Once a Land Girl (14 page)

‘Pigs? Wow! I love pigs.’

‘I made a shed for them a few years back. Seems they’d be grateful for help two or three days a week. Loved the fact that you’re an experienced farm worker. I said we’d
go over and meet them next week. Come on in, sit down. I’ll make you a cup of coffee.’

Prue sat in her usual chair by the window, the sun warm on her lap. She felt at ease here, in Johnny’s untidy room. She felt, again, a profound sense of gratitude, both for his intuition
and his kindness. ‘Thanks so much.’ She cupped her hands round the mug. Johnny went back to the table. There was no need for Prue to think of anything to say. She was grateful that he
was the sort of man who could cope with long silences, didn’t see in them anything suspicious or accusatory. Prue was grateful for that, too.

Eventually he pushed aside his papers, turned to her. ‘Also,’ he said, I thought we might drive down to Hallows Farm at the end of the week. We could start very early.’

‘That would be wonderful.’

‘I’ll wait till I see Barry’s car has gone . . . then off we’ll go.’

Prue was puzzled by the note of conspiracy but did not query it. As Barry seemed not to mind what she did while he was working – it held no interest for him – she would feel no guilt
at spending a long day out with Johnny. But perhaps he was right – it would be better not to mention their plan.

‘I look forward to that, though it might be . . .’ Prue decided not to add the word ‘difficult’.

‘People say you shouldn’t go back to somewhere you loved,’ Johnny went on. ‘But it can lay to rest the memory.’ Prue gave a very small laugh. ‘I hate to see
you so sad, Mrs Lawrence dying. We’ll try to have a good day.’

‘We will. Thanks, Johnny. You’re the kindest man . . .’

On the day they planned to go to Hallows Farm Barry left the house soon after six for he had to catch a train to London. As soon as he had driven off in the Daimler Prue parked
the Sunbeam in the road to avoid curious glances from Bertha. It was half an hour before Johnny had said he would be ‘concealed’ by a neighbouring tree but, to Prue’s surprise,
there he was already, waiting. As he got into the passenger seat she giggled at the slightly nefarious nature of their rendezvous. Her spirits lifted. ‘You’re early,’ she
said.

‘I had a hunch Barry might leave earlier than usual.’

‘You’re either uncannily intuitive or very peculiar,’ said Prue.

‘I’ve been awake for ages. Rather looking forward to it all. And it means we’ve got a good start, clear roads,’ said Johnny, ‘so you can put your foot down, see
what it’s like. I don’t think you’ve ever done over forty in your own car, have you?’

They drove through semi-darkness, which gradually gave way to a spread of pure, colourless light in which the rising sun spread its trails of amber. Once on the trunk road Prue accelerated
obediently, and loved the speed. The long journey flashed by. When they came to the familiar country near Hinton Half Moon she slowed down, stopped. She asked Johnny to take over.

‘I just want to concentrate on looking,’ she said. They drove to the farm, parked in the lane outside the yard. ‘Best if we go and introduce ourselves to whoever,’ she
said. ‘I’m sure they won’t mind if we look around, walk over the fields.’

The farmyard was now an empty place: no steaming dung heap, no rank smells, no hens running amok. The cobbles were swept, Sly’s old pigsty was empty. Not a sign of farming life.

‘Cripes,’ said Prue, frowning at the new blue paint on the window frames. ‘I’m glad the Lawrences can’t see this.’

She knocked on the back door – there had never been a bell – dreading the moment the new owner appeared.

A middle-aged woman with an angry mouth opened the door. ‘Yes?’ In the single word she managed to convey her distaste for people who dropped by uninvited.

Prue gave her a charming smile. ‘I was one of the land girls billeted here in the war,’ she said, ‘when the Lawrences owned the place. My friend and I were nearby, and wondered
if you would mind if we just looked around, went for a walk . . .?’

The woman allowed pure scorn to move her face. ‘You were a land girl?’

‘I was.’

‘We all know what they got up to.’

Prue giggled. ‘We had to work extremely hard, but it was a wonderful job.’

‘I’m sure.’ The woman’s defensive stance melted a little. She didn’t go so far as to ask them in – and had she done so Prue would have refused. She did not
want to see what abominations had appeared in the kitchen. With a look of extravagant condescension the woman agreed to their looking round the place. ‘Mind you shut the gates,’ she
said, in case Prue had forgotten a prime rule. ‘We’ve got a lot of sheep.’

