The minutes ticked on and turned into hours, and by the time a delicate mother-of-pearl dawn heralded another fine September day, Abby still hadn’t slept a wink.
PART THREE
Goings on Down on the Farm
1942
Chapter Ten
‘
C
an you believe this’ll be our third Christmas here?’ Winnie stopped fiddling with her hair and turned to look at Abby and Rowena who were changing into their dance dresses. ‘Two years and three months, and we’ve the muscles to prove it.’
Abby smiled. ‘I can believe it when I’m pulling frozen sprouts with no gloves on,’ she said ruefully, glancing down at her red chapped hands sticking out of the sleeves of her dance dress. Gloves were useless in the fields because they got wet through and froze solid.
‘Or when I’m up to my ears digging out sludge from the sewage settling tank,’ Rowena put in drily.
‘Or when we’re dumping lime, or sending in the terriers to search for rats in the bottom of the corn stacks, or driving the manure cart,’ said Abby, warming to the theme.
‘Or turning and collecting potatoes in the pouring rain for hours on end.’ On the suggestion of the Ministry of Agriculture, potatoes had been left longer than usual this year to grow large, and November had been a month of constant icy driving rain. Rowena hated nothing more than being wet and cold, and the oilskins the Land Army had dished out as part of their uniform were next to useless, leaking like sieves.
‘All right, all right.’ Winnie was laughing now. ‘Anyway, you know what Vincent always says, you’re not really wet till the rain’s running out of the arse of your trousers.’
Abby and Rowena both smiled but it was forced. Neither of them liked the farmer’s youngest son and the comment and language he’d used was just typical of him, but Winnie was sweet on Vincent and wouldn’t hear a word against him. The two had been courting in a fashion for some time, although Vincent talked to Winnie as though she was less than the muck under his boots on occasion.
When they had first come to Bleak Farm over two years ago, the three girls had thought a place had never had such an apt name, and that had been on a mild September day with the sun shining. After the first snow had fallen like a thick white blanket, concealing the drystone walls bordering the fields and lapping over the roofs of outbuildings and pigsties, accompanied by an Arctic blast from the east which whipped its way into bones and sinews, they had known they’d need every bit of resolve to get through the winter. For Abby and Winnie, born in the north-east and used to raw biting winds and snow which lingered for months, it was just about bearable, but Rowena was an Exeter girl and moreover one used to living in the lap of luxury. It was then that Abby and Winnie had seen what Rowena was really made of, and their admiration for their friend had increased as the weeks had gone on. Even Mr Tollett, Vincent’s father, had been forced to admit that the three girls surprised him.
The farmhouse itself bore little resemblance to Hill Farm where they had trained, having a definite Victorian feel to it and being considerably smaller. The whitewashed kitchen had a huge open hearth with black iron firedogs supporting a big wood fire, and wall ovens flanking the fireplace. Across the mouth of the chimney was fixed a stout iron bar which held several large crook-hung pots, along with skillets on the fringe of the fire. The kitchen served as the only sitting room, the other room downstairs - besides the scullery - being Mr Tollett’s office. All main foodstuffs were under strict government control and the farmer bemoaned the paper nightmare the war had caused; his returns of pre-war days were nothing compared to the pile of clerical work required by declarations of output and applications for supplies.
Abby had rapidly come to the conclusion after arriving at the farm that Vincent’s father was only happy when he had something to complain about, although Mrs Tollett was cheerful enough. Most evenings the girls retired to their bedroom fairly early to escape the monologue of grievances and grumbles in the kitchen. They shared one of the two bedrooms the farmhouse boasted - Vincent had been turned out of the room he had shared with his brother for what was little more than a long cupboard under the stairs - and read and talked a little by candlelight before they went to sleep, ready to rise at five o’clock the next morning. In the last eighteen months or so, however, Abby had awoken more than once to the sound of their bedroom door quietly clicking to and Winnie’s bed being empty. She disliked and distrusted Vincent and she hated the thought that her friend was besotted with him but she could do nothing about it, Winnie having made it plain she wasn’t prepared to discuss her relationship with the farmer’s son.
Abby walked across to where Winnie stood in front of the old speckled mirror in one corner of the room. ‘You look lovely,’ she said softly. ‘Right bonny.’
Winnie flashed her a quick smile, pulling at her dress where it creased round her middle. ‘I reckon I’ve gained a pound or two since I wore this last. Too many apple dumplings! Why does Vincent’s mam have to be such a good cook?’
Abby smiled but said nothing. Her friend had always bemoaned her ample figure but since she had met the farmer’s son, Winnie’s self-confidence seemed to have plummeted to an all-time low. And Abby did not like that. Neither did she feel at ease about the bruises which had appeared with increasing regularity on Winnie’s arms and legs lately, or the fact that her friend seemed to have developed the habit of walking into barn doors. The last marks had only just faded.
‘Well, I’m ready to knock them dead, how about you, Abby?’ Rowena swayed across to them, holding a dark brown eyebrow pencil in her hand. ‘Just draw me in a couple of seams, would you, darling?’ she added, hoisting her frock up to her thighs. With silk stockings having disappeared from the shops a year or so after the war had begun, an ingenious substitute had been devised by way of a little gravy browning and the pencil. ‘Let’s just hope it doesn’t snow tonight.’ She wrinkled her nose as Abby marked a seam on both legs. ‘The other Saturday I had half the dogs in Yorkshire sniffing round my legs.’
She peered into the mirror over Winnie’s shoulder, pouting her lips as she turned her head this way and that to admire the effect the burnt cork for mascara and soot for eyeshadow had on her eyes. ‘I don’t think I’ll bother with bona fide make-up after the war,’ she announced after a moment or two. ‘This is much more fun.’
