Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings (24 page)

‘Us’ll ’ave snow afore us sees the back of this lot,’ Ferdie announced, eyeing the bleak grey sky and turning his back on an icy easterly wind. ‘On’y needs for this wind to back round to the north and we’ll cop it, you mark my words!’ While Mabel spent her Christmas at Lower Post Stone with her grandmother and little Arthur, Ferdie was to visit
his widowed sister, bearing with him a brace of pheasants and a salmon, all poached from his employer.

By the morning of Christmas Eve the goose was plucked, stuffed and waiting in the Lower Post Stone pantry for the moment, on Christmas morning, when Rose would slide it into the oven. The girls, their suitcases packed and lined up in the cross-passage, ready for when Fred would arrive to collect them and deliver them to the railway station, were hurrying through their morning tasks when the first flakes of snow shimmied down the wind. Ferdie lurched painfully across the yard; his damaged bones always hurt him more when the weather was foul.

‘See that?’ he roared, pointing north to where the sky was dark with lowering cloud. ‘Didn’t I say? Due north that wind be now! And the snow baint far behind ’un neither!’

By the time the girls had returned to Lower Post Stone, changed their clothes and, clutching their suitcases and parcels, were climbing, shivering, into the back of Fred’s truck, the landscape was solidifying into a white blur. Lionel had already arrived and with Georgina, well wrapped, on the pillion seat of his motorbike, had ridden carefully away along the slippery lane and headed towards their home.

Alice, Hester and Mabel had waved goodbye from the porch and then run, shuddering with cold, back into the warm farmhouse. Gwennan, on the grounds that she thought she might be coming down with something but possibly simply to avoid being asked to help prepare the
vegetables for Christmas dinner, went to bed with a
hot-water
bottle. An hour passed and a sort of peace descended on the farmhouse, broken only from time to time by squeals of pleasure from Arthur, who was playing on the recreation room floor with Edward-John’s train set. The snow, spiralling down, the flakes huge and soft, now blanketed the landscape and, driven by the wind, was beginning to pile up into significant drifts. Alice, her larder stocked with enough food to feed her reduced household for at least two days, felt curiously safe and satisfied as, with her fingertips, she cleared the condensation from her window and peered out at the immaculate snowy scene.

Then, to her surprise, she saw Fred’s truck labouring cautiously along the snow-filled lane towards her. Why, she wondered, had he returned to Lower Post Stone and not to the higher farm where his cottage stood, close to the byres and barns where his work lay?

She watched as the truck slithered to a stop outside the gate. Amazed, she saw her girls, one after the other, climb down from the rear of the truck and, clutching their suitcases and parcels, troop forlornly through the deep snow, up the path and back into the farmhouse.

‘There’s no trains runnin’!’ Marion wailed.

‘Some goods-wagons ’as got derailed up Taunton way and they’ve blocked the track! What with the snow and all, no one can do nothin’ so they’ve on’y gone and closed the bleedin’ line!’

‘There’s no trains runnin’ in or out!’

‘So we can’t go home!’

‘We can’t go home!’ they chorused in unison, their eyes on Alice as though she, by some miracle, could change things.

‘I’m so friggin cold, Mrs Todd!’ Annie hissed between chattering teeth.

Alice reached for the teapot. She ordered the weeping, shivering girls to go to their rooms and change into warm clothes. She decided to offer them hot buttered toast and it was when she went to the bread cupboard that the full implications of the situation hit her. She had food enough for those left in her charge over Christmas and, at a pinch, for a couple of days after it. But not enough to feed the girls who had been unable to make their journeys home. Gwennan, in her dressing gown and clutching her hot-water bottle, burst into the kitchen.

‘Fred’s got the truck stuck in a snowdrift, just along the lane, Mrs Todd! I saw him from my window! He tried to dig himself out, like! But then he left the truck and it looks like he’s going to walk back to the higher farm! But will he get there, Mrs Todd?’ There was a slightly unhealthy excitement in Gwennan’s delivery of this news, as though, in her dark and Celtic way, she relished it. ‘Or will he die in the snow like Captain Scott?’

With the girls warmed and sipping hot tea, Alice set about checking her supplies. The goose, sliced thinly, would
feed them all on Christmas Day and there was no shortage of potatoes and swedes. She checked the pantry shelves and found tins of beans and of spam. There was a full can of milk but when that was gone it might be some time before any more arrived from the snow-bound dairy at Higher Post Stone. Bread would be the main problem. With no packed lunches to provide for four days, Alice had ordered only two loaves. Long and reassuring as they were, they would not last long now that she had her full complement of mouths to feed.

Rose, basking in the company of her son Dave, and enjoying the prospect of showing him off to Alice over Christmas lunch next day, had seen the girls return and knew, only too well, the implications of this where the hostel catering arrangements were concerned. Leaving Dave to sleep off the enormous lunch she had fed him, Rose waded through the loose snow of the yard and joined Alice in the kitchen.

