Rough Cider (4 page)

She was saying, “Beautiful, isn’t it? I don’t care what he did; that’s a beautiful letter and he was my daddy.”

I nodded, sensing that this was a significant moment. I had to be convincing now. Underhandedly, I slipped into her idiom. “Alice, you’re so right. It’s a wonderful souvenir to have. He obviously loved you and your mother above everything else. That’s something to remember all your life. Why not leave it at that?”

It was a poor try, I don’t mind admitting. She showed how little she regarded it by leaning forward and asking, “How do you remember him, Theo? What was he really like?”

I said curtly and dismissively, “I was a child then. If you’ve finished your story, All take a shower.”

But she persisted. While I ran the water in the connecting shower room, she argued persuasively (and accurately) that those wartime experiences must have made a lasting impression. How could anyone forget being removed to a strange environment and caught in a tide of events that culminated in murder and a trial at the Old Bailey?

I turned the shower control to lukewarm, which characterized my state of mind. For my own reasons I was extremely reluctant to dredge up the past. Yet I had to admit that Alice Ashenfelter (or Donovan) was entitled to know more about the fatal events of November 1943. Her knowledge of what had happened was fragmentary, gleaned from a few newspaper cuttings. Apparently she wasn’t aware that she could have read detailed accounts of the case in a dozen different sources. The Donovan case was regarded in Britain as a classic of forensic detection. I had two books on the shelf in my living room that I could have given her to read. Murder being more commonplace in America, I suppose she didn’t expect to find her father’s case written up and copiously analyzed by criminologists, pathologists, and policemen.

I stepped out of the shower and reached for a bathrobe. I told her, “I’ll sleep in the spare room. No offense, but there isn’t room for two in that bed”

She said. “But you haven’t told me anything, Theo.”

“Want some coffee? I’ve had enough champagne.”

“Please. I’ll come and help.”

“No need.”

“Could I take a shower, then?”

“Of course.”

I went downstairs and found the two books on the Donovan case and locked them in my desk drawer. Whatever impressions of me you may have formed up to now, I had no wish to cause unnecessary mental suffering to Alice Ashenfelter. I didn’t want her finding a book with a picture of the victim’s shattered skull on the jacket, and a mug shot of her daddy beside it.

I guessed she’d find some excuse to follow me downstairs, and she did. She’d wrapped herself in my dressing gown and tied back her hair with the ribbon she used for her plait. It was slightly damp from the shower.

She said, “I remembered my backpack.”

“It’ll be cold out there.”

She ran out and brought it in. “You know,” she said, “I have a bedroll here. There’s no reason why I should put you out of your bed.”

“Black or white?”

When I’d poured the coffee, I told her I’d found something for her.

She said eagerly, “What is it, a picture of him?”

“No. Just a souvenir. He made it.” I handed her a figure about five inches high, carved from a piece of wood, representing a country policeman with his bicycle. On the base had been whittled out the cryptic words
Or I then?
If you examined the figure in a detached way, I suppose you might have dismissed the subject as kitsch, while admitting to a robust quality in the workmanship.

She stroked the carving with her fingertips, as if it were a living thing. “He really carved this?”

I nodded.

“And gave it to you as a present? He must have liked you a lot.” She frowned at the lettering on the base. “I don’t understand the meaning of these words.”

“ ‘Or I then?’ Written like that, they have no meaning.”

“A secret message?”

I smiled. “Nothing profound about it. As a kid in Somerset, I used to meet the local bobby sometimes, and he always greeted me with what sounded like those words. It was the dialect, you see. Or I then?’”

She shook her head, still at a loss.

I articulated it for her. “All
right, then?”

“I got it.” She nodded, smiling.

As she still seemed somewhat bemused, I explained, “Duke was intrigued by the way Somerset people talked. He used to collect their sayings. Living with a family and going to school with the local children, as I did, I picked up a few examples for him. ‘Or I then?’ was one of them.”

“And this was his way of thanking you? I love it.”

“Keep it, then.”

She reddened and said. “Theo, I couldn’t do that. He made it for you. You kept it all these years.”

