‘Are you sure we should go ahead?’ Una Sharpe glanced at the circle of candlelit faces gathered around the table in the common room of Fieldhead Women’s Land Army hostel. A low fire settled in the grate, while outside in the dark night a strong wind gusted through the elm trees.
Brenda Appleby set the Ouija board down on the table. ‘Yes, come along, Una; it’s only a bit of fun.’
‘Fun; that’s all it is.’
‘Where’s the thingumajig – the planchette?’
Several high-spirited voices let an uneasy Una know that she was in a minority of one.
Brenda produced a heart-shaped piece of wood from the box then placed it in the centre of the board. ‘Here it is. Now, do we all know what to do?’
‘We ask it a question.’ It turned out that, of all people, fun-loving, modern go-getter Kathleen Hirst was adept at contacting the dead. ‘Starting with an easy one, such as: “How many people are in this room?” Then we wait for it to give us an answer.’
In the flickering candlelight Una studied the letters and numbers on the board. She ought not to be so silly, she told herself. What harm could there possibly be in joining in? And yet …
‘Ready?’ Brenda asked.
‘And willing!’ Kathleen was the first to place her finger on the planchette. ‘My Grandma Hirst was a dab hand at this lark. She could conjure up the spirit of her dead brother at the drop of a hat.’
Five other fingers joined hers, delicately poised and ready to begin. Only Una hesitated. And yet … death was already far too present in this, the third year of the Second World War. Allied soldiers perished daily in the blazing deserts of North Africa. Naval men went down with their ships in the Atlantic. Not to mention the brave RAF boys brought down by ack-ack guns or blown to smithereens by their German counterparts. Following her gut feeling, Una scraped back her chair and stood up.
‘I’m sorry, girls; I have a letter to write,’ she said by way of an excuse as she made her way to the door.
‘To lover-boy Angelo, no doubt!’ Kathleen raised a critical eyebrow over Una’s affair with the Italian POW. ‘Mi amore, la-la-la!’
Una ignored the cascade of light laughter from inside the room. In the cold, tiled hallway she bumped into Joyce Cutler who was descending the wide stairs in her thick Land Army coat and porkpie hat. She was on her way to help an elderly widowed neighbour who had telephoned the hostel to tell the warden that two of her pigs had escaped into the field behind the farmhouse.
‘Hello, Una. What are they up to in there?’
‘Nothing much. Some spiritualist nonsense, that’s all.’
‘Aha, not the old Ouija board? Who’s the ringleader? No, let me guess: Kathleen.’
Una shook her head. ‘Brenda this time. I didn’t fancy joining in, though.’
‘I don’t blame you.’ Joyce picked up on her roommate’s uneasiness. She too had her doubts about this fashionable dabbling with the spirits of the dead. Not that she believed in it exactly – she just thought it might lead to no good. ‘Listen, Una, I know Sunday is our day off and it’s already pitch black outside, but Peggy Russell has mislaid two of her prime porkers. I don’t suppose you fancy helping me to recapture the ungrateful blighters?’
Una gave a quick nod then sprinted up the stairs. ‘Hang on a second while I fetch my coat.’
‘Bring a torch,’ Joyce called after her. ‘And we’ll need gumboots for that boggy field. I’ll meet you outside the back door.’
In the dimly lit common room, Kathleen volunteered to ask the first question of the ghostly presence. ‘What year is this?’
The girls leaned forward to concentrate on the heart-shaped planchette. Their pupils were dilated, their chapped, work-worn fingers trembled with anticipation. Slowly the counter started to move jerkily towards the number one. Sitting to Brenda’s left, Elsie Walker felt a small flutter of excitement. Number one, then nine, then four; the planchette gathered speed until it came to rest against the number two.
‘Well I never!’ Elsie laughed. She ran her free hand through her boyish, cropped hair. ‘Nineteen forty-two. It’s got that right, at least. Ask it something else.’
‘Here’s my next question,’ Kathleen began.
