Land Girls: The Homecoming: A moving and heartwarming wartime saga

“Why are you still calling yourself Carter?” Joyce asked, breaking Connie’s idle thoughts. “Heard you introduce yourself twice today.”

“Had that name all me life. Not got used to being a Jameson yet, I suppose.” Connie shrugged. “Connie Carter’s got a ring to it.”

“She’s got a ring on her finger,” Joyce retorted.

Why hadn’t Connie been using Henry’s name? It was an odd thing for her to do. Married women happily took their husbands’ surnames. Secretly she knew that her explanation to Joyce was a lie. She didn’t use the name of Jameson because she didn’t believe it would last. Nothing ever did in her life. Part of her thought that her happy marriage would be a blip. Best not to get too comfortable with the luxury of Henry’s surname. Another part of her hated herself for hedging her bets and not fully committing. She should dive in rather than just dangling her feet in the pool. But that’s what came when you were buffeted from a lifetime of disappointment and rejection.

Connie shut out the thoughts and concentrated on the stern-looking woman and her tearful daughter. Connie offered a consoling smile to the girl, but the girl didn’t acknowledge it. Was she too upset to notice? Or was it fear making her reluctant to smile back?

“My John’s supposed to be on this train,” Joyce said, interrupting Connie’s thoughts. “But I didn’t see him on the platform.”

“Difficult to see anyone in that scrum, wasn’t it?” Connie offered.

John Fisher – an RAF flier – had been to the airbase in Brinford today and Joyce had been hoping to see her husband before they got back to Helmstead. He was Joyce’s rock – her childhood sweetheart and the only part of her family that she hadn’t lost in the brutal bombing of Coventry at the start of the war. It had been a lucky accident, which had meant they were in Birmingham on the night the bombs dropped. A sliver of serendipity that further cemented their relationship and their belief in their shared destiny together.

“Do you want to go down the carriages and find him?” Connie asked. “I’ll keep your seat.”

Joyce looked at the corridor outside their compartment. It was crammed with soldiers, pilots and factory workers. It would be nearly impossible to move down the train. Joyce decided to stay where she was. “I’m sure I won’t forget what he looks like if I don’t see him until Helmstead.”

The young soldier dutifully finished his roll-up with an audible gasp of satisfaction. But the victory was short-lived as he raised it to his lips and lit it; it promptly unrolled, dropping tobacco onto his trousers. He cursed and hastily patted his crotch to put out the burning embers before they scorched his uniform. Connie couldn’t resist letting out a small laugh. The boy looked back and smiled. He scooped up the tobacco and started to try again.

“Want me to do it?” she offered. Sod it if it wasn’t the sort of thing a lady did.

“Can you roll them?” the soldier said in surprise, a glimmer of hope in his eyes.

“No. But I can’t be worse than you, can I?”

Joyce nudged Connie to stop messing with the poor lad. “What? I’m just being friendly,” Connie said, under her breath. The middle-aged woman with the tear-streaked daughter shot her a disapproving look.

The soldier sucked in his cheeks and doggedly resumed his rolling.

The businessman already had a pipe in his mouth – unlit at the moment and being sucked on like a baby’s dummy as he contemplated the crossword.

The train snaked across the countryside. Fields of cows and fields of corn moved past the windows like frames at the flicks. The evening sun glinted low through the carriage windows, dappling the occupants with patchworks of light.

Connie entertained fragmented thoughts: Henry waiting with a cup of tea; Joyce joking in the fields with her; the snotty guard at Brinford station. The images washed over her in a hazy, comforting blur as the motion of the train and the evening sunlight flickered over her face. Sleep was a moment away.

The fields trundled by in a blur.

Connie tried to keep her eyes open. She didn’t want to sleep now. She sat up, breathed deep and thought about Henry waiting at the vicarage with his warm smile and trusting eyes. He was a decent man, a man who loved her despite her faults. He loved her despite her troubled past. It was too good to be true, really, but she had to accept it and hope it wouldn’t turn out to be some massive joke.

She glanced at Joyce – who was biting her lip. Connie didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what Joyce was thinking about. She was thinking about her man too.

