Once a Land Girl (2 page)

‘Mum, do you think we should?’ Prue, between clients, kept abreast of stories of post-war rape and murder in the
Daily Mirror
.

‘Don’t be daft, child. Two of us could beat an attacker any day. Get in quick.’ Mrs Lumley scrambled into the front seat without giving her daughter a glance.

Prue opened the back door and fell into a seat that seemed to her more like the softest sofa.

The man turned to her. ‘You all right?’

‘Fine, thanks.’ She could just see very wide-apart dark eyes above a certain pudginess of cheek.

‘Where to?’

‘Twenty-five Wimberly Road, if you don’t mind.’

Prue was certain the question had been to her, but her mother’s swift reply made her realize that Mrs Lumley’s excitement at the possibility of adventure was even greater than her
own.

‘Delighted. It’s on my way.’

The Daimler swooshed forward, parting the deep water on the street.

‘I’m afraid we’ll be making wet marks on your seats,’ said Mrs Lumley.

‘That’s no matter. Easily taken care of

Prue sat back, closed her eyes. Despite the discomfort of her soaking clothes this, she realized, was as near to bliss as a girl could come when she was not lying beneath a wonderful lover.

‘I’m Barry Morton,’ said the man, suddenly, breaking a fraction of silence.

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Morton. I’m Elsie Lumley. In the back it’s my daughter Prudence – Prue, we call her.’

‘Very nice.’

‘So . . . how come you have such a lovely car?’

‘I’m in cars. Buying and selling. Ten years from now there’ll be a very big demand for cars, all sorts. The market will explode. Mark my words.’

‘I see. Very interesting.’

‘And what line of business are you in yourself?’

‘I have my own hair salon: Elsie’s Bond Street Hair Salon, it’s called. Prue helps out.’

‘I often pass it. I’ve noticed it several times.’ He knew how to flatter, thought Prue, though it was just possible he spoke the truth.

‘Very kind of you to say so.’

Prue wished the journey would never end. This was no ordinary car: this was a moving cloud, a velvet box, a jewel. Its engine made no sound. There was sheepskin carpet at her feet, tickling her
wet ankles. And there, bugger it, far too soon, was their road.

Barry Morton drew to a stop very slowly. Neither of his passengers moved. Mrs Lumley pushed back a strand of wet hair that clung to her cheek – Prue knew her mother was wishing she’d
put on more lipstick before they left the shop, but she couldn’t have known that an ordinary journey home was to be transformed by a millionaire rescuer – for presumably he was a
millionaire.

Mrs Lumley turned to him, puckering her lips in the way she did when fondling a cat, or catching sight of some man across the street whose looks she fancied. ‘Well here we are, Mr Morton.
I can only thank you for your true kindness.’

‘Do call me Barry.’

Why call him Barry when he was about to drive off and they would never see him again? Prue wondered. She still did not move. She wanted to remember the touch of the seat against her shoulders.
She wanted to remember it when she was on the bus, or walking towards another dreary day.

‘Ba-rry’, said Mrs Lumley, after a pause to contemplate just how she should graft the name of this remarkable stranger on her tongue. She leant very slightly towards him, put a brief
finger on his shoulder. ‘We mustn’t detain you,’ she said sadly.

‘My pleasure,’ said Barry. Prue could not work out the logic of his reply, but sensed he was enjoying her mother’s appreciation. ‘Let me open the door for you.’

It would have been foolish to get out in such heavy rain when all he had to do was lean across his passenger. Prue could understand that. She watched, fascinated, as Barry leant as discreetly as
a bulky man can across a strange woman and opened the door. A shaft of rain flung into the car. Prue managed to open the back door on her own, helped only by an encouraging smile from the
millionaire driver. ‘You’d better hurry,’ he said.

‘Can’t make much difference, we’re so wet already.’

Barry’s remark had been addressed to Prue this time, but Mrs Lumley’s quick response showed that she was now happily in charge of any remaining fragments of conversation. She gave
the sort of laugh that Prue remembered had come so often to her mother before the war.

They hurried up the concrete path, heads bowed against the wind, eyes blurred with rain. In the small kitchen Prue lit the gas fire and Mrs Lumley put on the kettle. The white walls blazed in
the light of the forty-watt bulb that hung beneath a raffia shade from the centre of the ceiling. Prue remembered how she used to think this was how the perfect kitchen should be, and at first had
been shocked and repelled by the kitchen at Hallows Farm, with its peeling dun walls and a rabbit waiting in the sink to be skinned. Now she thought that the perfect kitchen. Her mother’s
neatness and brightness, the china plates and Bakelite mugs with matching poppies, jarred her senses in a way she found puzzling.