“Duke would have liked his baby daughter to have something he made.”

Her response was quick and spontaneous. She came up to me and kissed me on the lips. It pleased me. But if you’re thinking this was the trigger for more steamy sex in Pangbourne, think again. She was still trouble, and I meant to show her the door in the morning. I didn’t want a permanent houseguest. So, after the kiss, I put my hands on her shoulders and moved her gently out of range.

We sipped our coffee silently for a while, seated opposite each other across the kitchen table. She held the figure to her chest, as if it were in need of warmth. After a time, unable to contain herself any longer, she said, “You cared about him, didn’t you, Theo?”

“Yes.”

“He was kind to you?”

“Very.”

“But you testified against him in court?”

I nodded.

After a pause she said in a low voice, “Won’t you tell me what happened?”

I was tired and it was bloody late for a bedtime story, but she was going to draw it out of me before she went, that was certain. In humanity I felt bound to supply her with some sort of account. So it had to be now. I’m not much of a raconteur over breakfast.

*FIVE*

I’
ll tell you everything I told Alice. For brevity’s sake I’ve decided to drop her surname now. I’m not sure when it was that I fell into the habit of using what she called her “given name.” On that Saturday night, when my firm intention was to show her the door in the morning, I didn’t call her anything. With hindsight I’m able to be more civil. You may think it unimportant how I addressed her, but there’s a reason why I’m being scrupulously honest with you and anyone else who reads these words. You’ll understand later.

This won’t be a verbatim account of what was said, with all of Alice’s interruptions and questions, because that would make it more difficult for you to follow the thread, but take it from me, you’ll miss nothing you need to know.

I began by telling her about my evacuation in September 1943, the direct result of a German daylight air raid. A bomb, categorized in those days as high-explosive, hit the boiler house of our suburban school in Middlesex while we were singing, “Ten Green Bottles” in the underground shelter, and Mr. Lillicrap, our harassed headmaster in his tin hat, was waiting white-faced for the all-clear. That same afternoon he was on the phone to his sister in the country. We were all given letters to take home. One notorious rebel, Jimmy Higgins, opened his and dropped it down a drain, but I dutifully handed mine to my mother. It proposed that the entire school be evacuated to Somerset the following Monday.

I think about half the children, eighty or so of us, finally assembled at Paddington Station, labeled and carrying gas masks, favorite toys, packets of sandwiches, and, in a few deluded cases, buckets and spades. In retrospect, I could have used one of those buckets. I remember waiting a desperately long time with straining bladder to file into a train with no corridor, for a journey of uncertain duration, and, somewhere west of Reading, furtively watching my flannel trousers turn a darker shade of gray. A couple of hours later, by which time I was surely not the only child with a secret (possibly even in the majority), we arrived at Bath Spa, only to be ushered onto a smaller train. Finally, long after we’d pulled down the blinds for the blackout, we were told to get out at a small country station in Somerset.

I looked at the station boards—I was old enough to read and proud of it—and informed my co-evacuees of our destination: Frome. I made it rhyme with
home,
which was comforting, and mistaken. Frome rhymes with
doom.

We were marched in Indian file to a church hall where cheese sandwiches and orange squash were set out on trestle tables for us to help ourselves, while the public-spirited townsfolk who had volunteered to have an evacuee took stock of us. No wonder the bidding was slow. Even I noticed that we looked and smelled the worse for our journey. Some of the volunteers, I suspect, slipped away into the night, because at the end of the exercise the billeting officer was left with five of us (all boys) still without accommodation. Camp beds were found for us by the WVS, and we slept in a semicircular formation with our feet towards the coke stove.

In the morning we were driven to surrounding villages to be billeted with people who had no warning that we were coming. We watched dubiously from the billeting officer’s farm truck as each door was opened and the earnest talking got under way. One or two must have put up a good case, because we moved on without leaving anyone behind. I was getting hungry.

