Apple Blossom Time (13 page)

‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’ she cried when she saw me. ‘What are you doing here? Do you want to bring Germans to my house?’

‘There’re no Germans here, Madame.’

‘But they are coming. Ahmed has gone and taken the cutlery with him. He knows the British are finished here. Tomorrow he will come back to dance on my grave and begin a new job with the German who will take my house. And who will take care of my poor cats?’

She crammed a crazy collection of things into a faded carpet bag: a candlestick; a tin of corned beef; a little black cocktail hat with feathers; a cake slice; a suede jewellery roll (not so crazy, that); an enamelled hand-mirror; a pound of coffee …

I put my hand gently on her arm. It was stick-insect thin and shaking.

‘Really, Madame, I promise you … No Germans … Why don’t you sit down. Let me make you a nice cup of tea.’

‘Who can drink tea at a time like this? You are English. What do you understand? I go to mass every day, but they can always tell. Don’t you know what it is for Jewish people when the Germans come?’

*   *   *

But Rommel never came. He threw his exhausted army again and again at the Alamein defences, but the line held.

Madame Bouvier unpacked. Ahmed came back again and said he’d been to his grandmother’s funeral. Major Prosser mourned the documents he need never have destroyed. Pansy carried on feeding and bathing and changing Jonathan with monumental calm.

‘I told you so,’ she said.

And three days later, I was called into the company commander’s office. She stood up when I was shown in.

‘Sit down, Laura,’ she said.

And I knew …

*   *   *

All the bells in Britain rang when the news of the recapture of Tobruk came through. On that Sunday in November, the air that had been silent for three years reverberated with a joyous clamour, peal after peal.

I stood in the garden and listened to the bells of St Michael and All Angels. Surely, they had never rung like that before. The bats in the belfry would never come back. It sounded as though the ringers were trying to shake the tower to its foundations. The pale lime mortar would crumble to powder. From every death-watch beetle hole in every beam would pour fragments of masticated wood. Mrs Attwood would be furious on Monday morning when she came in with her broom to give the place the once over and found it covered in centuries of dust.

There was a pain in my chest, like a cruel hand squeezing, wringing me out, but I was already dry. I was sand, I was dust, my heart was embalmed. Tobruk was ours again. Rommel was really on the run, this time for good. The war in the desert was as good as over. And James would never know how much he’d contributed to that victory.

I stood in the garden and listened to the bells. And after they had stopped, the sound went on in my head, as though the air still vibrated, as though my eardrums had taken on a life of their own.

Conscious that Mother and Tom stood in the doorway, anxiously watching, I pulled up my coat collar and walked down the lane to the vicarage to watch Pansy playing with Jonathan.

1944

A hero, they said, and they gave him a medal, so it must have been true.

*   *   *

It was a long time before James’s commanding officer’s letter reached me. He was a busy man – he had a war to fight; my posting back to England had been sudden – a few days of mad activity, followed by ten weeks of mind-numbing passivity, as the troopship steamed the long, safe Cape route home.

Pansy and Jonathan had kept me sane during the dreary voyage. If Pansy had not been lucky enough to get a berth back on the same ship, I might have lost any contact with reality. There are so many widows in wartime – young women with children, with no families, no friends, no support, no home – in far worse a situation than I. They have to make the best of things and get on with living. At the time, I thought that might be better. I had nothing to do for ten weeks but stare at the sea and think. But I had Pansy’s love and support and Jonathan was a constant delight.

On the day we disembarked in England Pansy was back in uniform because she hadn’t been officially discharged and because nothing else fitted. As she walked down the gangplank, Jonathan in her arms, a docker shouted, ‘Crikey, look what the ATS are being issued with now!’ And I found I could laugh.

Major Prosser had recommended me for further intelligence work, with welcome promotion, and I wore the Intelligence Corps badge on the left side of my tunic with pride. A rose within a laurel wreath – soldiers described it as a pansy resting on its laurels. I had been at Bletchley for some time before the letter reached me.

