Evie (6 page)

Gwennan sighed.

‘Them was the days, eh!’

‘Guess we’ll always remember them days …’

‘Yep. Guess we will. But you was never as keen on kickin’ your heels with the GIs as some of us was, Gwennan.’

‘No. But looking back …’

‘Wish you’d let your hair down a bit more, do you?’

‘Not really.’ Gwennan’s expression tightened into its more familiar cast of faint disapproval. ‘Not when I remember where it landed you, Winnie!’ Gwennan was referring to the unwanted
pregnancy and the narrowly avoided disaster that followed it.

‘Thought we’d agreed not to talk about that no more?’ she said, sharply.

‘Yeah, we did,’ Gwennan conceded. ‘Always sayin’ the wrong thing, me! Famous for it!’ Screwing the top onto her bottle of varnish, Winnie smiled magnanimously.

‘Get movin’, girl!’ she said. ‘There’s a gin and orange on the bar what’s got my name on it!’

Edward John selected a robust young beech tree in the Bayliss hardwood plantation. He carefully incised the outline of a heart into the smooth bark, pierced it with an arrow and added the relevant initials. He was slightly ashamed of defacing the tree but such was the level of his passion for Pamela that, on balance, and because it was absolutely necessary for him to express it in some way, he felt justified.

A small cloud on Edward John’s horizon was the fact that his father, James Todd, now remarried and with a young daughter by his second wife, insisted that he should abide by a clause in his parents’ divorce settlement and spend each half-term holiday with his father and his new family.

Edward John still nursed strong feelings of disapproval of the way his father, after moving him and his mother out of London when the family home was bombed, had abandoned them in rented rooms in Exeter with so little financial support. Alice had been forced to take the only work she could find which provided a home for herself and for the small boy who had then watched his mother struggle with her excessive workload in the primitive hostel, in an
environment and amongst people who were mostly alien to her previous experience of life. He had seen her attempt to win the confidence of the land girls, of the acerbic, critical Rose Crocker and of Roger Bayliss, her detached and cold employer, and he had seen her gain the respect and finally the affection of all of them.

Edward John had always understood that to resist this half-term visiting arrangement only added to his mother’s problems so, apart from the first chaotic occasion, when he gave his father the slip at Paddington Station and made his way back to the Post Stone farms, he had dutifully complied with it.

There were boys at his school who had lost their fathers in the war. The form was that you were fetched from your classroom and taken to the headmaster’s study. After ten minutes or so you were handed over to the matron who led you to the sickbay where you were given tea and biscuits and allowed to remain, sometimes until the next day but more often for just a few hours, after which you were released, red-eyed, back into the routine of the school day.

In Edward John’s case the impact of the news of his family’s break up had been more protracted. His father, a middle-ranking civil servant, based at the Air Ministry but deployed near Cambridge, made several visits to the rented rooms in Exeter. On each occasion Edward John had been sent on errands, to feed the pigeons in the cathedral square or to buy himself a comic, while his mother was given more details of the uncompromising news that his father, having formed an alliance with the young WRAF officer who was
acting as his assistant, now wished to marry her.

‘How do you feel about all this, Edward John?’ his uncle had asked him, while visiting his boarding school and making arrangements to pay his fees.

‘I don’t really know,’ the boy had answered, vaguely. It was true. It was possibly the conviction that whatever he might feel would have little or no effect on what was about to happen to him that produced an impression of indifference. Maybe he was more affected than he realised by his father’s behaviour and was in a state of passive denial. His main emotion was an undefined sense of shame that his father, this man, whom he had loved and been proud of and who, he had assumed, loved him, clearly did not and had betrayed both son and wife. From being their protector he had become indifferent to them and was now deserting them. Edward John had watched his mother absorb this situation. He saw her draw on her courage, muster her skills – which, after an early and apparently happy marriage, were limited to domestic ones – and set about providing for the two of them. Had she been childless, Alice’s high-school education would have equipped her for some form of skilled work in one of the armed services, but with a small boy in tow, who needed to be well and safely educated where no bombs would fall, Alice soon found that her work opportunities were limited.

