I'll Be Seeing You (10 page)

‘But you did trace your father, in the end?'

‘Oh yes. It took a long time, but I did it – no thanks to the American authorities. I knew his name, you see, and my mother suddenly remembered him saying he'd been born in the same town as John Wayne – Winterset, Iowa. It's a small town, so I got in touch with the postmaster there and then with the local school. In the end it was easy. I was lucky, though. Not quite so easy if he'd been born in somewhere like New York or Chicago. I've been helping others in the same situation ever since and nagging the American government to change things.'

‘Have you been getting anywhere?'

‘Slowly. They have something called the Freedom of Information Act which gives individuals the right of access to documents held by federal agencies – and you don't have to be a US citizen.'

‘What about their Privacy Act?'

‘It doesn't overrule the Freedom of Information one. A legal firm over there has offered to take on our case for free. They're going to take out a lawsuit to try and make the Government release information to war children of American servicemen, but, of course, it could mean years and the fathers aren't getting any younger. Still, I'm going to keep on making a nuisance of myself. By the way, most of the ordinary American people I've come across are happy to help if they can, so long as they think you're genuine.'

‘That's a comfort.'

‘And it was a good idea of yours to ask the Bomb Group Associations' help in their magazines. It only takes one person to recognize someone in the photo and you've got a start.'

‘I'm keeping my fingers crossed.'

‘You said you're going to try and find the pub that was near the airfield. Take your photo with you and keep showing it to anyone who would have been around at that time. That's how one of my war children found her father. Some old man recognized him from a photo and remembered his name. Luck's got a lot to do with it. And keep in touch with me. I may be able to help you later on, a bit further down the road.' She paused. ‘I hope you don't mind my asking this, Juliet, but how much do you want to find your father? How much does it mean to you?'

‘I don't think I'll be able to come to terms with the situation until I do.'

‘That's what most of us feel. I only ask because the reality can be a big let-down. I've helped one or two whose fathers have turned out to be a great disappointment or who wanted nothing whatever to do with them. And sometimes the wives and families kick up a big fuss. It can cause a lot of heartache if it goes wrong. My advice is, unless you're prepared to risk that sort of thing happening, don't go on. Sometimes dreams are best left as dreams.'

Adrian came round the evening before I left for Suffolk, bringing a bottle of extremely good wine. I cooked mushroom omelettes and concocted a passable salad and we ate at the table by the open window. London was stifling in the July heat and I was glad to be getting away from it. Adrian was leaving, too, but for a villa in the South of France.

‘Belonging to some dear old friends of mine, darling. No effort required, thank heavens. I'm not up to it any more.' He poured another glass of wine for me. ‘I must say I had hoped you might have given up your bloodhound activities by now, but here you are still doggedly sniffing out the trail. Does Flavia know anything about it?'

‘No. Nothing whatever. I've told her I'm going off to do some sketching and painting in Suffolk – which is perfectly true.'

‘Well, it'll do you good to get away for a while. I'm rather intrigued, though, darling – never having met your mother and hearing this romantic story. Tell me, what was she like?'

I fetched the photograph of her in her WAAF uniform that I had brought back from Oxford and he considered it in his quiet, contemplative way. ‘Very like you – or you like her, I should say, since it was that way round. But I really meant, what was she like as a person? Not the usual platitudes, please – give me the essence of her distilled into one word.'

I understood him, but it was a hard question to answer about anyone. I thought for a moment about the way that Ma had been: the unwavering quality and style that had set her apart; the refusal to bow to fads or fashions or outside pressures. ‘True to herself.'

‘That's three words and it's a terrible cliché, but it will do. An excellent thing to be.
This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man
.'

‘She was pretty false to me.'

‘No, she wasn't, darling. She was marble-constant, as Shakespeare also said. An illegitimate baby was a huge black mark in those days, remember. She could easily have had you adopted, but she didn't. She hung onto you and she married another man because she thought it was the best thing for you. Presumably he knew all about you being on the way, and about your real father?'