Joyce was worried about John. He’d been to the base to finalise his leaving the RAF. It would be a big moment for both of them. Suddenly, John would be close to the home of Pasture Farm, where Joyce was billeted; he’d be finally safe from harm; but would it mean he’d lose his sense of purpose? Both Joyce and John held on to their roles in the war – as it made sense of the carnage and loss they had experienced in Coventry. Connie often wondered what Joyce would do when the war was over – if it ever finished. Would she feel lost without it?

But Connie was too tired to ask about such things tonight. A bath. A cuppa. And Henry. Those simple things were keeping her going.

So instead, Connie offered a less emotionally taxing conversation.

“I won’t miss this journey,” Connie said.

True, it was pleasant enough if you got a seat away from the scrum, but it still added a long journey to an already-long day in the fields.

“Me neither,” Joyce said, munching the cheese from her parcel. “Only good thing was not having to work with Dolores.”

“Don’t be ‘orrible. Just ‘cos she never says nothing.” Connie thought about the near-monosyllabic Dolores, who had joined them recently. But the thought drifted out of her head, sleep threatening to cover her.

“I wish Finch would pick us up sometimes,” Joyce said.

Connie wished he would to, as she bit her lip, trying to stay awake. Freddie Finch was the tenant farmer who lived in Pasture Farm. A ruddy-faced man with keen, smart eyes, he’d loaned out some of his Land Girls for the work on Brinford Farm. But despite having a tractor with a trailer that could easily give the girls a lift home, Finch wouldn’t stretch his meagre petrol ration to pick them up unless he had to. It was fair enough, but it didn’t stop Connie and Joyce from wishing.

Connie looked at the young girl again.

The whites of her mother’s knuckles were showing as she gripped the girl’s hand. Why was she holding on so tightly? That must hurt.

Connie offered a sympathetic smile to the girl. Nothing. She flashed one to the mother.

This time, she got a reaction. The stern-faced woman shot her a look that said stop staring and mind your own business.

This was like red rag to a bull. Connie didn’t avert her gaze.

The girl was looking at the floor.

“Is she all right?” Connie asked, poking her nose in even further.

Joyce looked around – this was the first she’d registered the young girl and her mother. She played catch-up quickly and registered Connie’s concern.

The mother frowned and shook her head – containing her fury at this interference.

“Of course she is.”

The soldier looked up from his rolling. The business man buried himself deeper in The Times.

“Yeah?” Connie asked the girl directly.

The girl raised her sad face, her eyes vulnerable and moist.

“What business is it of yours?” the mother asked Connie.

“Connie …” Joyce warned, about to tell her friend to pipe down.

But Connie wouldn’t let this lie. Maybe it was hard to let go when she saw something of herself in the haunted eyes of this youngster.

“It’s just that she seems –” Connie was about to say ‘sad’, but she would never finished the sentence.

BANNGGGGGGG!

There was a deafening bang from the front of the train, accompanied by the ear-splitting wrenching of metal. Everyone was jolted off their seats, the world folding in on itself. The businessman’s newspaper flew into Connie’s face as she fell forwards. And then there was a loud crunching noise from behind and the sound of twisting metal. Slowly, the compartment shook and rolled, tossing over and over. Bodies bounced around the carriage as the floor became the ceiling and back again. Connie felt herself sliding across the floor. Joyce’s elbow hit Connie hard in the neck as Joyce rolled on top of her. Connie could hear muffled screams. All the sounds were somehow distant, as if they had been muffled by cotton wool.

Connie thrust out a hand and grabbed the metal frame that secured the seats to the floor. With the other hand, she grabbed onto Joyce to try to stop them being tossed around the tumbling carriage.

The windows of the compartment shattered and there was a squeal of brakes. The outer door flung open and the young soldier was thrown into the air, rolling on the ceiling and then the floor, over Connie and Joyce, and finally spewing out of the opening to the outside world.

The businessman flew across the floor and hit the open door frame with a thud. Arms and legs and bodies intertwined as screams filled the air and the carriage tumbled.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Finally the nightmare seemed to end and the carriage came to juddering rest. It was almost the right way up again. The sounds suddenly became clearer. Screams. Connie slowly let go of the seat support and slid to the new floor. The first thing she focused on was the businessman’s pipe. It was inches from her nose, resting in a sea of diamond-like fragments of broken glass. The businessman himself was behind Connie, sitting in a heap of Saville Row tailoring and blood; shocked and confused, but probably all right.

