‘Yes, please,’ they both chorused.
Sheila smiled to herself, spooning stewed greens onto her plate and passing the bowl. She needn’t have worried earlier. The new girl was already settling in just fine. ‘Veg, Joe?’
Joe had finished carving the chicken and was now reading the newspaper. ‘Eh?’
Violet clucked her tongue in disapproval. ‘No reading at the table, Joe Postbridge.’
‘Sorry, love.’ Joe folded the newspaper he’d been studying and laid it aside, his look sheepish. ‘Football league’s started up again. I was just catching up on the latest results.’
Sheila paused, her forkful of chicken almost at her mouth. Her attention had been caught by a story in the local paper, just visible where Joe had folded it over.
FORMER MP TO SET UP PENZANCE HARDSHIP FUND
‘I’d like a quick read of that newspaper once you’re done,’ she told her son-in-law, resisting the urge to grab it up and risk her daughter’s ire.
‘You keen on football too, Mrs Newton?’ Grace asked innocently, and everyone at the table fell about laughing.
‘There’s your answer, I’d say,’ Sheila told her with a wink. But as she was eating, her gaze slid back to the newspaper.
The grainy black-and-white photograph accompanying the story was of a tall, angular woman in a fashionable twinset and pearls, smiling for the camera. A woman who was a former Member of Parliament. In other words, someone as rare as hen’s teeth. And she was setting up a hardship fund in Penzance.
If anyone would know how to go about helping the poor and needy of Porthcurno, it would be that woman. But how could Mrs Newton, a nobody from the middle of nowhere, ask for a meeting with someone as lofty as a former Member of Parliament? She’d be sent on her way with a flea in her ear. Wouldn’t she?
CHAPTER TWO
Grace, the new Land Girl, was sitting down to eat supper with them for the first time, and it seemed to Caroline, stealing fascinated peeks at her between mouthfuls, that everything had changed in the space of a few hours. Even the cluttered farmhouse kitchen, littered with shepherd’s crooks and muddy dogs, looked different and more interesting now that Grace was sitting among them. Her laughter trilled out, so quick and infectious that Caroline found herself grinning every time she heard it. And she wasn’t alone in being mesmerised. Her fellow Land Girl, Tilly, seemed enchanted too, twining her red hair round her finger and staring as they listened to the new Land Girl holding forth on every topic, from the weather to her previous work on farms …
Back in 1942, when she’d first come to Postbridge Farm, perched precariously on the cliffs above Porthcurno, Caroline had found it difficult to fit in with the other Land Girls. Selina – an elegant blonde, far posher than the rest of them – had been quite mean at times, lording it over them. Unsurehow to deal with this, Caroline had developed a thick skin, and even tried to outdo Selina with sarcastic comments and cruel digs, though this had made her uncomfortable. But her ploy had worked faster than even she had expected, and, for a time, she and Selina had become an unstoppable duo. Both pretty and fair-haired, they’d been the golden girls, rulers of the roost.
As the war had dragged on, though, things had begun to fall apart. Penny, the other Land Girl who’d originally been drafted to the farm with them, had grown tired of their well-aimed barbs, and moved away to Bude with Alice, the youngest niece of the farmer’s wife, who’d been offered war work there. Then Penny, with her homely charms, had married a rugged Bude fisherman, and Alice had gone away to London on some hush-hush business. The old gang had broken up for good.
For a spell, she and Selina had worked the land alone together, growing closer than ever. But that very closeness had worked against them in the end. Over time, Caroline had developed feelings for her best friend, and they had not been reciprocated. It had all become rather hurtful and embarrassing, and also difficult to hide from Joan and Tilly, the other two Land Girls who’d eventually joined them at Postbridge Farm. Then Caroline’s heart had been shattered to pieces when Selina left the farm for the wilds of Bodmin Moor to care for her dying sister.
It had been months since Selina had left. After her sister Bella had sadly died, Selina had resolved to stay on and look after her nephew and two young nieces. Caroline had visited, but had found Selina much changed since her sister’s death, more mature and focused on her new family.
It had been hard at first, but Caroline had gradually made peace with the idea that there would never be anything between them now but friendship.
She was trying to stay happy and busy all the same, and to be a reliable member of the farming team. She wrote to Selina weekly, to tell her what they were doing on the farm, about the weather and the pigs, and all the goings-on in Porthcurno. And although Joan had now left the farm to get married, there was still fun, lively Tilly to keep her company and make her laugh.
But inside her heart was broken.
One day, she would be over Selina and able to move on with her life. That day had not yet arrived. Until it did, though, she would keep smiling and carrying on with her duties as though everything was fine.
The list of her tasks was long and included mucking out the pigsty and the chicken coop, brushing down old Barney, the sturdy shire horse who did the work of Joe’s old tractor when it was off the road, digging muddy trenches and mending fences, chitting potatoes and harvesting cabbages, and sometimes even helping with the sheep shearing, though Joe usually did that himself with the help of a few stout boys from the village, as it demanded great physical strength.
But she knew her job inside out, and could almost have dug a ditch in the dark. Indeed, Caroline could scarcely remember a time when she hadn’t been a Land Girl.
Of course, it was only about four years since she’d first enlisted in the Women’s Land Army and received her draft papers, sending her to Postbridge Farm, here on the wild and rural south-west coast of Cornwall. Yet it felt more likea lifetime. Her happy childhood, spent at the family home in Ealing, West London, seemed far-off and dreamlike now.
Then the war had miraculously ended in 1945. Everyone had been so overjoyed. She and the other Land Girls had danced in the fields and drunk wine out of wellington boots, foolishly expecting their lives to revert overnight to how they’d been before war broke out.
But nothing had changed, not essentially. The soldiers had mostly stayed abroad to clean up the mess from the carnage left behind by the war machine, while here at home, their work on the farm had continued just the same. Except now they weren’t digging for victory, they were digging for the survivors.
She’d begun to think her life would be one long, dreary round of early mornings and digging for potatoes. So it had been a strange shock to hear Violet Postbridge, the farmer’s wife, talking to someone on the landing outside her attic-room door, and to poke her head round the door, expecting to see Tilly there, only to be confronted with a girl she had never seen before in her life.
And what an unusual girl! Dark-skinned, dark-haired, with eyes that sparkled with friendly humour when Caroline stopped dead on the threshold, staring.
‘Hullo,’ the young woman had said.
