Evie (3 page)

‘Just your mother?’ Alice asked, ‘Or …?’

‘Both of us, Mrs Todd … I mean, Bayliss. He always took both of us. We went to the seaside one year. Blackpool. Stayed in a boarding house. He was kind, then. Gave me presents and painted the house for Mum and bought a new carpet for the
front room … When I turned sixteen Mum told me I was to marry him. Looking back, I was daft to agree. I didn’t much like him – except in a grateful kind of way for what he done for us over the years. I told Mum I didn’t want to marry him ’cos I didn’t fancy him but she said life wasn’t about fancying people and all that rubbish I watched down the picture palace, and that you should marry a man as would look after you proper and not some good-looking ne’er-do-well. She said the house was too small for the three of us and that if I refused to marry Norman I knew what I could do.’ Evie’s voice faltered and stopped. Both Alice and Roger were regarding her in barely concealed astonishment. Alice composed her face and began topping up Roger’s coffee cup while he got to his feet, and with the poker, adjusted the position of a log in the hearth.

‘I don’t think I ever said yes to him,’ Evie continued. ‘Like I said, I was barely more than a kid and I’d always done as Mum told me, see. She’d get angry, Mum, if I didn’t do as she said. They bought a second-hand bed and we went to the registry office and I signed my name on a form. After that I had to sleep with him. I didn’t like what he done to me but Mum said I was a big girl now and it was something women have to put up with. I didn’t know any different. Not in real life. Not then.’

She carefully lifted her cup and sipped the coffee. ‘That’s nice, that is.’ She smiled briefly, looked from Alice to Roger and asked, hesitantly, ‘D’you want me to go on? Or have you had enough?’

‘Go on,’ Alice said quietly. Evie seemed to be gaining in assurance. Perhaps putting her strange history into words
distanced it slightly from the harsh experience of it and gave her a new perspective on events that had for so long overwhelmed her. She sat up straighter in her chair and put her cup carefully back onto its saucer before continuing.

‘I fell pregnant straight off,’ she told them. ‘It was a dear little boy but he was stillborn. I was ever so poorly and the nurse said I’d lost my womb. Norman got angry. He’d wanted a son, see. When they told him I couldn’t ’ave no more kids he wouldn’t speak to me. Neither of ’em would. They made me sleep downstairs on a camp bed. I got sent out to work, soon as I was well enough and Mum took all me wages for me keep. That’s how it went on till the war started and Norman got called up. When I turned eighteen I had to do war service and Mum wanted me to work in a munition factory near where we lived. But I’d grown up a bit by then,’ she said. ‘I’d seen the posters for the Land Army and it seemed like a good chance to …’ she hesitated ‘… to get away.’

‘So you came to Lower Post Stone,’ Alice said, amazed that this girl, of whose history she knew so little, after having had such a bad experience of life, had been absorbed so successfully into the community at the hostel. But there had to be more, and there was.

Now we come to the difficult part,
Roger realised, silently.
The part when this girl, against the advice of her warden, and against Land Army regulations, fraternised with an Eyetie POW.
Unpleasant as her husband undoubtedly was, Roger found it difficult to condone Evie’s behaviour. A man fighting for his country should be able to count on the fidelity of the girl he’d left behind him.

‘Did he write to you, while he was away, fighting?’ Roger asked, in a tone that Alice considered slightly confrontational.

