The Farmer's Daughter Read Free Page A

help them and they were now fairly well off. They had to work hard for their money, but everyone had been brought up to that and accepted it as a matter of course. What would happen when hostilities ended she had no idea.
    Once home, Donald and Terry went off to change out of their Sunday clothes to go out and let off steam with Laddie, the collie, at their heels. Doris wheeled Arthur into the kitchen to sit by the hearth while she finished cooking Sunday dinner. They had recently slaughtered a pig and the smell of roast pork permeated the kitchen. Since everyone was being encouraged to keep a pig, there were pig clubs springing up in the most unexpected places, even on urban allotments. Slaughtering, which had to have official approval, was done in rotation so that the meat could be distributed among all the members in turn. What was not to be eaten immediately was salted down or smoked to preserve it. Swill buckets were placed everywhere for people to put their scraps in. There was one outside their gate, one outside the village hall and even one in the school playground. It all went towards keeping the pigs and population fed. Those who kept pigs on a larger scale had to keep meticulous records and send all their animals to the pig marketing board. It didn’t alter the fact that they sometimes cheated.
    â€˜Bill says I have to apply to the War Ag. for help,’ Jean told her mother. ‘They will send whoever is available.’
    â€˜Then you had better do it. I’ll square it with your father. He’ll have to face facts, he isn’t going to go back to work yet awhile.’
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    Karl had never seen so many ships, thousands and thousands of them, all steaming towards him, bent on destroying him, or soit seemed. The biggest of them were pounding the shore with their heavy guns. The noise was ear-shattering and the heat was so intense it was sending rivulets of sweat running down his back and trickling down his forehead into his eyes. He crouched in the shallow depression in the ground, while shells burst all round him, making more craters and sending up clouds of earth which caught in his lungs and stuck in the two-day stubble on his chin. They had been expecting the invasion for weeks, but all the signs indicated it would be at the Pas-de-Calais, the nearest French coast to Britain. Even now, faced with an army streaming ashore, his superiors were convinced it was a feint to cover the real landing area. If that were really the case, he dreaded to think what that would be like.
    He risked a peep over the edge of the depression in which he was sheltering. All round him were wrecked vehicles, guns, bodies and bits of bodies, blood and flies, black swarms of the little devils. Enemy bombers droned overhead, dropping high explosives and causing more craters. One of them hit a tank and it exploded in a wall of flame. He felt exposed and vulnerable.
    Beside him in other hollows, his comrades crouched, waiting for the enemy to advance on them through the smoke. Their orders, coming from Hitler himself, were not to give up a metre of ground. How they could hold it without the help of their own tanks he had no idea. Where were they? Everything was in chaos; nobody seemed to be in command and his own captain had been killed. He wriggled over to Otto Herzig who was crouching in a ditch a few yards away. ‘What do you reckon we ought to do?’
    â€˜I don’t know, do I? You’re the sergeant.’
    â€˜We’d better pull back and try to find our own people.’
    â€˜OK. Lead the way.’
    There were only about a dozen of them left. He took them through a wood but stopped when it came out onto a road full oftroops being dive-bombed. They scattered back into the trees and dived face down in the damp earth. Above the noise of the tanks and the gunfire, he could hear someone shouting.
    He woke with a start and sat up still in the midst of his nightmare and, for a moment, didn’t know