‘Hold your horses; it’s time to give someone else a turn.’ Brenda stepped in eagerly. ‘Right then, whoever you are, what is the first letter of your Christian name?’
For a few seconds there was no movement. Each girl held her breath, caught between the urge to giggle and a sense that mighty, unknown forces could be at work. Elsie bit her bottom lip and cast a nervous glance at Kathleen. Suddenly the carved piece of wood slid smoothly towards the letter F.
‘“F”,’ Kathleen whispered as she looked around the table. ‘Who do we know from our pasts whose name began with an F? Could it be a Fred? Does anyone have a poor old Uncle Fred who came to a sticky end in the mud of a Flanders field?’
The wide-eyed girls shook their heads.
‘Perhaps it’s a Frank.’ Elsie nudged Brenda with her elbow.
‘Is your name Frank?’ Even as Brenda asked the question, the memory of Frank Kellett flew into her head. It was coming up to a year since poor, lovelorn Frank had been found frozen to death on Swinsty Edge – curled on his side in the snow, his icy hand still clutching one of Una’s embroidered handkerchiefs.
‘Yes.’ The planchette shot towards the word printed in the top left-hand corner. At the same moment, the glowing cinders in the grate collapsed unnoticed and sent a hot ember and a shower of red sparks on to the hearth rug.
As the disc moved, Elsie let out a squeal.
Kathleen was unruffled. ‘Hello, Frank. We’re glad you could join us. Do you have a message for someone?’
‘Yes,’ the board told them.
‘You’ve come to talk to Una, haven’t you? Is there something special that you want to say to her?’
Though Brenda had instigated the game and she kept her finger pressed lightly on the planchette, doubt wormed its way into her head. Perhaps this hadn’t been such a good idea after all. Thank heavens Una decided to make a quick exit, she thought.
‘Yes,’ the board answered promptly before the planchette moved back to the centre of the board.
In for a penny, in for a pound; Kathleen pressed ahead. ‘Is it that you’ll always love her?’
No one breathed. The wooden heart slid slowly towards the bottom of the board then shot swiftly up towards the ‘yes’.
‘Goodness gracious, can anyone smell burning?’ With a careless shove of the board across the table Elsie broke the mood. She jumped up and rushed to the other side of the room where the fallen ember had singed the rug. ‘Quick, someone; fetch a jug of water,’ she cried.
Brenda turned on the overhead electric light then ran to join her. She seized some handy coal tongs and whisked the glowing cinder back into the grate. Then she stamped on the singed patch. ‘Panic over,’ she reported as Elsie returned with the jug. ‘But you’d better pour water over it, just in case.’
Kathleen was the only one still at the table, putting the Ouija board back to rights and eager to continue their communion with the spirit world. ‘Someone turn off the light pronto. Let’s hope we haven’t lost Frank in all the kerfuffle.’
‘Let’s hope we have,’ Brenda countered. ‘The poor soul deserves to be left in peace after what he went through.’ Driven out in the middle of winter by his hard-hearted father, doted on by his mother who had nevertheless been unable to protect her simple-minded son, Frank Kellett had been an outcast and a victim all his life. ‘What do you say we play a nice game of whist and listen to the wireless instead?’
‘You two took your time.’ Peggy Russell’s poker-faced greeting was par for the course. The farmer’s widow stood in her doorway in her brown dressing-gown and carpet slippers, straight grey hair parted down the middle and tucked behind her ears, casting a doubtful gaze over Joyce and Una.
‘Yes, but we’re here now.’ Joyce waited for instructions while Una stamped her feet against the biting cold. Why did the wind always blow in so strongly from the west? she wondered. It must be to do with the steep valley sides of the Yorkshire Dales creating a funnel through which it gusted.
‘Pigs are loose in the back field.’ Peggy jerked her head towards the side of her stone-built farmhouse. ‘Two of them.’
Joyce shone her torch across the farmyard. ‘And you want them back in their sty?’
‘No, I want them on a plate with a couple of fried eggs. Where do you think I want them?’
