Gunner Girls and Fighter Boys (56 page)

Colin shook his head. ‘I was lucky, but, May—’

‘No, no, no.’ She put her hands over her ears and shut her eyes, trying to hide from the impossible truth.

‘Listen to him, May.’ Doug grasped her hands, pulling them down from her ears, as Colin continued.

‘Me and Bill, we just had time to grab our packs and run off into the jungle. Half a dozen of us ground crew escaped, but somehow we got separated. I’m not sure, May, but I think Bill might have got hit. He was lagging behind and when I looked back one time, he seemed to be limping, but that was the last I saw of Bill. By the time we’d stopped running, he wasn’t with us.’

Now the young man gave her an anguished look. ‘I’m so sorry we couldn’t go back for him, May. It’s our training. If you’re separated you have to just keep going, hope you’ll meet up at the rendezvous point. But he wasn’t there either and we walked all the way back to India, took us days. We got back, half-starved, in a terrible state really.’ He paused, looking down at his tightly clasped hands. ‘I’m sorry not to have better news for you, May.’

She stared at Colin for a brief moment and had to shake herself back into the present. She had been in the jungle with Bill, living his terror, urging him to run, run faster, her heart thudding as though she’d been running for her own life.

‘No, don’t be sorry, Colin. I can’t tell you how much of a relief it is.’

Doug looked puzzled, but May couldn’t explain that though it wasn’t the best news, it was good enough. If Colin had seen Bill killed she would have cause enough to mourn, but the last time anyone had seen him Bill was alive, and that was one more reason to hope.

‘He could have been taken prisoner,’ was the best she could do.

‘May, if that happened, then I’m sorry, but you should know it might have been better if he’d died in the jungle,’ Doug said.

Colin looked as if he disapproved of such bluntness, but May’s hackles rose. ‘Don’t you dare say that!’

She hated Doug at that moment, but he looked at her with weary eyes. ‘I just don’t want you to have false hope,’ he replied dully.

‘There is no false hope,’ she said.

*

As it was, the war ended before the monsoon did. May was in the communications centre with Sadie when she heard the news. The tin roof was exploding with the thundering downpour and the sergeant had to turn up the wireless and call for quiet. They gathered round the set, listening intently to the tinny voice which came through, announcing that the Americans had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan and that the Japanese had surrendered.

‘What’s an atomic bomb?’ Sadie asked.

And as the sergeant turned off the set, she replied, ‘Imagine a million heavy explosives, landmines, doodlebugs, V-2s, artillery shells, then times that by a million… get the idea?’

As the news sank in some people cheered and ran out into the compound, while Sadie and some of the other girls formed a Conga line, singing as they snaked out of the door. But May sat immobile as tears began to trickle down her cheeks. Others might take them for tears of happiness if they wanted to, but now that the long years of war were over, she found she could not rejoice at the destruction of someone’s world. All May could think of were the homes – all those Japanese homes, flattened, crushed, reduced to ashes, just like her own.

The war might be over, but of course she wasn’t going home. They were sending her to Singapore. Doug insisted that she come over to the airbase to say goodbye and she supposed she owed it to him. After all, he had helped give her that lifeline of hope, which had kept her going over the past weeks, but now she was leaving Chittagong, she felt it slipping through her fingers. Soon she would be adrift again, and she had to admit it had been a long way to come for such a slender promise.

She took one of the lethal three-wheeled taxis out to the base, where Doug met her at the gates. As they made their way to the servicemen’s club they passed rows of American bombers and British fighter planes. The camp was still full of airmen of all nationalities.

‘It looks busy as ever. Why won’t they just demob you?’

‘The British Empire still has a lot of tidying up to do in Malaya before any of us get out! The only way you get a fast ticket home is if you’re ex-POW or come down with malaria.’

After lunch Doug took her on a tour of the place and she saw the bamboo huts, with open sides, which she recognized from photos Bill had sent her. She saw the wooden bunks, swathed in mosquito nets.

‘Oh, I recognize those huts. Bill used to hate the mozzie nets, couldn’t sleep at all! Said as you turn over you get caught up in the bloody things and he’d rather get malaria!’ she said, with a half-smile of reminiscence.

