Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings (5 page)

‘Perhaps you would like to, Hester?’ Alice suggested.

Hester gathered herself, lowered her head and muttered, ‘For what we are about to receive,’ and then stopped, her lower lip trembling, Winnie and Marion smothering their amusement as the freak made a fool of herself. Then Rose’s voice cut in, sharp and authoritative.

‘May the Good Lord make us truly thankful. Amen,’ she concluded, glaring round the table and repeating the ‘amen’ so fiercely that Hannah-Maria, Christine, Georgina and Gwennan all joined her.

Rose had knowingly shaken her head when Alice had decided to present the mashed potatoes and cabbage in large dishes from which each girl could take what she required. Unfortunately Mabel, Winnie, Marion and Gwennan
required rather more than their share, so that by the time the dishes reached Hester and Georgina they were almost empty. At subsequent meals Alice would distribute the meat and Rose the vegetables.

Mabel, Winnie, Marion and Gwennan ate quickly, using pieces of a thickly sliced loaf to soak up the gravy on their plates.

‘What’s for afters,’ Mabel enquired with her mouth full. Her bovine frame would always be eager for food.

‘Prunes and custard,’ Rose announced.

‘Nursery food,’ said Georgina sociably.

‘You what?’ Winnie and Marion looked genuinely curious.

‘Prunes and custard,’ Georgina repeated politely. ‘What my brother and I always called nursery food because…’ She looked around at the eyes which were observing her, some hostile, some amused. ‘Because we used to eat that kind of thing in our nursery,’ she finished lamely.

‘Eew!’ said Marion, inaccurately imitating Georgina’s accent, ‘Eeen the narsery, what? La-di-da-di-dah!’ Winnie, reacting to Alice’s obvious disapproval, nudged her mate and told her to hush up.

‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,’ chanted Christine, happily counting her prune stones. ‘I’ll need four, ’cos my Ron’s a sailor! Minesweepers, he’s in. We’re gonna save up all our pay so when the war’s over we’ll have enough for a place of our own!’

‘Isn’t that lovely!’ said Marion sarcastically. Winnie giggled.

‘Love’s young dream!’ she added, with her mouth full. For a while no one spoke and cutlery clattered.

‘Perhaps we should introduce ourselves,’ Alice suggested tentatively. ‘We could go clockwise round the table. Would you begin, Christine?’

‘OK then,’ Christine smiled round the chewing faces. ‘I’m Christine Wilkins. Everyone calls me Chrissie… Me and Ron got married two months ago…’

‘Up the spout, are you?’ Winnie asked, nailing Chrissie with her shrewd eyes.

‘No, as it happens,’ Chrissie said cheerfully. ‘We’re not having kids till the war’s over… He looks like Leslie Howard, my Ron. I’ll show you his photo after. He got a forty-eight-hour pass for our wedding and I haven’t seen him since!’ There was a murmur of sympathy as she turned to Gwennan. ‘Your go now,’ she said.

‘Gwennan Pringle. From Builth Wells. My folks are both dead and I live with my aunt and my uncle, who is an undertaker.’ The girls stared at the narrow face with its prim mouth and at the hard, dark eyes that seemed to be daring anyone to make some joke or other at an undertaker’s expense.

‘A “taffy”, eh!’ said Hannah-Maria. ‘How do, Taff!’ Everyone laughed and suddenly the room felt warmer.

‘Next!’ demanded Chrissie.

‘Georgina Webster. My people farm in Taunton Deane.’ Winnie and Marion nudged and giggled. Georgina paused and then continued in a clear voice. ‘I volunteered for the Land Army so that my brother could stay on the farm.’ There was a slight intake of breath. Rose, about to dispense the last of the prunes, paused, spoon in mid-air.

‘And not get called up, you mean?’ asked Gwennan in her clipped, sing-song Welsh voice.

‘He’s a pacifist,’ Georgina said and then, her words dropping into a heavy silence, continued, ‘and so am I.’

‘What’s a pacifist?’ asked Hannah-Maria while Hester’s eyes went anxiously from speaker to speaker because she didn’t understand a word anyone was saying.

‘Someone who…’ Alice began, searching for a definition that would not provoke further dissension.

‘Who’s a friggin’ coward!’ Marion interrupted sharply. ‘And what’s more, Mrs Todd, me and Win’s not sharing a bedroom with no bloomin’ conchie!’

‘We didn’t want to come here in the first place!’ Winnie chimed in, self-righteous and injured. ‘We liked our digs in the village!’

