Birmingham Friends (16 page)

After wringing out the dress, twisting it round and round into a tight snake, I went into the hot garden and hung it, the thin straight shape of my mother, on to the washing line. Then I tried to turn my attention to the vegetable patch. Mummy, in her gristly way, had dug out, single-handed, another long strip of bedding for vegetables in the place where we all used to play cricket, and radishes were growing roughly where we positioned our homemade crease. Angus, William, Livy . . . I had to hold on to each day for what it was. The future was too uncertain and frightening to think about. And what was precious about today was another of Livy’s frequent letters, to which I would reply as promptly myself, keeping the threads of our friendship alive. And today – today I was going to see Angus.

For about half an hour I stooped and squatted round the bed, tugging at groundsel and grass, my summer dress tucked round my legs. I pulled lettuce and carrots for lunch, then sat staring in a dazed way at the rows of spinach and beetroot. I heard the latch on the gate behind me and, turning, was on my feet in an instant and running to him.

‘Oh darling, my darling!’

‘Katie!’

Laughing, almost crying, I ran to him and we were in each other’s arms, pressed close, quiet at first, suddenly shy.

‘I’ve missed you so much,’ Angus said after we’d kissed. I touched his face with my fingers, seeing his eyes full of love.

‘You’ve still got your uniform on.’

‘I’ve just walked in. Went up to change and I saw you through the window tinkering with the weeding.’

I laughed. ‘My mind wasn’t exactly on the job!’ I looked at him in silence for a minute, then said seriously, ‘It is so wonderful to see you. I love you.’

‘And I you. More than ever.’

The week passed with terrible speed. We saw each other so rarely that Angus’s leaving again seemed to overshadow even his arrival home. In many ways it was a blissful week, but for the sense of what was brewing in Europe. And I noticed a strange restlessness in Angus.

I sat beside him one evening in the Harveys’ house on their battered, comfortable sofa. Angus had his arm around me and we had been talking softly, but I noticed that he seemed tense. I leaned round, holding his slight body, trying to take in the fact that he was here with me. All that was in focus was the front of his white shirt, the row of translucent pearl buttons. I stroked my hand over his ribs. He felt even thinner than when he’d left.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s odd being home.’ He sighed. ‘All the time I’ve been away I’ve been dying to be back here with you. That’s the most important thing, seeing you.’ I pushed myself up so that I could look into his face. ‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ he assured me. ‘It’s just so comfortable here. I feel as if I’m being cosseted like a child again when I’m supposed to be out there doing a job.’

‘But they’re only trying to make you welcome. Give you some home comforts.’

‘I know. It’s quite unreasonable of me. I feel . . . everything’s changed. This wretched war has turned us all upside down. But you must know, Katie, nothing could change the way I feel about you.’ He leaned towards me for a kiss.

One baking hot afternoon we caught a train to a country station outside Coventry, with our sandwiches and lemonade, fruitcake and apples that Mrs Harvey had packed for us.

‘You have a lovely afternoon now,’ she’d told us. ‘You both deserve it.’ Her voice was wistful on our behalf, knowing how rare and brief were our times together.

We walked out into the Warwickshire countryside, finding fields into which it was possible to believe the war had not yet slunk its tentacles. The corn was turning yellow. Bees moved in and out of the poppies and morning glory and a breeze moved the wheat stems.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ I said, stopping, breathing in the smell of the fields, the air free of smoke. ‘It’s so long since I’ve been out of Birmingham. You almost forget there is anything else.’

We stood quietly for a few moments looking out over the gold field edged with the trees’ black shade and sprinkled with red.

‘I do think it’s right to fight for it,’ Angus said suddenly. ‘I’ve thought a lot about what your father said, before William and I joined up, and I can see he’s probably the most, I don’t know – saintly of us. But I do feel with every fibre of me that you have to stand up to the likes of Hitler, and I want to be part of defending all that this country stands for against what they’re doing.’ He spoke with a forced casualness, avoiding sounding pompous as William would have done. I reached out and squeezed his arm.

After a time we came to an oak tree providing a patchy ring of shade between two fields and sat on the soft grass edging the barley. I opened the packet of beef sandwiches. Angus’s mood was changeable that afternoon, sometimes joking, the next moment quiet and serious as if preoccupied, and then I could tell his thoughts were elsewhere.

