Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings Read Online Free Page A

when, in the kitchen of the pub and still clad in their working clothes, their landlady had set before them their plates of dinner which, as on most Thursdays, consisted of fried sausages, a pile of mashed potato and another of swede, all of it doused in thick Bisto gravy and followed by suet pudding under a spoonful of golden syrup. Then, just as they had drained their shandy, smoked the last of their fags and the future seemed bleak, the door of the bar burst open and a bunch of likely lads came stumbling in. They sported various uniforms: Fleet Air Arm, Navy and Army. On setting their eyes on Marion and Winnie they responded at once to the girls’ body language. Their bearing altering perceptibly, they slowed, regrouped and then, swaggering and grinning, approached their quarry.
    ‘Oh, aye!’ said Marion under her breath to her friend, baring her teeth in a wide smile, her Geordie accent warm in the thick air. ‘’Ere come the lads!’
     
    Alice was at her dressing table smoothing cold cream into her skin when she became aware of Edward-John at her elbow. He was wearing his pyjamas and his hair was on end where he had lain on it.
    ‘You should be asleep,’ she said.
    ‘I woke up,’ he said. ‘I was worried.’
    ‘Try not to be.’
    ‘You are,’ he said. His eyes were huge, missing nothing. ‘Anyway, where were you when I got home from school?’ Alice had almost forgotten about the other disaster of the day.
    ‘I had to go out into the countryside,’ she told him. ‘And then wait ages for a bus back again.’
    ‘I didn’t know where you were and I don’t like not knowing where you are.’ His voice was thick and she knew he was close to tears, which she guessed had as much to do with his father’s visit as her own, earlier, absence.
    ‘I’m sorry, darling. Won’t do it again. Promise.’ Then she lightened her tone and asked him whether he had remembered to brush his teeth. He smiled sheepishly and she watched him go to the hand basin and squeeze paste onto his toothbrush.
    ‘But where did you go?’ he persisted, shoving the brush around his mouth.
    ‘To see about a job,’ she said. Impressed, Edward-John stopped brushing.
    ‘Gosh!’ he said. ‘Like a workman, you mean? What would you have to do?’ The memory of the unsatisfactory interview swept over Alice but she controlled her voice and almost cheerfully told her son that this particular job entailed looking after land girls. Cooking their meals andsupervising their hostel. ‘What’s a hostel?’ was his next question, between spitting and turning off the tap.
    ‘This particular hostel is a farmhouse,’ Alice answered, a vision of the crumbling, damp building solidifying as she spoke. But her son’s eyes were widening.
    ‘A farmhouse? A real farm? With animals?’ Alice had not noticed any animals.
    ‘I don’t remember seeing any,’ she said, discounting the chickens in the yard and the distant sheep. ‘But I suppose there must be animals there…’ Her son was transformed by this news.
    ‘Animals! And haystacks! And carts and tractors and things! Can we go there? Can we go tomorrow?’ His delight was infectious. She found herself smiling with him as he pleaded, climbing beguilingly onto her lap, hugging her, pressing his cheek against hers, engaging her eyes via the dressing-table mirror.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘It would be too far to get you to school each day… You’d have to board…except for the weekends…’ He was interrupting her, his keen eyes inches from hers.
    ‘I don’t care! I don’t! Let’s go there, Mother!’
     
    In the pub, as the landlord called time, Marion and Winnie, closely pressed by several uniformed male bodies, were at the centre of a group clustered, singing, round the piano. Thechorus of ‘You’ll Never Know’ filled the smoky air and in Marion’s handbag were two lipsticks, a bottle of crimson nail varnish and several pairs of silk