Peggy’s sarcasm didn’t dent Joyce’s good humour. ‘Rightio, Mrs Russell – we’ll get on with it. Come along, Una.’
As the two young women clomped across the flagged yard in their gumboots, they heard the distant drone of aeroplane engines, gradually growing louder. Quickly turning off their torches, they instructed Peggy to close her door.
‘Just in case it’s Jerry and he spots our lights,’ Joyce explained.
Una listened carefully then offered her opinion. ‘They sound more like Lancasters to me. Probably RAF boys heading out of Rixley for an overnight raid on Munich or Saarbrücken.’
Joyce paused by the gate leading into Peggy’s field. Every night the sound of planes flying overhead made her quake and go weak at the knees, knowing that her fiancé, Edgar Kershaw, might be one of the pilots setting out on what could well be his final mission. Best not to think about it. Best to get on with the task in hand. She opened the gate and stepped ankle deep into mud. ‘Here, piggies!’ she called into the darkness. ‘Here, nice little piggy-piggies!’
‘Spoilsport,’ Kathleen grumbled as Brenda turned on the wireless. ‘Who wants to listen to boring speeches on our night off?’
‘I do.’ Elsie sat down and put her feet up on a low stool, her neat, small figure dwarfed by the worn leather upholstery of the old-fashioned chesterfield. The other girls shrugged then wandered off to their rooms to write letters and darn socks.
There was a whine of valves as the wireless warmed up. ‘It’s our duty as Land Girls to listen to what our prime minister has to say,’ Brenda opined. She found the station on the dial then plonked herself on the sofa beside Elsie while Kathleen stood with her back to the fire. ‘And let’s hope he gives us more good news from North Africa.’
They’d tuned in just in time for the political broadcast and soon Mr Churchill’s lugubrious tones filled the stuffy, book-lined room. He spoke once more of Allied gains in Morocco and Algeria and of an American naval victory over Japan at Koli Point. General Montgomery was soon to launch a new offensive in Libya.
‘About time too,’ Kathleen remarked through a cloud of blue cigarette smoke. ‘We’ve been hanging on by the skin of our teeth up till now.’
‘Hush!’ Elsie and Brenda said together.
Churchill’s voice growled on then built to a climax. He told the nation that the Desert army had forced Rommel into a humiliating retreat. ‘Now this is not the end,’ he warned them gravely. ‘It is not even the beginning of the end.’
‘You can say that again,’ Kathleen muttered.
‘Ssh!’ Brenda reached out to turn up the volume knob.
‘But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’
‘Hurrah!’ As Brenda clicked off the wireless, Elsie was genuinely heartened by the good news. ‘Things are changing in our favour at last.’
Kathleen bent to stub out her cigarette on the grate then flicked the butt into the fire. ‘They’re certainly changing; any idiot can see that. But not always for the better.’ Her youngest brother, Vernon, a boy of eighteen, was the latest member of her family to have been conscripted into the army. Clothing coupons had been reduced again, forcing some of the girls at Fieldhead into desperate measures, including cutting up their old jumpers and turning them into socks.
‘Oh, Kathleen; since when did you turn into such a moaning Minnie?’ Elsie jumped up to put a disc on the turntable of the gramophone standing in all its mahogany majesty in the bay window. She chose a recent favourite then flicked a switch and carefully lowered the needle. There was a hiss of static before a jaunty baritone began with the words, ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.’
‘When she comes!’ Brenda and Elsie chimed in, tapping their feet in time to the music. They smiled and got ready to insert their own cheeky words into the next verse. She’ll be kissing six tall sergeants when she comes … ‘Coming round the mountain, coming round the mountain, coming round the mountain when she comes!’
There was nothing nice about the little piggies that had escaped into Peggy’s back field. The two fully grown sows snorted and bolted, squealed when cornered then barged between Una’s legs, upskittling her and landing her in the mud.
Joyce hauled her friend on to her feet as the runaway pigs galloped off into the darkness. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, ta. Nothing hurt apart from my dignity.’ Una adjusted her hat then thought ahead. ‘We need a weapon to herd them with – a pitchfork or a rake.’
