Xandra Bingley - Bertie, May and Mrs Fish

The prisoners of war are forbidden to speak. Lined up in the yard in dark-blue jackets and trousers, they call out to me … Che bella bambina … cara … io te adoro … veni … veni qui . A man in dark-blue uniform has a gun in a holster and shouts … No talky … allez … skeddadle … go-go … follow lady on horsy. My mother rides into Homefield leading the line. Each prisoner carries a long-handled hoe over his shoulder. They walk to fields of kale and mangolds and turnips and swedes to hoe out weeds along the rows. In winter the Italians rub their hands and call out … È fredo in Inghilterra … molto molto fredo … è terribile … and my mother smiles and says … Yes … cold … molto coldo.

Landgirls live in the house on the top floor. They sit in the kitchen and smoke cigarettes and cry and turn the battery wireless onto the Light Programme when my mother is not there. A landgirl called Jannie is my nanny after old Annie Nannie goes back to Ireland. My mother barters cigarettes for herself and the girls on the black market in Cheltenham. She drives Merrylegs the dock-tailed Welsh cob seven miles down and seven back uphill every fortnight in the Ralli-cart, and trades homemade butter and fresh eggs and dead rabbits. Until the day she says to the landgirls … Getting us all cigarettes takes up too much time … I am stopping smoking … I shan’t be buying cigarettes in Cheltenham any more for anyone.

A landgirl says … We’ll have to get ours off the Yanks then, won’t we … American airmen are billeted at Guiting Grange. Our landgirls walk down the lane to the pub at Kilkenny in the evenings in gumboots and flowered cotton dresses and mackintoshes. They carry high-heeled shoes and get picked up in US jeeps.

Sometimes a girl comes home in the morning late for milking. One girl cries to my mother … I can’t have a Yankee baby … I told him … I swear I did … and my mother says … we’ll have to get you back home to Birmingham somehow. She writes in her diary … New landgirl up the spout.

My mother is pregnant again and has an abortion in the Pittville Nursing Home in Cheltenham. She does not tell my father. After a first difficult birth she is advised she must not risk having another child.

January and February and March are terribly cold months. One March an east wind blows and the weathervane fox above the granary gallops east for a week. My mother walks out of the house carrying her shotgun and loads two cartridges and aims at the fox. She fires both barrels and says … That should change things … We’ve had enough of this cold east wind. Grey tumbler pigeons fly off the barns and circle high in the sky and the copper fox pirouettes all morning. Joe and Mr Griff and the landgirls stop in the yard and watch the twirling fox. One by one tumblers fall wings closed to a barn and glide to a window ledge. By afternoon the fox slows down facing north.

Her diary says … Why can’t I be happy … I have everything I want … dear God …

He writes

… Eric Bates is having a bad turn. He has had a skin disease for months and that plus the fact that his wife is having a baby seems to have got him down. He sits by the hour with an ashen white face looking straight in front of him refusing to do anything. I try to knock some sense into him but it’s pretty tricky. His wife is in Scotland and due to foal next week .

Last night we played billiards after dinner and everyone got foxed. I broke several very old gramophone records over Basil’s head and he walked round the billiard table saying ‘I’ve never had that done to me before in my whole life’ as if it happens to everyone every day. We all laughed a great deal and it does a lot of good. I get very depressed and feel almost like Eric at times .

No more now my very special Bear. Not so very long to wait now till we see each other again after this lifetime apart. Soon now I shall be with you and we will be happy Bears together with all the spring flowers and sunshine and trees coming out and so much to look at and see with you. Keep your tail up. All my love my darlingest. Your one and only Big Bear .

In the kitchen my mother hears aeroplanes and says … Listen … listen … are they ours … out we run … quick … look … look up … and black wide-winged aeroplanes fly over in lines. At milking time one afternoon a single big grey plane roars low across the barns and clears Fishpond Wood and then the sky gets smoky over Top Field. My mother calls to Jannie my landgirl nanny and me … Stay put in the milking shed … and she and Joe Rummings and Griff pick up pitchforks and run up Homefield.

They walk back down and my mother milks and says … One of theirs crashed … you can’t see properly inside … what’s left is on fire … if they were alive it was not for long … I’ll change Top Field name to Airplane … in memory.

When a white smoke cross is in the sky after two planes pass she says … I hope the cross means those two are protected.

In daytime small planes rattle through the sky and at night slow heavy engines drone over. I sleep in my mother’s bedroom and in the dark she says … Poor pilots have a long way to go … I suppose they get lost sometimes … I hope this lot aren’t for Birmingham.

At breakfast a landgirl comes in the kitchen and unpicks sticky muddy bootlaces listening to the news on the wireless and cries and says to my mother … It isn’t fair … it isn’t sodding fair … it’s all on them … I’m going back home … I won’t sodding stay here … Birmingham is my sisters … you don’t know a sodding thing … you don’t … I don’t darn well care … sodding cows.

My mother says … I will ride down to Andoversford and send a reply-paid telegram to find out how they are … the west did have bad luck last night … I am sorry to say. In the milking shed she says to Joe Rummings … Very likely we’ll be a girl less by afternoon …

And Joe says … She’ll go back where she’s from …

And my mother says … It’s hard on girls sent here from a big town … no news so far if the tobacco factory’s gone.

A small plane flies nearer and she picks me up and runs to the yard. A cloud of silver tinsel falls from the sky onto my mother’s green topknot scarf. Silver hangs on my arms and on her pink linen blouse and her blue dungarees and sticks to my blonde curls. Tangled silver lands on stables and house gables and on barn roof moss. White pigs and brown hens and the one black hen and the grey Chinese geese are all silvery. Her black-and-white spaniel’s floppy ears sparkle. Three horses in Homefield gallop away under falling silver tinsel. Brown apple tree branches and blue delphinium flowers and red and pink and yellow roses and the green lawn and white yard stones are sparkling.

I pick up silver. The plane flies off. Griff freewheels down the yard and silver hangs from his bicycle handles and on his flat brown cap and my mother says … What do you suppose it is all for Griff … it must be all right … or why would they let it out over us … as long as it has nothing to do with mercury … what on earth are they dropping it on us for … so far I can’t see anything that’s fallen down dead … will you help Joe and the girls … I’m going in to turn the wireless on … you never know … we may get information.

In the kitchen she lifts me onto the dresser between the varnished wood wireless and glass butter churn. She turns the brown Bakelite wireless knob clockwise and behind the peacock tail material fan cut into wood a man’s voice fades in crackles … An announcement follows … reception … repeat … will … repeat … expect … and the voice disappears. My mother leans on the dresser and puts her cheek close to the wireless and twiddles the knob and I twist silver in my fingers. She says … Nothing … Düsseldorf … Brussels … Paris … London … nothing from anywhere … I don’t want to waste batteries … you can help me make butter while we listen … and Jannie can come indoors and stay with you while I ride round and make sure everywhere is safe.