Elizabeth Elgin - A Scent of Lavender

‘So, Lorna – and this is the first and last time you’ll talk to yourself! – you’ll get smartly upstairs,’ she whispered to the frizzy-haired woman in the mirror, ‘change into something cooler, then go for a long walk and sort yourself out!’

And oh my word, she thought as she took the stairs two at a time, wasn’t life going to be one big barrel of laughs? She was tetchy already and William only three hours gone.

She made a moue of her mouth. She always screwed up her lips when in danger of tears, and tears would not do! There was a war on, the Germans were little more than twenty miles away across the Channel and hundreds and hundreds of our soldiers had died, not a month ago, on the beaches at Dunkirk.

So behave yourself, woman! Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Straighten your shoulders and get on with it like half the women in the country are having to do!

She took off her costume and best blouse, peeled off her stockings, slithered a flowered cotton frock over her head, then pushed her bare feet into scuffed brown sandals, tying back the thick mass of hair that William said she must never cut short. It wasn’t very ladylike, she supposed, to go out stockingless and gloveless but wasn’t she, from this day on, pleasing no one but herself?

Defiantly, she made for the front door.

The village of Nun Ainsty lay at the end of a long straight lane, the only way into it and out of it. At the top of the lane and across the busy main road was Meltonby, which had a general store and a school which Ainsty children – had there been any – would have attended. Meltonby also had a post office with a bus stop outside it and a regular bus service to York.

Lorna stopped at the lane end. Its real name was Priory Lane, but to Ainsty folk it was ‘the lane’, which they walked up to the main road or walked down to the scatter of houses that was Nun Ainsty. Not big enough to be called a village. A hamlet, really, a backwater, and she loved it.

She paused, watching the busy road, then looked down at her shoes as a truck of soldiers whistled at her as they sped past. She felt her cheeks redden. Men still dismayed her – apart from Grandpa God-rest-him, and William. Those two she felt at ease with but strange men, or men en masse like the whistling soldiers, she found difficult to cope with. All to do with her sheltered life, she supposed; because Ladybower and Ainsty had been the centre of her life ever since she could remember. She recalled when William, a tall, almost grown-up young man, had patted her head and given her a chocolate bar. She had blushed furiously and run into the garden. She would have choked on that chocolate had she known that little more than ten years on she would marry him.

But William had gone to war and she was trying to clear her head, get things in order in her mind. She turned her back on the main road and started off towards the village, face to the sun, and when she reached the pillar box, she would know she had walked a mile exactly. Thereafter, still trying to clear her head, she would walk around the Green, passing each house, maybe even stopping to tell anyone who might ask that yes, thank you, William had got away on time this morning and she was waiting to hear he was safely there, and what his new address was. She reached the pillar box and was about to turn left to walk the Green clockwise, when an unmistakable voice called,

‘Lorna, my dear! A minute!’

‘Nance. Hullo. What can I do for you?’ Nance Ellery always wanted something doing and Lorna had grown used to asking what it was.

‘A word. A word to the wise, you might say. I’m going to Meltonby.’ She nodded to the parcel in the basket of her cycle. ‘Half an hour, say …?’

‘Fine. Anything of importance, or just a chat?’

‘Tell you later.’ She never wasted time or words. ‘William got away all right, did he?’ she called over her shoulder as she pedalled off.

A word to the wise? Lorna frowned. A word of warning was it to be to a young wife newly deserted, about the dangers of being alone and fair game for serving men away from their wives and missing the comforts of home. And bed.

She turned right at the pillar box instead and walked the few yards to her home, because Nance Ellery was going to have her say and fill her head with doubts and innuendoes so that clearing it would be well nigh impossible.

She decided against soup for lunch and ate a chunk of bread instead. Then she took a hairbrush from the dresser drawer and pulled it through her thick, corkscrew curls, wincing as she did it, wishing her fair, frizzy hair was straight and sleek and black.

She glanced up to see Mrs Ellery leaning her cycle against the gate. She had been to the post office and back, and found time to change into her WVS uniform all in the space of half an hour. And because she was wearing her plum and green, Lorna knew that the word to the wise must also have a ring of officialdom about it because anything to do with the war or the church, anything remotely authoritative, warranted the wearing of the uniform.

‘My dear.’ Nance was a big woman and puffed a little, on occasions. ‘Can we sit down? The garden, maybe? We won’t be overheard?’

‘The garden it is. And there’ll be no one listening.’ The garden of Ladybower House was overlooked by Dickon’s Wood, and completely shut off. ‘But whatever is the matter? It seems urgent.’

‘It is, in a way. The thing is, Lorna, how many bedrooms have you got?’

‘Five. You know we have.’

‘Yes! But how many available? You’ve cleared the attics, haven’t you?’

‘Of course. As soon as the government said we had to.’ And the directive had made sense, Lorna supposed. Any room built into the roof space of any house was to be emptied immediately, because of the risk of fire bombs. Nasty things, fire bombs. They pierced roofs then burned fiercely and it wouldn’t have been a lot of use having to clear a way through years of clutter to get to the thing and put it out with sand. ‘We threw a lot of rubbish away, but what was left is stowed away in the small bedroom.’

‘Which virtually means you have two bedrooms only?’

‘I suppose so, but why do you ask?’ Nance was putting words into her mouth; that she had only one spare bedroom. ‘I mean, are you billeting again? Are you looking for places for evacuees?’ Lorna felt uneasy.

‘Not at the moment, though the way things are with the war, I soon will be, nothing is more certain!’

When war broke out, children had been evacuated from towns which would almost certainly be bombed. A straggle of children had walked around Nun Ainsty, labels on coats, possessions in brown paper bags. It had been Nance Ellery’s job to help the Billeting Officer find homes for them, Lorna recalled. She and William had been landed with four, and William had hated it. William and Lorna had no children of their own, nor were any planned in the near future, and William took exception to other people’s being thrust upon his peace and privacy. That they had quickly returned to Leeds and Manchester had been a relief, and her otherwise patriotic husband said he would set the dogs on the next Billeting Officer who showed her face at Ladybower’s door – if they’d had dogs, that was!

‘So it’s children again?’ Lorna was clearly worried.

‘Not just yet, and if you’re clever you can fill that spare room with an adult who’ll be no trouble, and company for you now that William’s away. A female, of course.’

‘W-what kind of a female?’

‘A female for Glebe Farm. A land girl.’

‘A woman at Glebe Farm?’ Kate Wintersgill wouldn’t take kindly to that! ‘Are you sure they need a land girl? Can’t Bob and Rowley manage?’

‘Seems not. They want more help. And it would be better for the woman to live elsewhere, and Kate knows it. Well you would, I mean, with a son with only one thing on his mind, if what I hear is to be believed!’