The Farmer's Daughter (2 page)

‘I suppose they've got to put them somewhere,' Jean said.

‘Not on our doorstep, for goodness' sake.' This from Mr Harris.

‘I can't see how you are going to stop it,' Bill Howson said. ‘The government can do what it likes.'

Bill owned his own farm on the other side of the village, where he lived with his widowed mother. Jean had known him since he was a grubby five-year-old with wrinkled socks who persisted in treating her as one of the boys. He had grown out of that and was now a strapping six-foot hunk of a man, good-looking in a rugged kind of way and strong as an ox. The land girls who worked on Bridge Farm all sighed after him. Jean had been going out with him ever since they left school and most people assumed they would eventually marry.

‘I've finished cutting my wheat,' he told her, as they took their leave of Mr and Mrs Harris and he fell into step beside her. ‘I'll lend a hand with yours like I usually do.'

‘We're waiting for the reaper,' Jean said. Because the
Colemans only had a very small acreage they did not own a reaper-binder but hired one by the day. Jean had put in a request for it and was waiting to be told when it would be her turn to use it. There was only one field to cut; given good weather, it could be done in a day.

‘Let me know when it's coming and I'll alert everyone.' He meant the villagers who traditionally helped each other at harvest time.

‘Thank you.'

He let the others go on ahead and took her hand. ‘You are looking tired, Jean. Looking after that farm is too much for you.'

‘I manage.'

‘If you need any help with jobs, just let me know.'

‘Thanks, but you've got enough to do on your own farm,' she said. ‘And it's not just a few jobs, it's everything. I've advertised for a farm worker but so far I've had no reply.'

‘Well, you wouldn't, would you? Try the Land Army.'

‘Would they be better than the Italians?' The Italian POWs had been reclassed as collaborators since Italy had changed sides. They were allowed a certain amount of freedom and made full use of it.

‘Lord, yes. The men are far more interested in singing and flirting than work and they will down tools at the first excuse. Either it's too hot or too cold or too wet. I wouldn't like to think of one of them annoying you.'

‘Do you think I can't look after myself?'

‘You're a woman and a very pretty one at that.'

She laughed at the unexpected compliment. ‘A woman doing a man's job. There are lots of us doing that, you know.'

‘I know. I wish you didn't have to.'

‘I don't mind. I just want to find some help from somewhere.
We managed while Pa was well, but now it's all getting on top of me.'

‘You would have to apply to the War Ag.' He said, using the popular name for the War Agricultural Executive Committee, an arm of the Ministry of Agriculture. ‘They do the allocation of labour.'

‘Thanks, I will. In the meantime the boys can help when the school holidays begin.'

‘OK, the offer's there if you want it. I must go or Ma will be worrying where I've got to. Fancy the pictures on Saturday?'

On Saturday evenings, Jean usually allowed herself a little leisure. Sometimes they went to the cinema in Wisbech, sometimes to a dance or to listen to a talk in the village hall which might be about any subject the organisers thought might interest the population: natural history, what other people were doing for the war effort, cookery, jam-making, make do and mend.

‘Yes, I'd like that.'

‘OK, I'll call for you at six-thirty.' He veered off towards the middle of the village and Jean hurried to catch up with her parents.

As they approached the farmhouse from the lane, she was filled with a feeling of pride and love for the place which had been her home all the twenty years of her life. It was a large rambling structure of brick and flint, typical of the area, with small windows and a pantile roof. On one side, across the concrete yard were the farm buildings; stable, cowshed, and barn. The house and outbuildings were unusually extensive, considering the small acreage they farmed. According to her father, there had once been at least twice as much but, in the bad farming years at the end of the last century, her grandfather could not afford to pay the wages of his labourers and had reduced his holding, leaving only as much as the family could manage.

The war, with its emphasis on feeding the population, had made a big difference. There were subsidies and fixed prices to help them and they were now fairly well off. They had to work hard for their money, but everyone had been brought up to that and accepted it as a matter of course. What would happen when hostilities ended she had no idea.