At first, Edward John, barely nine years old when his life was so drastically changed by the war, was understandably anxious about how these changes would affect him. Although his mother did her best to conceal how much her husband’s desertion had damaged her, Edward John was aware of her
unhappiness. His reaction to the news that she was considering working as warden in a Land Army hostel had immediately intrigued him. ‘What’s a hostel? What does a warden have to do? Will there be animals and can I come too?’ had been his first list of questions. To which Alice had responded, ‘It’s where land girls live when they work on the farms. A warden has to supervise the hostel, cook the meals and take care of the girls. Yes, there will be animals and yes, you can come every weekend. You will be a weekly boarder at your prep school.’ There were further enquiries regarding what, exactly, land girls were. What did supervising mean and what sort of animals would there be and wasn’t there a village school he could go to instead of being a boarder in Exeter? The inquisition had continued, concluding with Alice informing him firmly that, yes, there was a village school but no, he would not be attending it.

It had been largely Edward John’s overwhelming enthusiasm that had influenced Alice to cast aside her doubts about accepting the wardenship. She had already seen the near primitive condition of the ancient, Devon longhouse that was to accommodate ten girls. She had been informed that the only assistance she would receive would be from Rose, the cowman’s widow, who made clear her disapproval of the choice of Alice as warden. While Edward John’s enthusiasm had not been solely responsible for her decision, it was true that his happiness was high on her agenda and with no other employment on offer, enough for her to find herself in the office of the Land Army Regional Officer, signing a contract committing her to at least twelve months as warden of the hostel at Lower Post Stone Farm.

Edward John found the land girls surprising. He was unfamiliar with the way they spoke and the way they behaved. Nevertheless he took to them and they took to him. In fact, he saw very little of them, because except for milking and at harvest time, the general farmwork ceased at midday on Saturdays, giving most of the girls that afternoon and all day Sunday off. This meant that on the two days when Edward John was at the farm, the girls were mostly absent from it.

During the run-up to the D-Day landings the South West had been overrun by troops, many of them American GIs, and all of them in the final stages of training for the invasion of northern France. The Post Stone girls had been in great demand for barrack room hops and for trips to Exeter to the cinemas, dance halls and pubs. There had even been a cricket match at a nearby camp – land girls versus GIs – followed by high tea in the mess and dancing to a regimental band from a nearby Fleet Air Arm establishment. It was on that occasion that Hester Tucker had met Private Reuben Westerfeldt, a relationship which resulted in marriage, followed, tragically, by Reuben’s death on Omaha Beach and, later and more happily, by the birth of his daughter, Thurza.

Most of the girls’ conversation either went over Edward John’s head, or, being mainly concerned with boyfriends, clothing coupons and the procurement of nylon stockings, failed to interest him. Sometimes, if the subject under discussion became inappropriate for her son’s ears, Alice would raise a warning finger to her lips. On one occasion, just before Edward John’s tenth birthday, he had inadvertently silenced the supper table by asking what a ‘period’ was.
He had been baffled when, after a brief silence, his mother explained that it was ‘a portion of time’. He had been unable to satisfactorily discover why Marion was given an aspirin because she was having a bad ‘portion of time’.

He enjoyed the rowdy, clamorous, turbulence of the hostel when, soon after his own arrival for the weekend, the land girls got back from the fields and fought noisily over the limited hot water in the one, peeling bathroom. In the summer there would be the sweet smell of female perspiration and then, after their shared ablutions, the scent of cheap perfume, face powder and nail varnish as they prepared themselves for whatever social life was on offer that evening. He liked the raucous choruses round the out-of-tune piano and the howl of the wind-up gramophone with its limited selection of records, the words and tunes of which would remain with him all his life. ‘Some day I’ll find you, Moonlight behind you …’

After two years Edward John’s fascination with the farmland which rose from the valley floor and up towards The Tops was undiminished by familiarity. He loved the Bayliss’s shadowy woodland, with its smell of mouldering leaves and fungi. He loved the steep tracks that wound across the heathland and on up onto the moor itself, where bumble bees lumbered clumsily over the warm, golden, butter-smelling gorse. Most of all he loved the freedom he was allowed, which developed in him not only an infallible sense of direction but wider instincts of self-preservation and common sense.