They were going to a Christmas dance at the local church hall some ten miles away courtesy of Vincent and the farm lorry. For the first few months at the farm Abby hadn’t accompanied her friends on the rare occasions they had gone to a dance at the little market town on a Saturday night, but since Winnie had been courting Vincent it made it awkward for Rowena if she didn’t go along. At first she had felt every time she was asked to dance that it was a betrayal of James, despite what Winnie and Rowena said to the contrary, but lately she had begun to relax and enjoy the evenings. The farm had no wireless or any means of obtaining news from the outside world and it was good to escape the claustrophobic confines for a few hours and hear the latest songs which the town band played. A few caused her problems, like ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ and ‘Lili Marlene’, but she gritted her teeth and smiled through the dreamier songs of longing and romance, knowing ‘Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy’ and ‘This Is the Army, Mr Jones’ would soon be belted out. She hadn’t expected the yearning for James to get worse as the years went by, but it had, and despite all Rowena and Winnie’s determined manoeuvring to get her interested in one of the many young RAF men from the base at Scarborough who often called in at the local dances, or one of the local lads, there was no spark with any of them.
Abby liked the Saturdays when they went to the cinema in Scarborough best. Winnie and Vincent would disappear to the back row and she and Rowena would find two places nearer the front. For a shilling or two they entered a dream world where the exhaustion of their days and the worry about loved ones at the front or dodging bombs at home could be forgotton. It didn’t matter whether it was the magnificence and splendour of
Gone With the Wind,
Greer Garson’s rose-tinted portrayal of an English mother who rallies the loyal villagers in
Mrs Miniver
, Hollywood’s
Casablanca
, or stirring war films like
In Which We Serve
, it was enough to be taken out of oneself. Once the film was over and the lorry was bumping and rattling through dark streets back to the open countryside, Abby’s concern returned for Wilbert fighting in the North African campaign, Leonard and Bruce - Audrey’s oldest son had been killed in the second year of the war - somewhere in Europe, and Clara and the rest of them at home, but she always felt the break had done her good.
‘Ready, girls?’ Rowena swished to the door in a swirl of parachute silk which her mother had acquired from somewhere and had made up into a stylish dance dress for her daughter. She handed Winnie and Abby a section of the long red liquorice sweets her mother also sent her which stood in for lipstick when chewed and held against the lips. ‘Let’s boogie.’
They had been at the dance for over an hour when Abby noticed the woman draped all over Vincent on the dance floor. She was no spring chicken, her peroxide curls and heavy make-up unable to disguise the fact that she would never see thirty-five again, but she was attractive enough in rather a coarse way. Abby looked round for Winnie but she was nowhere to be seen. After extricating herself from her dance partner, a young man with two left feet and a proclivity to hold her just a little too close, Abby made her way over to Rowena who was chatting to an RAF officer. She inclined her head at Vincent and the blonde, her voice low as she said, ‘Have you seen Winnie recently?’
Rowena shook her head, moving away from the officer and taking Abby’s arm. ‘Who’s the clinging violet?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Well, Vincent seems to know her pretty well.’ Rowena’s thin aristocratic nose wrinkled. ‘What a ghastly woman. She’s all but falling out of that dress.’
Abby didn’t care about the blonde’s dress. ‘I must find Winnie.’
Their friend wasn’t in the lavatory or the small anteroom where curling Spam sandwiches and sad-looking slices of sponge cake were being zealously watched over by the vicar’s wife. After declining refreshments at sixpence a portion the two girls made their way to the cloakroom, where too few pegs meant most of the coats were piled high on top of each other on the floor.
Abby fished out her coat and Rowena’s, along with Winnie’s. ‘She has to be outside and she’s not wearing her coat. She’ll freeze to death.’
‘I take it we’re going to look for her out there?’
‘Of course we are.’
Rowena glanced down at the beautifully dyed dance shoes which had accompanied the dress from home, and which had seen her insisting Vincent drop her at the door to the building earlier before he went to park the lorry. She sighed. ‘Lead on, Macduff.’
After several minutes of wandering around, they found Winnie sitting shivering in the lorry. It had begun to snow and by the time they climbed into the front seat next to her, Rowena’s pale pink dance shoes had brown streaks from the gravy browning and the curls she’d taken ages over hung limply against her cold cheeks.
‘Are you all right, lass?’
Winnie glanced at them but immediately looked away again, staring through the windscreen at the swirling white flakes.
Abby tried again. ‘How did you get in here? Didn’t Vincent lock it?’
Winnie lifted a hand and keys jangled. ‘I took them out of his jacket before I left the room,’ she said, adding bitterly, ‘He was too busy to notice.’
Abby and Rowena looked at each other. Abby rubbed her cold hands together, searching for words of comfort. ‘It might not be his fault, lass. She looked like the type of woman who latches on to a man and then makes it difficult for him to get rid of her.’
‘Get rid of her!’ Winnie gave a broken laugh. ‘When she came up to him tonight she made it clear she thought he was her property so I asked him who she was. Apparently they’ve been seeing each other on and off for years when she was still married, but recently she’s been made a widow.’
‘A very merry widow,’ Rowena murmured.
‘I told him I wasn’t having him messing about with her when he was supposed to be seeing me, and he said . . .’ Winnie paused, gulped, then went on, ‘He said she was worth ten of me. In front of her he said that! He said he’d been sick of me for months and I could go to hell for all he cared.’
‘Oh, Winnie.’ Abby put her arms round her friend and as she did so Winnie began to cry, great tearing sobs that shook her plump frame.