‘Yes!’ said Rose. ‘And there’s some as knows why!’ Marion and Winnie gasped. Hester was now thoroughly alarmed by all this shouting. Hannah-Maria and Gwennan exchanged speculative glances, Georgina dropped her eyes and smiled at her plate as Rose continued, ‘But whilst you’m ’ere you’ll sleep where you’m told! And be in be ten o’clock, like it
says in the rule book!’ Alice was slightly taken aback by the ferocity of Rose’s tone and placed a restraining hand on her arm.

‘I noticed that there’s a small single room,’ said Georgina coolly. She was in the habit of getting what she wanted. ‘If you would allow it, Mrs Todd, I’d prefer to sleep there.’

‘Fine by us!’ spluttered Marion.

‘Yeah!’ echoed her shadow.

‘Quiet, you two!’ Rose commanded and the girls subsided into a stunned silence. Alice said she thought it could be arranged, although the room Georgina proposed using was very small. Georgina said she didn’t mind a bit and the matter was closed. Rose offered the last of the prunes and Mabel accepted them with an alacrity that amused Chrissie and Hannah-Maria.

Later, in the double room they were to share,
Hannah-Maria
, who at supper had invited everyone to call her Annie, was unpacking her suitcase. Hester, whose one change of clothes was already stowed in the wardrobe and in the lower drawer of the shared dressing table, watched, fascinated as Annie shook out frilled blouses, floral frocks, sleeveless Ceylonese nightdresses with lacy inserts and two pairs of cami-knickers, which, she told Hester, had been a farewell gift from her boyfriend, Pete, who had run a barrow in Petticoat Lane until being recently conscripted, but only into the catering corps on account of his flat feet. Hester
stared at the curlers and the face powder and the little jars of Pond’s Vanishing Cream and Cold Cream and the bottle of Amami shampoo, which now stood on Annie’s side of the dressing table.

‘What with all that fuss with Georgina, we never got round to you, did we!’ Annie said, adding, when Hester shyly hung her head, ‘Come on! Your name’s Hester. And…?!’

‘And me dad’s a dairyman,’ Hester said. She had difficulty in understanding her room-mate’s cockney accent but, despite worries about Annie’s appearance and shocked by the colours and the cut of her clothes, found that she was reluctantly, almost guiltily, responding to her friendliness.

‘Yeah?… Go on, then!’ Annie persisted, smoothing out the creases in a blue crêpe de Chine frock before hooking it onto the rail in the wardrobe.

‘And he preaches, Sundays.’

‘Oh!’ said Annie.

‘We belong to the Brethren. It’s a religion.’

‘Yeah,’ said Annie. ‘Well, it would be, wouldn’t it! Is that why you wear dark colours and that?’ she enquired, running out of coat hangers.

‘Bright colours is sinful.’ Hester’s accent, Annie noticed, was like Mrs Crocker’s only softer. ‘It says so in the book.’

‘What book?’ Annie asked innocently, her face already betraying her response to Hester’s convictions.

‘The Bible!’ said Hester as though there was only one
book. Annie, her unpacking finished, had pulled a packet of Woodbines from her handbag and was searching unsuccessfully for matches. She caught Hester’s look.

‘Oh ’eck…I suppose smokin’s a sin an’ all?’

‘Yeah, ’tis,’ Hester muttered almost inaudibly.

Annie got to her feet, showed her teeth in a wide smile and crossed the small space to the door.

‘Reckon I’ll have my fag next door then,’ she said.

Hester sat on her bed beside her carpet-bag from which she lifted a framed photograph of her father, her mother and her young brother. She stared for a moment at the hard eyes of her father and then positioned the photograph carefully on the small table which separated the twin beds.

In the neighbouring room Marion and Winnie had rapidly appropriated the extra space left by Georgina’s decampment. The unoccupied third bed was now strewn with brightly coloured garments and half a dozen pairs of new silk stockings. Winnie lay sprawled on her bed reading a film magazine while Marion, one foot braced against the dressing table, daubed blood-red varnish onto her toenails. When Annie put her head round the door and asked Marion and Winnie if they had a match they responded in unison.

‘Yeah!’ they chorused, ‘your face and my bum!’ Then Marion, tossing a box of Swan Vestas in Annie’s direction, asked sharply whether their visitor had ever heard of knocking.

Although not invited into the room, Annie smiled and lingered in the doorway, smoking.

‘Nice colour,’ she said, nodding at Marion’s nail varnish. ‘Many blokes round here?’

‘If you know where to find ’em,’ Marion said.

‘Or if you like your men under sixteen or over sixty,’ Winnie giggled, adding to Marion, ‘Hey! She could come with us, Sat’day night, down the pub.’ She hesitated, silenced by a sharp look from her friend and then asked tentatively, ‘Couldn’t she?’