‘It was odd travelling up to Cambridge,’ he said, pouring lemonade into our two enamel cups. ‘Now they’ve made all the signs so small we couldn’t always tell where we were. It’s quite a haul from Cornwall too. We thought we must be going to Scotland, but then it all looked too flat!’

‘I wonder what they’ll do with you next?’

‘More training somewhere. Has to be. I’m a way from getting my wings yet.’

‘D’you really like flying?’

‘Oh yes.’ He sat eating with his knees drawn up in front of him, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows. His forearms were tanned under the dark hairs. ‘I enjoy it even more than I imagined. I wasn’t sure when we started off, of course. All those talks. It was all airframes and aerodynamics and navigation, and the hangars were horribly cold.’ He gave me his wide smile. ‘But as soon as they started teaching us to fly – oh, it was marvellous. Hard to describe it – it’s like another dimension to life. I’ll have to take you up for a spin one day, then you’ll see what I mean.’

He talked with enthusiasm about all he was learning and the other cadets training with him.

‘They’re a real mixed bag of course, but we’ve got used to each other now. We had to pull together against a couple of officers who are right – ’

I could tell he was biting back a swear word, another symbol of forces camaraderie.

‘ – well, tough sorts, let’s say.’

I laughed. ‘I do have more than the odd patient who curses, you know!’

Angus grinned sheepishly. ‘Of course. I’m sorry. I keep talking as if I’m the only one who’s doing anything.’

‘It’s all right.’ He’d already asked me about my plans. ‘The war hasn’t touched us all that much yet, except for there being so many people missing. I sometimes feel so stuck here with you all gone.’

To my annoyance, tears filled my eyes. The past months had been so lonely. I had poured all my energy into work. I didn’t want to be blubbing in the few days I had with Angus.

He shifted over to me, pushing aside the packet and cups and apple cores from our picnic. The grass was soft beneath us. Crows called in the branches.

‘Here, let me hold you.’

We lay in each other’s arms, looking up at the thick, strong branches of the tree, sunlight skewering through into our eyes now and then as the breeze shuffled the leaves.

‘I wonder what you make of it all,’ I said. The solid girth of the trunk was behind our heads. ‘You’ll still be here long after it’s all over.’

I rested my head on Angus’s chest, listening to the sound of his heart, one arm across his body. A daytime moon hung in the sky, remote and white like a slice of pumice.

‘How many children shall we have?’ I asked playfully, making believe we lived in a wholesome world to which there was no threat.

‘Oh, six at least.’

I leaned up on one elbow. ‘You are joking?’ But he was looking very solemn.

‘Katie – ’ He hesitated. ‘If I wasn’t to make it through all of this . . .’ I wanted to stop him, not to hear, but I knew I must let him speak. ‘We’ve none of us any idea how it’s all going to go, but I want you to know – I love you. Whatever happens, I’ll always love you.’

‘Oh God,’ I said, beginning to cry. ‘This is awful. Why did this have to happen? Those damn Germans messing up everyone’s lives. Angus, I love you, that’s what matters. Wherever you are you know you can always carry that with you.’

He pulled me strongly towards him.

‘I love you,’ we said again and again between our kisses. ‘I love you, I love you.’

Angus pushed himself into a sitting position, his jacket for a cushion, between the roots of the tree. I sat on his lap facing him.

He ran his hands over my shoulders, dark eyes watching my face. ‘You’re thinner,’ he said. ‘Heavens, I can feel your bones. Don’t disappear, will you?’

I stroked his hair, cropped RAF-style now, smiling at the bristly feel of it. Gently he tugged my thin red blouse out from the band of my skirt and reached round to free my breasts.

‘Oh God, I’ve missed you.’ His hands were warm on my skin, holding me close.

‘Katie – ’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve got some, well – protection this time. We could make love properly. That’s if you don’t think it’s wrong?’

‘You’ve been planning this!’ I teased him.

‘Not planning. Hoping.’

Without answering him I sat back, and to his surprise, unfastened first my clothes, then his.

‘I take it that’s a yes.’ Again he slid his hands under the red cotton of my blouse. As we touched each other I was aware of the muscular strength of him, the force of another body so close to my own. We were nothing but gentle with each other, but in our excitement I understood how lovemaking could so easily fall over into a fight.

