The Separation (31 page)

But I am in an impressionable state of mind, depending on B for everything, still in pain. Churchill’s warmongering rhetoric has had a disproportionate effect on me. In spite of it, I feel I am almost better. I hobble around on my stick, I am even able to stand unsupported as I use the toilet. B says I should rest as much as I can. I use the time to prepare my recovery: each day I plan to make progress, aiming to be back to normal by the end of next week. Is it possible? Mrs Woodhurst is coming to visit me next Thursday afternoon, which I hope will mean that I can get back to work quickly. Winston Churchill apparently took over from Neville Chamberlain on the same day as I was beaten up. It was confusing to wake up in hospital and find so many changes. The war has lurched further into unstoppable chaos. Churchill’s speech tonight made a clear distinction between the German people and the Nazis who are their dictators. He seems to be almost alone in maintaining that. Ordinary people can only commit themselves wholeheartedly to fighting a war when they demonize the enemy. Dad said this is what happened in the last war: the German people became Fritz, the Hun, the Boche. Now it is starting again: they have become Jerries, Nazis, Huns.

It was difficult enough to argue for peace before the latest events. In the present climate, with Churchill whipping up war fever, bracing the country for the worst, it is impossible. I simply do not know what to do any more.

His speech ended with simple words of calm determination: we will defend our island against invasion whatever the cost, fighting in the streets and fields and hills, never surrendering. His words mysteriously and powerfully evoked an England I know and love, a country it is right to defend and one that is worth dying for. Churchill made me proud of my heritage and nervous of losing it. He aroused my eagerness to hold my home safe. Without being able to resist, I started to cry.

June 21, 1940

Today I went to the Society office in Manchester, in preparation for my return to work in four days’

time, on Monday. I was not nearly as nervous as B at the prospect, but she went with me to Macclesfield Station and insisted on being there to meet me when I returned. We agreed the time of the train I would catch home, while she would do what shopping she could in the town.

All signs and place-names have been removed or obliterated, windows have been taped up as a precaution against blast, sandbags are heaped against many doorways. Everywhere there are posters and notices, warning, advising, directing. In the centre of Manchester, public air raid shelters have been opened at the end of almost every street. Most people carry gas masks or steel helmets. Many are carrying both. You see people in uniform everywhere. This is what it is like to live in a country at war. Now it is in earnest.

Tonight is by chance the shortest of the year. It is nearly 11 p.m. and it is not even fully dark outside yet. The sky is mostly black but there is a band of silvery blue touching the horizon in the west. A deep-grey, beautiful light washes across the plain below my window. No lights show, but in the charcoal shading of the long twilight most main features are visible. If the German bombers were to come now, they would find all the targets they want. The thought makes me nervous and I realize that this must be what everyone else is going through at the moment.

France surrendered to the Nazis today.

June 30, 1940

I have been back at work for a week, while the threat of invasion continues to worsen. Everyone talks about it, where and when it will happen, what Churchill will do about it, how strong our army might be after the disaster at Dunkirk. The newspapers and wireless report that German forces are gathering in France, that invasion barges are being prepared, that the Luftwaffe is massing its aircraft in the thousands. Every day we hear that shipping in the English Channel has been attacked by dive bombers. The harbour in Dover has been bombed several times.

All this talk of war. Few people seem to know that talk of peace is also in the air!

It is being kept out of the newspapers, but through my work at the Red Cross I know for certain that Hitler has made two peace offers to Churchill this week. One was sent by way of the Italian government. The other was passed through the Papal Nuncio to Red Cross HQ in Switzerland. Churchill immediately rejected both offers.

I was despairing and furious when I first heard about it, but I have been having a think. Churchill loves war. He makes no secret of it, even boasts about it. When he was a young man, ‘eager for trouble’, he pulled strings and even cheated his way into the front line of the wars in India and Africa. His reaction to the disgrace of the Dardanelles in 1915 was to join the British army and fight on the Western Front for several months. It is clear that he sees the present war as a culmination of his passion for fighting.

