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

Next Connie found the mother. She was unconscious. Connie got close and listened to the woman. She was breathing. She was alive.

“Help me!” the little girl said, her leg trapped under the twisted seat.

“I’ll just get your mother first,” Connie replied, as she flung the woman’s arm around her shoulders and edged her towards the door. The dead weight was difficult to shift and Connie found herself buckling under the woman. Finally she managed to wedge her into the door opening and cry for help.

“I need some help! Someone come and help!”

Suddenly, behind her, a strange rustling noise attracted Connie’s attention.

She turned to the source of the noise. It sounded oddly familiar.

“Fire!” the little girl shouted. “Help me! It’s on fire!”

The whole corridor of the carriage outside their compartment was ablaze; thick black smoke billowing behind the glass. It wouldn’t be long before it broke through the door and engulfed the compartment itself.

The girl was struggling to free her leg from the metal of the seat. But it wouldn’t budge.

Connie tried to move the unconscious woman, who was wedged in the door. She realised she didn’t have time for any more niceties.

“Sorry, love.”

She put her boot behind the mother’s bottom and gave her a hefty shove through the door. The woman fell out of the door, landing unceremoniously on the grass with a dull thud.

Connie raced back over to the girl and pulled at the frame. It started to bend and yield, but still the leg was trapped.

Knowing that it wouldn’t help things if the girl panicked, Connie looked the girl in the eye.

“You’ve gotta move it as I try and pull the seat. Got it?”

The girl realised it was the only way. Connie smiled encouragingly.

The fire in the corridor behind Connie’s shoulder was getting more intense. She could feel the heat as the flames danced hungrily behind the glass partition.

“One, two, three,” Connie counted, and with all her strength she pulled at the metal frame at the same time the girl wiggled her ankle. With a jolt, the leg came free. Connie hauled the little girl to her feet. The leg seemed unable to support her weight. It may have been broken or just bruised – Connie didn’t have time to check but ran with the girl’s arm around her towards the salvation of the open door.

The corridor door behind them suddenly exploded as the fire broke the glass.

Invigorated by the fresh air of the compartment, smoke and flames exploded into the space. Connie didn’t have time to hang around. She pushed the girl through the opening to the outside.

And a moment later, framed by an inferno, cloaked in thick black smoke, Connie stood in the opening herself.

The little girl looked up at the woman who’d saved her. She called for her to jump. But the smoke, billowing from the carriage suddenly covered Connie, obscuring her from view. The flames were raging in the carriage, pumping out more and more dark smoke. The little girl squinted.

She couldn’t see if Connie Carter had made it.

Chapter 3 (#u39b21249-e310-564f-84fc-462fa4024aaa)

A tractor with a hay trailer stood in the country lane. The casualties from the train disaster: the walking wounded and those too shocked to speak, were hauling their aching and battered bodies up onto the trailer. Freddie Finch, a large, avuncular man in his late forties, was helping them. Although ‘helping’ was a generous term for just telling them to mind they didn’t snag anything on the lip of the trailer as they crawled up. Finch wouldn’t stretch himself to help anyone physically, on account of his bad back; a condition that had oddly resisted any medical diagnosis and which seemed to move to different areas of his spine according to his memory.

“Mind your step. That’s it,” he said with a nervous chuckle as a young soldier climbed up. Finch glanced back at the surreal sight of the train and its carriages sprawled across a large area of grassland. The fire fighters had arrived and were trying to extinguish a blaze in the middle section. Some distance away, a large group of passengers were huddled together, being treated by a few village doctors and nurses. Some soldiers were building a pile of luggage as they recovered what they could from the wrecked train.

“I was just saying I wished you’d pick us up. And here you are.”

Finch looked round to the sound of the voice. It was Joyce Fisher, bruised and suffering some small lacerations to her face, but otherwise all right. She’d recovered from the shock of what had happened and found her voice. She had a hair pin in her mouth and was busy tidying her hair as she walked towards the trailer.

“I’m like the genie of the lamp.” Finch giggled.

