Land Girls: The Homecoming: A moving and heartwarming wartime saga

Connie tried to keep her eyes open. She didn’t want to sleep now. She sat up, breathed deep and thought about Henry waiting at the vicarage with his warm smile and trusting eyes. He was a decent man, a man who loved her despite her faults. He loved her despite her troubled past. It was too good to be true, really, but she had to accept it and hope it wouldn’t turn out to be some massive joke.

She glanced at Joyce – who was biting her lip. Connie didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what Joyce was thinking about. She was thinking about her man too.

Joyce was worried about John. He’d been to the base to finalise his leaving the RAF. It would be a big moment for both of them. Suddenly, John would be close to the home of Pasture Farm, where Joyce was billeted; he’d be finally safe from harm; but would it mean he’d lose his sense of purpose? Both Joyce and John held on to their roles in the war – as it made sense of the carnage and loss they had experienced in Coventry. Connie often wondered what Joyce would do when the war was over – if it ever finished. Would she feel lost without it?

But Connie was too tired to ask about such things tonight. A bath. A cuppa. And Henry. Those simple things were keeping her going.

So instead, Connie offered a less emotionally taxing conversation.

“I won’t miss this journey,” Connie said.

True, it was pleasant enough if you got a seat away from the scrum, but it still added a long journey to an already-long day in the fields.

“Me neither,” Joyce said, munching the cheese from her parcel. “Only good thing was not having to work with Dolores.”

“Don’t be ‘orrible. Just ‘cos she never says nothing.” Connie thought about the near-monosyllabic Dolores, who had joined them recently. But the thought drifted out of her head, sleep threatening to cover her.

“I wish Finch would pick us up sometimes,” Joyce said.

Connie wished he would to, as she bit her lip, trying to stay awake. Freddie Finch was the tenant farmer who lived in Pasture Farm. A ruddy-faced man with keen, smart eyes, he’d loaned out some of his Land Girls for the work on Brinford Farm. But despite having a tractor with a trailer that could easily give the girls a lift home, Finch wouldn’t stretch his meagre petrol ration to pick them up unless he had to. It was fair enough, but it didn’t stop Connie and Joyce from wishing.

Connie looked at the young girl again.

The whites of her mother’s knuckles were showing as she gripped the girl’s hand. Why was she holding on so tightly? That must hurt.

Connie offered a sympathetic smile to the girl. Nothing. She flashed one to the mother.

This time, she got a reaction. The stern-faced woman shot her a look that said stop staring and mind your own business.

This was like red rag to a bull. Connie didn’t avert her gaze.

The girl was looking at the floor.

“Is she all right?” Connie asked, poking her nose in even further.

Joyce looked around – this was the first she’d registered the young girl and her mother. She played catch-up quickly and registered Connie’s concern.

The mother frowned and shook her head – containing her fury at this interference.

“Of course she is.”

The soldier looked up from his rolling. The business man buried himself deeper in The Times.

“Yeah?” Connie asked the girl directly.

The girl raised her sad face, her eyes vulnerable and moist.

“What business is it of yours?” the mother asked Connie.

“Connie …” Joyce warned, about to tell her friend to pipe down.

But Connie wouldn’t let this lie. Maybe it was hard to let go when she saw something of herself in the haunted eyes of this youngster.

“It’s just that she seems –” Connie was about to say ‘sad’, but she would never finished the sentence.

BANNGGGGGGG!

There was a deafening bang from the front of the train, accompanied by the ear-splitting wrenching of metal. Everyone was jolted off their seats, the world folding in on itself. The businessman’s newspaper flew into Connie’s face as she fell forwards. And then there was a loud crunching noise from behind and the sound of twisting metal. Slowly, the compartment shook and rolled, tossing over and over. Bodies bounced around the carriage as the floor became the ceiling and back again. Connie felt herself sliding across the floor. Joyce’s elbow hit Connie hard in the neck as Joyce rolled on top of her. Connie could hear muffled screams. All the sounds were somehow distant, as if they had been muffled by cotton wool.

Connie thrust out a hand and grabbed the metal frame that secured the seats to the floor. With the other hand, she grabbed onto Joyce to try to stop them being tossed around the tumbling carriage.

The windows of the compartment shattered and there was a squeal of brakes. The outer door flung open and the young soldier was thrown into the air, rolling on the ceiling and then the floor, over Connie and Joyce, and finally spewing out of the opening to the outside world.

The businessman flew across the floor and hit the open door frame with a thud. Arms and legs and bodies intertwined as screams filled the air and the carriage tumbled.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Finally the nightmare seemed to end and the carriage came to juddering rest. It was almost the right way up again. The sounds suddenly became clearer. Screams. Connie slowly let go of the seat support and slid to the new floor. The first thing she focused on was the businessman’s pipe. It was inches from her nose, resting in a sea of diamond-like fragments of broken glass. The businessman himself was behind Connie, sitting in a heap of Saville Row tailoring and blood; shocked and confused, but probably all right.

The little girl was crying, her leg wedged under the seat. A seat that had been mangled almost flat in the crash. Her mother was face down on the floor, knocked unconscious.

Connie could hear her own heart thumping in her chest.

The taste of blood was in her mouth.

“What-?” She struggled to talk, but her words didn’t seem to come together; drunken sounds in her head.

Dust settled. Joyce looked up, her face bruised and slightly cut; her tight-permed-hair messed in all directions.

“Are you all right?” Connie finally managed to ask.

Joyce stared at her, as if she wasn’t hearing the words. She’d gone into shock.

“What happened?” Connie asked. “Joyce?”

Again, Joyce had no answers. Or even acknowledgement that her friend was talking to her.

Connie knew she wouldn’t get anything from her. She glanced towards the exterior door. Outside was grass. They had rolled down a bank and come to rest at the bottom of the incline. Connie got shakily to her feet, her balance slightly wobbly. She rubbed her neck and glanced quickly to check that Joyce wasn’t badly injured. She guided her shocked friend towards the exit, their boots crunching on the broken glass as if they were walking on fresh snow. With Connie’s help, Joyce jumped down onto the grass. It was a long drop without a platform. For some inexplicable reason, Connie saw an image of the guard back at Brinford station sweeping the platform. Or concourse, or whatever he called it.

“Flaming vandals,” he muttered in Connie’s head.

Joyce staggered a few feet across the grass, before falling softly onto her bottom. A soldier came over from another carriage to check she was okay and they sat together.

Still inside the carriage, Connie poked her head out and looked along the length of the carriage. Many passengers were dropping from their compartments onto the grass, where they struggled to come to terms with what had happened. Three-quarters of the train had been derailed and had tumbled down the bank, a wrecked and hissing snake in the long grass.

Connie put her head back into her compartment and turned her attention to the injured. The businessman was groggily coming round. He’d bitten through his lip in the crash. Connie reassured him that his injury wasn’t as bad as it looked. He might need a new shirt, though.

She helped him to the door and he jumped down onto the grass.