Evie

Under a narrow, humpbacked bridge two children in gumboots are wading in a shallow stream. The girl, nicknamed Kiwi when she was born in New Zealand, is Kathryn Bayliss, a lanky ten-year old. Her hair swings, sleek and dark, onto her shoulders. The boy, known as Pom because he was born soon after his parents arrived back in the Post Stone valley, is younger and solidly built, his blond hair darkening as he grows.

The eighteenth-century bridge, built at the same time as the nearby farmhouse, clumsily incorporates the stones of an ancient clapper crossing. Within its steep arch a lip of limestone protrudes, creating a high shelf about sixteen inches wide, well clear of the water and close to the top of the curved space. The boy has hauled himself up onto this and with his legs swinging over its edge and his head bent forward by the curve of the arch, is examining a bundle of something that he has found there.

‘What is it?’ the girl asks, craning upwards into shadow. ‘Is it treasure?’

‘Shouldn’t think so,’ the boy says. ‘Yuck! It’s all mouldy and slimy.’ From a distance they hear their mother’s voice, calling them in for their lunch.

In the farmhouse kitchen Georgina Bayliss sets a platter of cheese and pickle sandwiches on the pine table where her husband is sitting, leafing through the farming section of the
Western Morning News.

‘Boots!’ he shouts as the children approach the open door.

‘Hands!’ their mother adds and then, ‘Look at the state of you two! Where on earth have you been?’

‘Under the bridge,’ the boy says, drying his hands, sidling onto a chair, reaching for a sandwich and biting into it.

‘We found something creepy,’ the girl says. The father lowers his newspaper.

‘What d’you mean, “creepy”?’

‘Well it was all rotten and yucky,’ the boy says with his mouth full. ‘Old clothes and stuff. As if rats had lived in it.’

‘And died in it!’ the girl giggles.

‘Everything was sort of chewed.’ the boy says. ‘Looked like it might have been a kind of rucksack but it came to bits and fell into the river.’

‘And floated downstream. Glug, glug, glug!’ the girl says, pouring milk from a pitcher into a glass tumbler.

‘There was a zippered bit inside,’ the boy tells them, ‘and inside that, tucked into a kind of wallet thing … I found this.’

‘This’ is a square of damp card. Whatever had been written on one side is illegible but on the other is a photographic
print, the once glossy surface so damaged by damp and degeneration that it proves impossible to make out what is represented by the blurred image. Georgina lays it carefully on the coolest part of the Aga and it isn’t until late evening, when the children have gone to bed, that she remembers it. By now it is dry and showing more tonal contrast than when she had examined it earlier.

She is able to make out two figures. A young girl and an older woman. They stand facing the camera, their expressions unreadable. Their clothes and those of the people around them suggest the late thirties. In the background the outline of the familiar tower sets the scene on the Blackpool seafront. Georgina studies the picture for some time and then carries it across the kitchen to where her husband is sitting under a reading lamp, poring over a seed catalogue. Standing behind him she puts her arms round him and leans over him, holding the warped, sepia photograph directly under the light, and after a moment says, ‘Don’t you recognise her, Christo?’ He squints at the image.

‘The woman or the girl?’ he asks.

‘The girl,’ Georgina says. Christopher takes the photo from her hand and, tilting it this way and that, scrutinises it. Slowly, as he examines the set of the girl’s wide eyes, the fall of pale hair and the suggestion of uncertainty in the way the oval face is slightly turned to look at the woman beside her, he realises that she is familiar to him.

‘Good grief, Georgie!’ he says. ‘It is, isn’t it! It’s Evie!’

It was as Hester moved forward again, picking her way back across the muddy yard, that she saw it. She stopped, scanning the face of the abandoned Land Army hostel. There it was again. An unmistakable flicker of light as though someone with a candle or a torch was moving along the upstair passage.