Roger Bayliss had been quick to see these qualities in Edward John. The boy was observant where the stock was concerned and on more than one occasion had spotted an
ailing or injured animal and been instrumental in saving its life. When ‘little Arthur’, Mabel Hodges’ small son, had crawled into the bull’s pen it had been Edward John who had distracted the inflamed animal and pulled the little boy to safety through the framework of the stall.

Although he was unaware of it, Roger’s relationship with Edward John was much easier than that between him and his own son. The relationship between them had been complex. Perhaps they were too alike. Both had been unable to articulate their feelings about the loss of Frances, the boy’s mother and Roger’s wife. And when Christopher had become a flier and was under huge pressure, as were all the young Fighter Command pilots involved in the Battle of Britain, Roger’s fears for his son had not been confined to the regular hazards of aerial combat but that he would crack up, as he himself had done when, as an underage volunteer in World War One, overwhelmed by the horrors of trench warfare, he had, for some considerable time, lost his reason.

In 1943, when history had repeated itself, Roger had failed to respond to his son’s need for sympathy and support, leaving this to Georgina, whose feelings were also in a state of confusion as she herself was caught between her family’s pacifist ideals and her own increasing intolerance of the Nazi regime.

Half-term approached and to Edward John’s enormous relief, his compulsory visit to his father was cancelled on account of a mumps epidemic at his half-sister’s kindergarten.

Pamela was due home for a weekend, which coincided neatly with a Young Farmers dinner dance, held at the Rougemont Hotel in Exeter, to celebrate the start of the fox-hunting season.

Edward John had realised, as he made his way through the guests gathering in the hotel foyer, that he was one of the youngest of them. There was an animated contingent from Seale Hayne Agricultural College, some of whom were self-consciously sporting dinner jackets and black ties, probably for the first time in their lives. Others were wearing what looked like sixth-form blazers with the insignias of their various public schools on their pockets.

In his final year at his prep school, Edward John had been required to wear his first pair of long trousers together with a new blazer, the sleeves of his old one having become noticeably too short. He was a tallish boy for his twelve and a bit years, so that with his height, his long trousers and his new blazer there was very little evidence of the fact that he was several years younger than most of the other boys there, who already considered themselves to be young men.

He positioned himself in the ballroom, directly opposite the entrance, so that he would see Pamela the moment she arrived.

He barely recognised her. She was taller than he remembered and more woman than girl now. With the freedom of her dress-allowance she had bought herself a gown of such sophistication that her mother had almost forbidden her to wear it. But Pamela’s will had prevailed and there she stood, slender in midnight-blue chiffon, shoulders bare except for narrow velvet straps. Her hair was up, revealing her long neck and she was smiling her cool smile. As if it had been waiting for her appearance – and perhaps it had been – the small orchestra began to play. Instantly surrounded, Pamela surveyed the available partners, and choosing the best-looking
of the Seale Hayne boys, allowed herself to be led onto the dance floor.

Quite what Edward John had expected that evening, he did not know. Certainly not this. He had some vague idea that he would be there and she would be there and that would somehow be enough. Had he intended to ask her to dance? No. Because he didn’t know how to. There had been no dancing classes at his prep school. Next year, at his public school there would be. Tonight he and she would have sat, he had supposed, side by side on the small gilt, brocade-covered chairs that fringed the dance floor and talked. About …? Probably their horses? Or whether they would ride next day? Or go into Exeter to the cinema? Another of the Seale Hayne boys was dancing with her now. When the dance ended and she had been escorted back to the table where her parents had settled themselves, Edward John crossed the floor.