The Victory Garden(20)

Four more women had come into the room. They laughed, but the Irish girl shook her head. “I’m not risking my figure,” she said. “I’m proud of my seventeen-inch waist, I am. And I aim to keep it.”

“Suit yourself, love,” Alice said. “You’ll regret it when we’re doing back-breaking work in the fields.”

“Do you think it will be back-breaking?” one of the young women asked nervously. She was a slight little thing with a perpetually frightened, rabbit-like look.

“I don’t know,” Alice said. “I went down to Kent to pick hops in the summer when I was a girl. That wasn’t too bad. A lot of fun, actually.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Alice, by the way. And this is Emily.”

“Ruby,” the frightened girl said. “I’m away from home for the first time. I’m not sure how I’m going to handle it.”

“Me, too,” Daisy said. “We’ll look out for each other. I’m Daisy.”

“Maud,” a larger woman said, sticking out a meaty hand and giving Daisy’s a hearty shake.

“And I’m Maureen,” the Irish one replied.

Emily had turned away as she removed her dress, feeling horribly self-conscious of her lace-trimmed slip compared to their well-worn undergarments. Should she take off her corset, too? The others seemed to have no hesitation about removing theirs, giving whoops of delight as they twirled them in the air. Then she remembered how much she had hated wearing it when her mother took her to be fitted for one when she turned eighteen. “You’ll thank me for this later when you retain your girlish figure,” her mother had said, although her own figure was anything but girlish.

She fumbled with the hooks.

“’Ere, hold on a mo, love,” Alice said, and her calloused fingers freed Emily in seconds. Emily smiled self-consciously as she whirled her corset with the others. Their noise had attracted some of the women from the other room.

“What’s going on in here then?” one of them asked, poking her head around the door.

“This. That’s what!” Alice replied. “We’ve made a stand for freedom. No more corsets if they want us to do a man’s work.”

“Good idea!” the woman said. “Come on, girls. Let’s do it, too.”

Emily stepped into the bloomers and adjusted the elastic around the waist, then buttoned the tunic. They felt coarse and heavy. She was going to be weighed down when she put the boots on. A small wave of panic went through her. What had she let herself in for?

“Are you sure this is all right?” Ruby asked, glancing down nervously at the pile of corsets on the floor. “Won’t our insides all rattle around or fall apart?”

“God didn’t make corsets, love,” Alice said. “Women survived without them for a few thousand years. I feel better already, personally.”

They hadn’t quite finished dressing when the whistle sounded, and they had to scramble to do up buttons and hurry downstairs. Rows of chairs had been set up in a back room with a blackboard in front. Miss Foster-Blake stood there.

“Splendid. You all look the part now. Right. Straight to work. How many of you have been a member of the Girl Guides?”

A couple of hands were raised. “Well done,” Miss Foster-Blake said. “Your skills will prove useful. I myself was captain of a troop before the war. And how many of you have worked in agriculture in any way?”

Again, a couple of hands went up.

“Doing what?”

The big-boned girl from their room said, “My dad was a farmworker, miss. We used to help pick the crops during the summer.”

“Then you will be a great asset to us—Maud, isn’t it?”

“Yes, miss.”

“And who else?”

One girl had picked apples. Another older woman had grown vegetables in her own garden. As they went around the room, Emily was feeling more and more inadequate. It seemed they had all done some kind of physical work, except for the Irish girl with the red hair. It turned out Maureen was a dancer at a show on the pier in Torquay and was ambitious to make her name in show business. “I’d be in London now if it weren’t for that cursed Kaiser,” she said. “On account of him, all the theatres are closed. Still, this should keep me fit.”

They were then given their schedule. Up at dawn for milking instruction. Breakfast at eight. Planting and harvesting practice until lunch. An hour’s rest after lunch, then haymaking and animal care until six. Supper at six thirty and free time until bed at nine.

“It’s like ruddy prison,” Alice muttered during a tea break. She had latched herself on to Emily. “Working on the chain gang.”

“Why did you come?” Emily asked. “You could have volunteered in London.”

“I wanted to do my bit to defeat them Hun bastards—pardon my French—so that Bill’s death wasn’t for nothing,” Alice said. “And I read in the paper how we might all starve if there weren’t women to work on the land. That and I couldn’t afford the rent no more. Not on a widow’s pension. So I thought, why not? What have I got to lose? At least they pay us and feed us here, don’t they? What about you, ducks?”

“I’ve been wanting to do something useful for ages,” Emily said. “I’ve been dying of boredom at home. But my parents wouldn’t let me go. Now I’ve turned twenty-one so they can’t stop me. I really wanted to volunteer as a nurse like my friend, but it seems they have enough nurses and not enough land girls. Also my young man is in hospital in Plymouth. That’s not too far.”