‘So she said in her letter. He wanted to marry her, just the same.'

‘I'm sure he did. And the marriage worked – except, of course, that she never quite forgot her lover. She kept that photo and she played that record.'

‘Why on earth didn't she tell me his name, Adrian? Or give me some clues? That's what I can't understand. What was the point of it? How could the record possibly be set straight?'

‘Oh, I think
I
understand, darling. She didn't tell you his name because it made it easier for you to deal with. You'd only look for him – and maybe find him – if you
really
wanted to. Otherwise, you could just leave it alone.'

‘That sounds like one of the Mad Hatter's riddles. Why is a raven like a writing desk?'

‘I mean what I say, darling,' Adrian said blandly. ‘And I say what I mean.'

Later, I played the Sinatra record on the old gramophone. Adrian listened in silence until the song had finished. Then he sighed.

‘Ah, the potency of cheap music. Very Second World War. Very poignant. I wish you luck, Juliet, darling, but I fear for you. Don't get your hopes up too high. As you said yourself, the trail's old and cold and who knows what could lie at the end of it.'

I had few hopes of any kind as I set off in my car for Suffolk. The week before I had bought a book in W.H. Smith about the airfields of the American Eighth Air Force in England and had spent some hours studying it. The map showing the airfields in the Midlands and East Anglia was a mass of black dots. I drew in the Suffolk borders and sorted the bomber stations from the fighter ones, ringing those dots in red. There were at least fifteen, most of which had probably long since fallen into decay, or perhaps vanished completely. And reading the chapters devoted to each one and its exact location, I soon discovered that the airfields themselves were by no means necessarily situated close to the village they were named after; some were as much as several miles away, nearer another village altogether. My only real clue remained the Mad Monk and my only plan of action to drive around the area of each airfield in turn, hoping to find out where the pub had once been.

I began in the north of the county, close to the border of Norfolk where there was the densest concentration of dots. The harvest had just begun and juggernaut combines were at work in the fields, tractors hogging the narrow lanes. It had been many years since I had last been there, on some stilted weekend visit to friends of Mark's who had owned a manor house near Bury St Edmunds, and I had almost forgotten how beautiful Suffolk was. Every county, of course, has its own look and feel, distinct from the rest. Suffolk has its switchback landscape, its open skies and, most of all, its wondrous light. I drove through villages, past crooked timber houses with plaster walls painted in colours that would have looked wrong anywhere else in England: crushed-strawberry pink, mustard yellow, olive green, deep terracotta. And everywhere, there were hollyhocks of all colours, standing tall against walls and fences, lining pathways, grouped outside front doors. In wartime, with no paint available, the houses would have looked woefully shabby, but, even so, the Americans must have been rather impressed by the antiquity, if not by the plumbing.

I stopped in any village that was within ten miles of a red-ringed dot, working my way steadily across the county. There were Crowns, Angels, White Horses, Black Horses, Red Lions, Four Horseshoes, Six Bells, Brewer's Arms, Foxes, White Harts, Green Dragons . . . and I asked in every village if there had ever been a Mad Monk in the vicinity. When the pubs were shut, I asked in the post office or the village shop, or stopped a local to enquire. I spent the night at a B & B and continued the search the next day, breaking off sometimes to sketch the scenery for relief. Out of curiosity and with some difficulty, I hunted down one of the old airfields a mile or two outside a village and found it had become an industrial estate. Rusty Nissen huts served as workshops alongside modern Portakabins and an old aircraft hangar was being used for storage, but there was little else to show what the place had once been.

