Read Land Girls for Free Online Page B

was plain from the start that he and Mr Lawrence understood one another. He began with three hours’ labour a week, two shillings an hour. When the sheep did well and the flock increased, this was increased to a day and a half. By the time Mr Lawrence acquired Hallows Farm, Ratty was working every day, all hours. Within a few years, things became too much for the two of them: it was Ratty who suggested they should hire more hands. He found the two keen young lads himself – one from Hinton, one from a couple of miles west – and thereby earned himself the title of Farm Manager.
    These days, although Ratty still thought of himself as Farm Manager, and Mr Lawrence would never do anything so inconsiderate as to suggest there was any change in the position, both men understood the title was now more honorary than practical. What with his arthritic hip and the bad pains that sometimes struck his eyes now, Ratty would only come up to the farm a couple of days a week. When the boys had been called up, he had reluctantly agreed that Mrs Lawrence’s idea of land girls might be the solution.
    Every working day of his life Ratty rose at four o’clock in the morning. He liked the silence of the dawn, the silence of the kitchen as he boiled water in the huge black kettle for tea, and ate a chunk of Edith’s rich brown bread. Just before leaving he would take a mug up to the bedroom under the eaves, leave it on the table beside her. Sometimes he would pause for a moment to study the now white curls of his wife, and the creased face, cross even in sleep. Years ago, without disentangling herself from drowsiness, she would ask him for a kiss. He would oblige, and be rewarded with a sleepy smile. She had not smiled for years now, properly, Edith. Not with happiness. The only thing that brought a shine to her eyes was triumph . Scoring over the neighbours, her customers. Scoring over anyone she could find, not least Ratty himself. What was it, he sometimes wondered, that caused a carefree young girl to turn so quickly into a crusty old woman? Nothing Ratty could put his finger on: he did his best to please her. But marriage was a rum business, he had learned. At the time – foolish young lad – he had no idea what he was letting himself in for. But it had never occurred to him to desert his barren ship. He had made his promises to the Lord, and they would not be broken. Besides, if he tried hard enough, he sometimes thought, everything might miraculously change, and Mr and Mrs Ratty Tyler might become as happily married as Mr and Mrs John Lawrence.
    Fortunately for Ratty, he was blessed with a compartmentalized mind. He was able to abandon the tribulations of his marriage as he shut the front door behind him. At four thirty precisely he hobbled into the lane that led to Hallows Farm, limping slightly, hands scrunched into the familiar caverns of his pockets, ears stinging cold beneath his cap.
    For twenty years Ratty had been walking this lane, witnessing thousands of early mornings, each one so infinitesimally different that only a habitual observer could feel the daily shiftings that formed the master plan of each season. Since he had been forced by health and age into semi-retirement, and now only made the journey twice a week, the privacy of dawn was more precious than ever before to Ratty. He listened to his own footsteps on the road – no longer firm and brisk – and the scattered choir of birds. Sometimes a blackbird would soar into a solo, his song only to be muddied by a gang of jealous hedge sparrows. Sometimes an anxious mistlethrush would call to its mate, and be answered by a cheeky robin. There were few unseen birds Ratty could not identify by their song, and their sense of dawn competition made him smile.
    He slashed the long grass of the verges with his stick and noted, as always, the neatness of Mr Lawrence’s hedges. In the sky, a transparent moon was posed on a belly of night cloud. But the dark mass was beginning