‘Whatever will you do?’ she demanded dramatically – there was nothing Rose enjoyed more than an impending disaster. ‘This could go on for weeks, you know! Coupla years ago we was snowed in for almost a month! Couldn’t get in nor out! It’s the steepness, see, of the lanes!’ Alice had noticed the steepness of the lanes and was not comforted by what she heard.

‘The first thing, Rose, is tonight’s supper. We’d better open those tins of spam, fry some onions, chop up some
potatoes and make a hash. The second thing is to let Mr Bayliss know that the girls didn’t get away and that we’re snowed in here and already short of bread and milk. I’ll go and telephone him now.’ Alice pulled on her waterproof coat and her rubber boots and, with her scarf wound tightly round her neck, made her way across the yard, her boots sinking into deep, soft snow. It was only half past two but because of the thick layer of leaden cloud it was already almost dark. Alice fumbled her way into the barn where the telephone was and shone her torch onto the dial. Roger Bayliss would know what to do. He’d dig out the stranded truck and send a tractor loaded with supplies down the valley to Lower Post Stone. She lifted the receiver. There was no dialling tone. The line was dead.

Roger Bayliss was settling a log of wood onto the fire in his warm sitting room when Eileen, with the briefest of knocks on his door, burst in.

‘’Tis Fred,’ she said. ’E’s at the kitchen door and ’e’s froze!’

They brought him into the sitting room and sat him on a hard chair, which Eileen placed close to the fire. Melting ice pooled at his feet; his dripping coat, white with snow when he entered the room, was returning now to its original brownish colour. Blanched fingers protruded from wet, unravelling mittens as he clutched the tumbler of whiskey that his master had poured for him. He told how he had driven the land girls to Ledburton Halt only to find the railway closed and how he had returned them to the safety of the hostel and then, as he attempted to persuade the truck
back up the hill towards the higher farm, it had slithered into a ditch and become firmly embedded in deep snow.

‘Varmint of a thing,’ he grumbled. ‘So I ’ad to bloomin’ walk, di’n I!’ He sipped noisily, eyeing his master. ‘Main thing is them girls is all accounted for – save for the Webster one. Went off earlier on the back of her brother’s motorbike, she did. Lord knows where they got to!’

‘Mrs Todd can telephone the parents to make sure the girl arrived safely.’

‘Well, that’s where you’m wrong, sir, with respect. ’Cos the lines be down. I seen the wires danglin’ as I come up the ’ill.’

Since Fred’s arrival Roger had been waiting for Alice’s phone call. He had been preparing what he would say to her. First he would have asked her to confirm that all the girls were safely with her and that she had enough fuel and food for the immediate requirements of the additional mouths she had to feed. Then he would have instructed her to make a list of everything she would need to see the inhabitants of Lower Post Stone through the days or possibly even weeks of virtual isolation which might lie ahead. He would have asked her to telephone him in the morning to give him the list and he would have assured her that the supplies would be delivered by tractor without delay. He would have arranged for extra paraffin and more logs so that the fires could be kept burning round the clock until the thaw. The warden would have confirmed her instructions. Now, with the news
of the damaged telephone lines, this imagined conversation could not take place though Alice would almost certainly have tried, unsuccessfully, to contact him.

Outside, darkness had fallen. Thick snow-clouds diffused what little moonlight there was. To attempt to take the tractor down to the farm in these conditions would have been hazardous and if it, too, had become stuck in the icy snow, it would have reduced the chances of getting supplies through to the farm on the following day. Fred’s glass was empty.

‘By jim’ny, sir,’ he wheezed, ‘that be a powerful drop! I can feel the blood just startin’ to flow back into my frozen limbs!’ Eileen could see that Fred’s heavy hint had fallen on deaf ears.

‘You’re quite certain, Fred,’ Roger asked, ‘that all the girls are safely in the hostel?’

‘Oh yes, sir. I saw every one of ’em go up that path an’ in through the door afore I left ’em an’ tried to get meself ’ome!’

‘You best get back to Mrs Fred,’ Eileen suggested, relieving him of the empty tumbler. ‘’Er’ll think youm lost in the blizzard, else.’

Christmas morning, despite dazzling sunshine and a brilliant blue sky, was bitterly cold. The girls, having recovered from their disappointment, began to respond to the fact that this morning they were not obliged to pull on their cold, damp
dungarees and face the elements. With fires blazing round the clock, the farmhouse, its thick walls and thatched roof retaining every joule of generated warmth, was positively cosy. Hot water gurgled dangerously in the pipes and the bathroom became a steamy, tropical delight. Some of the girls slept in, pottering down to the kitchen to toast slices of the dwindling supply of bread and brew pot after pot of tea. Others took it in turns to soak luxuriously in the bath until the skin on their fingers became wrinkled. With no rules to obey and no timetable to be adhered to, they wallowed in the freedom from the grinding routine of their work.

