Free Evie by Julia Stoneham

village school but no, he would not be attending it.
    It had been largely Edward John’s overwhelming enthusiasm that had influenced Alice to cast aside her doubts about accepting the wardenship. She had already seen the near primitive condition of the ancient, Devon longhouse that was to accommodate ten girls. She had been informed that the only assistance she would receive would be from Rose, the cowman’s widow, who made clear her disapproval of the choice of Alice as warden. While Edward John’s enthusiasm had not been solely responsible for her decision, it was true that his happiness was high on her agenda and with no other employment on offer, enough for her to find herself in the office of the Land Army Regional Officer, signing a contract committing her to at least twelve months as warden of the hostel at Lower Post Stone Farm.
    Edward John found the land girls surprising. He was unfamiliar with the way they spoke and the way they behaved. Nevertheless he took to them and they took to him. In fact, he saw very little of them, because except for milking and at harvest time, the general farmwork ceased at midday on Saturdays, giving most of the girls that afternoon and all day Sunday off. This meant that on the two days when Edward John was at the farm, the girls were mostly absent from it.
    During the run-up to the D-Day landings the South West had been overrun by troops, many of them American GIs, and all of them in the final stages of training for the invasion of northern France. The Post Stone girls had been in great demand for barrack room hops and for trips to Exeter to the cinemas, dance halls and pubs. There had even been a cricket match at a nearby camp – land girls versus GIs – followed by high tea in the mess and dancing to a regimental band from a nearby Fleet Air Arm establishment. It was on that occasion that Hester Tucker had met Private Reuben Westerfeldt, a relationship which resulted in marriage, followed, tragically, by Reuben’s death on Omaha Beach and, later and more happily, by the birth of his daughter, Thurza.
    Most of the girls’ conversation either went over Edward John’s head, or, being mainly concerned with boyfriends, clothing coupons and the procurement of nylon stockings, failed to interest him. Sometimes, if the subject under discussion became inappropriate for her son’s ears, Alice would raise a warning finger to her lips. On one occasion, just before Edward John’s tenth birthday, he had inadvertently silenced the supper table by asking what a ‘period’ was.He had been baffled when, after a brief silence, his mother explained that it was ‘a portion of time’. He had been unable to satisfactorily discover why Marion was given an aspirin because she was having a bad ‘portion of time’.
    He enjoyed the rowdy, clamorous, turbulence of the hostel when, soon after his own arrival for the weekend, the land girls got back from the fields and fought noisily over the limited hot water in the one, peeling bathroom. In the summer there would be the sweet smell of female perspiration and then, after their shared ablutions, the scent of cheap perfume, face powder and nail varnish as they prepared themselves for whatever social life was on offer that evening. He liked the raucous choruses round the out-of-tune piano and the howl of the wind-up gramophone with its limited selection of records, the words and tunes of which would remain with him all his life. ‘Some day I’ll find you, Moonlight behind you …’
    After two years Edward John’s fascination with the farmland which rose from the valley floor and up towards The Tops was undiminished by familiarity. He loved the Bayliss’s shadowy woodland, with its smell of mouldering leaves and fungi. He loved the steep tracks that wound across the heathland and on up onto the moor itself, where bumble bees lumbered clumsily over the warm, golden, butter-smelling gorse. Most of all he loved the freedom he was allowed, which