Without Reservations (18 page)

But first, before meeting Shelby and Pat and a group of their friends for dinner that night, I was on my way to read some love letters. The letters were on display at, of all places, the Imperial War Museum.

At first I’d thought it odd, a war museum mounting what the guidebook described as “an exhibition about the special nature of romance in wartime, featuring true stories of happiness and heartbreak, illustrated by love letters, keepsakes, poems and
telegrams.” But the more I thought about it the more it made sense. What, after all, heightens the intensity of love more than separation? Particularly when that separation involves danger and uncertainty. And what more intimate way to transcend the terrible, aching apartness than through the writing down of words that carry in each pen stroke the physical presence of the absent one?

At the St. James’s Park tube stop, a well-dressed young man took the seat next to me. After a minute or two he pulled from his briefcase a thin sheet of airmail stationery and began to write in small, precise, straight-up-and-down strokes. As I watched the words take shape, I thought of my father’s handwriting and remembered how as a child, after he died, I would trace the handwriting from his letters over and over again onto onionskin paper, trying to make it my own.
Dear Children
, I would trace carefully with a finely sharpened pencil,
I have just arrived in Brazil, which is a beautiful country.…

Of course what I desperately wanted to trace were not his letters to Shelby and me but the ones he wrote to Mother. She would not allow it. “They are private,” she would say in a firm voice, one that suggested whining or pleading wasn’t going to change her mind. Sometimes, however, I would write down from memory the words I had seen in those letters:
My darling Nancy … My dearest wife … How I miss you.

Now, as the darkness rushed by outside the train’s window, I allowed myself to think of another letter, one I’d received earlier in the week and was trying
not
to think about. But the mind has a will of its own, and I managed to get around the self-imposed prohibition by thinking of Naohiro’s letter as though I were watching a play:

In Italy, I thought, trying not to feel sad. But walking the few blocks from the Underground station to the War Museum, I let myself feel the sting of missing Naohiro. Then suddenly the geography of hope kicked in:
it’s only an hour-and-a-half by plane from Paris to Venice
, I realized, feeling as elated as Penelope must have at the prospect of seeing Ulysses upon his return from Troy.

As I turned onto Lambeth Street and the Imperial War Museum came into view, I thought of the building’s origins. A large, architecturally elegant structure set in the middle of a park, the museum had once been a hospital for the insane. It was the last site of the notorious Bethlem Hospital for the Insane. Or Bedlam, as it came to be known. From insane asylum to museum. The building’s current name struck me as the perfect metaphor for the insanity of our time: war.

On my first visit to the Imperial War Museum I had been surprised to see that, despite its dated name, the museum’s approach to keeping alive the horror and sacrifice of the two world wars was quite modern. On the lower level of the building one could participate in a striking re-creation of what it was like to live through the London Blitz, from the warning sirens to walking through the
smoky rubble after a raid. There was also a re-creation of what trench warfare was like in World War I. After seeing it I began to understand, for the first time, the horror of life in the trenches. I seldom visited London without stopping by the War Museum to pay my respects and look around.

When I reached the entrance, a museum guard pointed out the location of the exhibit I’d come to see: “Forces Sweethearts.” To get there I passed through the glass-domed hall, where Spitfires from the Battle of Britain and a Sopwith Camel from World War I hung from the ceiling like mobiles over a child’s crib. Then, after passing a huge German V-2 rocket of the kind used to pound London in 1944 and a frighteningly small one-man German submarine, I turned into an enclosed space at the back of the center hall.

Inside this softly lit room there were no weapons or terrible recreations of trench warfare. Instead a woman’s voice sang “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when …” It was the voice of Vera Lynn, the “sweetheart” of British and Allied forces during World War II. Her plaintive words drifted over the 1940s-style vanity dressing tables set with silver hairbrushes and small blue-and-silver perfume bottles of Evening in Paris. They drifted over the pictures in heart-shaped frames of young men in uniform, of wedding dresses made from parachute silk, of pin-up photos of Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable. It was like stepping onto a movie set, one built for a romantic war film starring Teresa Wright as the girl at home waiting for her GI to return.

But it was in the love letters and pictures of the laughing young men who wrote them that I found the script for this movie:
Dearest, how I miss you … My darling girl, it seems so long since we held each other … Darling, do you remember the night …

I stopped before a photo of a dark-eyed young sailor with a wide grin. A British submariner, he had asked his sister to send the
letter to his girlfriend, Betty, if he “should not return.” His submarine was lost in May 1941. The letter began:

I looked again at the photo of the young sailor, imagined him hunched in his bunk under a tiny light, scratching out shaky words of love as the small submarine moved silently beneath the great weight of the ocean. How brave to face one’s own death, I thought. And how kind to write such comforting words to the one you love.

Then I imagined Betty, her face ashen beneath the rolled pompadour of her long hair, sitting at the dining-room table reading and rereading the shattering words meant to comfort her. I can see her rise and, after bracing herself against the back of a chair, walk to a desk, where she places the letter in a quilted satin box, next to other letters tied with blue ribbon.