At Higher Post Stone Roger Bayliss, in the pitch-dark, icy cold of milking-time, had pulled on his working clothes and joined Fred and Ferdie in the byre where they relieved the cows of their milk, rolling the churns out into the snow, anxious about how long it would be before the milk-truck could get through to collect them.

Eileen, unable to return to the village on the previous night, had made up a bed in the room in which the servants used to sleep, risen early, helped with the milking and then cooked a robust breakfast for the men.

A dozen miles away at the Fleet Air Arm training camp, Oliver Maynard was experiencing a situation not unlike Alice’s. While most of the men under his command had been given seventy-two-hour passes and had got away before the snow had closed in, he was left with a dozen or so of his own men and a similar number of Americans who, after a
Christmas dinner which they would eat at noon, had been planning to head off for Exeter or Taunton to find what pleasures they could in pubs and dance halls. This, because of the snow, had now become impossible. It was suggested that their Adjutant might make a Bren-gun carrier available to them but Oliver Maynard refused to permit the use of the military equipment under his immediate command for anything other than training purposes. It was this fact that gave him the idea that, within three hours, he had implemented and which was to transform Christmas day for everyone who became involved in it.

Underlying Oliver’s plan was his increasing ambitions where Alice Todd was concerned. His own domestic situation had, over recent weeks, worsened. When, soon after the outbreak of the war, his wife Diana had miscarried, it had been decided that, because his postings were taking him further afield and for longer periods of time, they should postpone any immediate attempts to achieve a second pregnancy until after the war and that, in order to fill her time constructively, Diana should join the WRNS, where she soon became a busy and consequently happier young woman. The enforced separation took its toll on the relationship and Diana had recently written to her husband, apologising for various infidelities on her part and suggesting that he should consider their marriage over.

By ten in the morning and at approximately the same time as the goose went into the oven at Lower Post Stone
and the succulent smell of it began to permeate the farmhouse, Oliver Maynard gave his men their instructions and began masterminding what he would later refer to, in the report he would submit to his commanding officer, as Operation Snowman.

In the silent cottage in the forest Christopher was woken when a shaft of low morning sunlight moved across his closed lids, penetrating a dream in which he was in the cockpit of a Spitfire and blinded by the beam of a searchlight. He woke gratefully and lay, while his pulse slowed, comfortably cradled by the undulating contours of the old sofa. The sheepskins over and under him were warm and his fire, well stoked at midnight, was still alight. He dismissed the dream and for a while let his mind drift back to the Christmases at Higher Post Stone when his mother was alive and cousins came to stay. Eileen’s father, now long dead, would arrive on a farm cart, dressed as Father Christmas. The children would humour their parents by pretending not to recognise him. For a few minutes Christopher considered making the slippery journey down to his father’s farm. But who, he asked himself, would it please if he did? Not him. He would rather be alone until Georgina came. She would come. Maybe not today. Or for some time. But one day she would. And not his father, whose eyes he could no longer meet because of the strange look in them, which he interpreted as accusation and disappointment but
which, as he would one day discover, was something more complex and more forgivable. Eileen would be pleased if he arrived at the farm in time to enjoy the Christmas dinner she would undoubtedly be preparing. He did not know that, were it not for the blizzard, Eileen would have been alone in her cottage while his father ate roast goose with Alice Todd at Lower Post Stone.

The hamper of Christmas food which Fred had delivered to Christopher early on the previous morning, and just before the threatening snow had begun to fall, contained an impressive array of festive food. Eileen, despite the rationing, had excelled herself. There was a game pie, a Christmas pudding and a pot of brandy sauce, an apple tart, a jar of pickled herrings, a Christmas cake, and a large jug of chicken soup together with his usual supply of milk, vegetables, eggs and bread. Christopher had shot a pheasant, plucked it, stuffed it with sweet chestnuts that he picked up from the forest floor and wrapped it in rind from the ham, a section of which still hung from a hook above his fire. At midday he would flatten the embers and set the bird to roast. He broke the ice in the well and refilled his water pots and kettle. He carried in an armful or two of split logs. He had discovered an old hip-bath in an outbuilding and had hauled it into the cottage. A couple of buckets of water, heated on the wood burner and tipped into the bath, met his needs. He shaved, lathered his hair, sluiced himself with the warmed water, towelled himself
down and dressed in the clean clothes that Eileen had sent up with his groceries.