Hester Crocker had left her daughter safely in her playpen, her husband’s dinner ready in the oven, picked up a wicker basket and crossed the deserted farmyard to the washing line. Thurza’s nappies would still be damp but a mizzle, which was developing into a light rain, would prevent them getting any dryer as the September evening darkened. Hester’s movements, as she reached up to unpeg the nappies and then stooped to drop them into her basket, were as lithe and youthful as they had been before she first carried and then delivered her daughter. She was, she knew, at that moment, in the gloomy yard with the warm light from her kitchen door streaming out over the
cobbles towards her, totally content. Happier than she had ever been in her life. She had her Dave, her baby, her home.

She lifted the clothes basket, set it on her hip and began to make her way across the yard. To her left the outline of the empty farmhouse was a dark smudge against a darker sky, its undulating thatch held between two chimney stacks which were barely visible in the murk. Until recently, with the war over at last and the strict rules of the blackout lifted, light would have been pouring out through its small windows. The wind-up gramophone would have been wailing in the land girls’ recreation room, where one or another of them might have been lustily singing, picking out a popular song on the untuned piano. Hester paused. No arguments over bathwater tonight. No clatter from the kitchen, where Alice Todd, the warden, assisted by Rose Crocker, the cowman’s widow, would have been washing the dinner plates and cutting bread for the next day’s sandwiches. Tonight there was just the whisper of the shallow stream that ran under the humpbacked bridge and away, along the valley floor. That was when she had seen it. That brief flicker of light, moving along the upper floor of the deserted farmhouse.

Ten minutes later, when Dave arrived home, damp, muddy and hungry after his day’s work at the upper farm, Hester met him at their door. In one hand she held a torch, in the other the key to the farmhouse door.

‘Afore you comes in, my lover,’ Hester had said, ‘Us must check on the farm’ouse.’

‘What?’ Dave queried, ‘Now? I be soakin’ wet and famished, Hes!’

‘But I seen a light in there, Dave. A lamp or a candle or som’at. Come on!’ She began to move away from him.

‘You sure?’ Dave grumbled, stumbling after her. ‘’Ow can there be a light?’

‘Course I’m sure! And there’s a shutter half open too, see? And I’m dead certain I latched ’em all when I checked ’em las’ week! There be someone in there, Dave! Could be a tramp … Or maybe a prisoner escaped from Princeton gaol.’ Key in hand, she was approaching the farmhouse, Dave behind her, closing the distance between them.

The ancient door creaked open.

‘Needs oil, that do,’ Dave murmured. The light switch in the cross-passage clicked without result and Dave swore under his breath. ‘’Twill be that buggerin’ fuse again, most like.’

They moved quietly through the building, flashing torchlight around the kitchen, scullery and recreation room, where threadbare sofas and armchairs still sagged as they had when the departing land girls had abandoned them. They climbed the narrow stairs, searched the bathroom, the torch beam probing the deep, stained bathtub, then began to move from one bedroom to the next, listening and looking.

The linen had been removed from the beds but there were still a few pillows and folded blankets on the thin, ticking-covered mattresses. Wardrobe doors stood open and the drawers in the cheap dressing tables were pulled out as though the girls had just that minute finished their packing and left the overcrowded, noisy space which, for almost three years, had housed them. But Hester and Dave had more on their minds than nostalgic contemplation. The creak of a
floorboard in the next room had not escaped them.

At first the small bedroom appeared to be empty. Then they became aware of an almost indiscernible shape in the shadowed space between a wardrobe and the corner of the low-ceilinged room. Shielding its face from the stabbing torch beam, a figure stood huddled and shaking as Hester and Dave approached it. Then, with a sob, knees buckling, whoever it was, slid down the wall and cowered at their feet, dazzled by the light.

‘Evie?’ Hester breathed, incredulously, the torch beam wavering. Then, louder, ‘What you doin’ back ’ere?’ The girl was bruised. Her clothes filthy, her hair tangled, her face tear-stained. Barely recognisable, but Evie. Definitely Evie.

She had been Evelyn Thelma Cooper. Until, at sixteen, Norman Clark married her. Evelyn. The quiet one. Who soon became known as Evie, had arrived at the hostel six months before the end of the war, when most of the group of girls still billeted there had known one another for the best part of three years.