‘Or something to tempt them back into the yard.’ Joyce knew that Peggy kept a store of turnips in the stone barn at the far edge of the field. ‘Wait here,’ she told her bedraggled companion. She was gone for five minutes then returned with two choice-looking vegetables. ‘These should do the trick.’
She was mistaken; turnips were not, it seemed, to Ivy and Ruby’s taste. Though Joyce and Una cornered and cajoled, made tweeting noises and offered what they thought was a mouth-watering treat, the recalcitrant pigs turned up their snouts and scarpered.
‘Try this!’ a voice called from the gate after a full hour of fruitless tempting. Peggy held up a bucket of pigswill that she kept at her kitchen door for just such emergencies.
Una aimed her torch beam at the stern figure standing by the gate. Joyce trudged across the field and took the bucket. Within seconds, Ivy and Ruby smelt its sloppy contents and came running full tilt. At the last moment, Joyce hoisted the bucket high in the air and Una opened the gate. The pigs skidded through then came to a halt on the stone flags of the yard. Joyce and Una nipped in after them and slammed the gate shut. Now all that remained was for Joyce to rattle a stick against the side of the bucket as she guided the runaways back into their sty.
When Joyce finally lowered the bucket to let the pigs feed, Una let out a long sigh of relief.
An unsmiling Peggy looked on with arms folded. ‘About time too,’ she commented before shuffling back into the house and closing the door.
Una and Joyce looked at each other in astonishment as they set off for home.
‘I’m saying nothing!’ Joyce broke into a loud laugh. Her round face was still wreathed in smiles when they came to the tall stone gateposts at the entrance to Fieldhead. ‘So, Una, what are you planning for the rest of your evening, now that we’ve accomplished our mission?’
‘I’ll write a letter to Angelo. He’s finally on the mend so they’ve moved him to a convalescent home near the seaside. I want to ask him about his new billet.’
‘And he’s definitely over the worst?’ Joyce was heartened by the news, knowing how much Una had fretted through the summer months and well into autumn.
‘Yes – for now.’ Una knew that, as yet, tuberculosis had no cure but if patients were well cared for and treated with modern medicines, the disease could be held at bay. Though unable to visit her beloved in the isolation hospital, she still dreamed of being with Angelo after the war ended – sitting with him amongst lemon trees and olive groves on the sunny slopes outside Pisa. She wore his gold cross around her neck, convinced that if she took it off, even for a single moment, it would bring bad luck.
‘That’s champion,’ Joyce murmured as they went round the side of the hostel and kicked off their gumboots outside the back door. ‘Actually, I have something of my own to tell you,’ she confided.
‘About Edgar?’
‘No, Edgar’s fine, touch wood.’ Joyce tapped her forehead. ‘But I’ve decided to move out of Fieldhead.’
Una gasped at this bombshell news. ‘Oh, Joyce – you’re not leaving the Land Army?’
‘No, just the hostel. It feels like time for me to make a change.’
‘Where will you go, for goodness’ sake?’
‘To a new billet, somewhere further up the dale.’
‘But why?’ Una couldn’t understand why Joyce would wish to move from the relative comfort of Fieldhead and forsake the company of the girls she worked alongside.
Unbuttoning her coat, Joyce stepped over the threshold. ‘I want to be of more use,’ she explained. ‘I intend to ask Mrs Mostyn to send me somewhere where they really need me.’
‘But we need you here.’ Una guessed rightly that her protests would fall on deaf ears. ‘You’re the one who knows most about tractors and ploughing, threshing and milking. You’ve been farming all your life. What will we do without you?’
‘You’ll manage,’ Joyce said with a smile. ‘But don’t say anything until I’ve told Mrs Mostyn after work tomorrow. Promise?’
‘Hand on heart.’ Una padded down the corridor in stockinged feet. Fieldhead without Joyce would be hard to bear. Who would save her a place at the rowdy breakfast table? Who would dish out advice about matters of the heart?