Once home, Donald and Terry went off to change out of their Sunday clothes to go out and let off steam with Laddie, the collie, at their heels. Doris wheeled Arthur into the kitchen to sit by the hearth while she finished cooking Sunday dinner. They had recently slaughtered a pig and the smell of roast pork permeated the kitchen. Since everyone was being encouraged to keep a pig, there were pig clubs springing up in the most unexpected places, even on urban allotments. Slaughtering, which had to have official approval, was done in rotation so that the meat could be distributed among all the members in turn. What was not to be eaten immediately was salted down or smoked to preserve it. Swill buckets were placed everywhere for people to put their scraps in. There was one outside their gate, one outside the village hall and even one in the school playground. It all went towards keeping the pigs and population fed. Those who kept pigs on a larger scale had to keep meticulous records and send all their animals to the pig marketing board. It didn't alter the fact that they sometimes cheated.

‘Bill says I have to apply to the War Ag. for help,' Jean told her mother. ‘They will send whoever is available.'

‘Then you had better do it. I'll square it with your father. He'll have to face facts, he isn't going to go back to work yet awhile.'

Karl had never seen so many ships, thousands and thousands of them, all steaming towards him, bent on destroying him, or so
it seemed. The biggest of them were pounding the shore with their heavy guns. The noise was ear-shattering and the heat was so intense it was sending rivulets of sweat running down his back and trickling down his forehead into his eyes. He crouched in the shallow depression in the ground, while shells burst all round him, making more craters and sending up clouds of earth which caught in his lungs and stuck in the two-day stubble on his chin. They had been expecting the invasion for weeks, but all the signs indicated it would be at the Pas-de-Calais, the nearest French coast to Britain. Even now, faced with an army streaming ashore, his superiors were convinced it was a feint to cover the real landing area. If that were really the case, he dreaded to think what that would be like.

He risked a peep over the edge of the depression in which he was sheltering. All round him were wrecked vehicles, guns, bodies and bits of bodies, blood and flies, black swarms of the little devils. Enemy bombers droned overhead, dropping high explosives and causing more craters. One of them hit a tank and it exploded in a wall of flame. He felt exposed and vulnerable.

Beside him in other hollows, his comrades crouched, waiting for the enemy to advance on them through the smoke. Their orders, coming from Hitler himself, were not to give up a metre of ground. How they could hold it without the help of their own tanks he had no idea. Where were they? Everything was in chaos; nobody seemed to be in command and his own captain had been killed. He wriggled over to Otto Herzig who was crouching in a ditch a few yards away. ‘What do you reckon we ought to do?'

‘I don't know, do I? You're the sergeant.'

‘We'd better pull back and try to find our own people.'

‘OK. Lead the way.'

There were only about a dozen of them left. He took them through a wood but stopped when it came out onto a road full of
troops being dive-bombed. They scattered back into the trees and dived face down in the damp earth. Above the noise of the tanks and the gunfire, he could hear someone shouting.

He woke with a start and sat up still in the midst of his nightmare and, for a moment, didn't know where he was. He looked round him. This was not France, not a road under fire, it was a Nissen hut lined with two-tiered bunks and there was an English sergeant standing in the doorway shouting
‘Raus! Raus!'

Wide awake now and all too aware of his situation, he shook himself and swung his legs over the bed onto the cold concrete floor. Everyone else in the hut was doing the same and shuffling off to the ablutions. The war was over for him and his comrades and he would be a fool not to feel relief. He could not admit it, of course, especially in front of those fanatical Nazis who viewed the invasion as nothing but a minor setback. The enemy would be driven back into the sea, they said, and there would be no rescuing them as had happened at Dunkirk. To them, Hitler was invincible.

