excerpt
Petty Officer Joseph Ignatius Carney sat in an empty compartment, staring out sadly at the green and yellow countryside of England. The train chugged through it noisily and slowly. It looked so peaceful. Who could have believed that the country was at war, that it had just been fighting for its very survival like a fish on a hook? Now the worst was over and the battle for Britain won. But the battle for Europe was not going well. The German army had pushed into Yugoslavia and Greece. Yugoslavia had surrendered, and the future for Greece looked grim.
Here in England all of that was a world away. Cows lazily grazed the fresh spring grass. New-born lambs on new-found, nimble legs scampered after shaggy ewes. The first crops were growing in the ploughed fields, and women, girls, young boys, and old men joined farmers in waging their own war against the invidious invasion of weeds. In the few orchards that the train chugged by, the apple and the cherry trees were dressed in blossom like lovely, young spring brides. The April sun was warm, and the faces that turned to watch the train pass noisily by were tanned already. So few were young men’s faces. Many were the so-called Land Girls, thousands of them, recruited from the city to boost farm production to thwart the German blockade of imports brought to the country by sea. Barmaids, waitresses, maids, hairdressers and others working in urban female occupations proved themselves tougher in the fields than the sceptical farmers had imagined. They worked fifty hours a week in summer, forty-eight in winter, ploughing fields, driving tractors, making hay. They undertook the full rigours of harvesting, threshing, and thatching. They also reclaimed land, worked in orchards and market gardens, and though they had to steel themselves to do it, they caught rats as well. As for the men, most of England’s farming labourers were far from their fields and pastures. In other fields their tired, tense faces, rank on rank, were shaded only by their gun-barrels. They were strained and stressed and drained of colour. Or smashed to gory pulp. Or still, limestone grey, like the faces in church effigies, turned towards the blue sky, their eyes closed in the unsought peace of death.
Manolis Aligizakis 