Alice's Girls Read Online Free

stylish cut of her dark hair suggested the Thirties rather than the Forties when most girls were favouring frizzy curls, created by ‘perms’ and maintained by curlers. Her skin and eyes were clear. Somehow she contrived to make the much despised Land Army uniform look almost elegant.
    ‘You’ve took in them breeches!’ Marion had accused her.
    ‘No I haven’t! Honestly!’
    ‘Well, you’ve lengthened the sleeves of that overcoat! Mine ends above me wrists!’
    ‘I think it’s just that your arms are longer than mine.’ Even in the dungarees, rubber boots, heavy sweaters and waterproofs which the girls wore day in and day out, Georgina Webster had a style about her that most of the other girls were always aware of and which some of them either resented or envied.
    Young women who were well educated, when faced with the necessity of doing ‘war work’, had tended to choose the more glamorous of the armed services, joining the WRENS, the WRAFS or the ATS, rather than working in munition factories or on the land. Consequently, and as a result of schooling that had been brief and often unheeded, the majority of land girls came from families regarded as working class and the Women’s Land Army becamepatronisingly referred to as the ‘Cinderella Service’.
    Georgina’s choice had not been forced on her by the level of her education, which was high, but by two other factors. The first was that as the elder of two children of a wealthy, East Devon farmer, her brother, two years her junior, could only avoid conscription if she herself volunteered for some form of war work. The second factor was that the Webster family were pacifists and the prospect of any of them being involved in combat was abhorrent to them. Georgina’s farming background made the Land Army an obvious choice and she arrived at the hostel prepared for the disapproval of her fellows.
    ‘I’m not sharing a room with no “conchie”!’ had been the uncompromising reaction of Marion and Winnie, a couple of outspoken, north-country girls, and Georgina had, at her own request, moved her monogrammed suitcases out of their room and into one of two tiny, drafty spaces above the porch, which were hardly large enough to be described as bedrooms.
    The girls had smirked and nudged when it became obvious to them that Georgina was attracting the attention of Christopher Bayliss, whom they encountered when he was on leave from the RAF.
    The young pilot, his nerves fraying, the breakdown he was about to experience only weeks away, approached Georgina clumsily, teased her about her pacifism and insulted her by implying that she, like most of the girls he fancied, was his for the taking. When she finally agreed tohave dinner with him it was, although it was a long time before he realised it, because she sensed his underlying vulnerability and saw, beneath the gung-ho bravado, the fragile state he was in. Nevertheless it had been she, when he finally cracked, who supported him through the early months of his breakdown. This, added to several other incidents which had shocked the Post Stone community – the death of one of the girls in an air raid on Plymouth, the suicide of a Jewish refugee and now the devastation of a young man, however obnoxious Georgina may have thought him, who had, for years, been risking his life in defence of his country – began to shake and then to undermine her pacifist convictions.
    Ironically, Christopher, by then slowly recovering in a military nursing home, astonished Georgina by announcing suddenly that he himself was now opposed to war. He was, unsurprisingly, dismayed when she told him of her own change of heart and that she was about to quit the Land Army and use the flying skills she had learnt as a schoolgirl to serve in the Air Transport Auxiliary, a non-combative arm of the RAF.
    They had been walking in the overgrown grounds of the building to which the psychiatric hospital had been evacuated. Christopher had stopped in