Whisper on the Wind
A moving story of women caught in the emotional crossfire of war.World War Two. For men, an era of terrible devastation, broken lives and perhaps a glimpse of heroism. But for many women, a time of opportunity, a new-found freedom, a challenge in a changing world. For Kath Allen and Roz Fairchild it’s a time for shadowy secrest and forbidden love…Against the express wishes of her long-absent husband Barney, Kath joins up as a landgirl and moves from the bustle of Birmingham to work on Mat Ramsden’s farm in the Yorkshire countryside. For the first time in her life she feels she belongs. Kath blossoms there like a flower in the sun and, free from the rigid restrictions of Barney and his family, begins to believe that she has a right to happiness on her own terms. But freedom can bring temptation. And temptation can be dangerous.Next door the Fairchild estate has been harnessed for the war effort. Roz, exempted from call-up to work on the land, has something to hide from her grandmother…but her grandmother too has secrets of her own.
Читать Whisper on the Wind онлайн беплатно
ELIZABETH ELGIN
Whisper on the Wind
Contents
‘Don’t agree with them trousers. You’re a married woman, and married women shouldn’t wear trousers.’
‘Breeches, Aunt Min, and there is a war on.’
Slowly, ponderously, Kathleen Allen gazed around the room as if looking at it for the very last time; a room she would rather not remember, truth known. An over-furnished, over-decorated, overcrowded little room.
Her eyes trailed the back of the sofa to the piano top and the photographs of her husband’s parents and Barney – Barnaby, her husband as a little boy, scowling into the camera. Barney with his bronze medal for ice-skating and Barney in khaki, grown fatter now, his toothbrush moustache tilting rakishly with the crooked, Clark Gable smile.
He wouldn’t smile when he got her letter, she frowned, wondering why she should feel so guilty about what she had done. But it wasn’t so much what she had done, she supposed, but the way in which she had done it. Sneakily, really, it had had to be, because her husband condemned out of hand any woman who joined the armed forces. He always had.
But surely Barney couldn’t object to the Land Army? Army. In that word the trouble lay. The Land Volunteers or the Farming Corps would have pacified him, but to call it the Land Army at once suggested a group of liberated women in breeches and bright green pullovers, swinging along in ranks of four, pitchforks at the ready.
‘And you’re still set on going, girl?’
‘Doesn’t seem I’ve left myself a lot of choice. I did volunteer.’
‘Yes, you did. And Barnaby won’t be pleased, but you know that, don’t you? I suppose you’ve told him?’
‘He knows.’ Well, he would when he got her letter, she amended silently. The trouble would start when she received his reply. Because trouble it would contain.
It was unfair, really, that her husband should object to her doing her bit for the war effort, but Barney could, and what was more, he would. He would object loud and long in every letter he wrote, not caring at all that the Censor would read every word.
She had written to her husband immediately the OHMS letter came; the letter that told her she had passed her medical examination and been accepted into the Women’s Land Army for the duration of hostilities. That official letter had also told her to report for service on Thursday 18 December, using the enclosed railway travel warrant, and that her uniform, which had already been posted to her in two parcels, would arrive within the course of the next few days. And that had been that. There could be no going back.
The day she had written to Barney was one she would always remember, for it was not only the day on which her calling-up papers came, nor the day on which she summoned up the courage to confess, on a sixpenny airmail letter-card, what she had done, but the day, too, on which her country declared war on the Japanese nation. The day on which, she accepted sadly, the entire world had finally been drawn into war.
But Aunt Min was right. Barney would not be pleased that his wife had joined the Land Army. Hadn’t he always made his feelings about women in uniform quite clear? Common, the lot of them and nothing more nor less than comforts for officers. Groundsheets. Why else would women doll themselves up in uniform? Plain as the nose on your face, wasn’t it?
No doubting it, Barney would not approve, but on the credit side, Barney wasn’t here to prevent it and for better or for worse she was in the Land Army for the duration; having a baby seemed just about the only thing that would free her from it. And getting pregnant when your husband was in the Army in Egypt was hardly likely to happen.
‘Where was it you said you was going?’ Minnie Jepson asked yet again. ‘In the wilds, I suppose it is?’
‘Somewhere in Yorkshire. Alderby St Mary. It’s in the North Riding, I think.’
Aunt Min stiffened. Back of beyond, that’s what. It wouldn’t have surprised her to learn it was cannibal country. To a Londoner, anything north of the river Trent was cannibal country.
‘You’ll have to watch your step, my girl. Funny lot, up there. And they talk funny, too. Whereabouts in Alderby St Mary will it be?’
‘I’m going to a house called Peacock Hey. It’s a hostel, really, and I’ll be living with other women so you needn’t worry, Aunt Min. I’ll be fine. There’ll be a Forewoman and a Warden to keep an eye on us all.’
‘Hmm. And how long will it take you to get there?’
‘I don’t know, for sure. It’ll depend on the train and if we get a good run through.’ And if they weren’t shunted into a siding to await the passing of something more important; a train carrying vital war supplies or a troop train, maybe. ‘I change at Crewe for York, then get a bus to Alderby.’
‘Then let’s hope you’ll be all right, girl,’ Minnie Jepson muttered. ‘Let’s hope they put you off at the right stop.’ After all, it would be dark tonight by tea-time. Black as pitch it would be, owls hooting and things creeping in hedgerows. ‘Can’t say I envy you with all them moors …’