At the moment, though, Churchill is cornered. No warmonger will entertain an offer of peace while his back is to the wall. He would interpret it as capitulation or surrender, not peace, no matter that common sense would tell him that worse punishment is to come. Churchill undoubtedly believes that he needs a military victory of some kind, before he will talk to Hitler.

No sign of that, so how am I going to feel when England is invaded, as surely she must be? For all my beliefs I remain an Englishman. I can’t bear to think about a foreign army, any foreign army, marching across our land. Thought of the Nazis worsens that imagining by many degrees. B is more scared than I am - better than most people, she knows what the Nazis are capable of doing.
July 25, 1940

Several airfields in the south-east of England have been bombed by the Luftwaffe, with many casualties and a great deal of damage.

The Red Cross is in a state of official readiness. Tomorrow I will be joining three other chaps from our depot and driving one of two ambulances and a mobile field surgery to our South London branch. It will probably take us two days to drive to London, bearing in mind how hard it is supposed to be to get around the country at the moment. It’s difficult to obtain reliable information, but we hear that many roads have been blocked with crude barricades.

It means I shall be going into the front line of the war, an idea I find inescapably romantic and terrifying, although there is in reality little danger of my being caught up in the fighting. All four of us will be returning to Manchester by train immediately we have handed over the equipment. Of course, it also means that I have to leave B alone here until after the weekend. She is feeling much stronger than she was and says that I must do what I believe is right. There is food in the house for her until next week. Since the weather has been so warm she has been spending more time in the garden. Teaching the child has given her a new-interest in playing and she has been learning new pieces. She says she will be so busy she will hardly notice I’ve gone.

July 29, 1940

I returned from London late last night, after long but uneventful journeys. B was asleep in bed when I arrived, but she woke up. She was obviously pleased and relieved to see me home safely again. We have spent a quiet, contented day together in the garden, as I was given today off work after the trip. In the evening B played me a new piece she has learned, by Edward Elgar.

British fighter aircraft are constantly active in the skies around here. I wish that reassurance was not what they bring, because that translates, I must admit, to their ability to shoot and kill. I get so confused by the strength of feelings the war induces in me. I write down in my diary what I feel, but in truth I no longer know exactly what I feel. Was it the bump on the head? Or am I simply responding to the changing circumstances, which I would never have predicted?

July 30, 1940

We have to deliver more ambulances to the south, so tomorrow I am once again driving to London. My immediate concern was with B and how she would cope during my absence, but she has assured me she will be all right on her own for as long as I have to be away.

I have spent today packing the vehicles with emergency supplies. We will be setting off to London first thing tomorrow morning.

August 6, 1940

I am still in London after a week. I cannot begin to describe the confusion that the Society is having to deal with, a terrible warning of the chaos that will follow, should hostilities really get going. Every day the fighting seems to worsen, although for the moment much of it is skirmishes between warplanes. The bombing is confined to attacks on military bases. Naturally, the damage spreads far and wide, so civilians become casualties too. This is where we come in. For the last four days I have been driving my ambulance to and fro across the south-eastern counties, acting as a relief to the regular ambulance services. Mainly I am simply expected to be the driver, but inevitably I have to help out with many of the injured. I am learning fast about the work.

I have left a telephone message for B at the post office in Rainow, so she knows where I am and that I am safe.

I am staying at the YMCA in the centre of London. I wondered at first if I might meet other COs doing similar work to mine in the capital, but as far as I can tell I’m the only one. Almost without exception the men here are in the forces, in transit from one part of the country to another. Most of them are only staying overnight while changing trains or arranging to be picked up, so it is difficult to strike up friendships with any of them. The few civilians appear to be merchant seamen, en route to one of the ports to find a berth. It leaves me feeling isolated and wishing I could be at home with B. At the end of last week, Hitler made a speech to the Reichstag, in which he made public an offer of peace to Britain. German aircraft even dropped leaflets over London reporting what he said:

‘At this hour I feel before my conscience that it is my duty to appeal once more to reason and common sense in England and elsewhere - I make this appeal in the belief that I stand here, not as the vanquished, begging for favours, but as the victor speaking in the name of reason. I can see no grounds for continuing this war. I regret the sacrifice, and I also want to protect my people.’

