The Way Ahead (4 page)

Jonathan reckoned the most significant turning-point had come when the Eighth Army finally and decisively defeated General Rommel and his Afrika Korps at the end of 1942. Prime Minister Churchill had said that that victory was only the end of the beginning, but couldn’t hide his satisfaction and optimism.

And that had been eighteen months ago. The country had made more progress since then, and it was bound to be ready now with the Americans to open up the Second Front. That, thought Jonathan, might be the final step towards the end of this durned old war.

‘SAY THAT AGAIN,’
said Mrs Rosie Chapman to her husband that same afternoon.

‘Saying it six times over, Rosie, won’t put a difference on it,’ said Captain Matthew Chapman, officer in charge of a specialized workshop at Bovington. He had just arrived home at his cottage in Dorset. ‘This is my first day of embarkation leave, after which, along with a team of our best mechanics, I’m going on a boat trip to China.’

‘China?’ said Rosie. ‘China?’

‘Just a code name for the real destination,’ said Matt, ‘and I daresay it won’t sabotage the war effort to tell you I think it’ll be Italy. Damned old shame, Rosie, but when Dorset husbands a ship do find, Dorset wives get left behind.’

‘That old piece of Dorset doggerel needs a burial service,’ said Rosie. ‘Are you telling me you’re being sent overseas despite your crippled ankle?’

‘Well, that’s it, Rosie, seems I’ll have to take it with me,’ said Matt. He’d broken an ankle when a boy, and a faulty repair job had resulted in lameness. But it had never been a serious impediment as
far
as he was concerned, and eventually the Army agreed with him, enlisting him as a first class auto engineer with the rank of second lieutenant. He’d been twice promoted since then, much to Rosie’s pleasure. Her faith in his expertise had always been total.

‘I’m not in favour of your going,’ she said, making a face. ‘You do know, don’t you, that you’re a husband and father, that you’ve a wife and two children?’ The children were Giles, born in May 1942, and Emily, born in August last year. Emily had been named after Rosie’s late adoptive mother, a gesture that touched everyone in the Adams and Somers families. Rosie, almost twenty-nine now, was the bright star of Matt’s little world in the heart of Dorset, her hair the colour of golden corn, and her clear expressive eyes as magnetically blue as her Aunt Susie’s. She had an extraordinarily warm and engaging personality, and a deep well of love and affection for all who were dear to her. Her natural father, Sir Charles Armitage, had been killed in action at Tobruk, and that had saddened her, although it was her adoptive father, known as Boots, who had always meant more to her. ‘Matt,’ she said firmly, ‘a man with a wife, two children, and a gammy leg can’t go off on any boat trip to China or wherever. I object. Giles and Emily object. We’ll write protest letters about it. Giles and Emily might only come up with inky blobs, but they’ll be blobs with a clear message of complaint.’

‘Where are our blobs?’ asked Matt, his uniform giving his sinewy frame the kind of man appeal Rosie thought sexy.

‘Emily’s asleep in her pram, and Giles is in the garden with Felicity,’ said Rosie. Felicity, her blind sister-in-law, had accepted an invitation to come and stay with her for a couple of months. The immediate development of a warm friendship turned the temporary stay into one that looked like lasting until the end of the war, when Felicity and her husband Tim, a Commando, would find a home of their own. Felicity fought the disability of blindness with resolution and courage, and at the moment was so taken with little Giles that she’d been wondering if she could cope with a child of her own. You could cope as well as the best of us, said Rosie, so have a private word with Tim on his next leave. Hell, said Felicity, a private word with your brother about something like that might land me with a lot more than I bargained for. Tim’s a Commando of vim, vigour and virility, she said, and all that could add up to triplets, absolute disaster for a woman who can’t see for looking. Oh, chance it, said Rosie, give it a go. ‘Matt,’ she said now, ‘I’m going to hate not having you home once a week, but as there’s nothing we can do about it, I’ll put my long face in the broom cupboard and keep it there. Come and see Emily, and you’ll know what an angel in a pram looks like. Then come and talk to Giles and Felicity.’

‘I’m damn glad to know you’ll still have Felicity here while I’m away,’ said Matt, whose gifted affinity with engines was responsible for his posting to Italy to set up a new repair workshop for tanks. ‘She’s a walking advertisement for guts and courage.’

‘Yes, darling, I know,’ said Rosie, ‘I know it a
hundred
times over, and so does Tim. He’ll be here later this afternoon, he’s managed to get three days leave before disappearing again on some crucifying Commando exercise.’

