Some Sunny Day (27 page)

To Rosie’s disappointment they were only at the dairy farm for two days, whilst they filled in for another gang, and on the Wednesday morning they discovered that they were being sent to a different farm, to do some weeding.

To make matters even worse, when they arrived at the farm they discovered that George Duncan
was in even more of a foul temper than usual. When one of the girls from another gang asked to be excused because she wasn’t feeling well, he stepped up to her and yelled at her in such a loud voice that everyone including the lorryload of POWs that had just arrived, could hear. ‘No you can’t. Bloody women and their ruddy women’s problems.’

The poor girl looked close to tears and Rosie really felt for her. She gave the foreman an indignant look on the poor girl’s behalf as he strode past them on his way back across the yard towards the lorry, and then had to hold her breath as he saw her and stopped to glare at her.

‘That was brave of you, Rosie,’ Peggy breathed admiringly. ‘The way he looked at you just then would have scared me to death.’

‘You’ll have to watch your step now, Rosie,’ Mary cautioned her. ‘He’s a bully and no mistake, and if you want my advice you don’t want to be falling foul of him.’

Rosie knew that she was right, but it was too late to regret what she had done now. The arrival of the POWs had caught her off guard after so many days of not seeing them. They looked so dejected, with their bowed shoulders and general air of defeat, that she felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for them.

Immediately she tried to distance herself from her feelings and to focus on something that would stiffen her spine. Like
him
, for instance. He certainly
had had a bit of an air about him that said he thought a lot of himself. Not that she had noticed him that much, of course, but you could tell when a lad was a bit on the arrogant side with just one look. And she certainly wasn’t going to look across at the men again just to check to see if he was there with them, and she hadn’t noticed.

But thanks to Sheila she discovered that she didn’t have to, because the other girl had obviously already had a good look at the men, and was able to tell her teasingly, ‘That good-looking lad as fancies you isn’t here, Rosie. Shame.’

‘Will you stop going on about him?’ Rosie hissed back to her. ‘He doesn’t fancy me, and even if he did, I don’t fancy him.’

‘Can I have him then? He’s a smashing-looking lad, with a lovely smile, and them big brown eyes of his! Oooh, it makes me insides go all funny just thinking about them,’ Sheila giggled.

Rosie certainly wasn’t going to respond to Sheila’s silliness. Why, she hadn’t even been close enough to him to see if his eyes were brown! They probably would be, though – that warm gorgeous brown that could melt your heart with a single glance. And Italian men learned young how to give that adoring amorous look that turned girls’ heads. They were nothing more than flirts, the lot of them, and she would certainly never be taken in by one of them. Sheila was welcome to him.

It was a long walk to the field they had to work, carrying their hoes and the buckets for the weeds
that had to be buried deep in a trench at the bottom of the field the foreman had set the POWs to dig.

‘I’m going to go over and have a chat with them lads,’ Sheila announced as soon as the foreman had disappeared.

‘Sheila, you can’t,’ Rosie protested. ‘We’re not supposed to have anything to do with them, and if the foreman catches you—’

‘He won’t! Anyway, what’s wrong? Don’t you want to know where your chap is?’

‘No I do not,’ Rosie replied fiercely, ‘and he is not my chap.’

But it was too late. Sheila was already taking advantage of the foreman’s absence and edging her way round to where the men were working.

Rosie refused to watch her, concentrating instead on her weeding. Sheila was going to get them all into serious trouble if the foreman came back, and Rosie didn’t want to be dragged into her mischief any more than she had to be. Angrily, Rosie jabbed her hoe at the weeds, slicing them off and throwing them into the bucket.

When Sheila finally came back, Rosie pretended not to have noticed, but Sheila wasn’t the kind to keep quiet.

She gave a gusty sigh and announced with obvious disappointment, ‘Well, that were a waste of time. There’s not one of them can speak a word of English. It turned out that they’re not the same lot that were around the other day.’

Rosie couldn’t avoid the Italians completely,
even though she would have preferred to do so, because the girls had to take their buckets of weeds over to the trench the men were digging to throw them in.

