Roland Moore - Land Girls - The Promise - A moving and heartwarming wartime saga

But the blonde woman wasn’t listening any more. She was already setting off across the room. “I’ve got to meet that man,” she muttered under her breath, earning a baffled stare from Mrs Gulliver. But then Mrs Gulliver knew that people were strange.

The stranger straightened her blouse and gave her hair an imperceptible lift with her hand as she got nearer to Freddie Finch. He was watching the events on the dance floor, so he didn’t notice her approaching. She was only two feet away from him, and about to speak, when the two soldiers who had been arguing flew in a messy heap of fighting limbs into a nearby table. Finch held his pint glasses high, out of harm’s way, as other people scattered while the two men fought on the floor, knocking over chairs and tables. The girl who had been with them was screaming at them to stop. Connie and Joyce rolled their eyes. This was a fairly typical event thanks to the combination of alcohol and high spirits. Lady Hoxley ran across the room to the fracas, two military policemen in tow. She wasn’t going to stand for it. The band stopped playing and the lights were turned up, the party over in an instant.

The blonde woman stood for a moment, contemplating the situation. Finch was edging away from the fracas, pints in hand, as if he was expecting to get the blame somehow.

It wasn’t the right time to meet Frederick Finch. Not now.

No one noticed as the blonde woman turned on her heels and disappeared out of the door. By then Iris had returned to thinking about her own problems, as if the bubble of the dance had been burst by the fighting. The real world had come flooding back, bringing with it familiar feelings of unease and fear. Iris felt a chill, despite the warmth of the room and the contented giddiness in her head from the cider. She’d half-hoped that the soldier might be waiting for her, but he wasn’t.

Iris trudged back towards Pasture Farm. The other girls were singing and laughing, but she felt lost in her own thoughts. The shadows in the fields taunted her, while the girls seemed oblivious. Thoughts of Joe Batch had receded, to be replaced by her more usual preoccupations: thoughts of Vernon Storey and his promise to return for her. She wished with all her heart that she could put it out of her mind. When her head was woozy with cider, it all seemed a bit easier to cope with. Iris wondered whether she needed another drink when she got back to the farm. She decided that it probably wasn’t a good idea. Instead she listened to the humourous conversation between Joyce and Connie behind her and tried her best to join in.

The outbuilding stood alone in a corner of Pasture Farm; a crumbling rectangle of red bricks capped with a corrugated-iron roof and a green wooden door with more holes in it than one of Frederick Finch’s moth-eaten old jumpers. It was one in a large number of dilapidated buildings, seemingly positioned at random positions around the nexus of the farm cottage, as if they were seeds from a wind-blown dandelion clock. But despite the building’s basic construction, it looked welcoming, thanks to a soft-orange light emanating from within, visible through the single, tiny, grease-smeared window. In the daytime, it was a place where the Land Girls mended their tools. But in the evenings, it was a place of learning. Iris would go there to meet Frank and he would try to teach her. Their progress was slow and sometimes their nightly meetings would be mocked by the other girls with taunts about Iris meeting her fancy man. But she hoped that the dilapidated rectangular outbuilding would also be a place that would change her life.

“DeEr MUm”

The pencil scratched out the words with half a dozen spidery lines. And then the letters started to form again, better this time.

“Dear MUm”

Iris was aware that her tongue was sticking out as she painstakingly scrawled the letters on the notepaper that Frank had given her. The large, flat carpenter’s pencil seemed strange in her hand, hurting her fingers as she pressed it on the page. But then she wasn’t used to writing and coordinating the pencil was hard work. It always looked easy when other people did it, but when she tried, she struggled to steer it across the paper. She didn’t realise that she’d made a spelling mistake, but even she could see that the letters were an uneven bag of uppercase and lowercase, written in a size that bore no correlation to whether they were capitals or not, as if it was a ransom note made from glued newspaper letters. But she’d done it, and she felt a small sense of pride welling up in her heart.

And to cap it all, Frank seemed impressed with Iris’s handwriting. “Not bad, Miss Dawson. Not bad at all.”

“Did I spell it right?”

“Near enough.” He cracked a smile, kindly fissures erupting around the corner of his mouth and his eyes. He didn’t want to dampen the enthusiasm in his young trainee, but Iris was smart enough to know when she was being soft-soaped. Frank spotted the slight grimace on her face as she put the pencil down on his workbench.

“Hey, come on. You’ll get there. That’s two more words than you were writing before.”

It was true. When she came to Pasture Farm as a member of the Women’s Land Army, Iris Dawson couldn’t read or write a word. She had a sweet nature, which meant she always brought out the maternal and paternal instincts in older people. This was why she also had a good relationship with Freddie Finch, who seemed protective and kind.

Such was the case with friendly odd-job man, Frank Tucker, who worked on Pasture Farm doing many of the chores that the tenant farmer was too lazy to do. Their friendship had been cemented long before Iris had saved Frank from the gallows. They had struck up a relationship after Frank had spotted Iris’s reading shortfall when she had failed to read a tractor manual. The contraption had very nearly ripped her arm off when she attempted to start the thing. He wasn’t going to let her make such dangerous mistakes on account of the fact that she couldn’t read instructions. So Frank had taken her under his wing, happy for the company, and he had started to teach her to read and write. They had begun with some of the children’s picture books that had belonged to Martin, and now they had graduated onto books with fewer pictures. Iris was currently stumbling her way through Enid Blyton’s Five On A Treasure Island , but it was hard going. She liked the fact that she was reading Martin’s books; turning pages that he had turned, connecting with him, somehow, across time.

The writing was just as arduous as the reading.

“Why is it all so difficult?” Iris had complained.

“Nothing worth doing is easy.” Frank smiled.

It was Iris’s ambition to be able to write a letter home to her mother. Margot Dawson knew that Iris couldn’t read or write, but she also knew that some kind soul would read out the letters that she sent to her daughter. So Frank had found himself providing a mouthpiece for the missives from home. He related to Iris about how her grandfather’s leg was getting better (‘It doesn’t really play up much now. Mainly when he has to get coal in. Funny that!’). He told her about the gossip caused when a new racy neighbour moved in (‘She only wears crimson. And I don’t want to say she’s fast, but the milkman spent a long time in her house the other day.’) But as well as the light-hearted information, Frank had broken the sad news that her beloved dog, Neville, had died. He’d also told her about how her siblings were getting on, since they’d gone to stay with an aunt outside the city. And in return, Frank would dutifully write replies to Margot Dawson, dictated by Iris. She would search for a word and Frank would painstakingly suggest one. They had spent many an evening hour together with him reading and writing and her learning. Sometimes she would censor her thoughts when dictating. Certainly she wouldn’t mention anything about how she felt about men, in particular Martin. So her letters home were mostly about the mundane matters of farm life; how hard she was working, the blisters she was collecting, the odd mention of a dance or a film she had seen in the village hall. She wouldn’t dictate anything that gave away her troubled, inner thoughts either. They were best locked up until the time came when she could write them down herself. Or when she could go home and talk to her mum face to face.