‘He told you that in so many words?’ said Matt.

‘In so many words,’ said Rosie, and as she and Matt bent over the pram to gaze at the soft relaxed face of the sleeping child, Matt thought that a crucifying exercise pointed to the Commandos making ready for either a special assignment in war-torn Italy or something else. What? An invasion of France? Could the long-delayed opening of the Second Front be in the air at last?

‘Where are we?’ asked Felicity later that day. She and her husband Tim, Boots’s son, were out in the dogcart belonging to Rosie and Matt, the nag a placid ambler only inclined to break into a trot if the driver was cussed enough to insist.

‘Where are we?’ echoed Tim, Commando officer with a number of barbaric raids to his credit (or discredit from the point of view of those on the receiving end). ‘Well, Pussy Willow—’

‘Objection,’ said Felicity.

‘Well, Puss,’ said Tim, ‘we’re still on a road, but I’ve no idea where it’s taking us. There aren’t any signposts, and I’m only an occasional visitor to Dorset.’

‘What a case,’ said Felicity. ‘I’m married to a chump who doesn’t know where we are.’ Dark glasses, as ever, covered her scarred eyes, but her complexion was healthy, her body vibrant, her spirits buoyant. As Tim’s wife, she always thought of
him
as the man who had dived into her slough of despond, pulled her out and convinced her that her blinded eyes didn’t mean a life of no hope and no fun. ‘Listen, useless, you at least know the way back to the cottage, don’t you?’

‘Believe, Mrs Adams, I’ll make as good a guess as I can,’ said Tim.

‘I’ve heard that good guesses can be bad news for a girl,’ said Felicity. ‘On a par with running out of petrol on a lonely road.’

‘Don’t worry, Dobbin will get us back,’ said Tim, enjoying the slow wandering around lanes where hedgerows were bursting with growth. ‘As soon as I turn him round, he’ll make straight for home.’

‘He’s called Humpy, not Dobbin,’ said Felicity. ‘By the way, I want to ask you something, but first tell me what you think of Giles and Emily.’

‘Love ’em both,’ said Tim, ‘and not just because they’re Rosie’s.’

‘I’m besotted with Giles,’ said Felicity, ‘and I daresay I will be with Emily too when she’s older.’ On a slightly flippant note, she added, ‘Even if I’ve never seen either of them.’

‘Point taken,’ said Tim, and lightly patted her knee. ‘Rosie says you’re a marvel with Giles.’

‘Oh, we toddle up to the chickens together, and feed them together,’ said Felicity. ‘Giles looks, I listen, he sees them pecking and I hear them clucking.’

‘That’s fair,’ said Tim, and glanced at her. In profile, her good looks were clearly defined, her expression containing nothing of self-pity. He wondered if any other person could have fought
blindness
as well as she had. Her jolly, breezy self had taken a terrible hiding, but had refused to be broken. ‘What’s on your mind, Puss, what was it you wanted to ask me?’

‘Oh, I’d just like to know if you think I could cope with children of our own,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘Come again?’ said Tim, sitting up.

‘I’d like to hear you say I could and then do something about it,’ she said, placing her hand on his left thigh and applying a caress.

‘Message received and understood,’ said Tim. ‘Let me think.’ He reflected. As a lively young ATS subaltern, Felicity had seemed just one step up from a jolly-hockey-sticks type, the kind who ended up as a games mistress at a girls’ school. Bugger that, he’d thought at the time, am I going to let her spend her life running about with a whistle on a playing field? Not if I can help it, and not while I’m sure she can do me the world of good as my legal bedmate. Well, that had come to pass, but children when she was as blind as a bat? ‘Felicity, you’re serious, you want children, and you want them now?’ he said.

‘Allowing for the fact I can’t have them tomorrow,’ said Felicity, ‘yes, I’d like us to start a family, and to begin now, while you’re here on leave.’

‘I did think that if we decided to have children, we’d wait until after the war,’ he said cautiously. They had always practised birth control.

‘I know, but must we wait?’ asked Felicity. ‘Need we, if you think I could cope? I’d have Rosie’s help.’

‘If you’re sure of your feelings, I’d bet on you
being
able to manage,’ said Tim. ‘As long as you did have Rosie’s help.’

‘I will have,’ said Felicity. ‘And you know now Matt’s going overseas, Rosie would like me to stay on indefinitely.’

