched in formation back into the turnip field.

  Kit slipped an arm through Lily’s and they walked slowly back to their quarters in the old farmhouse. Lily found it hard to keep up. Her suitcase knocked against her leg, which she was sure would cause a bruise, and she had to stop and put it down. She’d lost some of her strength in the past week, it was obvious. Kit quickly took the case.

  ‘We’re all here,’ Kit said quietly. ‘You’re not alone, Lily.’

  And then she remembered what David had written to her about Kit.

  You’ll need a friend in the event you get the worst news. Kit will help you, as will my own father and mother. You would always be welcome at Millicent if I don’t come home.

  ‘Thank you, Kit.’

  When work was finished at Athelstone, Lily followed Kit and some of the other girls to Hectorville, where they picked olives in a grove. They laid sheets under the trees and beat their branches, loosening the fruit to encourage it to fall to the ground. When that didn’t work they hauled out tall ladders and leant them against the trunks, which made Lily think of summer and cherry picking at Norton Summit, her first Land Army posting, the place she’d met Kit. After picking, they pickled and packed the olives until the grove was bare. Then they moved to a potato dehydration plant not far away and worked side by side on a fast-moving production line. The spuds were peeled in a mechanical tumble, but each one had to be checked for flecks of skin and each eye had to be gouged out with a knife before they were returned to the line to be shredded and then dehydrated. Kit joked that she felt like a scientist, in her white coat and hair net, but Lily couldn’t laugh at it. The work was repetitive, their hands were wet all day and the whole place was loud. The droning noise of the machines and the tumbling potatoes sounded like bombers.

  One night, as they were drifting off to sleep, excited at the arrival of spring after a warm and sunny day, Lily asked Kit about what they would do next. She’d ceded her future to her friend, to her strength, to her confidence, having somehow lost the will to make decisions for herself. She would do anything but go home because going home was surrendering, not fighting. And until she knew where David was, what fate had befallen him, she had to fight to keep him alive in her memory, in her fingertips, on her lips and her body and in her heart.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about cherries,’ Kit replied in the quiet of their room. ‘I’ve been thinking about Norton Summit. Feel like going back there in December?’

  Lily turned to stare at the ceiling. She remembered how hopeful she’d been, after D-day in June, that the war might be over by Christmas. Surely all those boats and ships and planes would steer the Allies to victory? Her father had been right to temper her expectations. There had indeed been many more battles to fight. It wouldn’t be over by Christmas. She would stay with Kit in the Land Army.

  ‘Cherries it is,’ Lily replied.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Betty

  July 1944

  Betty and Gwen huddled under their four blankets each, their breath clouding in front of their faces.

  ‘Is the fire out?’ Gwen called.

  From across the quarters, the reply came. ‘Of course it is. Someone forgot to bloody well chop the firewood, didn’t they?’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’

  ‘Wasn’t it Betty’s turn?’

  ‘No, Betty did it yesterday. Almost chopped her foot off with the axe.’

  ‘It was Elaine’s turn.’

  ‘It was not my turn at all,’ Elaine answered, her insistence muffled by the blankets covering her head.

  No one liked chopping wood but it was a necessity in July in Batlow, a small town nestled in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains, two hundred and seventy-five miles west of Sydney. It meant sawing the big logs with a cross-cut saw and then splitting the sections with an axe, which always seemed to be blunt. And given they had to be up in the dark at six-thirty the next morning, the Land Army girls chose to stay in bed and gripe, rather than search outside for any wood.

  Their accommodation was clean but primitive. The long building was divided into six rooms on each side of a long hallway, two to a room. There was a verandah at the front of the building that afforded them some protection from the rain. The laundry served as their bathroom, with metal tubs instead of a bath, which they had to fill with water heated in a copper. When the taps froze, they had to fetch water from the tank outside, crack the ice on top of it, and wash themselves with that instead.

  There was a matron’s room and a mess hall next door with bare t
ables and stools, but it had the advantage of having a stove in it for warmth, and a kitchen, in which they had to volunteer one day a fortnight. There was always a race to put one’s hand up for that duty when rain was forecast.

