A Christmas Promise (27 page)

‘They did it!’ Janet cried when she met Tilly for lunch. ‘Our boys have given Jerry a bloody good kick up the backside!’

‘All by themselves?’ Tilly laughed, although she couldn’t help worrying if Drew had landed safely, disappointed once more that he hadn’t written. She understood that there must have been so many other more important things for him to worry about, but she couldn’t help but be anxious, all the same. The only letter she had received today was from her mother telling her everything she should have been told in 1942. To add to her concerns, she knew the first wave of the military had been fiercely attacked and many Allied servicemen killed.

‘I don’t know how you can keep all this top secret information to yourself, Tilly. I’d be too excited and want to tell someone.’

‘I know.’ Tilly laughed as she sat down at the table opposite her best friend with her lunch tray. They hadn’t had the same day off for weeks and there was a lot to catch up on.

‘So, any news of Drew?’ asked Janet, who knew Sally’s story now.

‘He didn’t walk out on me,’ Tilly said, her face clouded. ‘In fact he didn’t walk at all for months.’

‘I don’t understand. What are you saying, Tilly?’ Janet stretched her hand across the table, concern for Tilly wreathed across her face.

‘I’m saying that he couldn’t walk – he had broken his back in a car accident. He didn’t want me to know … He didn’t want anybody to know …’

‘How awful for him … But I must say, he is very strong-willed to be able to keep something like that from you.’

‘He had a lot of help from our interfering parents! His father asked my mother to keep it from me and she thought it wise to do so.’ Tilly gripped the handle of the cup so hard it broke, spilling tea all over the table. In the distressing confusion she wiped the table with a clean handkerchief and then burst into tears.

‘How could my own mother do that to me, Janet? How could she keep such devastating news from me?’

‘Maybe it was because the news was so devastating that she didn’t want you hurt.’

‘She didn’t want me to “waste” my life pining for the man I loved, you mean?’

‘Come on, Till,’ Janet said quietly as she reached for Tilly’s hand after the waitress had come to the table and efficiently cleared the mess before bringing another pot of tea and fresh cups, ‘she only did what she thought was best, I’m sure.’

‘Well, I’m not so sure,’ said Tilly as tears trailed down her cheeks. ‘How could she do that to her own daughter?’

‘You said that she had to look after her own husband, your father, from an early age?’

Tilly nodded as the realisation dawned on her; it mustn’t have been easy for her mum to bring her up after her father had been injured in the First World War.

‘I’m sure she didn’t want the same thing for you. It would be like history repeating itself.’

‘But wasn’t it my decision to make?’ Tilly asked. ‘I had a right to know.’

‘And what would you have done about it?’ Janet disputed Tilly’s explanation that she would not have gone to pieces. ‘You would have tried, come hell or high water, to get over to America!’

Janet gave a mirthless laugh but was silenced when Tilly said, ‘He wasn’t in America – he was in London. They sent him over to Barts Hospital for ground-breaking surgery. Kill or cure by the sounds of it. And he was there for months.’

‘Wow,’ Janet said in a low voice, all banter forgotten now. ‘That is a blow, I’m sure.’

‘Drew was less than ten miles away from me and I didn’t even know.’ Tilly sounded desperate now, and Janet jumped up from her chair and went round to the other side of the table to give her friend a reassuring hug.

A little while later, when Tilly was calm again, Janet went back to her chair and poured the tea, spooning a little extra sugar into Tilly’s cup.

‘I’m sure it will all be fine in the end. Strange things happen in wartime – we all know that – and I’m sure your mum would never have done it if she thought it was going to hurt you this much. Didn’t you say yourself it was kill or cure? What if Drew had died? I know you think it was your decision to make, but you can see why your mum wanted to save you from more heartache, can’t you?’

Tilly sniffed into the clean handkerchief that Janet had given her and nodded, knowing her mother would never deliberately set out to cause her any distress, but she just wished that she would treat her as a grown-up, as the British Army did.

When she got back to her office Tilly realised that Janet still had her dog tags and her pendant and that she had never asked for them back after the ball. There had been so much activity that both of them had clean forgotten. Almost immediately, the telephone rang. It was Janet to tell her she had just remembered the same thing and Tilly said she would collect them from her later in their favourite café. However, the pendant and her afternoon’s work was soon forgotten when she spied the familiar handwriting on another envelope. It was a second letter from her mother.

‘Pregnant!’ Tilly cried. ‘And already married! Well, that’s very nice, I must say!’

Tilly had arranged to meet Janet in the café after she had cleared up her files in the throne room office. She was on her way there after work, down the hot, dusty road surrounded by hills of rubble, when suddenly there was an almighty explosion that shook the ground under her feet and seemed to vibrate to the hills beyond, boom after boom. Tilly threw herself to the ground and curled up into a tight ball, edging herself towards the wall of the nearby building, getting as close as she could.

People were running down the road past her and she wondered if it was an air raid. Looking up from the scant security of her elbow, she noticed what she thought was a football rolling, almost bouncing, down the centre of the road, before it came to rest in the thorn bush beside her. When she peered over to take a closer look, Tilly realised the spherical object wasn’t a ball at all, but a man’s head that had been taken clean off his body.