‘No,’ Evie said. ‘He never did. After VE Day he wrote to Mum to tell her he’d be comin’ home soon. I was a land girl by then.’ There was a slight paused before she continued. ‘I know I shouldn’t of, but I’d hoped Norman wouldn’t come back from the war. That he’d get killed like so many of ’em did. But he’d got took prisoner a coupla months after he was called up, see, and after that ’is letters had come from a camp somewhere. I didn’t hear nothing from him ’til that night he come to the farm and took me away.’ She paused. ‘I couldn’t never work out why he did that. It wasn’t as though he wanted me. But I was his wife. So I suppose it was like he owned me. It wasn’t as if he loved me or nothing. Not Norman.’ Suddenly her throat closed. She dropped her face into her hands and wept silently, shoulders shaking, tears running from between her fingers. ‘Not like Giorgio,’ she whispered, eventually. ‘Not like my Giorgio loves me! He got my address, you know. One of the Post Stone girls give it him and he came to find me. He broke his parole, doin’ that. He risked being sent to jail, ’cos it was against the rules of some convention or other. He could even of got shot! But he come looking for me. And he found me. And then Norman half killed him! Giorgio wants to stay in England, see. Farmer Lucas is keen to keep him on at his place. All we want is to be together!’ She was speaking directly to Alice and Roger now. Both of them were affected by the simple intensity of her words. ‘I need to see him! I really do! Please can I see him?’

‘You shall, Evie,’ Alice said, ‘You shall. I promise you.’

‘But we need to clarify a few things first,’ Roger stated, flatly, picking up Annie’s letter.

‘It’s from Annie and Hector,’ Alice told Evie. ‘They wrote to us because they were concerned about you.’

‘We know they visited you and tried to help you. What happened after that?’ Roger’s question hung in the air, unanswered while Evie seemed to struggle to know how to answer him.

‘Evie?’ Alice prompted, gently.

‘After Norman got ’ome that day Annie and Hector come …’ Evie began, hesitantly, ‘he was ages before he brought me supper … I was locked up, see, in the attic … He asked if anyone had come while he was out and I pretended no one had.’

‘So he didn’t know Annie and Hector saw you?’ Alice asked, Evie shook her head.

‘I told him I wanted to see to Mum. She was ill, see. Coughin’ and coughin’, she was. But he wouldn’t let me. She’d been bad for days and Norman wouldn’t send for the doctor. I told him if he didn’t let me see her I’d break a window and shout for help, so he said he’d send for the doctor next day. But he never and no one came. I couldn’t hear Mum coughin’ no more. Next time he brought me food I shoved past him. He came after me, down the stairs. I got to Mum’s bedroom before he grabbed me. I could see Mum were real bad. Strugglin’ to breathe, she was, and there was blood all down her nightie. I don’t think she even knew who I was. Norman grabbed me and dragged me back to the attic. He was pretty rough. That’s when I got me bruises. He locked
me in again. I was that scared. For meself and for Mum. I never thought I could get out of that attic winder or down onto the ground without killin’ meself – but I had no option, so I done it! Down the drainpipe, across the outhouse roof and then a drop down into the back alley. It was pouring down with rain and all I had was the clothes I was wearing and the money Hector had thrown up to me.’

‘So you …?’ Roger asked, made almost speechless by a story which was becoming increasingly astonishing.

‘So I ran all the way to the station, hid in the Ladies ’til a train come. Got to Birmingham and waited ages for an Exeter train. I walked all night from Ledburton Halt to the hostel. It was just startin’ to get light by the time I got there. It was all locked up but I managed to get in through that little winder in the scullery, you know the one Mrs Todd … Bayliss. I dunno how many days I hid there. There was water, of course, but nothing to eat except I did find a tin of spam at the back of the pantry cupboard. And one night, after Hester and Dave had put their light out, I went across to the barn and took a couple of swedes. It was the next night, yesterday, that is, that Hester must of saw the light from the candle I was using.’ She paused, miserably. ‘You know the rest and I’m ever so sorry. Can I see Giorgio now? I’m scared for ’im, see! Scared that Norman’ll guess where I am and come lookin’ for him!’ She turned desperately from Alice to Roger. ‘And then there’s me mother! It’s true she weren’t good to me but she were that sick and I left her with no one to care for her!’

The Italian surrender in 1943 had resulted, as time passed, in a considerable laxity in security at the POW camp near Ledburton. As time passed, trusted inmates were to be seen working without guards on the various farms in Post Stone valley.

