Allie Burns - The Land Girl

The letter seemed to be encouraging them to think he’d been captured, and they surely wouldn’t give them hope without good reason.

But still, however would they cope with the wait? Mother’s knitting needles and wool were discarded by her feet, her lips tinged blue. Hands trembling, pupils dilated, she wheezed.

‘Mother, can you breathe?’ Emily asked, her own throat constricting so much she could hardly catch her own breath. After a few moments Mother inhaled, panted, and slumped forwards.

‘It’s been a terrible shock,’ Mother said. ‘The letter came in the first post.’

‘You’re shivering,’ Emily said. She stepped out to speak to Daisy, suggested they call out the doctor and give her a sedative.

‘I need to lie down,’ Mother said when Emily returned.

Emily perched on the end of Mother’s dark oak bed. Mother was tucked up and they prayed quietly together for John’s return, and silently she wished for Theo’s safety too, for good measure. Mother’s face glistened with the residue of grease that her cold cream had left behind. Her hands flat on the bedspread, she stared off towards the window and didn’t say a word. Mother had managed her regular night-time rituals – that had to be a sign that everything would be all right, didn’t it?

‘Oh, John,’ Emily whispered to herself later in her own room.

The British army had lost her dear, sweet brother. How could she sleep until they found him and returned him safely home?

August 1915

Dearest Emily,

What terribly distressing news. My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family, and of course John. We mustn’t lose hope that he’ll be found and returned to you safe and sound.

Fondest wishes

Theo

The darkness pressed up against each of the window’s panes, but she was too alert to think of going back to sleep. She pulled the heavy burgundy damask curtains along their runners anyway, ready for the day that wasn’t yet prepared for her.

If she lay down again her mind would whirl and make John’s smile merge with Theo’s, their voices becoming one, until she couldn’t remember whose was whose. Who had said what, who had comforted her, and who had advised her. The tiredness had muddled her mind until she could no longer distinguish one from the other.

She couldn’t stay inside and whilst roaming about she found Mr Tipton in the shippon supervising the milking. She told him about John missing in action and without hesitation he embraced her, warm and clammy, his short arms stretching around her shoulders.

‘I need to keep busy. I can’t sit around up at the house. Can you give me something to do?’

She would worry about Mother later. She had insisted that Emily stayed at the house with her, but she was drugged and drowsy and Emily doubted she’d notice if she was gone.

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of Mr Tipton wiping away the tears with the back of his sleeve.

John was somehow missing like a hoe or a scythe, not a living, breathing person. He had said it could happen and she’d pushed the thought of it aside. He’d asked her to take care of Mother, but their problems were bigger than her – what about the house, the estate, the farm? Would they have to sell up if John didn’t come home? If only she’d asked him what it was that he meant, what she would need to accept and how she might be of best help to Mother.

Mid-morning, as she was going into the farmhouse for a cup of tea, she did a double take as Mother, holding her skirts aloft to reveal her heeled boots, stepped around the puddles and shooed away Mrs Tipton’s welcoming committee of chickens.

‘Emily dear, there you are.’

Mother had aged twenty years in that one night. Puffy pillows had gathered beneath her eyes, new hoods hung over them and shadows lurked beneath her cheekbones.

‘Has there been more news?’ Emily asked, realising that this was how it would be now: waiting and wondering when news of John would come.

‘I’m just so astonished that you deserted me,’ Mother continued. ‘I think you should come back to the house.’

‘Will Cecil come home?’ she asked hopefully.

‘I’ve sent him a telegram,’ Mother said. ‘I insisted he stay in Oxford. His studies mustn’t be interrupted. We must carry on as usual.’

She suggested Mother pay a visit to Hawk; the stallion had grown restless in his stables at Mother’s voice. His hooves dragged across the cobbles. It had been so long since Mother had ridden him and yet the faithful old beast was still loyal. He might be the balm, the connection that Mother needed.

‘I want to see John, not a horse.’

Emily raised a boot to a too-brave hen. She could never say the right thing.

*

She and Mother spent the afternoon in the conservatory, amongst the potted palms and ferns, Mother with a pristine newspaper folded in half across her blanketed knee. She faced the vegetable garden that Emily had dug with John when he’d been home on leave.

‘It makes me sad; my rose garden all ploughed up like it is and then just abandoned to nature. You have desecrated our lawn. Surely it can’t make that much difference to food supplies.’

‘While there’s still a shortage of food, the potato crop …’

‘Haven’t we given enough to this war?’

It was a funny thing to worry about: the rose garden.

‘Can you see to it for me?’ Mother continued. ‘I want the roses back. Perhaps ask Mr Tipton to send up old Alfred to lend a hand.’

Emily held her tongue. John had asked her not to argue with Mother, to pull together, to accept what had happened. She owed it to him to try her best. But he had also told her not to give up on what she wanted. He’d been certain that she’d find a way; but then he must have known that in the event anything happened to him it would make her escape even harder.

‘I’m glad I have you here, dear.’ Mother smiled weakly. Her head slumped in her hands. ‘You are quite impossible, but you’re all I have.’

*

Bishop warns against spate of hasty marriages

She was under the monkey puzzle tree, the newspaper resting on her knees.

Young people were getting carried away with romantic ideals and marrying when they’d only just met, the Bishop warned. A young man, a gunner with the army, spoke out against the Bishop. The gunner argued that the man of the cloth didn’t understand how war made every moment precious. He stated that the marriages weren’t hasty at all, but blossomed after couples wrote to one another for many months, becoming better acquainted in pen and ink then they ever would under the watchful eye of a chaperone.

So, Theo wasn’t the only one proposing out of the carriage windows. It had seemed so soon, well it was soon – she’d only met him that afternoon and he’d asked her to marry him. But they wrote letters often and she discussed things with him she’d never dream of sharing with anyone else. He was interested in her, he believed in her and he’d been such a great comfort to her since John had been reported missing. He was often the only beam of light in an otherwise dark existence.

Her gaze travelled through the jagged branches of the tree. The gunner in the newspaper was right; life was precious. John’s disappearance had taught her that. It was important to reach out and grasp whatever the Fates sent you.

*

January 1916

Emily and Cecil shared a birthday and so Cecil came home from university so they could celebrate as a family. She might have guessed that he’d cause trouble before they’d even got to the main course of their evening meal.

‘I’m going to ignore my call-up papers,’ he announced. ‘I won’t be fighting in the war.’