Darkest Before Dawn (40 page)

Mr Wilmslow gave a howl of protest and Martha was sure his pale face actually whitened. He leaned across the table and grabbed both her hands, holding on so tightly that his fingers dug into her flesh. ‘No, you mustn't go, you mustn't leave me,' he said wildly. ‘It's all right, Martha – Mrs Todd, I mean – we'll leave things as they are, if that's your final word. I only thought things should be regularised . . . I mean, you've got my ration book . . .'

Martha laughed; she couldn't help herself. ‘It's all right, Mr Wilmslow. If I did leave, and I hope I shan't have to do so, then I'd give you back your ration book,' she assured him. ‘But I think that we should forget this entire episode, pretend it never happened, then we can go on comfortably as friends and colleagues. I assure you, no one will think the worse of either of us.'

For a few moments, Mr Wilmslow stared at her. His mouth worked but no words came out and Martha saw, with some distress, that his eyes were bright and shiny with what might possibly have been tears. To save him embarrassment, she went over to the stove and pulled the kettle over the flame. ‘I'll make us a nice cup of tea and then I think we'd best both go to bed,' she said, over her shoulder. ‘We've got a hard day's work ahead of us tomorrow and you never know when those perishin' Germans will decide to give us another bashing.' She filled the teapot, poured two cups of tea and added conny-onny, then handed Mr Wilmslow his cup. ‘All right, Mr Wilmslow?'

Her employer nodded. ‘Perhaps it's for the best, Mrs Todd. But it would have been nice to have a wife again, especially one who could do her share in the business,' he said wistfully, and began to drink his tea.

Chapter Twelve

June 1942

‘Letter for you, Toby.' Toby's friend Miles grabbed his arm and shoved the letter into the top pocket of his pal's shirt since both Toby's hands were engaged in carrying the rather frail bowl, made of banana leaves roughly sewn together, which contained his booty. Miles looked hopefully at the bowl. ‘What have you got there? Gosh, is it curry and rice? Going to give me some?'

‘I'll give you half for handing over my letter,' Toby said. Extra food was difficult to come by in Changi, but letters were even rarer. God knew what the Japs did with the POW mail – probably used it to light their fires – but his mother and Evie, who were his most regular correspondents, numbered their letters so that he might read them in order. Unfortunately, Letter 2 was often followed by Letter 22, proving that few of the missives from home ever reached their destination. POWs were supposed to be allowed to send and receive mail, amongst other things, but here in Changi men were only allowed to despatch standardised cards with preprinted comments which they could tick. Sometimes, however, the Japs did hand on letters which arrived for their prisoners and today was clearly one of those occasions.

The two of them crossed the compound and went into the hut. Once, Changi had been a British army barracks, but not with probably three thousand men confined in it. Now, it was just a collection of tumbledown buildings and a good deal of wire fencing, though this was regularly breached by the prisoners when they sallied forth in search of food.

Toby and Miles squatted on the ground near their sleeping mats and Toby produced the curry and rice. It had seemed well worth the price which Toby had paid – his trusty fountain pen – but now it looked rather small to be divided between two ravenously hungry men. Still, friends were precious and Toby knew that Miles would have shared every last grain of rice with him had their positions been reversed. He held the improvised bowl out. ‘Dig in,' he said brusquely, and watched as Miles transferred the first handful to his mouth. Then he followed suit, and they ate, turn and turn about, until the delicious curry was only a memory.

‘Did you have any trouble getting through the wire?' Miles asked presently, sitting back with a satisfied sigh. Because rations were so inadequate in the camp, their guards turned a blind eye to the practice the men had adopted of sneaking out into the surrounding countryside, when things got desperate, in order to barter their possessions for food. Of course, if you were caught coming back in, the guard who had seen you would insist on a half share, but the men had grown cautious and Toby had managed to get out and back without being spotted.

