Sarah Hall - The Carhullan Army

At the side of the building was a lean-to shower, with a rain-chamber above it. A back boiler heated it in the mornings and evenings, but only to the level of tepidity, and I became used to washing with furious haste, barely bringing up a lather from the slab of lanolin soap before rinsing myself and running back out to dry and dress. I washed my hair as infrequently as possible, and tried to shower at the end of the day when I was already hot from work. The pot-hole toilets were bitterly cold. I’d visit them after someone else had been, while the wooden seat was still warm.

There was a tradition at Carhullan, a custom that had been implemented early on, as soon as the numbers began to grow. Each woman was allowed to bathe indoors on her birthday. For up to an hour she could lie in the deep green-stained copper bathtub surrounded by hot water and steam, undisturbed, and look into the mirror opposite. When I heard this I realised how lucky I had been to have access to the indoor bathroom for the weeks I was recuperating. It now seemed like the most luxurious place on the whole farm.

I began to wear the yellow tunic as an undershirt, with my heaviest jumper and a waterproof over it when I worked outside. I still did not want to discard it and the warp and weft of it was tight and warming. As soon as I was well enough to do more than clear the plates and help prepare meals I volunteered to work, and I was placed with a contingent of women shifting and storing peat bricks. Swathes of turf had been cut and were drying under long canvasses stretched on the fells. With the weather turning it needed to be brought inside, to be burned slowly and aromatically through the winter months along with wood from the willow copse. There were even plans to heat tar out of a portion of it, and refine the distillation into paraffin oil. It was amazing to me that so much could be culled from our surroundings, and that such knowledge was put into practice by the women as a matter of course.

I was happy to help move the fuel but it had not been my first choice. I had asked Jackie if I could join her unit. After our talk before the meeting I felt sure that she would agree. The day I was deemed fit to join the others sleeping out in the converted barns, I went looking for her. I found her feeding the dogs in the courtyard, and told her I had decided that this was what I wanted to do at Carhullan. As usual her smile was crooked, pulling the unmarked side of her face upwards. She shook her head. ‘No, Sister.’

Naively, I had expected her to be pleased. She had given the impression of beckoning me to her those past weeks. And, as if to keep my interest piqued, she had left another book on my bed, Lawrence’s Seven Pillars . I had read it quickly and left it propped against her bedroom door. Instead she seemed amused by my offer. ‘Ask me again in spring,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re ready to walk through fire just yet. Not while you think you’ve still got scores to settle. Besides, they’re going to want to see you pulling your weight here first. And I can’t use someone who isn’t built up. I can’t afford any accidents.’

In her hand was a plastic tub. The dogs writhed around her legs, yapping for the food. She emptied the red chunks out of the container into a trough and they butted heads over the scraps. I was taken aback. ‘Jackie,’ I said, ‘I understand what you did to me and why you did it. And I swear I’m not harbouring any bad feeling. I feel great.’ She looked at me, through me. ‘I don’t mean up here, Sister. I mean back down there. There’s no room for vendettas in what we’re doing. You’d be a liability. Chloe could do with some help at the gullies. You know where they are.’ I went away disappointed and confused.

The cutters looked up from the black trench when I arrived. They had scarves wound round their faces or hoods gathered into small openings to keep out the strong wind, and it was hard to see them properly. ‘Need some help?’ I called out. They were quiet for a moment and then one of them came forward. Under the wrappings of her head I saw her eyes, a rich sorrel, and the skin surrounding them was dark. ‘Sit,’ she said. ‘No, really, I’m fine to help you,’ I told her, ‘I’d like to. I’ve been doing nothing for weeks.’ Her eyes shone. She seemed amused. ‘Sit down. I need to wrap up your feet. Otherwise you’ll get trench foot.’ I glanced down at her legs and the legs of the others. All of them had plastic sheeting over their boots. I sat down on the coarse moorland.

She walked to a barrow that was half filled with slabs, and took out two old carrier bags from the canvas satchel hanging on it. She came back and knelt beside me, lifted one of my legs onto her knee and slipped the bag over my boot. She tied the handles at my ankle. Then she repeated the procedure for my other leg. ‘Got to look after your footwear,’ she said. ‘It’s like a bog out here when it rains.’ She reached into the pocket of her coat, fetched out a spare pair of gloves and passed them to me. ‘I’m Shruti. This is Chloe, Katrina, Fish, Lillian, and Maud. They’re all imbeciles. Just ignore them.’ The women cawed with laughter, shouted a few expletives, and started lifting the squares again. Shruti picked up a spade and passed it to me. She held her hands apart. ‘About this big,’ she said. Then she pointed to a row of dun slabs under a tent of canvas. ‘When you get bored you can help turn those ones.’ I couldn’t see her mouth under the tassels of her scarf, but I could see from her eyes that she was smiling.

The group of cutters was friendly. The women were hard working and used to each other, and they did not mind having me along with them. I liked Shruti as soon as I met her. She was kind, sombre looking under her work gear. She put me at ease and had a serenity about her that gave way from time to time to a droll wit. The other women always called her by one of her nicknames, Shrooms or Titty, and they teased her accent, but she gave as good as she got. ‘If you bunch of white-bread bints have nothing better to do than stand around all day copying me that’s your problem,’ she would say to them. ‘Take your time. Sister and I will keep things running.’

It was the tamer end of the banter at Carhullan. At first the jokes among the group seemed shocking and vicious to me; little was taboo, too impolitic or too rude, and they called each other terrible names, referred to their gashes and snatches, as if it was nothing to them to use such language. They insulted each other about their sexual proclivities, but no one seemed to take offence. I had heard the harsh way Jackie talked about the women at the farm, describing them as bitches and twats, and I had thought it was just her rough policy, but it seemed endemic to the place.

Shruti was about my age, and had come to Carhullan when she was twenty. There was a shiny patch of skin on the right-hand side of her neck that I saw when she took her outdoor clothes off for dinner. She wasn’t in my dormitory, so I had never seen her undress, but Nnenna, whom I bunked next to, told me the disfigurement ran on down her shoulder and breast, all the way to her thigh. She’d had acid thrown over her by a member of her family, a brother, an uncle, for some cultural transgression — a marriage refusal or an illicit relationship. But this was not why she left her home and headed north. She had been standing trial for a revenge assault. The charge had been downgraded, taking into account the provocation and the state of her mind, but she was looking at fifteen years’ detention. The Ministry of Justice had not managed to track her. Now, like the rest of the women up here, she had ceased to exist altogether, and that was fine by her.

It was a good group to be on the fells with. They worked outdoors all year between the gullies, the willow copse and the orchard, and they were bronzed and lively. Because I was new to them, and curious, they seemed to enjoy the opportunity to retell their stories, discuss old war wounds, and boast about their early misadventures. There were fewer victims at Carhullan than I had imagined. Often it was the women themselves who had committed a crime or were misfits: they had been violent, outspoken, socially inept, promiscuous, drug-addicted, and aware they needed some kind of system to bring them in to line. They all agreed that Carhullan was the best thing to have happened to them. That coming there was the best decision they had ever made. Not that they weren’t sick of the sloppy hare stews, the arse rashes, stinking loos, nipple-pinching showers, and lack of tampons.