‘You and Rosie, well, there’s a gilt-edged partnership,’ said Tim. ‘As for doing something to help, well, God bless you, Puss, it’s—’

‘I’m not relying on God,’ said Felicity, ‘I’m relying on you. I’m entitled to, I’m married to you.’

‘Happy is the day,’ said Tim. ‘Let’s see, begin now, that was the idea, I think. Well, it’s a warm afternoon, and that’s in our favour. What else is?’ He surveyed shelving green slopes, farmlands and a farmhouse away to their left. Not far from it was an open barn full of light and shade, and hay. ‘This is a lovely spot, and that over there is promising.’

‘Could you enlarge on this and that?’ asked Felicity.

‘Yes, the spot’s quiet, we’re by ourselves, and there’s a barn not more than fifty yards from here,’ said Tim. ‘I could walk you over the field to it.’

‘You shocker,’ said Felicity, ‘you’re talking about a roll in the hay with the well-brought-up daughter of a Streatham gent recently promoted to bank manager. Little did I think, as a growing schoolgirl with romantic ideas about chivalry and men of honour, that I’d end up marrying a first-class bounder.’ She expelled a little laugh. ‘Oh, well, some girls are lucky. I’m one of them, I like my own particular bounder.’

Tim smiled and gave the reins a little tug. The ambling nag stopped, its nose dipped and it began
nibbling
at the grass verge of the lane. Its own attitude to hay was to eat the stuff while it was still grass.

‘The barn’s a washout?’ said Tim.

‘Well, I ask you, lover,’ said Felicity, ‘a barn when we’ve got a room and a bed all to ourselves at Rosie and Matt’s cottage? That makes some farmer’s hay a ticklish joke.’

‘So how about if we go for an early bedtime and a discussion under the bedclothes to make certain, before we get reckless, that you really are sure about this family planning idea?’ suggested Tim.

‘I’m already sure about one thing, even if I sound soft in the head,’ said Felicity, ‘and that’s that I’d like us to have our own versions of Giles and Emily.’

Tim put an arm around her.

‘We’ll go for it, Puss,’ he said, but he was painfully conscious of the fact that whatever children they had, she would never experience the joy of actually seeing them. Never. She must know she’d have to live with that, and he was certain she’d taken it into account. His pride in her and his admiration for her had never been more acute. He had to survive this uncivilized war and be around to help her in her inevitable moments of frustration and stress. He had only narrowly survived a Commando raid on Sicily last year, a raid designed to test the German coastal defences of the island before the Allies invaded it. Those defences proved vigilant and deadly. German machine-guns caught the vanguard of his group, which lost seven men killed and two taken prisoner in a matter of minutes. He himself and Colonel Lucas, his brother-in-law, both took leg wounds. They were
evacuated
only just in time. Having been wounded on other occasions during his time as a Commando, Tim had a feeling the Jerries were out to get him one way or another. Sod that, he thought, I need to stay alive for Felicity and the kids we’re going to have. There’s something special blowing the way of the Commando group, something that makes me think I’ve got to take extra care. I think we’re going to be geared up for a real blood-and-guts operation that’ll make all others seem like larky tea parties. He shook the reins. ‘Walk on, Dobbin,’ he said.

‘It’s Humpy,’ said Felicity.

‘Well, I love the nag and you too,’ said Tim.

‘Mutual all round, old soldier,’ said Felicity. ‘So let’s look forward to the patter of tiny feet.’

That, of course, was Felicity thinking of sounds. Sounds were her substitute for images. Tim reached and took hold of her hand. Her fingers curled and squeezed, and he interpreted the gesture as one that meant his jolly-hockey-sticks bedmate really did want children.

He thought later about the two Commandos taken prisoner during the raid on Sicily. The Germans had reported to the Red Cross that they were shot while attempting to escape. Tim and Colonel Lucas, when learning of that, both expressed doubt and suspicion. Shot while attempting to escape was becoming too commonplace.

They would have known the truth if they had seen a copy of Hitler’s top-secret Commando Decree issued in October 1942.

‘
I order that from now on all opponents engaged in so-called Commando operations in Europe or Africa, even when it is outwardly a matter of soldiers in uniform or demolitions parties with or without weapons, are to be exterminated to the last man in battle or while in flight. Should any of these individuals, on being discovered, make as if to surrender, all quarter is to be denied on principle …
’

In other words, shoot all Commando prisoners.