On one April morning and only weeks from VE Day, Giorgio Zingaretti, who had proved himself to be an excellent worker, was fixing a drinking trough. The sun was warm on his broad back. Under the shock of dark hair, perspiration glistened on his forehead. His olive skin which, even after the long, English winter, had not lost its Mediterranean glow, was already acquiring a deeper tan.

A girl, wearing khaki dungarees and wellington boots was striding uphill towards him. He smiled at the Englishness of her blue eyes, creamy complexion and the pale hair, braided into a thick plait. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow. As she drew level with him he said, ‘
Buongiorno, bella
signorina
! Why you so much in a hurry, eh?’

Like most of his fellows, Giorgio, through his contact with the camp guards, the local farmers who availed themselves of his labours, and to a more limited extent, the civilians whom the prisoners encountered when, on Sundays, a farm lorry ferried them to and from the Catholic church in Exeter, had acquired a limited use of the English language. More recently – and always under surveillance – the trusted prisoners were allowed to shop in the village store.

The girl had stopped to catch her breath after the steep climb. She held up a hoe, the shaft of which was in two pieces.

‘’Cos I’ve broke me hoe!’ she told him, ‘An’ I gotta take it up to the farm and get Mr Jack to fix it.’ When he appeared to be having trouble understanding her she repeated, slowly and clearly, ‘Mister Jack? Fix?’

‘Ah!’ Giorgio smiled. His teeth were even and white ‘Si! Mr-Jack-fix-hoe!’ In the warm air the girl was conscious of the heat coming from him. And of the sweet smell of his sweat. It was not like any sweat she had smelt before. It was not how the land girls smelt at the end of a day of summer heat, hoisting hay onto the carts. And it was not how her husband Norman had smelt.

‘
Che?
’ Giorgio queried, reacting to her changing expression and the soft blush which had washed across her face.

‘I best go,’ she said, moving off up the lane, ‘or I’ll be in dead trouble!’ He watched her go. The heavy plait bouncing on her shoulders.

April became May. During the VE Day celebrations there
was an evening of dancing in Ledburton square where an amplified gramophone belted out Glen Miller.

To begin with the village girls and the Post Stone land girls were slow to respond to the group of smiling Italians who, scrubbed up and in basic fatigues rather than their usual, mud-encrusted dungarees, were almost unrecognisable. But after a while, when the girls had first smiled and then giggled and the men shuffled their feet, ranks were broken and partners decided upon. It was as the couples gathered, hands were taken and arms placed round waists, that Giorgio caught sight of a figure in a floral dress. Her hair was held back by a ribbon at the nape of her neck. With a slight sense of shock he recognised the girl with the broken hoe.

They danced together until the gramophone finally fell silent and Alice Todd began shooing her land girls towards the farm lorry which would unceremoniously deliver them back to the hostel.

Giorgio had held her gently and protectively. Their bodies, as they danced, soon felt as familiar to one another as long-established lovers. They did not speak. Not he in Italian nor she in English. They did not need to. When the music stopped he led her towards the lorry, discretely releasing her before they reached the gaggle of girls jostling to climb up into it and anxious not to show their camiknickers or ladder their precious nylons.

‘Come on, our Evie!’ someone shouted as arms reached down to haul her into the truck.

‘Evie.’ Giorgio had said aloud and in his uncertain English. ‘So. She call Evie.’

In 1940, the year in which Mussolini committed Italy to the war, Giorgio had been employed, like his father before him, as an episcopal carpenter, responsible for maintenance work in several Neapolitan churches. He was newly married and his wife pregnant, when shrapnel from an Allied bomb struck and killed her and the unborn child she was carrying. In an inconsolable response to the tragedy, Giorgio enlisted in the navy, only to be taken prisoner following the routing of the Italian fleet at Cape Matapan, after which he and a small group of survivors had been transported to rural England where they were interned for the duration of the war. During this time the men had been reasonably well fed and provided with weatherproof clothing but the barn in which they were housed had bars on its windows, barbed wire around its perimeter fence and guards who were armed.