Whether or not we should believe him was swept aside yesterday, when the Churchill government formally rejected the offer. The war goes on, presumably to Mr Churchill’s deep satisfaction.
August 12, 1940

I am
still
here in London, torn between my urgent wish to go home for a few days and the growing realization of the emergency the country is in.

I am on duty for most of the daylight hours, dealing with an ever-increasing number of casualties. More and more of them are our airmen, shot down and wounded in the violent aerial dogfights taking place overhead. The authorities constantly warn us that the ‘blitzkrieg’ tactics used in Poland, Holland and France must soon break upon us. That is a terrifying prospect.

Today I managed to speak to Mrs Woodhurst on the telephone. She is arranging for someone to come down from Manchester to relieve me for a few days. All the excitement of being in the thick of the war has faded: I want only to see B again.

August 15, 1940

Home at last, in the uncanny peace and quiet of the Pennine hills. The war suddenly seems remote from me. I

slept for twelve hours last night and have woken refreshed. B certainly seemed pleased to see me yesterday evening and we have had a happy reunion. She woke me this morning at about ten when she put her head around the bedroom door to tell me she was about to catch the bus into Macclesfield. I dozed for a while longer, then pottered contentedly about the kitchen, eating toast, drinking tea and looking through the letters that arrived while I was away. After that I took a bath. Because it is a fine, warm day I stood for a while in our garden, enjoying the sunshine, looking down at the plain of Cheshire, relishing the silence.

Later on in the morning I made an unusual find. I’m still puzzling over what it means. Some of the furniture in this house was here when we moved in. Among the better pieces is an immense old oak wardrobe in our bedroom. (We can’t imagine how anyone got it into the house and up the stairs, except in pieces.) We keep most of our clothes inside it. This morning I was searching around on the deep shelf that runs from side to side across the top, hoping to find an old jacket of mine, when my hand rubbed against something made of fabric, but stiff and round. It had been placed right at the back of the shelf, apparently put there deliberately so it would be hard to find. I had to stretch right in to get hold of it. It was an RAF officer’s peaked cap, complete with badge.

I looked at it with interest, turning it around in my hands. I had never been so close to any part of a military uniform before. The cap was almost new, in excellent condition, with only a couple of small darkened streaks on the inner sweatband to show that it had been worn a few times. I tried it on, experiencing a
frisson
of something (embarrassment? excitement?) as I did so. It was a perfect fit. I looked at myself in the mirror, startled by the way it seemed to change the shape of my face. I didn’t want B to find me with the cap, so I put it back where I found it. I have said nothing to her about it, but I can’t help wondering if she knows it’s there.

August 18, 1940

The war has taken a new turn: the German bombers are ranging more extensively across the country, seeking other targets. So far they appear not to be aiming deliberately at civilians, but there have been many reports that some of the German planes jettison their bomb loads as soon as they are attacked by British fighters. As a result, a number of bombs have gone off in the countryside. We have always thought that the remoteness of our house would give us a measure of safety from the bombs, but we are forced to recognize that nowhere is safe. The German raiders appear almost everywhere: we have heard of air raids in Scotland, in Wales, in the London area, in the extreme south-west. Of course, the towns along the south coast are attacked almost every day. Then there is the fear of a parachute attack. For obvious reasons, parachutists will land in open countryside in remote areas. The country is already rife with rumours about parachutists being seen. So far there has been no substance to any of these stories, but with an enemy like Hitler anything is possible.