A mechanic in overalls emerged from one of the huts, wiping his hands on an oily rag, and told me that the runways had been taken up the year before and sold for motorway hardcore and that only a short length of the perimeter track was left. The control tower had apparently collapsed several winters ago. They got American veterans coming back all the time, he said, and the poor blokes could never make out where everything had been because it had changed so much. He thought it was a shame really because they looked so disappointed, as though they'd somehow expected to see it all still there, just the same as when they'd been young. He'd found an old baseball once, buried in the long grass on the edge of the airfield, and kept it on a shelf in the Nissen hut for years. Eventually he'd given it to one of the Yanks. The old man had held it in his hand, staring at it without a word, and then started to weep.

I progressed slowly southwards but still with no success. For three days I sketched and painted – cornfields, woods, farmhouses, barns, stone bridges, whatever took my fancy – convinced now that it was a hopeless waste of time and energy to carry on looking for the pub. For all I knew I had passed it already, prettied up as somebody's private home – the smoke-filled, nicotine-ceilinged, rowdy bar where the RAF and the Yanks had drunk warm weak wartime beer transformed into a genteel sitting room. Only three airfields remained now and when they were crossed off, I planned to give up.

I did the same tour of the next two, driving round all the villages in the area and asking the same question. In the lounge bar of the Six Bells in one of them, I came across an American and his wife who were over from Phoenix in Arizona to revisit his old bomber airfield. He had thinning grey hair and sun-mottled skin. It was hard to imagine him as one of the fresh-faced young boys who had descended on a war-weary England.

‘My first visit back. Never had the time before, or seen much reason, but when you get to my age you start to go backwards in time, to think about what's been important in your life – about what good you've ever done. I reckon what I did over here was just about the best thing I've ever managed.' He nodded towards his wife, dressed in a lilac tracksuit and white trainers, who was absorbed in going through her shoulder bag. ‘Joan didn't want us to come. The past is past, she says. No point in looking back. But I wanted to do it once. To remember those times . . . and the boys I knew who didn't make it home.'

I asked him if he had been out to the old airfield yet. He nodded.

‘Yep. Went there yesterday and had the darnedest time even finding the place. It's all different. Trees grown where there weren't any, half the buildings gone, the rest all grown over. I couldn't recognize a thing except the briefing room and that was in a real mess. Had to fight my way through the brambles to get to the door.' He held out scratched hands for me to see. ‘Joan stayed outside while I went in and took a look at where we'd sat in rows while they told us what we were in for. The platform was still there, up one end, and some of the old wiring, and the holes where the stovepipes went, but the ceiling was coming down and the brambles and stuff were coming right in through the windows. I stood there, remembering how it was . . . all us guys sitting there listening real hard, that big map on the wall with the red ribbon pinned across it, that long stick pointing everything out like we were kids in class, the CO giving us his pep talk at the end . . . and, hell, I got
exactly
the same knot in the guts I used to get back then, like they were all screwed up in a vice. Just the same.' He shook his head. ‘Spooky. Joan said she yelled at me to come out a couple of times, but I guess I never heard her. After that, we drove out onto the main runway and it was all weeds and potholes with a whole lot of turkey sheds and muck in the middle. I couldn't believe I'd ever taken off from there.'

‘You were a pilot?'

‘Co-pilot. On B-24s. Liberators you called them.'

‘So, there were two pilots on a bomber? On B-17s as well?'

‘Sure. Captain and co-pilot. We needed them. It was a tough job flying those heavy suckers and keeping formation with the others for hours on end. I'd take over from the captain for some of it – give him a break. We never understood how the RAF made do with only the one guy, but then your bombers were lighter to handle and they went on their own, not in formation.'

‘Did you ever come across a pub called the Mad Monk?'

‘Can't say I did. Crazy name! We always used to come in here or the Cross Keys down the road. There were two or three other pubs as well, but none of them was called that. I'd've remembered a name like that.'

I showed him the photo. ‘Do you recognize any of these men, by any chance?'

He took his spectacles out of the breast pocket of his shirt to look at it. ‘This is a B-17 crew. We were on 24s, like I said, so I wouldn't have come across these guys.' He handed the photo back, smiling, ‘Say, you're too young to have known any of them.'