Doug looked at her for a long moment. ‘You’re still in love with him, aren’t you, May?’

She blushed.

‘You don’t have to say anything, and I know I’ve got no chance. But, May, I want you to know there’s been no one for me, not since I made a mess of things back in Essex. If you could ever forgive me… well, I’d like another go at it.’

Now it was his turn to blush. His eager big-boned face was deadly serious, though, and she felt a pang of utter hopelessness. She would rather stay in love with Bill, in this world or the next, than launch out into the unknown with Doug. Perhaps it was a decision she’d regret. Perhaps that was how life was supposed to be – you let go the dream in order to grasp the reality. But she couldn’t do it.

‘I’m sorry, Doug,’ she said gently. ‘I do forgive you. It’s not because of what happened back then. I just can’t let him go…’

*

Singapore was like a transit camp for the whole world. It was as if someone had shaken up all the military personnel in South East Asia and thrown them down in a heap on the island, where they were being shuffled around until they could find their rightful place again. Everyone seemed to be waiting. British and Commonwealth troops were in makeshift barracks and billets, waiting with their demob numbers until a ship became available to take them home. Australians and New Zealanders were flying out, as were the GIs. The wounded in Red Cross centres and hospitals were convalescing until they were declared fit. But it was the POWs fit enough to travel who were ushered out first. One leave day, May and a group of signals girls went to the harbour to see the allied fleet of ships that had amassed there. They stood back letting a pathetic line of POWs, liberated from the island’s Changi Jail, troop past them. They were dressed in new uniforms, clean-shaven, trying to hold themselves erect and proud, but there was no disguising the gaunt skeletal frames beneath the khaki. They all looked so old to May and yet she knew that many of the wizened faces belonged to young men the same age as Bill. She searched every face for his and when the girls wanted to move on to a nearby café frequented by GIs, she made an excuse that she wasn’t feeling well. When they were gone, she stood in the same spot, till the whole column of POWs had passed and she was absolutely certain that Bill was not amongst them.

Afterwards, her dreams were full of home. It was always summer in the Southwark Park Road house, as she dreamed of those hot childhood days when her mother would fill the grey tin bath with cold water and let them splash around in the backyard. She dreamed of the chicken run that her father had made and how she’d cried when she realized the connection between her feathered friends and Sunday dinner. Over and over, she dreamed of the kitchen, with the Ascot and boiler, the deal table, scrubbed white. But sometimes the dreams would take her where she didn’t want to go. The table would be holding back a ton of rubble from crushing her sister; sometimes she would find herself trying to move a pile of crushed stone and slate with her mother’s old soup ladle. She would wake in a cold sweat and find herself longing for the old familiar comfort of that place, which no longer existed. And then she would get up and look into a sky filled with foreign constellations, and wonder if there was anywhere on earth she could still call home.

*

She should have known the army’s ways by now. Only two months after her posting to Singapore she was given her demob number and had joined the displaced souls all over the island in the long wait for a ship. Her sergeant pulled all sorts of strings to get the signals girls on the same troopship home, but some POWs had to be squeezed on board at the last moment and May had to wait for another berth. So it was she found herself, and a few other ATS stragglers, squeezed aboard a hospital ship taking home a large number of refugees and wounded. Rather than spend the entire voyage kicking her heels, she decided to volunteer to help out the Red Cross nurses. She made beds, emptied bedpans, and even learned how to change bandages after a little training.

She’d received a stack of letters just before embarking and tried to adjust to the idea of a world that was fast moving on from war in Europe. Peggy had decided to keep the nursery going and her mother had come back to Bermondsey to live in Fort Road with her. Pat had returned to Angelcote with Mark and they were now living with the major.

May was pleased for them all; they were already inhabiting a future she was frightened to imagine, because for her, it would be a future without Bill. In Singapore she’d experienced a curious sort of loneliness. The place was full of people, yet sometimes she felt locked in a solitary prison of invisible, impenetrable walls. Sometimes she would go dancing with the girls, dance with young men, just for the illusion of not being alone, but always she’d come back to that prison. Like a street mime artist she’d once seen on Tower Hill, she put out her hand and touched those invisible walls and wondered how they could be so strong.