Many of Giorgio’s fellow prisoners had histories as tragic as his own. Although they were simple men they were intelligent enough to despise the leader who had inflicted first humiliation and then defeat on the country they loved. They celebrated when, after his surrender to the Allies, Mussolini was punished by his own people. Hanged, ignominiously by his feet, he had swung, together with his mistress, above the heads of jeering crowds.

During the first years of his internment Giorgio lost track of time. He worked, ate and slept. He shivered through the brutal English winters, while the summers only served to remind him of the blissful warmth of the Italian sun. He occasionally received letters from his brother, who was married now and the father of two small children. When one
of Giorgio’s fellow prisoners, injured by a collapsing barn, was repatriated ahead of the rest of the group, he, like the other men, had been jealous, until the thought of resuming his life in Naples without the girl who had always been at its heart plunged him into a deeper depression.

Most of the prisoners vented at least some of their pent-up frustrations by shouting obscene comments at the local women they glimpsed from the truck that took them to and from the various farms where they worked. When they caught sight of the land girls, driving stock, stooking wheat sheafs, lifting potatoes and swedes or innocently hoeing their way down the long lines of brassicas, the air turned blue. Fortunately no one who heard them was aware of the level of crude abuse that poured from them. They transposed lewd words into well-known Italian songs, and smiling, bawled them in the general direction of any women within earshot.

After his first encounter with Evie, in the lane where he was repairing the gate, Giorgio no longer joined in these ribald choruses. Although he knew she did not understand the words, it seemed to him inappropriate that they should be polluting the air she breathed.

When, as early summer had given way to harvest time, the war in Europe was over at last and Japan’s surrender only a matter of weeks away, the sense of impending change became as palpable in the Post Stone valley as the stench of smoking oil from the clattering reapers, blundering their way through the ripe cornfields and the juddering, dust-caked threshing machines. It was the time when the girls cut the legs off
their dungarees, rolled down their heavy, regulation socks, exposing their legs from thigh to ankle. Hair became bleached, foreheads, forearms and shins tanned and sometimes reddened by the hot July sun.

At the hostel that summer and before matchmaking had blossomed into formal engagements and even weddings, there had been a lot of ‘does he, doesn’t he?’, ‘will she, won’t she?’, ‘do I, don’t I?’, questions, which all too often had been referred to the warden herself. Much of this, the confidences, the stormy tears, the misunderstandings, reconciliations and celebrations, went over the head of Alice’s young son. Nevertheless Edward John had become increasingly aware of the importance in his mother’s life of her employer, Roger Bayliss, and it had occurred to him that should the two of them marry, he could happily delete from his shortlist of worries the threat of a compulsory move back to London when his mother’s duties as hostel warden ended.

Edward John Todd had turned twelve during that summer. He was a robust child with a touch of his mother’s solemnity, her dark-blond hair and direct, grey-blue eyes. The break-up of his parents’ marriage had affected him more than he had realised at the time and diminished his previously affectionate feelings for his father but, largely due to his mother’s example, he had weathered the experience. On Friday evenings he arrived at the farm from his weekly boarding school in Exeter and late on Sundays caught the bus back. At the hostel he slept on one of the two divans in a ground floor room which was his mother’s bedsitting room. He had become enchanted with the idea of living on a farm even while his mother hesitated before
making the decision to take on the role of hostel warden. Nothing, over the past two and a half years, had disappointed him and the one cloud on his horizon, that third summer, had been the possibility that when the war was over, his mother would pursue an offer of work in London.

By the time his school broke up for the long summer holiday the hostel had been alive with romance. First there had been the wedding of Georgina, his favourite land girl, to Christopher, Roger Bayliss’s son, at which he served as a pageboy and had been allowed a glass of hock during the reception at her parents’ elegant home.

It was on that occasion that Edward John first encountered Pamela, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy family who farmed a large acreage adjacent to the Post Stone valley.

