Land Girl

“A beautiful world,” Joyce murmured, “but going on too long.” Every branch on every tree had a neat layer of snow and the sun shone from a hard, blue sky. For five days now, the valley suburb had been cut off. It was treacherous underfoot and the Coop shelves were completely plundered. There had been no post, no deliveries and no social club.

Joyce sat at her front bedroom window, keeping an eye on the street and watching two blackbirds who had commandeered her holly bush for its’ crop of berries. They gulped them whole, in short bursts, in between darting low across the white ribbon of road and up over the snow decked bungalows on their urgent errands.

Now and again, Joyce got another reward from her street vigil in the form of a bundled up figure moving slowly across her line of vision, man or woman, it was hard to tell. Each time (two in the last hour) she said “brave” aloud and was pleased she had such a well-stocked freezer. So much food, she kept, in case one of her daughters and their families might come on an unexpected visit, although it was hardly likely as one lived in Edinburgh and the other in France, and here she was on the South coast of England.

All this white, she thought, so glittery, so pretty for a while but now, decidedly bleak, even
though she was cocooned in her well insulated bungalow with double glazing and a very efficient central heating system. She hadn’t spoken to a soul for three days and this snow muffled world turned her in on herself. It seemed all she could hear was her own heartbeat and the ebb and flow of her blood in her ears. She said things aloud to make sure she hadn’t become deaf.

The busy blackbirds ruffled the holly bush, they were at its’ centre, and she wondered if, come spring, they would nest there. The female was plumper than the male with browner feathers, quite distinct from her sleek black mate, altogether cosier looking. And now came a whole human family, two adults and two children, genderless, in their bright padded jackets and bobble hats, the children pulling yellow plastic sleds. They had a brief snowball fight in the middle of the road, the parents looking on and smiling. ‘It’s a nice holiday for them,’ Joyce said and she was glad for them, her heart lifting as the male blackbird swooped again over the rooftops.

She thought about a cup of tea but didn’t move from her post, her body wouldn’t obey the thought and perhaps didn’t really want the tea but she must do something. She got up finally, wincing at the stiffness in her knees, and went to the kitchen which had a strange blue glow to it. “Must be coming from the garden.” She said. There wasn’t a breath of wind out there, the bird feeders hung empty and the birdbath was capped by a great wedge of snow.

The kettle began to sigh as she sat waiting. When it boiled she still sat for long minutes silently willing herself to make the tea and at last, leaning heavily against the clean white counter, she set about it. She had to boil the kettle again because she’d left it so long. “What a waste of energy.” Her voice sounded rusty. Never before had making a cup of tea seemed like a chore. She hauled the four-pinter of milk out of the fridge and poured until the tea was the right tone of caramel and carried the cup back to her post in the bedroom. The blackbirds were still stripping berries, the quivering holly branches the only movement in the world outside.

She watched the two houses opposite, identical to hers but blind and empty looking even though one housed an elderly couple and the other a family of five. If she moved right up to the window and craned her neck to the left she could see a shining strip of silvery sea; it always surprised her. But she never went to the sea and now vowed she would as soon as the snow cleared. The tea slipped down her throat, threading it’s way to her stomach in a miraculous stream of warmth.

The male blackbird gave his alarm call, high pitched and urgent and both birds careened across the road. Joyce gasped as spilled tea soaked through her skirt to the skin of her thighs. Quickly she shed her skirt, shocked at her own clumsiness, and threw it into a corner of the room - disgusted, as if the liquid had come from her own body.

What had frightened the birds? She peered at the street – nothing, just whiteness. She pulled on an old pair of trousers and fetched a cloth from the kitchen to mop the floor, and felt curiously energised. A movement outside caught her eye as she bent to the floor and, cloth forgotten in her hand, she watched a figure emerge from the alleyway between the two houses opposite. It was a young chap, hardly dressed properly for the cold weather, in a cheap nylon windcheater, light denim jeans and designer trainers. A Tesco carrier bag dangled from one hand. He sank to his knees and then very slowly keeled over sideways until his head touched the ground. One by one he unfolded his limbs like some awkward great bird until he lay flat on his back in the snow.

Joyces’s heart pounded. What should she do? Was he ill? Was he drunk, had he taken some awful drug, was he dangerous? But he could die out there, he could freeze to death. He couldn’t be left like that. Could she go out there to him? She would have to, by all the unwritten laws of common decency she would have to. But she was in her eighties, her knees ached and she was terrified of falling, of breaking a hip and having a ‘hip replacement’, which was touted (rather deceptively in her view) as being ‘highly successful in most cases’. Perhaps it was but that phrase made it seem simple and relatively painless, which was definitely not the case. Still, she must go out there, she had a conscience after all, even if many didn’t these days. It would not let her rest if she left him.

She fetched her fur-lined boots from the back door and sat in the kitchen to zip them on. It was harder than usual, she was breathless with the effort and the thought of the task she had in front of her. She made her way down the hall to the lobby, put on her winter coat and opened the front door. Her front steps were thick with snow, it was hard to see where one ended and the next began. She inched her way down clinging to the handrail which was flaking with rust.

As she made her way slowly down the short drive she darted quick glances at the young man, hoping against hope that he would move off. But still he lay there, flat out, arms neatly by his sides. And now she saw that his carrier bag had spilled out a quarter bottle of some spirit and a packet of tobacco. So he was drunk, her task now seemed even more oppressive.

The road was glassy under last nights’ fresh layer of snow. Perilous, she thought, like crossing some vast chasm but she would do it, worse things happened at sea as Colin used to say, if only he was here, if only someone else would come, that young family or the husband of the elderly couple but nothing moved, the houses sat squat and smug in the woolly silence.

She was nearly across the road now and felt suddenly brave and elated, she was useful, she had been a land girl, she had lived through a world war. She thought of the farm she’d worked on and the jodhpur type breeches they’d worn and the rainbow she’d seen from the top of the hill, the hill she could see from the bedroom window. And how, although the war had been a terrible time, she had felt such joy at the sight of that rainbow and how the work had been so very hard but had allowed her a true sense of herself, yes, that’s what it was, a true sense of herself.

She knelt down slowly by the young man’s head and gently shook his shoulder.

“You must get up,” she said, “or you’ll freeze to death.” Nothing. She shook him harder and he flailed his arm nearly pushing her off balance. He mumbled incoherently.

“Get up now,” she said loudly, “this is no place to lie down.”
“Gerroff, what you want with me, gerroff,”
“You must be on your way, move or you’ll freeze. Where do you live?”
“What you want?”
“Where do you live?” she said.
“I dunno, can’t go there now.”
“Why not?”
“Kicked me out.”

Joyce sighed and felt the cold creeping into her knees. She couldn’t stay out here like this much longer and she was angry at what seemed such a waste of this boy’s life drowning in cheap vodka.

“Will you get up and go home?” She said.
“No.”
“Then so be it.”

Joyce got up slowly and inched her way back over the road and up the steps fitting her feet to the prints in the snow she’d made before.
“So be it,” she said again as she lay on the bed in the warmth and dreamed of that time of the rainbow.