‘You didn’t keep the Friesians?’

‘We couldn’t run to cows, no. We’re not cattle people. We’re going to pull down the old milking sheds next year.’ With a tilt of her head she indicated the sheds
across the yard, lest Prue had forgotten, too, their whereabouts.

‘Gosh,’ said Prue. ‘Well, sorry to have bothered you and we’ll be sure to shut the gates.’ She hoped her note of sarcasm was appreciated.

The woman backed into the kitchen. Prue saw a flash of hideous new paint and shut her eyes. Then she and Johnny made their way back across the yard.

‘The trouble with that old bat,’ said Johnny, ‘is that she missed what she thought the land girls got up to.’ They both laughed.

At Sly’s old pigsty Prue stopped, leant on the wall and looked at the bare concrete floor.

‘I suppose they’re going to pull this down, too,’ she said. ‘Can’t think why they bothered to buy a farm.’

‘Why don’t you take me on a guided tour of the land?’ Johnny asked. ‘I’d like to know some of the things that happened in some of the places.’

His interest, reckoned Prue, wasn’t just kindness: it was genuine, and she warmed to him for that. On the other hand he seemed . . . out of place: a northern poet-carpenter in thin clean
trousers and a tweed jacket. Prue disliked him for not being Joe, or Barry One, or even Robert, and berated herself for such thoughts. They began to walk down the lane, stopping at gates to look
into some of the fields where Prue had spent so many days ploughing, or picking up potatoes, or harvesting. They came to the huge hedge where Ag had earned her colours in Mr Lawrence’s eyes:
he had nominated her the best female hedger he had ever known. Now it was shaggy, uncared-for, its high branches adrift.

‘Good work not kept up,’ said Prue. ‘Everything goes to ruin.’

At that moment a bird fluttered out of the lower branches of the hedge and rose into the sky. Prue clutched Johnny’s arm, excited. ‘Look at that! I do believe it’s a stormcock.
Mr Lawrence would have loved to see it. Ag taught him its Latin name. She said he was so pleased she’d reminded him.’

‘
Turdus viscivorus,
isn’t it?’ said Johnny, quietly, moving his arm from Prue’s hand.

‘You know what? Ag would have liked you. She’s a real scholar, too. I remember the evening of the day they saw the
Turdus-
whatsit. At supper that night Mr Lawrence taught us
all the other names for a stormcock. He said we should learn about birds. So I wrote all the names down and tried really hard just to show them I wasn’t a completely stupid
hairdresser.’ She frowned a little, patted the red spotted bow in her hair. ‘Shrite, skite, gawthrush, mistle thrush, garthrush, jercock . . . and one more. What was it?’

She looked up at Johnny.

‘Could be syecock?’

‘That’s it! Syecock. So you know more than just about chickens.’

‘A little. I’m glad we saw the stormcock.’

Suddenly Prue did not dislike him any more, though she could not be reconciled to his trousers.

They began to walk. They walked a long way, through all the fields so familiar to Prue that past and present were an inextricable jumble in her sight. Long Meadow, Lower Pasture, the place where
Ratty’s mad wife had thrown the scalding tea at the harvest gathering . . . They pushed their way through dozens of sheep, who paused from eating to look at them with their indignant yellow
eyes: sheep, but not the Lawrences’ sheep. Prue used to know the habits of every animal in the flock. But not these, not one did she recognize.

They came to the field where ploughing, on a steep slope, had always been hazardous. At the top Johnny suggested they have a rest. He laid his jacket on the ground, produced a Thermos of tea
from a pocket.

They sat without talking, looking down on the fields and the trees which were just beginning to turn. By now the sky was a blue very like that of her Buckingham Palace dress, thought Prue,
untrammelled by cloud. The occasional bleat from a sheep or the call of a skylark were the only sounds that chipped the huge silence.

‘Think we’d better go back,’ she said, when the tea was finished. The truth was she could not be sure that she would not cry if she went on taking in all this for much longer.
Memories could be dangerous, as Stella had said at one of their annual lunches, thinking of Joe. Just when you thought you were doing fine, they could suddenly flay you.

On the long walk back, the weather had one of those swift changes of mood that had often surprised Prue in the past. She would go off on the tractor on a sunny morning, only to be drenched by a
downpour a couple of hours later. The blue gave way to bruised sky and dark clouds. It began to rain. Prue did not care: she liked rain, and was pleased to see that the admirably quiet Johnny did
not put on his jacket again.