Looking around, her stomach heaving at the discovery, she could see no sign of the the rest of the poor soul’s body. Again, her stomach heaved and she only just managed to stop herself from throwing up. She scrambled to her feet and headed back in the direction from which she had come earlier. And at the bottom of the hill, she was met by a gaggle of ATS girls who had also been caught up in the mêlée caused by the explosion, and they told her that it had been an ammunition ship in the harbour that had been blown up. The loss of life and the damage was awful.

The battle at Cassino was raging now and Tilly could hear it from where she was. The thump, thump, thump of the shells was relentless. Tilly worried about how she was going to get back to her billet. And what about Janet? Tilly hoped she hadn’t lingered in the café and was somewhere safe.

The constant noise that came from the direction of Cassino made the hairs on the back of Tilly’s neck stand on end. The noise was so awful she couldn’t have described it if she had been asked to, except to say it was something she doubted she would ever forget.

Buildings were shattering around her and she noticed that the troops had started to move out along the road to Rome leaving the battle site to be scrutinised. She saw a colonel calling some of his men together and they started out in cars, to go and check what state the place was in after the bombardment, and to make sure all the Germans had been flushed out. As Tilly got onto the road leading up towards her billet there was an almighty flash of light, a boom the like of which she had never heard before, and then everything went black.

Further down the road, soldiers had to abandon their vehicles as the rough, uneven road was rutted with craters. Moments later Tilly came to, her head thudding. She dragged herself to her feet, but her head was spinning now and she couldn’t walk very easily on the uneven road, so instead, she decided to walk on the loose stone wall with the flat top when she heard a lot of very loud shouting coming from the top of the range above her.

Looking up, she saw four soldiers who had seen her climbing onto the wall screaming at her broken English.

‘Get down – the wall is mined!’ The Germans had taken out a flat stone every so often and put a mine in because they knew that Allied soldiers would be climbing up. Tilly saw some soldiers clearing up after the battle, collecting bodies. She saw a bayonet sticking out from behind a rock and went over to give it a tug, and out rolled a German body. When she walked to the edge of the hill and looked down she couldn’t believe it.

The whole plain was a mass of lakes where there were bomb craters that had filled up with water. Everything else had been flattened. The monastery was in ruins and there were soldiers of different nations everywhere she looked. German soldiers were being brought out of the cellars of the monastery, which had been bombed from the air and was nothing but a hill of bricks and wreckage.

Stumbling over the rubble, Tilly picked up a piece of small fresco; sitting neatly in the palm of her hand, it had the face of an angel on it. She closed her eyes and said a silent prayer of thanks. Perhaps she should take a little bit of Italy home with her? A reminder of the preciousness of life. Suddenly it was knocked from her hand by an irate monk who had been hiding in the ruins of the monastery.

‘This monastery is not always going to be a ruin. We are going to rebuild it after the war is ended and we want every piece of the original monastery that we can find. If everybody took a souvenir, there’d be nothing left to use.’ Tilly, considering herself to be well and truly chastised, thought about explaining, but instead, apologised and headed back towards her office. As she reached the end of the road, there was another almighty explosion, and her last thought before she was knocked her off her feet was a silent promise to write to her mother  … 

‘No! No! Archie, No!’

Olive could not take it in as she gripped her husband’s jacket and her tears flowed freely onto his proud chest. The telegram, which was still tightly wrapped up in the palm of her hand, told her that her daughter, Tilly, was missing in action – presumed dead.

‘Come on, love,’ Archie said, while Agnes, who had travelled from the farm, held open the door to allow Archie to help his stumbling wife towards her chair near the fire. Archie gave Agnes a small nod to signal she was to pour two fingers of brandy into a glass before gently urging it to her lips.

‘The telegram doesn’t say that she definitely is …’ He couldn’t bring himself to say the word ‘dead’, even though they all knew that was what he meant. ‘They have been known to make mistakes, darling …’ And for as much as Archie had been in this situation many times before, and had reassured so many people who had been the recipients of such bad news, he never imagined that he would have to give solace to his own wife.

‘We’ll get a letter soon telling us it was all a big mistake, just you wait and see.’

However, a week later, there was still no word, and Olive knew that her daughter would certainly get news to her own mother if she was alive. Every day and every night, the house was filled with women eager to bring some kind of comfort to Olive, who only wanted to be left alone.

She was grateful for all their concern, of course she was. Agnes had come straight from the farm when Archie informed her that Tilly was missing, but there was little she could do except cry along with Olive.

Dulcie left her newborn son and came with Agnes, and busied herself making tea for the many visitors from a supply she had brought with her. Vaguely, Olive reminded herself to thank them and offer to pay for the tea. Sally administered care, and, eventually, a sleeping draught, so Olive did not go into early labour with the shock.

Tucked upstairs in the front bedroom, Olive slept right through the knock on the front door, and as Archie opened it he was met by two army officers whom he invited into the front room. The girls all made themselves scarce and when the officials had gone Archie came into the kitchen, his face wet with tears.

‘Archie?’ Sally was the first to speak when she noticed a big brown envelope in Archie’s hands. He sat down heavily at the table.

‘She’ll never get over this … None of us will,’ he cried, and pushed the envelope towards the three women sitting at the table. Sally put her hand inside and the loud audible gasp was threefold when she pulled out Tilly’s sapphire pendant and her dog tags.

‘Then there can be no question of what happened. I don’t think we need any more proof than that,’ Agnes said solemly.