Marion’s glance as she screwed the top tightly onto the nail polish was designed to shut Winnie up and close the subject but Winnie persisted. She would have been happy enough for Annie to join them. There were always more than enough men to go round on a Saturday night. But Marion remained adamant, exercising her well-developed facility to lie.

‘No, Win,’ she said, ‘she can’t ’cos we’re going on, aren’t we!’ She began running a razor over a smooth shin.

‘On?’ Winnie echoed. She was, Marion considered, very stupid at times.

‘To Exeter, Win! To that dance! Gary and Sergeant Whatsit’s got a staff car for the night and there’s only room for them two and us. Sorry,’ she added, glancing coolly at Annie.

Marion was not beautiful. She was not even pretty. It required a lot of hard work to make her sharp face,
mousey hair and angular body attractive to men. She employed most of the devices available to her and spent a large portion of her small income on smoothing out the sharp corners of the raw material against which she had been fighting a running battle ever since she had first admitted to herself that she was plain, bordering on ugly. In her raw state Marion would have been passed unrecognised by the same men with whom,
foundation-creamed
, plucked, rouged and powdered, her contact could hardly have been more intimate. She was very aware of competition. Winnie, small, soft and silly, was the perfect companion. She laughed at Marion’s jokes and was impressed by her shrewdness. She was happy to sit smiling in the pub until Marion attracted the men and Winnie willingly linked arms with the soldier, sailor or airman who, for one reason or another, did not link arms with Marion. Annie, on the other hand, struck Marion as competition. She was not only attractive but pretty, if not downright beautiful. Added to which she had exactly the sort of personality blokes like best. As a consequence she would have to make her own way into the unreliable, fluctuating social scene of the Ledburton area for neither Marion nor Winnie would initiate her, a fact which, although Marion would not have considered it so, was no disadvantage. As Annie stubbed out her cigarette she caught sight of the silk stockings.

‘Blimey!’ she exclaimed, ‘where d’you get all them?’

‘Where d’you think!’ Marion snapped, enjoying Annie’s envy.

‘From an admirer!’ Winnie said smugly. ‘Three pair each, we got!’

‘Jeez!’ said Annie, deeply impressed. ‘He must’ve been feeling generous!’

‘Well, he was feeling
something
!’ Marion shrieked and the ensuing laughter echoed along the corridor and was even faintly audible to Rose as she knocked on the door of Alice’s room.

After supper and the washing-up and the setting of the table for tomorrow’s breakfast and the putting of porridge oats into a pan to soak, Rose had retired to her cottage where she had eaten the plate of chicken which, despite being reheated, was not quite hot enough to be pleasant. Try as she might – and for her own, complicated reasons – to harden her heart, she could not forget the look of exhaustion on Alice’s face when her day’s work was at last completed. Unable to stomach the chicken, Alice had given her portion to a cat that, discovering the farmhouse to be once again inhabited, was clearly planning to take up residence in it. Rose fretted for a while and then left her fireside, returned to the farmhouse, heated a pan of creamy milk, filled two cups and made her way through the house to Alice’s door.

‘Only hot milk,’ Rose said breezily. ‘Six tins of cocoa we ordered but d’you think I can put my hands on ’em?’ Alice
was at her mother’s desk. She looked, Rose thought, like an exhausted child.

‘We must reorganise that store cupboard tomorrow,’ Alice said, reaching for notepad and pencil.

‘Never you mind that now,’ said Rose, putting one of the cups of milk into Alice’s hand. Alice thanked her.

‘Bit of a baptism of fire, that supper!’ Rose stood, her own cup in her hand.

‘It certainly was!’ said Alice. ‘And the awful thing is that we have to do it again tomorrow… And the day after… And the day after that!’ She was trying to laugh but Rose felt, uncomfortably, that she was very close to tears. ‘Sit down,’ she invited Rose. ‘Join me, won’t you?’ She indicated one of the two armchairs but remained where she was, at her desk. Rose sat. She looked round the room and complimented Alice on how nicely she had arranged it.

‘The other bed’s for your boy, I suppose?’ Rose said. The thought of Edward-John, alone in his boarding school dormitory brought Alice close to tears. She nodded at Rose and there was a small silence while both women sipped at the hot milk. ‘They’re a rough old lot, these girls!’ said Rose. Alice looked at her in surprise.

‘D’you think so?’ she asked.

‘I
know
so!’ Rose replied. ‘And that Georgina! Make my blood boil, conchies do! When I think of my Dave…out there…riskin’ ‘is life! While her sort—’