“Mind you, didn’t think I’d have to go through all this to get a lift.”

Finch beamed a large grin. “Thank heavens you’re all right. That’s the main thing, eh?”

He plucked her from the ground and spun her round – chuckling with relief.

Joyce winced. Finch put her down awkwardly.

“Bruises.” Joyce grimaced.

“Sorry, got carried away!” Finch chuckled. Realising that he was being watched by rows of blank eyes on the trailer, he placed his thick fingers on his lower back as it twinged with pain. “Overdone it.”

Frederick Finch gave bed and board to Joyce – as well to Esther Reeves, the Land Girls’ warden, her teenage son and three other Land Girls. Within the boundaries of the Hoxley estate, Pasture Farm sported a homely and quaint little cottage in its vast expanse of fields and outbuildings. Before the war, it had just been home to Finch and his young son Billy, but now Billy had gone away to fight and the house was rammed full of new people, the vibrant chatter and noise making it once more not just a house but a home. Finch enjoyed having the house feel so alive, full of strangers who became friends. It reminded him of before. It reminded him of when his wife was there, the fire roaring as she laid on feasts for their friends, a house full of laughter.

As Finch watched Joyce get up onto the hay trailer, he poked a stubby finger in the air and counted how many people he had on board. Joyce hid her amusement that Finch’s mouth moved while he counted.

Reaching a tally in his head, Finch frowned. Someone was missing.

“Where’s Connie?”

Nearer the wreckage, the young nine-year-old girl with blonde curls was wrapped in a blanket as the village doctor, Dr Wally Morgan, checked her leg for injury. He was a well-meaning but often drunken man in his fifties; a man unused to having to use his limited medical knowledge on such a scale.

“How’s that?” Wally asked, manipulating her ankle.

The girl winced. He’d got his answer.

“Point your toes to the ground. Can you do that, dear?”

The girl tried her best. Her foot was moving fairly well. “Hurts a bit, I think.”

“I don’t think it’s broken,” Wally said, tapping her shoulder by way of closure as he got to his feet. He plucked up his medical bag, ready to move to the next patient. “Probably just a bad bruise. It’ll go a pretty old purple over the next day or so, I’ll wager.”

Wally Morgan scanned the huddles of patients and helpers, deciding where to go next. This was a lot more activity than he was used to as a village doctor. He was already feeling that he’d reward himself with a drink or two tonight. This felt like proper war work, a step above looking at Mrs Gulliver’s bunions. Wanting an easy win, he managed to ignore a man with a twisted leg and set off to see a young man who had a bleeding temple.

As she’d stood in the wrecked doorway, smoke billowing out around her, Connie Carter had felt the searing heat of the fire on her back. It felt as though it was already burning though her Land Army sweater; angry orange tendrils trying to fry her skin. The heat could overcome her at any time and topple her, unconscious, back into the burning carriage. That would be the end of it. As she stood there, it only took a fraction of a second, but for Connie the moment stretched out forever. She gripped the sides of the doorway, her boots crossing the threshold. A clump of mud fell from one boot. Dimly she thought of the station master at Brinford with his broom and his short temper.

“Mind you don’t mess up my burning train.”

A bloom of black smoke belched from the back of the carriage and engulfed Connie, pulled past her into the fresh air. There wasn’t enough air to breathe. Connie felt herself totter, woozy, losing focus. She steadied herself, blinking to try to clear her head. More smoke rushed past her. It was getting harder to breathe, the air dry and somehow thin. She tried to focus and force herself forward. But her fuzzy brain suddenly couldn’t work out which way was forward. Even though the opening was inches in front of her, she was disorientated and looking around for the way. But the black smoke was rushing past her, like a biblical plague of suited commuters. She couldn’t see anything, even though logic should have told her to follow the direction the smoke was heading in. Towards the air. But logic wasn’t working.

Connie swooned, almost fell. There was nothing left in her lungs. She couldn’t see and all she could hear was the rush of smoke and the crackle of burning wood somewhere in the distance.