The little girl was crying, her leg wedged under the seat. A seat that had been mangled almost flat in the crash. Her mother was face down on the floor, knocked unconscious.

Connie could hear her own heart thumping in her chest.

The taste of blood was in her mouth.

“What-?” She struggled to talk, but her words didn’t seem to come together; drunken sounds in her head.

Dust settled. Joyce looked up, her face bruised and slightly cut; her tight-permed-hair messed in all directions.

“Are you all right?” Connie finally managed to ask.

Joyce stared at her, as if she wasn’t hearing the words. She’d gone into shock.

“What happened?” Connie asked. “Joyce?”

Again, Joyce had no answers. Or even acknowledgement that her friend was talking to her.

Connie knew she wouldn’t get anything from her. She glanced towards the exterior door. Outside was grass. They had rolled down a bank and come to rest at the bottom of the incline. Connie got shakily to her feet, her balance slightly wobbly. She rubbed her neck and glanced quickly to check that Joyce wasn’t badly injured. She guided her shocked friend towards the exit, their boots crunching on the broken glass as if they were walking on fresh snow. With Connie’s help, Joyce jumped down onto the grass. It was a long drop without a platform. For some inexplicable reason, Connie saw an image of the guard back at Brinford station sweeping the platform. Or concourse, or whatever he called it.

“Flaming vandals,” he muttered in Connie’s head.

Joyce staggered a few feet across the grass, before falling softly onto her bottom. A soldier came over from another carriage to check she was okay and they sat together.

Still inside the carriage, Connie poked her head out and looked along the length of the carriage. Many passengers were dropping from their compartments onto the grass, where they struggled to come to terms with what had happened. Three-quarters of the train had been derailed and had tumbled down the bank, a wrecked and hissing snake in the long grass.

Connie put her head back into her compartment and turned her attention to the injured. The businessman was groggily coming round. He’d bitten through his lip in the crash. Connie reassured him that his injury wasn’t as bad as it looked. He might need a new shirt, though.

She helped him to the door and he jumped down onto the grass.

Next Connie found the mother. She was unconscious. Connie got close and listened to the woman. She was breathing. She was alive.

“Help me!” the little girl said, her leg trapped under the twisted seat.

“I’ll just get your mother first,” Connie replied, as she flung the woman’s arm around her shoulders and edged her towards the door. The dead weight was difficult to shift and Connie found herself buckling under the woman. Finally she managed to wedge her into the door opening and cry for help.

“I need some help! Someone come and help!”

Suddenly, behind her, a strange rustling noise attracted Connie’s attention.

She turned to the source of the noise. It sounded oddly familiar.

“Fire!” the little girl shouted. “Help me! It’s on fire!”

The whole corridor of the carriage outside their compartment was ablaze; thick black smoke billowing behind the glass. It wouldn’t be long before it broke through the door and engulfed the compartment itself.

The girl was struggling to free her leg from the metal of the seat. But it wouldn’t budge.

Connie tried to move the unconscious woman, who was wedged in the door. She realised she didn’t have time for any more niceties.

“Sorry, love.”

She put her boot behind the mother’s bottom and gave her a hefty shove through the door. The woman fell out of the door, landing unceremoniously on the grass with a dull thud.

Connie raced back over to the girl and pulled at the frame. It started to bend and yield, but still the leg was trapped.

Knowing that it wouldn’t help things if the girl panicked, Connie looked the girl in the eye.

“You’ve gotta move it as I try and pull the seat. Got it?”

The girl realised it was the only way. Connie smiled encouragingly.

The fire in the corridor behind Connie’s shoulder was getting more intense. She could feel the heat as the flames danced hungrily behind the glass partition.

“One, two, three,” Connie counted, and with all her strength she pulled at the metal frame at the same time the girl wiggled her ankle. With a jolt, the leg came free. Connie hauled the little girl to her feet. The leg seemed unable to support her weight. It may have been broken or just bruised – Connie didn’t have time to check but ran with the girl’s arm around her towards the salvation of the open door.