  Their days were long. The women would be out in the orchard in the dim early-morning light at seven-fifteen and work until twenty past four. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. And then half a day on Saturday too. The weeks were long. The work was hard. It was freezing cold.

  Why on earth had Betty and Gwen made the decision to return to Batlow for the apple season of 1944?

  ‘Gluttons for punishment, that’s what we are,’ Gwen had decided. You only needed one good friend to survive the Land Army, Betty knew, and Gwen was her one friend.

  ‘It’s an adventure, Betty. That’s what it is. And we Land Army girls can do anything. We’ve proved that, all right.’

  Betty reached inside her sheet to check the warmth of the brick she’d slipped into her bed a few hours earlier. The girls had learnt a practical tip: to put a brick in the fire and then wrap it in a cardigan to slip between the sheets. Betty’s was already stone cold. Under her four blankets, she wore a pair of men’s pyjamas, winter underwear, a jumper sent from home and two pairs of socks, but she still shook from the cold.

  She closed her eyes and wished herself back in her bedroom in Sydney. Their quarters were rough, and that was a polite way of putting it. Betty played a game with herself, counting the rafters overhead, and in the morning she counted the shafts of weak sunlight that shone in like spotlights through holes in the corrugated-iron walls. The girls had given up pretending their breath clouds were elegant cigarette smoke. What had been fun the first night, walking up and down pretending sophistication, their fingers in a V as if they were holding a cigarette between their fingers, was now a tedious reality.

  More than once, they’d eaten a breakfast of rolled oats and hot tea and then trudged outside to see snow blanketing the ground. The first time, it was delightful and beautiful. Now, it made the days more miserable.

  ‘Psst.’ In the next bed, Gwen peeked out from under her blankets.

  ‘What?’ Betty asked.

  ‘Perhaps after the war we’ll to Queensland. Somewhere way up north. Where the sun shines all the time, hey?’

  Betty had invented this game for Gwen when they were in Mildura, after Gwen had found out that her fiancé, Reggie, had been reported missing in action over Germany. A year later, and Gwen still hadn’t heard anything more. His parents had sent letter after letter to the Red Cross, to the Minister for Defence, had even asked their local mayor to help, all to no avail. Reggie was still missing and Gwen was still heartbroken. Betty tried to distract her whenever Gwen appeared to be feeling low. They’d been playing the game a lot lately.

  ‘I wonder what fresh pineapple tastes like?’ Betty wondered. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing like what comes out of the tin.’

  ‘I bet it’s sweet as sweet.’

  ‘When Reggie’s back, I just know you’ll take John and Peter and Margaret for the trip of a lifetime. Perhaps you’ll have a new car, maybe one of those Chevrolets, and you’ll pack everyone inside and head off for an adventure.’

  Gwen laughed. ‘That sounds marvellous. Fresh pineapple. Imagine that.’

  Betty shivered and pulled the blankets in close around her. She wished someone had done their fair share of the chores. She wished the fire was roaring. She wished she was anywhere but here in this shed, sleeping on a straw-filled mattress with a fruit box for a dressing table and a suitcase for a wardrobe.

  The freezing temperatures had made her disheartened. The weather and the hard work had combined to make this the toughest posting she and Gwen had endured since they’d joined up.

  They been to lots of places. They’d picked peas in Oberon, which they’d agreed was the most back-breaking work of all the agricultural jobs one could do. They’d debated which was worse there: the back aches from the constant bending or the brown snakes.

  They’d both agreed it was the snakes.

  From Oberon, they’d gone to Turramurra to work on a poultry farm and then, in January, they’d gone back to Mildura, to the Stocks for the sultana harvest.

  From there, they’d come full circle, back to Batlow. When they’d arrived back in February to pick apples in the local orchards, the autumn weather had been a much-welcomed respite from the blazing summer heat and dry winds of Mil-dura. They’d worked for three months on a variety of properties, picking juicy apples for dehydrating or canning or to send to the city. There had only ever been Granny Smiths in the fruit bowl at home, but here she had picked Jonathons and Red Delicious and Sundowners, right into June. When the picking season was over, she and Gwen had decided to stay on for the pruning season—heaven knows there was enough work—but it had tested them. The work was tough. The ladders were heavy and balancing on them was precarious, especially when leaning over to find the main leader to cut that to a bud, to open up the inside of the tree.