After, we lay close, quiet in the dappled shadow of the tree, our heads on Angus’s brown jacket. That day is one of my most precious memories of Angus. The intent, tender expression in his eyes when he moved into me for the first time, the haze of leaves and blue sky behind his head and my hands pressing into the flesh of his back under his shirt. His cry, ‘It’s lovely – God it’s so lovely,’ at the height of it. And our ‘thank you, thank you’ afterwards as our cheeks touched, mine wet with tears.

Lying together, we heard the planes, the sound half obscured at first by the breeze, then swelling towards us, engines straining across the sky. Angus sat up.

‘They are ours?’ I asked, only half joking. Without my specs I couldn’t even see the planes, let alone their insignia.

‘Yes, definitely ours. Off on a practice run, I expect.’

The sight of the planes had pulled his mind back to his training, his job.

‘Can’t escape it for long, can we?’ I said, sitting up. ‘Oh, I do wish we could see what’s going to happen.’

Seldom has a wish been more ill-guided. In our ignorance of the future that afternoon we sat, peaceful and loving in our barley field between Birmingham and Coventry, cities whose solid, familiar faces would be shattered almost beyond recognition by the approaching storm.

As we waited through the intense days of the Battle of Britain, Angus was sent to Canada to complete his training in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. The inhabitants of Apple Valley en route to Moose Jaw stopped their train and deluged the lads with the red fruit which gave the place its name. Before he left again, Angus gave me a book of poems.

‘Some of them are my favourites,’ he said. ‘I want you to keep this for me.’

The collection was by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I found them hard to understand but for glimpses of beauty in them and my favourite was the simplest: ‘Heaven–Haven – A nun takes the veil’:

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,

To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

I kept the poem in my head as a charm, a conjuror of peace, even if there was none in the world.

‘Every day I thank God selfishly,’ I wrote to him, ‘that you have, as yet, no wings on your uniform.’

God was on people’s lips more than usual in any case. With autumn came the bombing. At the height of the blitz on Birmingham I went to church with my mother. I had moved to live back at home now my training was complete.

‘Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us, o’er the world’s tempestuous sea,’ we sang. The church was packed and people stood in the aisles. We all needed something to hold on to.

Mummy was tense as a trip-wire. I stood with her one day while she was wrenching the pale flesh from a boiled pig’s head for brawn.

‘Wouldn’t this be a good time for you to go back to nursing?’ I ventured. ‘They’re short-handed everywhere.’

Daddy was working incessantly it seemed. Days, nights, any demand that came he tried to meet, as if he had something to prove.

‘How can I?’ Mummy said briskly. ‘There’s the house to run, all the garden – there’s so much to do. And no Simmons.’ Simmons had volunteered for the ATS.

‘But I’m here to help,’ I urged her. ‘I thought you wanted to do more nursing?’

‘What’s wanting ever had to do with anything?’ she snapped. She handed the bowl of pig’s flesh to Mrs Drysdale. ‘Here, you could finish this off for me, please.’ We went through to the living room. ‘She’s so wasteful getting the meat off,’ she murmured.

Mummy was up to her eyes in make do and mend. There were old cut up shirts and curtains strewn all over the living-room sofa. She held up a length of curtain material in a yellow and white regency stripe.

‘I thought this would run to a skirt. Or do you think you’d look too much like a stick of rock in it?’

‘No, that would suit me very well.’ I smiled cautiously. ‘It’s just – I’ve decided to delay my midder training for a few months and work in casualty for a bit. Extra help’s needed everywhere.’

Mummy stopped again and looked up at me awkwardly. ‘I suppose I could fit in a few hours at a first aid post. It’s not as if you and William are holding me back any more.’

‘I’m sure they’re crying out for you,’ I said.

The first bombs had fallen on Birmingham in August 1940. The bombardment crescendoed through that foggy, blacked-out winter, right through until April 1941. So much that we had thought solid and sure, familiar landmarks made of weighty stone, caved in like plywood boxes. The bombs destroyed the Market Hall, smashed to rubble sections of Fort Dunlop, Marshal and Snelgrove’s, the Bull Ring, the BSA. People pushed the remains of their belongings from bombed houses to the emergency centres in wheelbarrows and babies’ prams. In November, the fires from Coventry’s sacrifice bled into the sky.