And now, after all these years, here was the letter, in the Imperial War Museum—
Betty—my darling—I think you wouldn’t mind me calling you that for the last time …
Leaning forward, I touched one of the blue-and-silver perfume bottles on the table, wondering if any of the sweet, heavy fragrance remained inside. As I straightened up and took a step back, my large tourist’s handbag sideswiped a woman standing just behind me.

Before I could apologize, the woman spoke to me. “My husband courted me with a bottle of that perfume,” she said, calling to
her side a man standing nearby. “Harry, do come and have a look at this, won’t you?”

“Right-o,” the man said, putting down a brochure he was reading. As he drew near, she pointed to the Evening in Paris perfume bottle. The man—I judged him to be in his mid-seventies—glanced at his wife and smiled. He was tall, tall enough to have acquired a permanent forward tilt of the head that brought to mind a gooseneck lamp. That’s what years of making eye contact with shorter people does to you, I thought.

“It brings back memories, doesn’t it?” the woman said to the man. Then she turned to me. “Are you a Yank, then?” She laughed when she said it, a pleasant laugh that made me think she had reasons to like “Yanks.”

“Yes, but how did you know?” I asked, a little confused, since I’d not yet spoken.

“We were at the entry when you came in and heard you asking about the exhibition.” Actually I’d noticed them, too: the tall man wearing a V-neck sweater, shirt, and tie under a tweed jacket, and the short, ruddy-faced woman dressed in a bright red jacket, white shirtwaist, and dark pleated skirt. “It’s quite touching, isn’t it?” she said. “All these heartbreaking letters. But in those days we all lost someone in the war.”

I wondered whom she had lost. Obviously not Harry. A brother, perhaps. An uncle. Maybe even her father. World War II, after all, was not a war fought exclusively by the young.

The three of us moved through the rest of the exhibition at the same pace; not exactly together but close enough to remark occasionally on this letter or that diary.

“I remember starting a diary when the buzz bombs began coming over Kent in 1944,” the woman said. “I remember we’d go down into the bomb shelter and a lot of the girls would knit or darn socks.
But not me. I’d be writing words from the songs my husband and I used to dance to.” She put up her arms and pretended to dance, her purse jiggling from her hand. Seeing this, Harry smiled.

After staying another half-hour or so we left the exhibition and walked together through the main hall. Suddenly Harry stopped in the middle of the room and pointed to a small plane hanging from the ceiling. It was a very basic-looking plane, except for the torpedo-shaped appendage above its tail. “That’s a buzz bomb,” he said. “But everybody called them ‘doodlebugs.’ ”

I was surprised; the buzz bomb looked completely different from the way I’d imagined it. “I’ve always pictured it as looking like a rocket,” I told Harry. “Like that one,” I said, pointing to the huge V-2 rocket rising ominously out of the floor like an evil stalagmite.

Harry, who hadn’t talked much before, warmed to the subject, explaining the differences between the two rockets in power and speed. But it was the distinct sound of an approaching doodlebug that had left the most indelible impression on him. “It was not like anything I’d ever heard. First off, we’d hear this sputtering engine noise
—putt, putt, putt
—like a plane in trouble. Then the noise just stopped and there was this frightful silence for a few seconds. Then, an explosion.”

“Yes,” said the woman, “its a noise one never forgets.” She told me about hearing it one night and knowing there wasn’t time to get to the bomb shelter. “So we snatched up the baby and ran out into the fields.” Later she was told it had exploded in an open space, not too far from where they crouched.

I wanted to hear more and invited them to join me for a cup of tea in the museum’s café.

“What do you think, Harry? Shall we nip in for some tea?”

“Right-o. I could do with a cup of tea,” he replied. “And a bit of cake, as well.”

For the next hour or so the three of us sat at a corner table and talked. Or, rather, they talked and I listened. Listening, I had learned in my job as a reporter, was just as much of a skill as asking the right questions. And I sensed that Harry and Helen had stories, like many who visited this museum, that they needed to tell.

Harry, who had worked near Dover as an engine fitter for the RAF, recalled watching Spitfires chasing the doodlebugs, trying to shoot them down before they reached London. “One clear night when it was fairly quiet I went out to get some air. Just a bit after that, I saw our lads coming in after one of the ‘D’s,’ firing at it.” It seemed to be headed in his direction, he said, but he couldn’t move. “Frozen to the spot, I was. Kept thinking I should run. But which way?” After a few suspenseful moments, the doodlebug passed over him, crashing and exploding just past some large trees. The next day, Harry said, he went to church for the first time in years.

Helen nodded as Harry talked, the way people do when they know exactly what the other person means. Then she said, “You know my husband flew alongside the Yanks on some of their bombing runs. In an RAF plane, as an escort. I’ve never forgotten something he wrote in one of his last letters, about watching your chaps take off in their Flying Fortresses. Dozens of them. Said it was like watching a great migration of cranes flying across the sky.”