No one remembered being aware of Evie’s arrival. Whether this was because with Christmas looming, everyone was preoccupied with their various plans for the brief break in their relentless routine of work, or because Evie herself was so quiet, so inconspicuous and so lacking in the sort of striking physical features which attract attention that she seemed to enter the small community and blend into it, causing barely a ripple of interest.

It had been mid December when she arrived. Almost at once she volunteered to be one of the few girls needed to
form the skeleton workforce which would keep cows milked, eggs collected and pigs fed with swill over the few days of the Christmas break.

She was a short girl, not thin, not stout, with silky, blondish hair held back from her face by an Alice band. Her watchful eyes were wide and blue-grey under a rounded brow. Her mouth had a softness about it, almost a shy, half smile. The whole effect was self-effacing. And quiet.

During those last months of the war and the start of peacetime, the hostel would be slowly winding down. Girls and even the warden herself were going through the complicated processes of identifying new careers, finding new partners and turning their faces towards futures which, three years previously, would have seemed inconceivable to them. One was planning to run a public house in a northern town, another about to become a GI bride, two more would soon be married. The directions of all their lives had been changed by their years at the hostel in each other’s company and by the wise, practical influence of their warden, Alice Todd.

It was difficult to define what Alice meant to this diverse group of young women whose backgrounds, education and experiences of life varied so hugely but as month succeeded month and each one of them fought for survival in the raw winter cold and the bleak and draughty hostel where food was limited by wartime rationing, they became united by Alice Todd’s diligence, tolerance and sensitivity. Too young and too posh to be a mother-figure to them and not harsh or domineering enough to be a school marm, Alice possessed the warmth of the former and when necessary, the authority of the latter.

During her years as warden Alice too, had moved on from her own unhappy situation – she had lost both marriage and home during the course of the war – to the point where she was able to recognise and accept new relationships and opportunities for herself and her young son, Edward John. The long, slow-burning course of her association with her widowed employer, the complex Roger Bayliss, was, by that time, finding its way towards a happy resolution.

The warden had very little initial contact with Evelyn Clark – this late arrival, who was so quiet, so appreciative of the food Alice doled out each evening to her ten, hungry charges. Food which was as filling, nourishing and plentiful as wartime rationing allowed. Evie never complained, never quarrelled with the other girls and only once broke the ten-thirty curfew and then by less than half an hour.

On that occasion, assuming all the girls had arrived home together as usual, Alice had locked up and was preparing for bed when she heard someone try the latch. In hindsight she was to see the significance of that occasion. As spring arrived and the weather warmed, the land girls had resumed their habit of spending the evenings sauntering along the lanes and into Ledburton village for a shandy or a gin and orange. Evie would go with them. It wasn’t until she broke the curfew that Alice discovered that although she walked with the other girls as far as the village street, once there she was in the habit of wandering off alone, rejoining the group at closing time and arriving with them, back at the hostel.

‘What happened, Evie?’ Alice had asked that night, more out of interest than as a remonstrance. ‘I thought you all
went together to the pub.’ Evie was disconcerted. More so, Alice later realised, than the question warranted. She had hesitantly explained herself.

‘I’m not that fond of the pub, to be honest, Mrs Todd. I like to walk out into the countryside, see? It’s ever so pretty along by the river.’ The conversation had moved on to the subjects of nightingales and owls and then the warden and the land girl had wished one another goodnight. Alice withdrew into her room and Evie had gone quietly up the narrow staircase to her bed.

Having absorbed the shock of finding Evie hiding in the hostel, bruised and tearful, Hester and Dave had helped her to her feet, then down the stairs, across the yard and into their cottage where they sat her by their fire. Dave found some port, left over from Christmas, poured a little into a tumbler and persuaded her to drink it. Hester put Dave’s loaded plate in front of him and while he ate, poached three new-laid eggs, toasted thick slices of bread and offered them to Evie who seemed almost too tired and too distressed to eat. Soon she sat with her eyelids drooping, a cup of warm milk between her palms; she was almost asleep by the time she’d drained the cup and Hester eased it from her fingers.

