Free Dark Harvest by Amy Myers Page B

follow.’
    ‘Why so much fuss about a bally Thorn?’
    ‘What did you say?’ Mrs Dibble whirled round on Harriet, who had come into the kitchen after a hard morning cleaning the windows.
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘Yes, you did.’
    Harriet’s temper flared. ‘I don’t mind waiting on Agnes. But I ain’t a-waiting on that bastard Thorn she’s got inside her.’
    ‘We’re wed,’ Agnes shouted.
    ‘Late,’ sneered Harriet. ‘And the Rector had a say in that, I’ve no doubt.’
    ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, Harriet Mutter.’ Mrs Dibble intervened before Agnes could reply. ‘The Rectory is no place for Thorns and Mutters to air their grievances. And you remember, Harriet, you’re employed here as parlourmaid-cum-housemaid, and it don’t matter what your name is.’
    ‘I don’t take my orders from you, but from Mrs Lilley.’
    ‘Want me to ask her, poor lady, with all she has to do, whether she approves of you using bad language about an unborn baby? She’s a good Christian lady, praise be to God.’
    Harriet subsided. She’d gone further than she meant, but she wasn’t going to admit it. She had her pride, after all.
     
    ‘Tea, miss, and make it a strong ’un, me old china.’
    Countless khaki-clad bodies pushing and shoving, shouting in the hot refreshment room, the talk and raucous songs in such thick Cockney accents that Phoebe didn’t understand most of it. Drink wasn’t the attraction here because there was no alcohol, it being a YMCA-sponsored operation. The soldiers came in droves becauseit was much nearer than Crowborough’s and Tunbridge Wells’s public houses—and girls were serving the refreshments.
    The refreshment rooms in the recreation hall were under the management of a stern-eyed lady called Mrs Manning, who kept her ‘young ladies’, as she called them, under a strict eye. Not that Phoebe had any intention of misbehaving; she was still too overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all. At the railway station, her own venture, she had felt in control when the troops laughed and joked as she took them tea. This was a different world. The sound of ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ and ‘We are Fred Karno’s Army’, not to mention the awful ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers’ being bawled out night and day filled her dreams, as tiredness refused to let her brain stop working.
    Her work colleagues were strange to her too. Helen was the one she liked best. Her father kept a draper’s shop in Tunbridge Wells. Marie’s was a milkman in Crowborough and Betty’s a farmer. Their language and jokes both fascinated her and repelled her, but she was gradually growing accustomed to them, and Mrs Manning’s grim eye stopped them in their tracks anyway, much of the time. Only Marie had so far accepted an offer to step out with a young soldier; she had reappeared the next day with never a word to say about it. Phoebe was the only one who dared to ask her. She giggled but said nothing.
    There were thousands of young soldiers at this camp and the recreation hall could hold twothousand, so it was not surprising that the faces were a bewildering and ever-changing mass. One group, though, always seemed to be there, and one face in particular. She noticed him because he never shouted and was often silent when his mates were yelling their heads off. She told herself he was homesick for London, and gave him a special smile whenever she could.
    ‘Miss Phoebe’s got her eye on you, Harry,’ one of his mates observed.
    Harry Darling blushed.
     
    Laurence walked briskly up Station Road to the railway station. Briskness was called for—the weather was cold. All around him May was burgeoning forth and the hedgerows were brilliant green, but above the skies lowered day after day, not even sending welcome spring rain. Half the village grumbled that the guns on the Western Front had changed the weather, and the other half that they were paying for last year’s heat. He had just come