Pamela had by then completed her first year at an expensive boarding school. After just twelve months the change in her had astonished her parents. Yes, they intended her to become well educated, articulate and self-assured, but the young woman who had stepped neatly down from the train at Ledburton Halt at the start of her school holidays, seemed, initially, to be almost a stranger to them.

Edward John, a tidy boy in his school uniform, his hair slicked down, a white carnation in his buttonhole, his first glass of wine in his hand, had stared at the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Pamela stood, cool and smiling, responding sociably to those wedding guests who spoke to her, her eyes appraising the women’s hats as she accepted compliments from her father’s middle-aged friends, who barely recognised the gawky child she had been when they had last seen her.

After that initial encounter, things had not been the same for Edward John. He was, although he did not at the time recognise the symptoms, quite simply in love. It was not the sloppy sort of love expressed by the simpering heroines of the movies he saw, with their flouncy sulks and huge, bunchy skirts. Nor was it the flirty, rowdy, bawdiness of the land girls which occasionally caused Rose Crocker to purse her lips and his mother to call her girls to order.

‘Not in front of Edward John,’ she would murmur if her son was within earshot. No. What Edward John was experiencing that summer was, he was certain, unique, significant and unquestionably everlasting.

He made it his business to discover Pamela’s habits. It was not difficult. She, like many girls of her class and her age, was devoted to horses. She rode Playboy, her piebald pony, at local gymkhanas and agricultural shows and had, over the years, accumulated an impressive collection of rosettes and even trophies. With little else to do with herself during the long school holiday, she and Playboy ranged the valley and beyond it, climbing up through the Bayliss forest, past the woodman’s cottage to which, after the breakdown which had seen him ignominiously discharged from the RAF, Christopher Bayliss had withdrawn to allow his shattered nerves to heal. And where he and Georgina had, eventually, become lovers.

Edward John’s familiarity with the topography of the valley made it easy for him to discover where Pamela was heading on her daily rides.

She would see him approaching on a reciprocal course, or descending an opposite hill, or appearing suddenly in a
stand of young beeches or rounding a curve in the path that followed the stream. He would raise the hard-hat his mother insisted on, in a way that he hoped suggested not only good manners but sophistication.

‘Where are you heading today?’ he’d ask her.

‘Nowhere in particular,’ she’d shrug. ‘Might go over The Tops and home via the ridge track.’

‘Can I join you?’

‘If you want to …’ And they would ride, side by side except where the path narrowed, Playboy and Tosca, the bay mare Roger Bayliss had put at his stepson’s disposal, falling into step with each other.

As the stream thrust its way down through the Post Stone valley, there were places where it narrowed significantly, restricted by outcrops of smoothed, mossy granite which created waterfalls and, below them, deep, dark pools. Sometimes the riders would stop, dismount and let the horses drink and then graze the short grass. One hot July day they pulled off their riding boots and waded into water which had the colour and clarity of cider.

‘If it wasn’t so cold we could swim,’ Pamela said, lightly.

‘It’s always freezing here,’ Edward John informed her. ‘It’s because the headwaters are up on the moor, in the granite.’

‘You don’t say!’ Pamela said, embarrassing him. He felt himself blush, turned away and lobbed a white pebble, watching as its colour changed from silver to dark gold, before glimmering down into the jet-black depths.

‘Anyhow, we haven’t got our bathers,’ he said.

‘Bathers?’ Pamela echoed, adding to his embarrassment.

‘Bathing costumes,’ he said.

‘I do know what bathers are, Edward John! But who needs “bathers”? At school we often give our sports mistress the slip and swim, stark naked, in our pool.’ Edward John made a fast recovery.

‘I sometimes swim here, stark naked,’ he lied, casually.

‘Thought you said it was freezing,’ she countered, nailing him with her beautiful eyes.

‘Yes it is,’ he said, putting his foot in Tosca’s stirrup, swinging up into her saddle and kicking her on. ‘I dive off that boulder,’ he told Pamela, indicating a smooth slab of granite which overhung deep water. ‘That’s how I know how extremely cold it is.’