Weather or Whether

She looked up at the sky, wondering if the weather would hold or whether it would break today, as they had said it would. The sun still felt deliciously warm on her skin, her freckles more prominent than in wintertime and her skin rosier. The hairs on her arm were lying flat for a change. No cold or fear today.

She listened to the drone of a bumblebee as it drifted lazily from the delicate blue cornflowers in the wheatfield beyond the hedge, to the blowsy red poppies by the water trough. Watching it alight on a large crimson petal, she smiled as its big fuzzy pollen-covered bottom inadvertently dragged the petal down, causing the bee to scramble quickly towards the centre of the flower to save being tipped out.

How simple its life was. It wasn’t sitting there worried about its brother off fighting God-knows-where in France. Or its parents still in London taking cover in their Anderson shelter every time the sirens sounded. Or Robbie… There her thoughts faltered. Robbie, in his Spitfire, risking his life every time he flew.

Every year they had said it would be over by Christmas, but Christmas had come and gone again with no sign of an ending. It was early summer now, and if she lay down flat in the long grass so that she could not see the jeeps and supply lorries forever trundling along the roads, and blocked her ears so that she could not hear the planes, the dogfights, or the fireballs, and put her hand over her nose so that she could not smell or taste the exhaust fumes overshadowing the smell of summer, she could almost imagine there was no war. But what was the point?

‘Rose?’, came a yell from the farm. ‘Where are you?’

‘Coming’, she shouted back. Her short break was over; it was time to get back to work. Jumping up, she brushed the front of her overalls with her hands and sped back down the hill.

‘You been daydreaming again?!’, asked Edith, shaking her head but with a smile on her face.

‘Maybe’, grinned Rose. ‘It’s better than here anyway’.

‘It’s not so bad’, said Florence. ‘At least we’ve got each other’. The three land girls clasped hands in a moment of solidarity in an unstable world.

‘And eggs’, put in Edith.

‘And eggs’, they all laughed, glancing at the hens clucking in the yard.

Truth be told, Rose had no idea how she would have got through the days without the other two girls. They all worked hard, which was just as well, there was so much to do. It was a big farm and the sons had gone off to war, leaving old Mr Carter with far more than he and his wife could cope with. As per War Ag instructions, the farm now had crops as well as a dairy herd, along with the usual pigs and chickens. The girls had their hands full, providing the manual labour, but they were goodhearted and worked well together. As they said, they could do anything a man could. Well, nearly!!

Later that afternoon, Rose was cleaning the cow shed, Edith was getting the milking equipment ready, and Florence was hauling feed into the mangers. Florence slipped on a pat of manure that Rose hadn’t got to yet, and dropped the feed sack which split, spilling cow cake all over the ground where it mingled with the slurry.

‘Bloody hell!’, Florence spat, sitting down heavily on the sack as she fell. The others looked at her in sympathy, knowing she was going to have to rinse off the spilt grain. None could be wasted, and it could not be fed to the cows covered in muck.

‘I HATE the Jerries, I wish they were all DEAD. Then I could go back home to London and not have to be doing all this’, she looked disgustedly at the heap of filthy grain. Florence was usually quite mild, but she had not been sleeping well recently and when she was tired, her temper got the better of her. The others sympathised. It was getting them down as well.

‘Me too’, said Edith wearily.

Rose thought of Robbie. If Jerry were dead, defeated, Robbie would be safe. They could get married, settle down, have a family…

‘And me’, said Rose.

But as she said it, something felt wrong. She knew Jerry was the enemy, that the Germans had to be stopped, that they were slaughtering millions. That Robbie’s life was in danger because of them. And yet. They were people too. Young boys, hardly even men, sent out to fight and die on behalf of all those older men who sat safely in their war rooms strategizing. Hitler was clearly insane and she would not lose any sleep if they did put his other ball in the Albert Hall. But the foot soldiers, like her Robbie, what about them? Just people. Like Robbie, like her, like Edith, like Florence. She would not carry hate in her heart for them.

‘I just want it to be over’, she whispered. ‘No more killing. ’

She wondered what the weather would be like on the day the war ended. Whether it would be hot and sunny like today, or whether rain would be falling. Whatever the weather, there would be jubilation in the air, she knew that for sure because Jerry would not, could not, win.

© Stefanie O’Donnell

21 May 2026