‘Well I never,’ Mrs Lumley was saying. ‘Talk about the unexpected. But there again, surprises do turn up once in a while. It was nice he – Ba-rry – noticed the
shop.’ She went to her pile of souvenir biscuit tins and chose the top one which housed a precious store of gingernuts, only brought out on special occasions. There was lightness in her step.
Prue recognized a flame of hope. The pathos in her mother’s small toss of her head was alarming.

‘You never know,’ Mrs Lumley went on, dithering among the biscuits. ‘He knows the salon. He might drop in one day.’

A week later there was still no sign of Barry Morton. Mrs Lumley never mentioned him after the night they had met, which Prue guessed was an act of considerable self-will. She knew her mother
could think of little else. In silence as she stirred tinned soup in a saucepan, her lips would move into the familiar provocative pout and she would run a hand through her thin, decorous hair. She
had started to paint her nails scarlet, a new colour by Peggy Sage.

One evening she turned from the saucepan to Prue. ‘I shouldn’t really be saying this to you, Prue,’ she began, ‘but sometimes I don’t half fancy lying back and
thinking of England again under some nice fella.’

‘Oh Mum. Something will happen.’ Prue had no wish to be party to her mother’s private yearnings. She put an arm round her shoulders, felt the bone of the blades through the
skin.

‘I hope so.’

The next afternoon there was no one booked into the salon. Prue and her mother sat on the two chairs placed in front of mirrors, contemplating their own faces. They waited patiently for a
surprise appointment. Occasionally someone one would drop in on a whim, attracted perhaps by the photographs of Margaret Lockwood and her Drene-brilliant hair in the window.

‘I wonder, Mum,’ said Prue, who was so bored that even the act of wondering tired her, ‘if anyone actually thinks Margaret Lockwood gets her hair done here?’

‘Must do. Else they wouldn’t come in, would they?’

Mrs Lumley, exhausted by hope, moved her eyes from her own reflection to the door of the shop. Thus she was the first to see the delivery man knock, not in reality but in the mirror image. He
held a large bunch of flowers. Then Prue saw his reflection in her mirror. As Mrs Lumley leapt up, knocking hairbrushes, combs and tongs to the ground, Prue kept her seat. This was her
mother’s moment: she had no intention of detracting from it.

At the door Mrs Lumley gave the delivery man the sort of smile she had not exercised for a week. ‘Those’ll be for me,’ she said. ‘Thank you, dear.’ She signed a
receipt with a shaking hand, returned to her seat. Then everything went into slow motion. She pulled at a red bow of pre-war satin ribbon, let the tissue paper fall in a cloud onto the floor. She
buried her head in a bunch of pink roses, searching for scent that did not exist, but the surprise caused her to cry out with joy.

‘Who can they be from, Mum?’ Prue asked, knowing how much her mother would enjoy the answer.

‘Who do you think, silly?’

‘Where’s the card?’

‘The card? Oh yes. Silly me, this time.’ She bent down, ruffled through the tissue paper, noting in the still practical part of her mind that there was a lot of hair on the floor
that Prue should have swept up. She found the small envelope. ‘Here, take these while I open it.’ She handed the roses to Prue.

Mrs Lumley slit open the envelope with her best cutting scissors. To Prue, impatient to know what Barry Morton had said, her mother’s every movement was maddeningly slow.

The card was pulled from its miniature envelope by two scarlet nails – chipped, now, sign of fading hope. Then there was a pause while Mrs Lumley found her glasses in the pocket of her
apron. Finally she held up the card so slowly it might have been a great weight, and turned it towards the grey light in the window. Prue watched, horrified, as her mother’s slow eyes trudged
back and forth over some short message, and the skin round her rouged cheeks turned a deadly white.

‘They’re for you. They’re not for me.’ She handed Prue the card.

‘Oh, Mum. There must be some mistake.’

‘No. Read it.’

Prue scanned Barry’s politely phrased invitation to a ‘proper ride’ in the Daimler and a drink on Friday evening. He added that he would be honoured, should she accept.
‘It could still be a mistake,’ she said. ‘He may have meant Mrs.’