‘It goes without saying that I’ll miss you,’ Joyce whispered as she entered the kitchen and went to the stove to warm her hands.
‘Likewise.’ Una was overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness. Change was afoot. Events near and far ran out of control.
‘Before we know it, it’ll be time to start sprout-picking for the Christmas market.’ Grace Mostyn stood behind the bar in the Blacksmith’s Arms. She was well into the third month of her pregnancy and had reluctantly taken her doctor’s advice to pull out of farm work due to severe morning sickness.
‘The Land Army will have to get by without you,’ Dr Hood had told her firmly across his wide, leather-topped desk. The sun had been reflected in the lenses of his heavy glasses but there was no denying the directness of his gaze. ‘Baby must come first.’
Grace had suffered similar pressure from her mother-in-law, Edith Mostyn, who happened to be the local Land Army rep. ‘Bill agrees with me; he told me so in his last letter. We simply can’t have you digging ditches and mending walls in your condition.’
‘I could transfer to lighter duties,’ Grace had suggested without conviction.
‘Such as?’ Edith had run through the litany of winter jobs: sprout-picking, potato-lifting, hen- and goose-plucking and the dreaded mechanical threshing of this year’s wheat crop. ‘No, Grace; it’s too risky. I’ll telephone county office first thing in the morning and ask for your release.’
Which is why Joyce found Grace serving in her father’s pub in the village of Burnside on the Monday evening after work. She took a slow sip of shandy from a half-pint glass. ‘Standing out in a frozen field picking sprouts will bring on the chilblains, no doubt.’ There was nothing like it to cause one of the most troublesome complaints of the winter. ‘Not to mention the frostbitten fingers and the backache and what have you.’
Grace wiped down the already spotless bar then paused to take a long, hard look at her brother’s fiancée. Joyce’s shoulder-length brown hair was hidden beneath a green headscarf tied like a turban around her head and she sat on the stool in muddy brown dungarees, elbows on the bar, evidently exhausted after a long day digging ditches at the Kelletts’ place. Still, she managed to give off a pleasant, friendly air.
‘You’re not here just to pass the time of day with me, are you?’ Grace remarked at last.
Joyce shook her head. ‘Well spotted, Sherlock.’
‘I know you, Joyce. There’s a reason why you didn’t go straight home after work.’ Grace slipped away to serve two Canadian airmen from the base on Penny Lane and when she came back she resumed the conversation. ‘Well?’
‘I called in to see your mother-in-law and ask for a change of billet.’ There; she’d said it! It was really happening.
Grace’s oval face registered surprise. ‘Whatever for?’
‘That’s exactly what Mrs Mostyn said.’ Whatever for? Has Hilda Craven upset you? Has one of the other girls? If so, I’m sure this is something we can easily sort out.
‘And what did you tell her?’
‘That I liked living at Fieldhead but I was ready for a change.’
‘A different challenge?’
‘Exactly. I thought perhaps I could retrain as a lumberjill.’
‘For the Women’s Timber Corps?’
‘Yes. Or I could study for a certificate as a mechanized operative then I could train other girls to drive and maintain tractors.’
‘What did she say?’
‘That she would enquire at head office on my behalf, but that meanwhile, if I was serious about wanting a move, I’d better be prepared to be sent wherever they need me the most.’
‘It could be in the back of beyond,’ Grace pointed out when she’d had time to digest Joyce’s news. ‘Would you mind being billeted in a farm miles from anywhere, surrounded by nothing but bare hillsides and sheep?’
Joyce thought she would not. ‘I’d have plenty of time in the evening to read my library books and write letters.’ To Edgar, she thought but didn’t need to say out loud. ‘I’ll miss Una and Brenda, of course.’ But not the hurly-burly of meals at the long dining-room tables, the scramble for the bathrooms and some of the silliness that resulted from a gaggle of young women from Yorkshire mill towns and factories all being thrown together in a run-down manor house that had been converted into a Land Army hostel to aid the war effort. ‘And you, Grace; I’ll miss you too.’