He said as much and Miles grimaced. ‘If only Singapore wasn't on an island, then we'd stand a chance of getting out of here and living on the country,' he observed. ‘But after what happened to those sailors . . .' He shuddered, remembering something which no man who had been forced to watch it could ever forget. ‘Well, you could call it a disincentive to any sort of bid for freedom,' he finished.

‘I know. The worst thing was, the bloody Japs enjoyed it. They laughed and joked whilst . . .' Toby pulled a face. ‘I try to forget it, but it's always there in the back of my mind.'

‘I'm the same,' Miles said. He peered at the envelope which Toby was just pulling from his pocket. ‘Who's it from?'

Toby glanced at the handwriting and felt a tiny flutter. It was from Evie. He still longed for a letter from Seraphina, but he had not heard from her for months, though he told himself, stoutly, that she would still be writing to him; it was simply that the letters never arrived. Evie's letters were always good value because she talked – or wrote, rather – of her family in the most natural and amusing way. She often included snippets about Seraphina, and had mentioned that her husband had been posted to North Africa. He had also got the feeling that Seraphina's marriage was not all it should be. Evie had hinted that her sister's relationship with Roger had been less than satisfactory, even before he was sent abroad. She had told him that the couple had not shared Seraphina's very first leave and this, more than anything else, had given him hope. Had he been in a similar position, he would have moved heaven and earth to spend that week with his golden girl, but it appeared that Roger had not made the attempt.

‘Well, I'll go and see what everyone else is up to,' Miles said, getting to his feet. ‘What did you barter for that curry and rice, anyway? You did pretty damn well. Last time I went over the wire, I took four six-inch nails and a khaki handkerchief, and all I got was . . .'

‘. . . some very suspicious-looking fish and sweet potatoes,' Toby finished for him, grinning. ‘It was very nutritious, I'm sure, though of course we do get some sweet potatoes from the gardens, when they're in season. I bartered my fountain pen this time. Since we can't write letters home, I thought we might as well eat it, so to speak.'

Miles grunted and wandered out, heading in the direction of the gardens which the POWs had started to cultivate. These were a great source of food when the vegetables ripened, but they had to be guarded night and day or the produce would have been stolen by the guards, who were fed no better than the prisoners themselves. Being more used to the diet, however, the Japs remained healthier than their charges, whose weakened state caused them to fall prey to any illness or infection around.

But right now, Toby felt comfortably full of curry and rice, so he sat back and ripped open his letter. Dear little Evie! He could see her monkey face as clearly as though she stood in front of him, see the sparkling dark eyes and the straight, lank hair which fell down past her shoulders. Incredibly, this was letter 31; poor kid, he could imagine her disappointment and rage had she known that almost all the letters she so lovingly penned never reached him.

It was not until he was on the third paragraph of the letter that something she said made him sit back and think.
Mam met me out of work yesterday
, she had said.
I'm sure I told you that the Rotunda disappeared in the May blitz last year but not all the picture houses were hit. We went to the Forum on Lime Street. I've not been there before but it's lovely. It's not terribly big but very rich, with beautiful paintings and comfortable plush seats. The film was George Formby in
Turned Out Nice Again,
with Peggy Bryan. It was very funny and a little bit rude – well, you know what George Formby's like – but Mam and I laughed at all the jokes and now we keep singing ‘Auntie Maggie's Remedy', only of course we can't remember all the words. Afterwards, we went to a nearby café for our supper. It was great. Mr Wilmslow would have liked to come as well – he dearly loves a laugh, though you wouldn't think it – but Mam said it was a girls only outing. It was as well because GF was working in an underwear factory in the film and some of the jokes were a bit near the knuckle. So we had our outing, just Mam and me, which was wizard.