The ship made a stop at Ceylon, taking on fuel and a contingent of ex-prisoners from Singapore’s Changi Jail. One of the Red Cross nurses explained to May that these were the prisoners who’d been too weak to make the journey home when they’d been released and had been sent first to a convalescent hospital in Ceylon. Two months of very careful feeding and supervised exercise had put on the required weight and muscle strength necessary to continue their journey.

‘Mind you, they’ll still be all skin and bone,’ the nurse said to May. ‘Some of them were only four stone when they got here! You can make yourself useful later on with the meals. They can’t have the same as everyone else, they’ve got baby-sized stomachs and a roast dinner will kill them! So we’ll go to the galleys and sort out their food, and then we’ll have to serve them. Are you OK to help out with that?’

May nodded. ‘Of course – you know I don’t mind what I do.’

And the nurse patted her hand. ‘You’re a good girl, and you’re right to keep busy. I lost someone myself – it’s why I joined the Red Cross. You feel like you’re helping the one you loved… don’t you?’

May shouldn’t have been surprised. She was a soldier in a different sort of army now, the legions of those who had lost someone. It doesn’t take a genius to spot us, May thought ruefully, though the little sweetheart badge with the angel wings and photo of Bill that she still wore close to her heart might have given her nursing friend a clue.

After they had toiled in a corner of the stifling galley, they served tiny meals to the newly arrived men, who, whatever their depleted physical state, had carried aboard with them a universal brimming humour which seemed to proclaim how sweet life was when there were three certain, if small, meals a day and a lifetime of tomorrows ahead. May had never, not in any pub or dance hall, been in such jolly company as these poor emaciated men, with their malaria and fevers and all their painful memories. It made her feel ashamed of her own self-pity. So when the mess deck was cleared and someone suggested an impromptu concert, she was happy to join in. With two of the weaker men supported on either arm, they walked slowly along the corridor to the rec room. A little band had already been formed in the convalescent hospital in Ceylon and now the musicians found their places. While May was settling her two charges into some chairs near the door, the band struck up.

Why did they have to be playing that song? It was normal, she told herself, there would be all sorts of reminders of the life that might have been hers. But this was the one guaranteed to shake her foundations. The band’s crooner reached the verse ‘
I’m looking for an angel, to sing my love song to, and until the day that one comes along, I’ll sing my song to you.
’

And all May’s hope seemed to melt away. She turned round and walked out of the room with tears stinging her eyes.

Next morning she dragged herself out of her hammock after a sleepless night. Her hand felt the damp canvas and she felt ashamed of the tears that had soaked it. She only had to walk up on to the decks to see hundreds worse off than her. These men had been robbed not only of years and youth, but dignity and humanity too. But they were alive, and she knew it was only hope that had kept these ones from dying, like so many of their fellow prisoners.

She told herself to buck up and after a morning spent answering letters, she went to see what the nursing sister had for her to do that afternoon.

‘The weaker cases are taking the air up on deck. Could you go up and help give them a spin in their wheelchairs?’

The nurse gave her instructions where to find the invalids, and after walking the length of the ship she found them near the prow. A small area had been set aside for the convalescents, with an awning to shade them from the heat of the day. Some were lying in daybeds; others were in wheelchairs. As she came to the first daybed, the man raised a bony hand and gave her a toothless grin. May smiled at him. She couldn’t imagine how thin he’d been when he arrived, if this was what he looked like after two months’ feeding up.

‘I’m looking for the men in wheelchairs,’ she told him.

‘Are you indeed, lucky beggars!’ he said, and pointed with his thumb further along the deck.

The unruffled sea shone like a brass plate under a full sun. Almost blinded, she had to squint against its brightness, feeling her way along the handrail. Some Red Cross nurses had already set off with their charges on a perambulation of the top deck. A small welcome breeze lifted her hair and suddenly she felt the fine hairs along her arms rising. She stopped in front of a young man, who sat in his wheelchair, eyes closed, head tilted back to catch the sun. A stillness came over her, just as she’d felt on the predictor, before setting the fuse, or when she’d lain alone in the fairy ring, imagining herself outside of space and time.