The corridor door behind them suddenly exploded as the fire broke the glass.

Invigorated by the fresh air of the compartment, smoke and flames exploded into the space. Connie didn’t have time to hang around. She pushed the girl through the opening to the outside.

And a moment later, framed by an inferno, cloaked in thick black smoke, Connie stood in the opening herself.

The little girl looked up at the woman who’d saved her. She called for her to jump. But the smoke, billowing from the carriage suddenly covered Connie, obscuring her from view. The flames were raging in the carriage, pumping out more and more dark smoke. The little girl squinted.

She couldn’t see if Connie Carter had made it.

Chapter 3

A tractor with a hay trailer stood in the country lane. The casualties from the train disaster: the walking wounded and those too shocked to speak, were hauling their aching and battered bodies up onto the trailer. Freddie Finch, a large, avuncular man in his late forties, was helping them. Although ‘helping’ was a generous term for just telling them to mind they didn’t snag anything on the lip of the trailer as they crawled up. Finch wouldn’t stretch himself to help anyone physically, on account of his bad back; a condition that had oddly resisted any medical diagnosis and which seemed to move to different areas of his spine according to his memory.

“Mind your step. That’s it,” he said with a nervous chuckle as a young soldier climbed up. Finch glanced back at the surreal sight of the train and its carriages sprawled across a large area of grassland. The fire fighters had arrived and were trying to extinguish a blaze in the middle section. Some distance away, a large group of passengers were huddled together, being treated by a few village doctors and nurses. Some soldiers were building a pile of luggage as they recovered what they could from the wrecked train.

“I was just saying I wished you’d pick us up. And here you are.”

Finch looked round to the sound of the voice. It was Joyce Fisher, bruised and suffering some small lacerations to her face, but otherwise all right. She’d recovered from the shock of what had happened and found her voice. She had a hair pin in her mouth and was busy tidying her hair as she walked towards the trailer.

“I’m like the genie of the lamp.” Finch giggled.

“Mind you, didn’t think I’d have to go through all this to get a lift.”

Finch beamed a large grin. “Thank heavens you’re all right. That’s the main thing, eh?”

He plucked her from the ground and spun her round – chuckling with relief.

Joyce winced. Finch put her down awkwardly.

“Bruises.” Joyce grimaced.

“Sorry, got carried away!” Finch chuckled. Realising that he was being watched by rows of blank eyes on the trailer, he placed his thick fingers on his lower back as it twinged with pain. “Overdone it.”

Frederick Finch gave bed and board to Joyce – as well to Esther Reeves, the Land Girls’ warden, her teenage son and three other Land Girls. Within the boundaries of the Hoxley estate, Pasture Farm sported a homely and quaint little cottage in its vast expanse of fields and outbuildings. Before the war, it had just been home to Finch and his young son Billy, but now Billy had gone away to fight and the house was rammed full of new people, the vibrant chatter and noise making it once more not just a house but a home. Finch enjoyed having the house feel so alive, full of strangers who became friends. It reminded him of before. It reminded him of when his wife was there, the fire roaring as she laid on feasts for their friends, a house full of laughter.

As Finch watched Joyce get up onto the hay trailer, he poked a stubby finger in the air and counted how many people he had on board. Joyce hid her amusement that Finch’s mouth moved while he counted.

Reaching a tally in his head, Finch frowned. Someone was missing.

“Where’s Connie?”

Nearer the wreckage, the young nine-year-old girl with blonde curls was wrapped in a blanket as the village doctor, Dr Wally Morgan, checked her leg for injury. He was a well-meaning but often drunken man in his fifties; a man unused to having to use his limited medical knowledge on such a scale.

“How’s that?” Wally asked, manipulating her ankle.

The girl winced. He’d got his answer.

“Point your toes to the ground. Can you do that, dear?”

The girl tried her best. Her foot was moving fairly well. “Hurts a bit, I think.”

“I don’t think it’s broken,” Wally said, tapping her shoulder by way of closure as he got to his feet. He plucked up his medical bag, ready to move to the next patient. “Probably just a bad bruise. It’ll go a pretty old purple over the next day or so, I’ll wager.”