Bletchley Park – even the name is classified. I hardly dare think it, let alone speak it. All I could tell them at home was that I was doing clerical work in the Home Counties. True enough, if not the whole truth. Mr Churchill called the Park and its operators ‘my golden goose that never cackles’. I don’t intend to change that.

We were a mixed crowd, mostly WRNS, but with a good sprinkling of civilians and a few soldiers and airmen. The boffins were a world apart – scientists from Oxford and Cambridge, the best mathematical brains in the country, linguists, musicians, crossword solvers, chess players, sometimes all of these, indicative of a particular type of brain – who mysteriously beavered away in all sorts of places: in the mansion, the apple store, in huts and concrete blockhouses all over the Park. And then there were the debs – girls of good family, but (so it was said – how cruel – it can’t have been true) like Pooh, of very little brain, who worked in ‘C’ block, known as Deb’s Delight, keeping the vast card indexes up to date. It was a vital task and they did it well.

Sometimes the Park, with its copper-domed Victorian mansion and ornamental lake, reminded me of a girls’ boarding-school. I almost expected to see a gaggle of girls with red knees and lacrosse sticks running across the grass, pursued by a games mistress shouting, ‘Cradle, girls, cradle!’ Sometimes it felt as though we were working in a university technical laboratory, sometimes it was very like being a factory hand. Scarcely ever did it feel like the army.

*   *   *

James’s CO’s letter finally found me, having chased me from Cairo via Gibraltar and Catterick, six months after James had died. It lay in my pocket all through a dank, January day when my breath seemed to have frozen even before it left my nostrils. Muffled in greatcoat, scarf, fur boots, I sat all day, with mittened fingers like blue sausages, operating a cipher machine rather like a typewriter designed by Heath Robinson. The air in the hut was stale and icy at the same time, still and heavy, cold as bone, cold enough to make your face ache with every breath. Even thirty bodies working at feverish speed didn’t generate enough energy to warm my nose. Yet the rumour was that in other huts, where the mysterious code-breaking machines, the bombes, were operated, the heat was enough to make operators faint – Hut 11A was known as the hell-hole. I’d have swapped gladly.

In my pocket, the letter was a focus of heat. I could feel it glowing, a little hot spot, a message from the desert. I never thought I’d have missed the sun. I never dreamed that I’d long for that fetid, noisy, harsh, utterly impossible country. England seemed so drab, so austere and monochrome. It was like reaching the end of
The Wizard of Oz,
that moment when the glamour of the Emerald City is replaced by black and white Kansas. If I’d been Dorothy, I’d have kept a sharp eye open for another pair of ruby slippers! Had it always been that way? My eyes had been seared by the brilliance of Egypt and England would never look the same.

I could have read the letter during NAAFI break or during lunch, but I held back. All through the jolting bus ride back to digs in the village of Milton Keynes, as shift workers were dropped off and picked up, I was tempted to open it, but I wanted to be alone.

My landlady raised her head from the
The People’s Friend
as I walked in the door. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said – as though anyone else would have dreamed of choosing to walk into that cheerless semi-detached, given a choice. So many people had been drafted to work at BP that local lodgings were scarce. ‘Tea’s in the pot,’ she said, licking a finger to turn over a page.

I put my hand on the teapot. Tea was in the pot, all right, and had been for at least an hour by the feel of it.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I answered.

‘Suit yourself.’

There was a fusty smell upstairs, blankets long unwashed, mattresses unturned, slut’s wool under the beds, windows not opened from September to May. I looked in the handle-less cup where I kept shillings for the gas meter. Empty. I’d been certain … but I could never prove how many had been there. That was something else I’d need to hide away in future. Even after promotion, I was earning little over a pound a week. I couldn’t afford to lose my gas money. There’d been something like three days’ pay in that cup. How could I have been so stupid?

I kept my only pair of good stockings under the mattress along with a little paper bag of Lux soap flakes especially for washing the stockings. My one precious lipstick was in the toe of a spare pair of shoes. If that sounds dotty, well, you’ll understand if I say it wasn’t just Tangee. It was Revlon Cherry Coke, produced like a conjurer by Grandmother from who knows where. She was so clever like that.

