Land Girls: The Homecoming: A moving and heartwarming wartime saga. Roland MooreЧитать онлайн книгу.
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.
A gust of wind saved her life.
Outside the carriage, the wind poked a brief hole in the billowing blackness that was exiting the door. For a moment, Connie could see a soldier sitting on the grass in the distance, a man in shock being treated by a nurse.
She knew she had to head in that direction.
The flames staged one last attempt to grasp her, but Connie launched herself from the doorway, following the brief glimpse of light she’d seen. Her lungs were gasping as she fell in a heap on the ground. Looking behind, she saw tall flames consuming the carriage, dancing, blowing the glass out from the windows. One second longer and she would have been overcome with smoke and she would have collapsed into that inferno.
It had been a narrow miss.
Connie sobbed in relief and took hungry mouthfuls of air. Each breath made her hack up the acrid smoke that had tried to take over her lungs. It took several minutes before she could speak, and even as she got her voice back, the coughing would be there to remind her of her lucky escape.
Now Connie Carter sat on the grass drinking tea from a mug. Some villagers had lit a fire and were boiling a kettle to provide hot drinks for the wounded. The tea was weak and milky but it hit the spot. Connie noticed the young girl from the carriage and moved over towards her.
“How you feeling?” Connie asked.
“All right. Your face is all black.”
Connie laughed. She hadn’t seen herself, but she supposed that it would be. Certainly a thin smear of greasy soot covered her arms and hands. It probably caked some of her face too. She offered the mug. “Want some tea? It’s weaker than a kitten, but it hits the spot.”
The girl shook her head. “Not allowed tea. But thank you.”
“What’s your name?”
“Margaret Sawyer,” the girl replied.
“I’m Connie Carter. Well, Connie Jameson. Keep forgetting. Married.” Connie reached into her pocket and pulled out the parchment parcel. She opened it up, considered eating it, but then offered the piece of cheese to the girl. “Do you good to eat something, you know.”
The girl looked uncertain. Connie wondered whether she had been told not to take things from strangers.
“It’s all right. Your mum’s over there. And I’m a vicar’s wife.”
Margaret overcame her reticence and took it. She gobbled it down, taking another chunk before the first one was swallowed. Connie was surprised at how ravenous she seemed. “Blimey, doesn’t your mum feed you?”
“She’s not really my mum,” Margaret said.
But before Connie could enquire further, they were interrupted. It was the portly man with the trilby hat and the camera that Connie had seen at Brinford station.
“Hello, ladies,” he wheezed. “I’m Roger Curran from The Helmstead Herald.”
“About time someone told us what was going on,” Connie replied. “Why did the train come off the tracks like that, then?”
Roger was slightly wrong-footed. “No, I was hoping to ask you some questions.”
“Well I don’t know nothing,” Connie said.
Margaret, with a mouthful of cheese, stifled a giggle at their exchange.
“They think there was an explosive on the line,” Roger said in a hushed voice, hoping that the explanation might enable him to get on with his line of questioning.
“What, the Germans?”
Roger didn’t know. The bomb could have been planted by Nazi sympathisers or communists or any group allied with the German cause. There had been several instances of terrorism in Helmstead and the surrounding areas in the last few months. The air base at Brinford had been bombed mercilessly in a raid by German bombers, and while that action wasn’t terrorism, most locals thought someone had tipped off the secret location of the base to the enemy. And a sympathiser had even been shot dead at Hoxley Manor when Lady Ellen Hoxley had discovered him transmitting secret messages from the stables. The enemy was closer than anyone wanted …
Roger Curran explained that an explosive had been detonated as the train engine went across the track. The bomb must have been on a timer. It would have been common knowledge that, due to its proximity to the air base, the evening Brinford train would have had a large number of military personnel on board.
Connie hid her shock. Part of her had hoped the crash had been the result of a random accident. A rock on the line or something. It was terrifying to think that someone, or some group, was behind it. Terrifying that it was an act of war.
“Anyway, tell me what happened to you,” Roger said, pulling out a small notebook. He licked the end of his pencil and poised it over the page to write. Connie didn’t understand why people licked pencils. What was the point of that?
Connie wasn’t sure she wanted to tell the story, playing down any suggestion that she had been heroic. But, despite her efforts at modesty, Margaret piped up:
“She saved my life. She saved the lives of everyone in our compartment. She was brilliant.”
Connie blushed. She tried to downplay it, but was reluctantly forced to reveal that this was more or less the truth. She related the tale of what happened and Roger took a few pages of notes, his smiles of encouragement becoming more frequent. He sensed this was a good story for his paper. It might even give him his first front page since the Land Girls’ Tractor Race. He ended by asking Connie where she lived. Proudly Connie told him that she lived at the vicarage with her husband.
“This will be a lovely piece for the paper. ‘Vicar’s Wife Saves Lives’,” Roger said. Then he turned to the young girl. “And where do you live?”
“I don’t know if I should say,” Margaret replied, offering a worried glance in the direction of where the middle-aged woman was.
“It’s all right,” Connie encouraged.
“Jessop’s Cottage,” Margaret admitted, hesitantly.
As Roger tried to place it, Margaret informed him that it was in the middle of a valley, miles from anywhere. The nearest landmark was Panmere Lake and Helmstead was the nearest town. Roger couldn’t place it.
“Don’t worry. Nobody knows it. Nobody comes there.”
“Not even your friends?” Connie asked.
Margaret shook her head quickly, keen to close down all these intrusive questions.
As Connie mulled this over, Roger unhooked his camera from around his neck and started to frame a shot of Connie and Margaret.
“Perhaps, if you don’t mind getting closer …?” Roger said, wafting his hand for them to scrunch together.
Connie and Margaret shuffled closer over the grass – Margaret still wrapped in her blanket. They smiled weary smiles for the camera.
Roger clicked the trigger. “Cheese!”
He let the camera bounce back onto his ample