Allie Burns - The Land Girl

‘He’s from Yorkshire, he’s very attentive and interested in me and my life,’ she said. That seemed to satisfy both Mother and Grandmother and so she stretched her fingers out across the keys.

‘Oh,’ Cecil whined. ‘Do you have to make that din?’ Deftly he turned the attention to himself. He hadn’t looked up from his book since he’d sat down. He’d even read it at the dinner table.

‘It’s a piano, Cecil,’ she retorted. ‘Not a brass band.’

‘Emily won’t play if you find it distracting,’ Mother said. ‘Emily dear, can’t you find a less invasive occupation?’ Mother’s gaze remained trained on her lap.

She sighed and slammed the lid shut. She could do no right. As it was, within a few moments Cecil had lost interest in his books and wandered out of the room in search of something new.

‘I would like to hear you play,’ said John. ‘Cecil?’ He called down the hallway. ‘Will you come back shortly for a game of charades?’

Cecil returned momentarily to poke his head around the doorway. ‘Anything for you, dear brother,’ he said.

Emily straightened her back and prepared to play. She hadn’t sat on this stool since before the war, before John had joined up, when they all came together in the evenings for piano music, song and laughter. They hadn’t done any of these things when it was really Christmastime, and John was away. It would have been wrong to carry on as usual without him. They hadn’t sung or played charades, either.

Grandmother and Mother stood beside Emily, while John leant an elbow on the body of the baby grand before them, where Father had done the same when he was alive. He warbled in a silly false tenor, his arms stretched out to accentuate his notes.

John took Mother’s hand. Emily had warmed up now, switched to a show tune, and John and Mother glided together to a foxtrot. Emily glanced up every now and then. Mother wasn’t hamming it up – she really did have style and grace. She gazed into her dance partner’s eyes with unbidden pride. Mother’s slim waist and hips meant she could pass for a woman John’s age, from behind. Her energy too. She was so often in her armchair these days it was a jolt to see her out of it and dancing and to recall how full of verve Mother had been when Father was alive, especially when she entertained.

Emily smiled to herself in the hallway later that evening. Home really was home when John was there. How did he do it? He was the glue that bound them together. It gave them the confidence and freedom to be and please themselves. To prove the point, Cecil was in his room with his books, while Mother, Grandmother and John talked in the library. On her way upstairs, she passed them, the door open a crack to reveal the light inside.

‘I don’t think you should ask him for help,’ she overheard Grandmother say. ‘Too much has passed.’

‘But what choice do we have?’ Mother said. Emily stopped and held her breath. ‘Things can’t go on as they are for much longer.’

‘I know,’ said John. ‘We’re approaching a point where we’ll have to shut HopBine House up.’

‘Or sell …’ Mother said. Emily put a hand to her mouth. Sell their home? No wonder Mother was so keen for her to marry someone from a good family; she must be hoping she’d save them.

Why hadn’t John said anything when they’d been on their own, digging up the rose garden? He’d had plenty of opportunity to tell her they had problems. Where would they go, and what would happen to the farm? Her legs lost their strength beneath her.

‘He’s offered help,’ John said. ‘I suggest we hear what he has to say.’

Emily took a light-footed step back towards the door, straining to hear whether John would reveal who this ‘he’ was.

‘What are you doing lurking about in the hallway?’

She jumped clean into the air and clubbed herself on the chin with the back of her own hand; Cecil had appeared on the stairs out of nowhere. ‘I was just getting a glass of water,’ she said loudly enough for John and Grandmother to hear her in the library, and then strode purposefully towards the kitchen.

She was about to chastise him for creeping around, but to her surprise he’d joined the others, too. She back-tracked. It must have been a family meeting and she’d not realised. As she reached the door, she caught a glimpse of John. He smiled, but just then Mother came into view, and snapped the door shut in her face.

‘Should I come in too?’ she called.

‘Take yourself off to bed, dear,’ Mother said turning the key in the lock. ‘It’s getting late.’

July 1915

Dearest Emily,

I am moving up the queue and it will soon be my turn for leave. I ought to go to Yorkshire to see my mother, but I wonder could you meet me at King’s Cross station when I break my journey and pick up the train for Wakefield? I keep the photograph you sent me in my pocket, and look at you before I sleep – often you’re illuminated by shell light. But I long to see that determined chin for myself, your lively, mischievous eyes alight on me in person, my love.

What do you say?

Fondest wishes

Theo

‘You and John have had a lot of clandestine meetings in the library.’ She probed Cecil two days later under the shade of the monkey puzzle tree on the lawn, the brim of her sun hat low. Cecil lounged out on the other side of the trunk, reading, as usual. The soporific heat pushed her eyelids shut. ‘I waited up for you both last night but in the end I had to go to bed.’

‘We were playing chess.’ Cecil’s tone was falsely flippant. He was no more going to let her in on what was going on than Mother.

‘And who won?’ she asked.

‘I’d like to think I thrashed him, but I think he let me win.’

‘He always lets you win.’ She chuckled. ‘Has he ever beaten you or I at anything?’

Cecil reflected for a moment and then groaned. ‘All that effort to try and outwit him and all for nothing,’ he said banging his book against his thighs.

She hadn’t written back to Theo in the end. It would be difficult for her to travel to London without a chaperone. And after the conversation she’d overheard when Grandmother was visiting, it seemed she might need to a find herself an officer, not a corporal.

Her gardening journal slid from her grasp and her lap, but her hand was too heavy to move and catch the book. The buzzing of the bees and the collared dove in the canopy above all faded away …

She woke much later with a start, heavy still with sleep. A car door had slammed shut, footsteps on the gravel.

No one had mentioned that they were expecting guests.

Cecil had gone. She carried on where she had left off with her journal for the vegetable garden, planning which new crops she would plant and where. She hated afternoon tea and polite conversation with strangers, but it was nearing the end of John’s leave and there was no telling when he might next be back.

Now that the stinging heat of the sun had faded it was safe to emerge from the shade and cross the lawn to the borders she had helped Mr Flitwick to plant. Taking the secateurs from her pocket, she snipped the stems of some cosmos for Mother.

Declining Daisy’s offer of help, she placed the blooms into a vase in the kitchen and made her way through to the sitting room so she could casually drop by and determine whether the guest was someone she wanted to stay for.

‘Hello …’ She stopped on the threshold to assess the scene of John and Cecil flanking Mother, who perched on the edge of the sofa, wringing a lace handkerchief with her fingers.

A man with his back to her in the armchair by the door turned to face her. Her hand froze around the vase as she placed it on the bookcase. The man was the ghost of her father yet greyer, sterner, leaner. In a smarter, tailored suit, with neater hair. Altogether more groomed than her father, Baden.