Despite his near normal appearance, Christopher was not fully recovered from his breakdown or from the trauma that had induced it. He still had nightmares and far from addressing the future in the way most people would, even when recovering from a disastrous experience, he blotted it out, living his days one at a time and contriving to be so physically tired at the end of them that he would fall asleep, curled up on the old sofa amongst his pile of sheepskins, before provocative thoughts could form. When the nightmares woke him he would light a lamp, brew a pot of tea and focus his mind on the pages of one or other of the books he had brought with him, reading until sleep overtook him or dawn broke, whichever happened first.

At Lower Post Stone, Hester Tucker dolefully set the kitchen table for Christmas dinner. Reuben, currently stationed at a training camp on Salisbury Plain, had been expected to arrive by noon but because of the snow it seemed unlikely that he would arrive at all.

‘This is my Dave,’ said Rose, who, anxious to show off her son to Alice Todd, had encouraged him to cross the yard with her. In fact, Dave, now rested and full of his mother’s good food, needed little persuasion and was anxious to meet the bevy of girls who, so promisingly for a young soldier on his first home leave, had been
conveniently deposited across the yard from the cottage in which he had been born and bred.

Hester was the first girl he saw and, for him, she was more than enough. He stood transfixed, smiling into her wide blue eyes and lost in the curve of her unpainted mouth. She was the right height, the right width and her accent, when she said, ‘Pleased to meet you, Dave,’ was as familiar to him as his own. His mother did not for one moment miss her son’s reaction to the girl. She had seen his eyes light up and something like a blush deepen the colour of his ruddy Devonian complexion. When Hester went out to the pantry to fetch the platter on which the roasted goose was to be carved, Rose leant close to her son and whispered urgently to him.

‘’Tis no good you lookin’ in that direction, Dave! Hester be spoke for!’ Dave seemed not to hear her. Even when Annie, Gwennan and Winnie joined them in the kitchen his eyes remained on Hester, or, when he sensed that his admiration was attracting attention, on the slate pavings of the kitchen floor, while he racked his brain for something to say to her.

‘Bin a land girl long, then?’ he managed at last.

‘Feb’ry, weren’t it, when you come ’ere, Hester?’ Rose answered, butting in. Hester smiled and nodded.

‘Like it, do you?’ Dave tried again. This time it was Gwennan who took the question.

‘Oh, yeah!’ she said. ‘It’s great being up to your middle
in mud, with rain runnin’ down your neck!’

Marion, in the bedroom she shared with Winnie, was still wearing a powder-blue rayon dressing gown which she had recently persuaded a young naval rating to buy for her in Exeter when, from the low window, she saw the
Bren-gun
carrier. It was, at that point, a quarter of a mile away from the snowbound farmhouse and was making a lurching descent into the valley. Marion had never seen anything like it before. She could see that it had tracks like a tank, which was why it was able to negotiate the deep snow. She could see the barrel of a gun and behind that the heads of a dozen men. Thinking that they might be Germans and that this was an invasion, she anxiously scanned the paintwork for a Swastika and was relieved not to find one. As it grew closer, Marion saw that the vehicle was towing a trailer and that on the trailer were more men. It was the fact that the vehicle itself was camouflaged with curious shapes in various shades of brown and green and that the men aboard it were wearing khaki that finally plunged Marion into action. By the time the Bren-gun carrier was idling outside the farmhouse gate, Marion was not only dressed in her most flamboyant frock, but had rouge on her cheeks, mascara on her lashes and lipstick on her mouth. She was rapidly fixing her hair as Oliver Maynard made his way up the path and knocked loudly on the door.

He had thought of everything. The turkey and the ham were both cooked to perfection and, being well wrapped,
had, together with the roasted vegetables, remained piping hot during the half-hour transfer from the cookhouse at the camp to the farmhouse kitchen. Puddings, cakes and pastries were unloaded from the trailer together with kegs of beer, bottles of port, ginger ale and Coca-Cola. They had brought plates, glasses, knives, forks, spoons and tablecloths.

‘All we need,’ said a burly GI cook, settling his chef’s hat over his crew cut, ‘is a table! Can you guys manage that?’ Alice and the girls thought they could.

Sergeant Marvin Kinski, US Marines, bearing a barrel of beer, swaggered into the farmhouse kitchen, the stump of a cheroot clamped between his strong, white teeth. His stocky build had earnt him the nickname ‘Short-arse’. His beard grew so fast that within an hour of shaving he looked as though his chin had not made contact with a razor blade for many days. His deep-set, brooding brown eyes had a sharp, defensive look which conveyed an ‘OK, lady, so you don’t fancy me, well, guess what – who cares,’ approach to women. And he was right. Most women didn’t find him attractive. Except for Marion, who, much later and in the privacy of their room, confessed to Winnie that, although she didn’t know why, because, let’s face it, he wasn’t her type, she’d felt quite peculiar when she was dancing with Sergeant Kinski – which she had been, exclusively and almost continuously, from the moment Christmas dinner was finished until well after midnight, when Oliver Maynard had ordered his men to bid the girls goodnight.