  ‘Shape it out towards the sky,’ the orchard’s foreman had shouted at her when she’d been learning the year before. ‘And don’t cut the spurs. That’s where next season’s fruit comes from.’

  Next year’s fruit. It was such a cruel thought. Wouldn’t the war be over by next season? Surely all the boys would be home by then and all the girls could go back to the city and be the wives and mothers they’d always hoped they’d be? That was her dream, to be Michael’s wife and mother to his children.

  It was the dream that every Australian girl had, wasn’t it?

  Michael wrote regularly, but the vagaries of the wartime postal service meant that since he’d been away, there had sometimes been months when she wouldn’t hear from him, and then, to her great delight, twelve letters would arrive at once. She’d never made a big fuss, out loud at least, about the troubles and delays with the post. It felt unfair when Gwen didn’t receive anything from Reggie. So she’d waited and read her letters in private, purposely not recounting any of his news to Gwen. If she asked, Betty would simply say that he was well and safe.

  But when she could, she pored over Michael’s words. She laughed behind her hand at the news of the hijinks that he and his friends had got up to. He always passed on regards from his parents back in Sydney and even filled her in on what he knew of his brother Patrick. He never once mentioned any fighting or that he’d been in any danger, which Betty always took as a good sign. If he wasn’t near the fighting, he would always be safe, wouldn’t he? In her letters back to him, she had filled him in on her adventures all over the country and the fun she was having with Gwen. She hadn’t written to Michael about Reggie and how he was missing. Some things were perhaps best left unsaid.

  ‘Betty?’ Gwen called. ‘Is your brick still warm?’

  ‘As cold as ice, I’m afraid. In fact, hold on, it might even be ice.’

  Gwen giggled and Betty laughed with her. They’d made their beds and they were going to lie in them. Even if they were cold as charity.

  After their work finished on Saturday morning, there was a tussle about who would get the first lot of hot water so they could wash their hair. It had been the same battle every Saturday for months now. Betty figured it was the difficulty of the weather and the work that was causing such aggravation between the girls and she hoped that the dance that night at the Batlow Literary Institute would help ease the tension that had been brewing among them.

  The two-and-a-half-mile walk helped as well. By the time they reached Batlow that night, they were too tired to argue and too excited about the occasion. The institute was a rather grand-looking two-storey building, with its name set in plaster along the top and a portico with columns and the date 1935 above it. The wooden double doors were closed to keep the cold out but when the girls pushed them open, there was party music from a live band and laughter and a delicious supper of hot soup and sandwiches. Almost immediately, their aggravations were forgotten. The hall was filled with local people—farmers
, orchardists, those who worked in the packing sheds—and the Land Army girls were welcomed with open arms. When they shrugged off their heavy coats to reveal their winter uniforms, they received a round of applause that bucked them all up considerably.

  Betty figured that if the girls hadn’t arrived to pick that season’s apples, there would have been no jobs for locals in the packing sheds. She could understand why they were so grateful.

  ‘Excuse me, miss. May I have this dance?’ A boy who looked no more than twelve stood in front of Betty, bowing, one arm bent behind his back and the other crossed over his stomach. His hair was parted in a crooked line and smoothed down with cream. He wore a white shirt and a tie, and what looked like an older brother’s trousers. They bunched at the ankle and almost covered his shiny brown shoes.

  Betty smothered a giggle of pure delight at his eager manner. ‘Of course you may.’

  The boy, a head shorter than Betty, slipped an arm around her waist and held out a hand. She was impressed he knew that much, but three steps in she realised that was all he knew.

  ‘To whom do I owe the pleasure of this dance?’ she asked his two left feet.

  ‘What’s that?’ He looked up at her, his mouth curled in a question.

  Betty looked down. ‘That means, what’s your name, young man?’

  He lifted his chin. ‘Roger.’