The foreman was back now and bullying them dreadfully, and the POWs had a crushed, exhausted look about them. Brief snatches of their conversation reached Rosie and a wave of nostalgia swept over her, as those fragments of the familiar language of her old friends took her back to her childhood. Just hearing Italian being spoken overwhelmed her with sadness, leaving her feeling miserable and forlorn.

‘It’s no wonder them poor lads look the way they do with that foreman treating them like that,’ Mary said sympathetically when she came back from getting rid of her own weeds. ‘There’s one down there that doesn’t look much older than me own kid brother, poor little thing.’

Rosie had seen the young boy she meant, but whilst the other girls were expressing their sympathy, instead of joining in, Rosie shook her head and said fiercely, ‘Well, I don’t feel sorry for them. They’re the enemy, after all, and if it wasn’t for the likes of them then there wouldn’t be a war.’

She could see from their faces that she had shocked the other girls.

‘That’s a bit hard, isn’t it, Rosie?’ Jean protested. ‘I’ve heard as how that Mussolini was forcing men to fight by threatening their families. There’s a lot of Italians who don’t agree with that Fascism stuff.
And as for them lads down there, that poor kid looks half scared to death of the foreman already and he’s got a bruise the size of an egg on his forehead. If you ask me we should show them a bit of sympathy, just like we were told at Reaseheath.’

‘You can if you like, but I’m not going to,’ Rosie answered doggedly, but she knew that her face was burning bright red with a mixture of chagrin and defiance.

‘Fine. Well, you go and have your dinner with the foreman then, ’cos the rest of us are going to have ours with the POWs,’ Jean told her smartly.

Rosie watched them as they walked away. She felt as though a huge uncomfortable lump of misery had taken root inside her chest. But she wasn’t going to swallow her pride and run after the other girls. She wasn’t going to have anything to do with any Italians, no matter what anyone else said. Italians had brought her nothing but heartbreak and misery. First Bella turning against her, and then Maria and la Nonna abandoning her, and finally the news that Aldo had been her mother’s lover. And if her supposed new friends preferred their company to hers, well then, that was their loss, wasn’t it? Her throat prickled and her eyes were smarting but Rosie wasn’t going to let herself admit that it was her own fault that she felt hurt and left out. It was the Italians that were to blame, just as an Italian had been to blame for causing her father so much pain. Just look at the trouble her mother had brought on their small family,
thanks to getting herself involved with one of them. Rosie didn’t want to be tarred with the same brush as her mother but, more importantly, she didn’t want to betray her father’s memory by being friendly to members of a nationality that had caused him so much distress. The other girls could do what they liked. She wasn’t going to be budged.

Even so, as the afternoon wore on Rosie was miserably conscious of the way she was being excluded from her friends’ chatter. Once again she was all alone.

It was growing dusk before the foreman returned to tell them they could finish work.

‘’E certainly gets his ruddy pound of flesh,’ the girl hoeing next to Rosie grumbled. ‘I can hardly see me ruddy hoe, never mind the weeds. And to think they’re only paying us twenty-four shillings a week, and we have to pay for our own board out of that. I’m beginning to wish I’d stayed put and got meself a factory job. That foreman’s made us work all this time but his breath stank of beer and you can bet he knocked off ages ago and went off to the pub whilst we were still having to graft.’

Rosie didn’t say anything but she too had smelled the beer on the foreman’s breath.

As the girls were lining up to leave the field for the long walk back to the farm, the POWs were standing beside the trench, but the next moment, the foreman, who had been yelling at them to get in line, grabbed hold of the young lad the girls
had felt so sorry for earlier and gave him such a shaking that he dropped his spade. The foreman swore at him and let go of him, bending to pick up the spade, which he then drove down hard into the ground at the boy’s feet.

They all heard the boy cry out when he didn’t jump back swiftly enough, and they saw the way the sharp spade sliced open the flesh on his leg as he fell over.

Rosie had to smother a horrified cry of her own whilst the other girls protested loudly against the foreman’s bullyboy behaviour.

‘Poor little sod. That must really have hurt him,’ Mary said angrily as the young man struggled to his feet, helped by his friends.

Several of the girls hurried forward, ignoring the foreman, to see if the boy was all right but he was so obviously embarrassed by their concern that they fell back again.

‘It doesn’t seem too bad,’ Audrey reported to Mary. ‘He wasn’t bleeding very much and he can walk.’