Vee would have had such a laugh about it. ‘You’re getting so suspicious,’ she’d have said, ‘a real old maid.’ Is there such a thing as a married old maid? ‘You’ll be hiding your kirby grips in the teapot next and accusing the postman of peeping at you through the letterbox – lucky chap – go on, give him an eyeful, Laura, do. Make it worth his while!’

Heavens, I missed them – I missed them all so badly. There was nothing to laugh about any more.

But it wasn’t imagination that had rifled through the contents of my dressing table a few days ago and it wasn’t imagination that had gone off with the shillings in the cup.

I raked through my bag and all my pockets, looking for some more gas money, but all I came up with was a few coppers. I pushed them into the meter slot, one by one, turning the knob after each. The popping, blue flame didn’t do much to improve the temperature in my room. It wasn’t even worth taking off my greatcoat.

I slit open the little packet, then sat a while with the letter in my hand, not unfolding it, not even certain, now, that I wanted to read it at all.

All ranks join with me,
James’s commanding officer wrote …
condolences … well-liked and respected young officer … tragic …

How many letters like this had that poor man to write? How many were written daily, weekly, monthly? How many since the beginning of the war? When he died, would he wear them, like Marley’s ghost, in a long tail that rustled after him wherever he went?

I would be less than honest with you, if I did not say that James made a shaky start with the regiment. He was rather shy and unsure of his capabilities. He matured very quickly, however, into a thoroughly professional soldier. He met his death fulfilling his duty in a manner far above that required of his age and rank.

There are three men still in the regiment now who owe their lives to your husband’s courage. With no thought of his own safety and in full view of the enemy, whilst under heavy fire, James rescued them from a burning gun-towing vehicle and would not leave the scene until all three had been taken away for medical attention. It is a tragedy that he should, himself, have died of burns sustained in the rescue.

It may be some comfort to you to know that he was well cared for and kept free from pain until his death. The unit padre was with him at the end.

I have recommended your husband for the highest honour this country can award for bravery. I have no doubt that my recommendation will be favourably viewed.

I have the honour to be, Madam,

Your obedient servant …

In the packet were a fountain pen with a crossed nib, a watch with a broken glass, a few Egyptian coins and a photograph of me. It was the picture that Vee had taken outside our hut, the one I’d given to James on one of his short leaves. So carelessly I’d handed it over, unloving, not bothered whether he kept it or threw it away, not ever expecting that I should be his wife or his widow. And now it had come back to me. It was a picture of a different girl, a smiling, suntanned, carefree girl. I didn’t recognize her. One corner of the snap was missing, the edge black, crumbling and charred.

On the back, he’d scribbled in a childish hand,
My darling Laura, Maadi Camp, September 1941.

And in the end, it hadn’t been as he had wanted. I knew how much his CO’s words about freedom from pain were worth. It was kind of him to try to comfort me, but I knew too much. It hadn’t been clean, not like the swimmer into cleanness leaping. We had quoted poetry at each other, children mouthing adult words, not knowing what they meant.

I sat on the sagging bed in an icy room and felt again the chill evening wind from the desert, plastering my sweat-soaked blouse to my skin. I saw it ruffle James’s sun-streaked hair, heard his voice …

‘…
if it’s really like that
,’ he’d said, ‘
I don’t think I’d mind too much … I don’t want to let everyone down – the lads, you know
…’

And I heard my own answer.
‘You’ll be all right…’

What had we known?

I thought about the last time I’d seen him. His kitbag was packed at his feet, the driver waiting downstairs. I’d looked out the window and seen the soldier, lighting a cigarette in cupped hands, lounging against the side of the Austin ‘Tilly’.

‘I’m sorry, Laura,’ James had said. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this.’

‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ I’d said, with an attempt at a smile. ‘We’re both soldiers. We know the form.’

‘I know things haven’t been … the way they ought to have been between us.’ Even through his tan, I could see his young skin darkening, an ugly, embarrassed colour. ‘It wasn’t … I didn’t mean…’