We’d exhausted every possibility in Frome by late morning. There were two of us still without billets: a fat boy known as Belcher Hughes, whose glasses were held together with Elastoplast, and me. A telephone call was made at a post office and we were told that we would be the guests of Shepton Mallet. From the way it was put to us I got the impression that Belcher and I had struck lucky. Mr. Mallet, I confidently decided, must live in one of the large stone mansions we’d seen along the route.

We were handed over at a crossroads, where another billeting officer met us. My hopes of high living were dashed when I saw the names on the signpost. Belcher was allocated to an old lady in a terraced cottage, and I was taken several miles on, to Gifford Farm, in the hamlet of Christian Gifford, between Shepton Mallet and Glastonbury.

There I lost contact with the people I knew, apart from a couple of visits from Mr. Lillicrap. He seemed well satisfied with the instruction I was getting with the local children in the schoolhouse up the lane.

In justice to the Lockwood family, they hadn’t volunteered to be billeters. They had to be reminded of the government’s evacuation order. It was well known locally that they had a spare bedroom because their son, Bernard, had moved out, so they were obliged to take me.

My first contact was with Mrs. Lockwood, and my first impression was that she was a worried woman. She did a lot of head shaking and muttering in a dialect I couldn’t understand. Thinking back, I suppose she was perturbed at the likely reaction of her husband to having me foisted on them. Much to her credit, so far as I was concerned, she started by taking me into the farmhouse kitchen and feeding me. I was given two slices of bread generously spread with dripping and gravy. The bread was fresher and less gritty than the national loaf we had at home.

Mrs. Lockwood would do me no active harm, I decided as I watched her across the wooden table nipping the stalks and stones out of victoria plums for a pie. Stout, with glossy black hair fastened with grips, and a broad face almost as dark as the plum skins, she was obviously older than my own mother, but she looked to be in better health. There were no dark crescents under her eyes from lack of sleep.

The inconvenient thing about Mrs. Lockwood was her voice, which was so soft that I had to ask her to repeat almost everything. Even then she didn’t raise it a semitone. And as I had to repeat every utterance silently to myself to unravel the complexities of the dialect, communication was slow. It took the rest of the morning to establish who else was in the family and what they did.

Mr. Lockwood, I learned, had recently bought a smaller, adjoining farm called Lower Gifford for his twenty-one-year-old son, Bernard, who had moved out to the farmhouse a mile down the lane. The plan was for Bernard ultimately to manage both farms, when the work got too much for his father. The parents would see out their lives in the main farmhouse, looked after by their daughter, Barbara.

I’d already spotted one or two items of female apparel drying over the range that even to my inexpert eye would have looked skimpy, not to say silly, on Mrs. Lockwood. Barbara, I gleaned by degrees, was nineteen and worked on the farm.

She came in for lunch and captivated me without even noticing that I was there. This is pure Mills & Boon, but true. It was the impression she made on a nine-year-old who had shed silent tears in his camp bed the night before. Dark like her mother, though with softer skin and more delicate features, Barbara stood in the doorway and untied the green scarf around her head. A mass of fine, dark hair tumbled onto her shoulders. She shook it lose, talking all the while about something that had happened on one of the farms nearby. I was thrilled to discover that I could understand most of what she said.

Then she noticed me and immediately took me over. A few swift questions to her mother elicited the essential facts about me, and she picked up my suitcase and gas mask and showed me upstairs to the room Bernard had recently vacated. At the window, she stood with a hand on my shoulder pointing out chickens and geese and her favorite chestnut mare in the yard. After a bit we sat on the bed and I told her about my father being killed at Dunkirk and my mother doing war work and my Auntie Kit having us to lunch on Sundays. It emerged that Barbara had never been to London, so I talked urbanely about Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace. No one had ever listened to me with such attention before.

That night I didn’t shed a single tear. I remember lying awake for a time, staring at the ceiling in my new bedroom, wondering about Farmer Lockwood and what he would say about having an evacuee. He was harvesting, and that apparently meant that he would not be in till after my bedtime. At one stage I heard a man’s voice talking seriously at some length, but it was the nine-o’clock news on the wireless. I fell asleep soon after.