‘It was still a rotten thing to do,’ Jean objected.

‘The man’s a proper bully,’ Mary agreed as they all started to trudge wearily back to the farm. ‘I can’t bear that kind of behaviour.’

It was almost dark when they finally got back to the hostel.

‘You should have seen my bathwater,’ Mary grimaced later on in the evening when they were
all in the common room. ‘You could grow potatoes in it, it was that thick with mud.’

‘Just as well George Duncan can’t hear you saying that, otherwise he’ll have us tekin’ it back to the field,’ Sheila groaned.

‘Shush!’ Mary demanded all of a sudden. ‘Listen.’

All the girls went quiet as they heard the now familiar sound of planes overhead.

‘That’s what you should be thinking about when you’re saying how sorry you are for the POWs,’ Rosie said bitterly once the planes had gone.

‘Italians aren’t the same as Germans, Rosie,’ Mary insisted firmly. ‘And I have to say that I was surprised at you for the way you acted today. I thought better of you than that. I really did.’

Red-faced, Rosie bent her head, her eyes burning with tears.

Half an hour later, after Rosie had gone up to the dormitory, feeling that her company wasn’t welcome in the common room, the door opened and Mary came in.

‘I’m sorry I was a bit sharp with you earlier, Rosie,’ she said quietly, ‘only I can’t help thinking about how it’s been on the newsreels – about the way some of Hitler’s men have been treating them as they’ve taken prisoner, and I wouldn’t want to think we was like that, in this country. I’d like to think we had some decency – war can’t strip you of that unless you let it.’

‘I don’t mean the Italians any harm,’ Rosie told
her, relieved that she was being offered an olive branch. ‘I just don’t want to get too friendly with them, that’s all. And the way Sheila was going on about…well, I didn’t like it.’

Mary shook her head. ‘Well, I don’t know, Rosie; they seem a decent enough lot of lads to me. And the girls felt you was being a bit unkind.’

‘I have my reasons for what I’ve said,’ Rosie told her, ‘but…but I can’t talk about them.’

‘I can’t say that I understand, because I don’t, but you’re a good sort, Rosie, and I don’t want us to be bad friends. Why don’t you come down and get your supper before Jean eats it for you?’

Mary was smiling encouragingly at her and holding open the door. Jean was always hungry, so Rosie returned her smile and got up.

No one was smiling later on that night, though. They had all heard the noise of the bombing of Liverpool, and then had all listened to it dying away, and now, although none of them had said anything, Rosie knew that, like her, the others were straining their ears for the first sound of the planes returning to Hack Green.

‘Here they come,’ Peggy squeaked, her voice high with relief.

Everyone was counting silently and as they got to ten, the tension in the dormitory mounted. Everyone knew that two fewer planes had come back than had flown out, but no one dared say so. Rosie was holding her own breath along with
everyone else, willing the engine noise of the two final planes to break the tension. The seconds became minutes, and still no one spoke. And then in the darkness someone gave a small muffled anguished sob. Rosie knew immediately that it would be Peggy. Pushing back her bedding, she slid her feet onto the cold lino and pattered quietly over to her bed, only to discover that most of the other girls had had the same thought.

They were all still clustered round Peggy’s bed when, just as they had given up hope, they heard the rackety wheezy sound of a damaged plane accompanied by the stronger sound of another.

For once no one cared about breaking the blackout. The girls all rushed to the nearest window, pulled back the blind and looked up into the night sky.

There, coming towards them from the west, they could see two planes flying virtually wing to wing as the stronger one escorted the weaker.

‘Oh, thank God, thank God…’ Peggy breathed.

Rosie knew she wasn’t the only one with tears in her eyes as they finally heard the welcome sound of the planes banking for their descent to Hack Green.

Of course, none of them was fit for anything in the morning when the alarm went.

They had been put back on dairy work at yet another farm because, as they found out from another gang who had also been drafted in, there’d been a tuberculosis scare with some new cows that
had arrived at the farm, with one of the cows already having to be put down and the rest quarantined. The girls who had been working with them had been sent for tests, and Rosie and the others were given the job of scrubbing down the milking shed with a disinfectant so strong it threatened to take the skin off their hands, and the smell brought tears to their eyes.