Wally Morgan scanned the huddles of patients and helpers, deciding where to go next. This was a lot more activity than he was used to as a village doctor. He was already feeling that he’d reward himself with a drink or two tonight. This felt like proper war work, a step above looking at Mrs Gulliver’s bunions. Wanting an easy win, he managed to ignore a man with a twisted leg and set off to see a young man who had a bleeding temple.

As she’d stood in the wrecked doorway, smoke billowing out around her, Connie Carter had felt the searing heat of the fire on her back. It felt as though it was already burning though her Land Army sweater; angry orange tendrils trying to fry her skin. The heat could overcome her at any time and topple her, unconscious, back into the burning carriage. That would be the end of it. As she stood there, it only took a fraction of a second, but for Connie the moment stretched out forever. She gripped the sides of the doorway, her boots crossing the threshold. A clump of mud fell from one boot. Dimly she thought of the station master at Brinford with his broom and his short temper.

“Mind you don’t mess up my burning train.”

A bloom of black smoke belched from the back of the carriage and engulfed Connie, pulled past her into the fresh air. There wasn’t enough air to breathe. Connie felt herself totter, woozy, losing focus. She steadied herself, blinking to try to clear her head. More smoke rushed past her. It was getting harder to breathe, the air dry and somehow thin. She tried to focus and force herself forward. But her fuzzy brain suddenly couldn’t work out which way was forward. Even though the opening was inches in front of her, she was disorientated and looking around for the way. But the black smoke was rushing past her, like a biblical plague of suited commuters. She couldn’t see anything, even though logic should have told her to follow the direction the smoke was heading in. Towards the air. But logic wasn’t working.

Connie swooned, almost fell. There was nothing left in her lungs. She couldn’t see and all she could hear was the rush of smoke and the crackle of burning wood somewhere in the distance.

A gust of wind saved her life.

Outside the carriage, the wind poked a brief hole in the billowing blackness that was exiting the door. For a moment, Connie could see a soldier sitting on the grass in the distance, a man in shock being treated by a nurse.

She knew she had to head in that direction.

The flames staged one last attempt to grasp her, but Connie launched herself from the doorway, following the brief glimpse of light she’d seen. Her lungs were gasping as she fell in a heap on the ground. Looking behind, she saw tall flames consuming the carriage, dancing, blowing the glass out from the windows. One second longer and she would have been overcome with smoke and she would have collapsed into that inferno.

It had been a narrow miss.

Connie sobbed in relief and took hungry mouthfuls of air. Each breath made her hack up the acrid smoke that had tried to take over her lungs. It took several minutes before she could speak, and even as she got her voice back, the coughing would be there to remind her of her lucky escape.

Now Connie Carter sat on the grass drinking tea from a mug. Some villagers had lit a fire and were boiling a kettle to provide hot drinks for the wounded. The tea was weak and milky but it hit the spot. Connie noticed the young girl from the carriage and moved over towards her.

“How you feeling?” Connie asked.

“All right. Your face is all black.”

Connie laughed. She hadn’t seen herself, but she supposed that it would be. Certainly a thin smear of greasy soot covered her arms and hands. It probably caked some of her face too. She offered the mug. “Want some tea? It’s weaker than a kitten, but it hits the spot.”

The girl shook her head. “Not allowed tea. But thank you.”

“What’s your name?”

“Margaret Sawyer,” the girl replied.

“I’m Connie Carter. Well, Connie Jameson. Keep forgetting. Married.” Connie reached into her pocket and pulled out the parchment parcel. She opened it up, considered eating it, but then offered the piece of cheese to the girl. “Do you good to eat something, you know.”

The girl looked uncertain. Connie wondered whether she had been told not to take things from strangers.

“It’s all right. Your mum’s over there. And I’m a vicar’s wife.”

Margaret overcame her reticence and took it. She gobbled it down, taking another chunk before the first one was swallowed. Connie was surprised at how ravenous she seemed. “Blimey, doesn’t your mum feed you?”

“She’s not really my mum,” Margaret said.

But before Connie could enquire further, they were interrupted. It was the portly man with the trilby hat and the camera that Connie had seen at Brinford station.