The British sent all prisoners to holding camps when they first arrived where they were deloused, fed and interrogated. The Tommies were pretty good at that and when faced with exhausted, hungry, dispirited men, soon found out much of what they wanted to know. He hadn't witnessed any beatings and, as far as he was aware, they stuck to the rules of the Geneva Convention, though rumours were flying that if you were sent to the London Cage, you were in for some rough treatment.

Each prisoner was categorised according to his perceived belief in Hitler's dogma. Those labelled ‘black' were the strongest Nazis and likely to cause trouble, the ‘whites' were opposed to National Socialism and could, in some measure, be trusted. The majority were ‘greys', neither one nor the other; they had fought for their
homeland and for their families, not for Hitler and his cohorts. The blacks were sent to special secure camps. Karl had been considered grey, which meant he had been sent to a normal prisoner-of-war camp, here in the fens of East Anglia.

Life in the camp was boring. The men were left to amuse themselves and, under the direction of the
Lagerführer
, Major Schultz, and various other volunteers, organised games and entertainments and educational classes to relieve it and keep them occupied. There was even a newspaper put together by the prisoners themselves. It had a page of events and entertainments being staged, the results of sports and games, snippets of gossip and a letters page. News was culled from hidden wireless sets which were tuned in to
Deutschlandfunk
, and the BBC, translated for those who did not speak English. Being able to read both versions, he was amused by the different slant they put on events.

The attempted assassination of Hitler was a case in point. He had read both accounts, one of which said it proved how unpopular Hitler was with his own people and they would rise up against him and force him to sue for peace, and the other that the crime was down to a handful of traitors and cowards. The editorial comment had said, ‘Our beloved Führer is impervious to such traitorous attacks. He has God and Right on his side. The enemy will learn this to his cost, as will the perpetrators of this outrage. Everyone who has had any hand in the conspiracy, however small, will be hunted down and receive the fate they deserve.' It seemed Hitler was decidedly rattled and this latest edition reported that eight very senior officers had been hanged with wire from meat hooks after what Karl guessed was a cursory trial. There had been thousands of arrests and more to come, they were promised, until every traitor had met his just deserts. He wished the plotters had
succeeded, but that was a wish he kept to himself. He had no doubt Lieutenant Colonel Williamson, the camp commandant, read every word.

Even so, there were those who considered it their duty to escape and they were busy making plans. Whether they would come to fruition he did not know, but he did not give much for their chances of making it back home, or even off the island. A few, considered trustworthy, were being allowed out to work on farms and building sites. With an English guard, they left the camp in a lorry each morning and returned each evening. He wouldn't mind doing farm work, even if it was for the enemy. It was better than being incarcerated behind barbed wire and listening to his fellow prisoners grumbling and quarrelling.

He returned from the wash house and took his place in the dining hut for breakfast, after which he asked to see the camp commandant.

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Williamson did not relish his job but it was one that had to be done and, as he was too old for front-line duty, he was glad to do his bit. He was a fair man and treated the prisoners kindly so long as they behaved themselves, but he would not tolerate disruption and did not hesitate to put troublemakers in the
‘Kühler'
as a punishment.

He smiled at Karl from behind his desk. ‘What can I do for you, Sergeant?' he asked in English.

‘I should like to go out of the camp to work,
Herr Kolonel
, preferably on a farm.'

‘Worked on a farm before, have you?'

‘Yes. My folk are farmers, that is if they are still alive. I haven't heard since the Russians bombed my home town over a year ago. We thought the farm was out of range of their bombers, but we were wrong.'

‘I am sorry to hear that, but war is like that. The good, the bad and the indifferent on both sides, suffer indiscriminately.'

‘Yes,
Herr Kolonel.
'

The colonel pulled himself together suddenly and became businesslike. ‘Normally we wait until prisoners have settled down before letting them out.'

‘I understand.' He knew they had to be sure it was safe to do so and that meant watching him for troublemaking tendencies. A committed ‘black' would never be sent on a working party. ‘I have been here a month and I need an occupation.'