‘“For a healthy, happy job, join the Women’s Land Army!”’ Brenda wielded a pitchfork like a lance and charged at the tattered poster pasted on the door of one of the stables in the weed-strewn yard behind the hostel.
She and Kathleen had spent the whole of Wednesday lifting potatoes from clamps in the top field at Brigg Farm. Each clamp was twenty-five feet long, made up of nine-inch layers of straw alternating with harvested potatoes. The girls’ job was to transfer the spuds into hessian sacks then sling the full sacks on to the back of a horse and cart before driving back to the farmyard. It was back-breaking, bone-chilling work, carried out in temperatures well below freezing, and now that the day was over, Brenda took out her frustrations on the familiar call to arms. ‘Join the flipping Land Army!’ She thrust the prongs of the pitchfork deep into the wooden planks. ‘Take that!’ she cried.
Kathleen laughed as she wheeled her bike into the nearest stable. ‘Never mind, things are looking up. I took delivery of a Peek Freans Christmas cake this morning; one and nine from Stannings grocery shop in Northgate.’
‘Sent by?’
‘My ma, bless her. She thinks I’m starving to death out here.’
‘That adds up to a lot of coupons,’ Brenda remarked. ‘She must have been saving them up for weeks.’
‘Yes and I’ve got strict instructions not to open the cake until the week running up to Christmas – that means more than a month before we can break into it.’
Their easy conversation took Kathleen and Brenda indoors and down the long, dark corridor into Ma Craven’s kitchen where they found the warden preparing to load the evening meal of boiled beef, potatoes and carrots on to a rickety trolley. While her back was turned, Brenda lifted the lid of the stew pot and picked out a steaming piece of carrot.
‘I saw that!’ Hilda warned.
‘Blimey, it’s true what they say – you really have got eyes in the back of your head.’ Brenda retreated with a wink. She was fond of the unflappable older woman whose job was to run every angle of household affairs at Fieldhead, including cooking, cleaning and generally keeping the girls in line. ‘Is there anything we can do to help?’
Hilda huffed and puffed as she lifted the heavy iron pot. ‘Yes, you can carry those water jugs into the dining room, then you can set out the knives and forks.’
‘Trust you, Brenda. I was looking forward to hopping into a hot bath and having a good soak before dinner,’ Kathleen complained as they carried out their tasks. The two girls were well matched in personality and appearance. Both were tall with long legs, graceful figures and slender waists, though Kathleen’s hair was fair and wavy (thanks to a bottle of bleach and some perm solution, she cheerfully admitted) while Brenda’s was dark and fashionably short, giving her a cheeky, vivacious air that reflected her independent spirit. They were town girls born and bred, strong-minded and strikingly attractive, and on a Friday night out at the Blacksmith’s Arms, they had to fend off the attentions of Canadian pilots, POWs and local farmers alike.
‘What is it about you two?’ Joyce had asked them when they were setting off for work one foggy morning at the start of November. ‘Even togged out in dungarees and wellington boots, you manage to look as if you’ve just stepped off a Paris catwalk.’
Ah yes, Joyce. Brenda rapped knives and forks down on to the bare trestle table while Kathleen lined up the glasses. Joyce will leave a bloody big hole when she’s no longer at Fieldhead. There’ll be no one with enough common sense and know-how to step into her shoes.
‘I’m moving on from Fieldhead,’ Joyce had announced the night before as she queued behind Brenda for the bathroom. ‘I’m waiting to hear where they’ll send me.’
Brenda had flashed her a startled look but for once had held her tongue. It was Joyce’s business, after all.
‘Will you miss me?’ Joyce had asked over a late-night cup of cocoa.
‘Not a whit!’ Brenda had assured her with a wink.
Oh, but I will! She finished laying out the cutlery and heard Ma Craven trundle her trolley down the uneven flagged corridor. I’ll miss Joyce Cutler more than I can say!