‘What’ll us do?’ Hester whispered to her husband.

‘Leave ’er to sleep, I reckon. She’ll be comfy enough in that chair with a couple of blankets over ’er.’

‘But in the mornin’, Dave? What’ll us do in the mornin’? S’pose that ’usband of ’ers comes lookin’ for ’er? Eh? Like ’e did afore.’

Although the land girls had been barely aware of Evelyn Clark’s arrival at the hostel, no one would ever forget the occasion of her removal from it. On a hot evening in late June their meal had been interrupted by heavy knocking on the farmhouse door. Burly, balding, sweating in his army uniform, Norman Clark, Evie’s husband, had pushed into the cross-passage and demanded that his wife should fetch her belongings and return at once with him, to their home in Coventry. Initially Alice had resisted, on the grounds that as warden, only she could sanction Evie’s departure. But it seemed that Corporal Clark had already called at the higher farm, presented himself to Roger Bayliss and, brandishing his marriage certificate, established his right to take Evie away with him. That had been almost three months ago and since then nothing had been heard of her. Until tonight, when tremulous and beaten, Dave and Hester Crocker had found her, cowering in the deserted hostel.

Next morning, when the couple crept downstairs, Evie was still sleeping, curled, like a stray cat, in their threadbare armchair. Hester repeated the whispered question she had put to her husband on the previous night.

‘What if ’er ’usband comes?’

‘Reckon we better tell the boss. He’ll know what’s best. Soon as I’ve had me porridge I’ll get off up to the higher farm and tell ’im.’ He was aware of his wife’s anxiety ‘S’okay, me lover. Shan’t be long. Promise.’

Hester watched him go, broad shoulders hunched over the handlebars of the farm bicycle as he tackled the steep rise in the lane, turning once to wave to her as she stood, her
baby on her hip, in the doorway of their cottage.

Hester and her brother Ezekiel had been deprived of a normal childhood by their father, Jonas Tucker, a lay preacher in a sect stricter and more zealous than even the local Plymouth Brethren. Jonas’s religious obsessions had distorted the lives of both his children and even that of their browbeaten mother, all of them existing in an atmosphere of extreme and unnatural piety in which the world beyond their particular faith and every living soul within it was held in contempt and condemned to everlasting damnation. It had taken the war to remove both children from their father’s influence and introduce them to a world which, initially, they found difficult to comprehend. The group of young women in whose company Hester was to spend her time as a land girl, at first reduced her to a tongue-tied, almost scandalised silence. The Post Stone girls, with their make-up, provocative clothes and flamboyant behaviour, would have been denounced by Jonas Tucker as scarlet women. Harlots, consigned to hell’s everlasting flames. It had taken Hester several months to discover that, in fact, the girls were kind, generous, loyal, and in most cases, singularly lacking in malice. These new friends had persuaded Hester into pretty clothes and to release her spectacular blond-gold hair from the tight bun her father had always insisted on.

‘You look like the girl in that picture’ someone said, thinking of the foxed print of Lizzie Sidall which hung above the fireplace in the hostel’s recreation room.

Dave reached the yard of the upper farm and knocked on the open door to the kitchen. Eileen, her white apron clean on that morning, was busy preparing the day’s vegetables.
She had known Dave Crocker ‘since afore you was born’ as she often told him.

‘What’s up, Dave?’ she asked him, picking up on the urgency in his voice.

‘Gotta see the boss’ he said ‘S’important.’

‘They’m not up yet, Dave. I’ve took ’er breakfast and her post up to his room … um … their room. She on’y got back from Lunnon late las’ night, see.’

Eileen, like everyone else in the valley, was having trouble adjusting to the fact Mrs Alice Todd, who had been warden of Mr Bayliss’s Land Army hostel, had recently become his wife. Post Stone people were finding it hard to remember to call her ‘Mrs Bayliss’. Mostly, they forgot and called her ‘Mrs Todd … um … sorry … Bayliss’.