‘No. The handwriting’s quite clear.’

Prue could see her mother was beginning to disintegrate. Her feet were shuffling on the floor among the unswept hair. She kept licking her lips.

‘Well I won’t go,’ said Prue. ‘Of course I won’t go. Who’d want to go for a drink with a strange man just because he has a bloody great car?’

Mrs Lumley looked her daughter in the eye, suddenly fierce. ‘You will, my girl,’ she said. ‘You certainly will. I want to know what game Mr Barry Morton’s playing.
You’ll go.’

‘If you say so,’ said Prue. Concerned by her mother’s disappointment, she was in no state to anticipate what the date with Barry Morton might bring.

Mrs Lumley watched Barry’s arrival from her bedroom window. She had been waiting behind the net curtain for twenty minutes and was surprised when the Daimler drew up at
precisely six thirty for she had begun to think he might be a cad rather than a punctual man of honour. After all, he had been so friendly to her that rainy night, scarcely exchanging a word with
Prue in the back seat. He couldn’t have caught more than a glimpse of her.

As Barry strode down the front path she could see that he was a man of means: camel-hair coat, carnation in his buttonhole, box of Black Magic in hand – well, obviously a man who could
pull strings even in these days of sweet rationing. She could also judge better, in daylight, his age: definitely a touch older than she had supposed. If things had turned out for her and Barry she
would have been accused of cradle-snatching. If possible romance came to fruition (she had found the phrase in a romantic novel and it had stuck in her mind) for Prue and him, it would be said her
daughter was associating with (marrying?) an older man.

She heard voices downstairs but could not make out the words. Prue had begged her to be there to greet Barry, to ‘make things easier’. But Mrs Lumley had been insistent. She
certainly wasn’t up for making conversation with a man who had shown his colours so strongly, then changed his mind. All the same, when Prue and Barry, halfway down the path, stopped, turned
and waved up at her window, Mrs Lumley relented. She waved back, knowing the gesture would be unclear behind the net curtain. After that, she observed Barry put a hand under Prue’s elbow and
guide her to the car.

Several faces peered from neighbouring houses. This Mrs Lumley noted with satisfaction. Her sense of vicarious importance increased when several children ran up for a closer look at the car. One
stretched out a hand and touched its bonnet. That, too, was gratifying. Mrs Lumley had always been accused of bringing a touch of class to the neighbourhood – though the accusation was never
voiced, she was positive it existed. She had always been able to feel it. And now here was proof. Rich man, swanky car, pretty daughter taken out. Curiously soon, considering her dreadful week, Mrs
Lumley found that she was able to transfer her hopes for herself to hopes for Prue. She came downstairs, sat in the kitchen surrounded by her precious souvenir tins, and as she ate several of the
best biscuits – surely extravagance was permissible on such an occasion – she imagined the couple fox-trotting in some posh hotel in the city centre.

Barry Morton made no suggestion about fox-trotting, but drove instead to a large pub on the outskirts of the city. There, Prue felt overdressed. She had chosen –
encouraged by the mother – the dress she had worn at Buckingham Palace for the tea party the King and Queen had given for land girls. It had been perfect on that unforgettable day. Several of
the other girls, who had had to alter their mothers’ pre-war dresses or run something up from lace curtains and parachute silk, had congratulated her. An almost bluebell blue (not quite dark
enough to Prue’s keen eye for colour, but no one else noticed this imperfection) with a sweetheart neckline and a flirty skirt, the dress had, as she recounted back at the farm, dazzled their
Majesties.

In the smoke-filled bar, at the table Barry chose, furnished only with a tin ashtray advertising Colman’s mustard, she feared it was too much. On the way to the table she was conscious of
many turning heads – mostly of men, some in uniform. When she crossed her legs her knees were more exposed than she would have liked, but the shortage of even artificial silk meant the skirt
had to be short. Still, she was wearing her only pair of nylon stockings, which gave her legs a burnished sheen, a sight that Barry Morton was able to admire as he lit his cigar.

‘So, Prue,’ he said, ‘where do we begin?’

Several ideas skittered through Prue’s mind, rendering her silent. In truth she was aware of a clutch of disappointment in her stomach. She had imagined that a man with a Daimler would
head straight for the poshest hotel in the area, not this dreary pub. Perhaps, she thought, he was putting her through some kind of test.