Toby sat back on his heels. He had not seen Evie for two years; he still thought of her as the pale and rather dirty child who had greeted him on the station platform after Dunkirk, but now that he thought about it she must have turned fourteen, and be working, of course. Not realising that he had received almost none of her letters, she would assume that he had heard all about her leaving school and about her new job. Maddening not to be able to explain, but he had given up, long ago, any attempt to get in touch with anyone. The Japanese had been signatories to the Geneva Convention, or so he believed, but they took no more notice of it than they did of any normal rules of human behaviour. He let his eyes flicker down the rest of the closely written sheet but the only thing he picked up on was that her friend Percy intended to join the Royal Air Force just as soon as he was old enough.

I shan't miss him as much as I would have done once,
she observed,
since he's hardly ever at home and we don't go about together any more because he's got a girlfriend! Her name's Sandra and I told him she must be mad as a hatter to go out with a spiv like him, but he only laughed. Did I tell you he was a spiv? During working hours, he's mate on a delivery van, taking supplies from the docks to places as far away as Manchester and Bradford, but in the evenings he hangs about street corners, wearing a suit so sharp it's a miracle he don't cut himself and hissing out of the corner of his mouth: ‘Fancy a nice lean piece of beef for the weekend, missus? Or a pair o' nice silk stockings?' I reckon he nicks stuff off of the delivery van . . . well I know he does . . . but when I charged him with it, he said it were perks of the job and everyone does it. Then he had the cheek to offer me a tin of peach slices . . . oh, Toby, I know you're a POW, and I guess the food is pretty boring, though I know all about Red Cross parcels – we send you one whenever we can afford it, and I'm sure your mam does too – but we've been told what they contain and it's the sort of stuff we get with our ration books. But at the thought of peach slices – in syrup, Toby – I nearly fished out my wages and bought them then and there. It took all my courage and resolution to tell him where to put his peach slices. But I did it and I'm proud.

Toby put the letter down for a moment whilst he laughed and mopped his streaming eyes. Peach slices! They had all heard about the delights of Red Cross parcels, but not a single one had ever arrived in Changi, or, at any rate, had ever been given to any POW. He had heard that such parcels contained wonderful luxuries like dried milk and powdered egg, tinned sardines and corned beef, but he did not think anyone had ever mentioned peaches. Still smiling, he returned to Evie's letter. From her remark about the Rotunda, he guessed that there had been no serious raids since the May of the previous year, for if she was going to the cinema with her mother it sounded as though life had returned to normal, or at least as normal as it could be in wartime.

He was nearly at the end of the second page now and here was news, at last, of Seraphina. Toby felt his heartbeats quicken as he read her name.

Seraphina got a forty-eight last week and came home with a friend of hers who is also an R/T operator
.
She's married and her husband is in the air force, so she and Fee have a lot in common. I heard them talking one night when they thought I was asleep, only I couldn't drop off. Mam had a bad cold and was snoring like anything, so I sneaked out and went into the kitchen for a drink of water. They were in the living room with their bedrolls laid out on the floor – this flat is tiny compared with our old one – but it was a hot night and they weren't asleep, either. It's wrong to listen, but I
didn't,
Toby, honest to God, I didn't. I heard, which is quite different from listening. They were talking about divorce and the Betty girl said you could get one if you could prove non-consummation . . . well, something like that at any rate. It isn't a word I know but I guess it means unfaithfulness, wouldn't you say? Anyway, Seraphina said it wasn't the sort of thing one wanted to say out loud, let alone in court, and the other girl said better a bit of honesty than being trapped for life. So I reckon, when the war's over, either Seraphina or Betty will be giving her husband the go-by. What do you think? Mam says I shouldn't ask you questions because she's heard that Japanese POWs aren't allowed pencils or writing materials, which would account for neither your mam nor me getting any letters from you. I still look every day for the postman, hoping for a letter from you, but if you can't reply it doesn't matter. I shall still go on writing once or twice a week because I always did like you best and I guess I always will. I know you're Seraphina's pal really, but you were awful kind to me. Even if you only use my letters to light your fire, or worse, I guess you won't mind reading our news, so I'm going to keep on.