They passed the coppice, Prue’s constant meeting place and most loved corner of the Lawrences’ acreage. She looked up at the yellowing leaves of the elms, which guarded the dense
mass of evergreens of the inner wood, with its complicated tracks among the undergrowth and mossy banks.

‘Lovely-looking wood,’ said Johnny. ‘Shall we go in? Shelter from the rain?’

‘I’d rather not,’ said Prue, and they walked on. That he did not insist earned him further high marks in her appraisal.

Back at the farmyard the owner’s car had gone and there were no lights on in the house. Prue suggested they had a quick look at the barn before returning home. By now it was raining hard.
Their clothes were dark and clinging to them.

There was a grainy light in the barn. It took Prue’s eyes a few moments to adjust. She saw that here, at least, nothing had changed. Bales of hay were piled high. The old tractor –
her tractor – was still in its usual place in the corner. There were sacks of meal, some leaking beige trails thin as rats’ tails, and bags of pig food Sly had not eaten before she was
slaughtered. Plainly the new farmer did not consider the barn a priority and Prue was glad. She went over to the tractor, put a hand on one of its mudguards. Then she climbed up onto its seat,
remembering the exact curves of the iron, so well designed – especially, she used to think – to support the shape of her bottom. Looking down on Johnny, she laughed. ‘You realize
this is a great privilege, Johnny, do you? You’re seeing the Land Army’s best ever plougher actually sitting on her tractor. Cor, what I wouldn’t do to start the engine, drive off
. . .’

‘In this rain?’ Johnny mimicked her light note.

‘Best in the rain, I often thought. Lovely getting into your eyes, your mouth, though it didn’t do much for these.’ She touched the sodden bow that had flopped in her wet hair,
then climbed down. Johnny was looking up at the rafters, peering around. Prue imagined he was seeing just some untidy old barn. It would be impossible ever to explain to him what this place had
meant to her and the others: the things that had gone on there. She had no intention of trying.

‘Is that the rafter you walked along?’ he asked.

Prue nodded. ‘It is. It’s quite high, isn’t it?’

‘It certainly is.’ He gave her a look. ‘Would you dare to try it again?’

‘What? Now?’ For an infinitesimal moment Prue contemplated the idea, then dismissed it as absurd. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That was then. Some things can’t be
repeated.’

She moved towards the stack of hay bales, began to climb. It was as easy as she remembered. She sat on the highest one, looked down. Johnny had judged her feat as a challenge and was following
her surprisingly fast: she had not thought of him as athletic. He sat beside her, looked up at the rafters, some six feet above their heads, then down at the lowest spread of bales.

‘Quite some way to fall.’

‘It was. Though I didn’t fall to the bottom. I—’ She stopped. What had happened next was private, nothing to do with Johnny. As it was, she felt a rising of the
resentment that had come and gone all day. What was he doing here, trying to share her past?

The rain was harder now. Noisy gusts hit the roof with a sound of spilt nails. In her soaked shirt, Prue felt cold. She rather envied Johnny’s tweed jacket, which he had brought up here
with him and laid over the hay. But she resisted picking it up and putting it over her shoulders.

‘That rain,’ said Johnny. ‘It sounds like barrels of rice tipped onto iron.’

Prue looked at him with utter scorn. ‘No, it doesn’t,’ she said, ‘it sounds like rain on a corrugated roof, which is what it is. But then of course you’re a poet,
so I can’t squabble with your fancy ideas.’ She had no idea why she was so cross. Johnny had spent the day doing his best to be sympathetic, and all she could do was snub him.

‘You’re quite difficult, you know. Hard to please,’ he said.

‘Sorry.’

Johnny pulled the jacket towards him, took a Mars Bar from the pocket. He tore off the paper, and passed it to her.

Prue burst into tears. No wonder, she thought. This is the Lawrences’ barn and I’m here with Johnny, not Joe. I’m in the place Joe and I first made love, and he gave me a Mars
Bar. And now
Johnny
is doing the same thing.

‘This is unbearable,’ she sobbed, shaking her head as Johnny passed her the chocolate. ‘No, I don’t want it. This whole thing is an utter mistake. We should never have
come here. Why are we here?’

Johnny could scarcely understand her protest, so fraught were her sobs. ‘I don’t understand what’s happened – what’s the matter? Why’s a Mars Bar set you
off?’