Secrets (44 page)

The sky was suddenly deserted, and looking at his fuel gauge Michael realized he’d flown further than he intended, away from the rest of the squadron. He wheeled round to head for home, and it was then that he saw John’s Spitfire, upside down. The tail was ablaze – obviously the flash of flame he’d seen earlier – and though John was in the correct position for bailing out, it looked as if he couldn’t get the cockpit open.

Sweat trickled down Michael’s face and suddenly he was trembling. He had already lost four good friends in the squadron and heard that at least another dozen men he’d known had bought it. But although he’d felt badly about each and every one of them, and sympathized with their families, this was the first time he’d actually witnessed a fatality.

‘Get the cockpit open!’ he roared instinctively. But even as the words came out he was aware of the futility of it, for the only person who could hear him was the radio operator.

Michael cried all the way home. John was so innocent – only a couple of days earlier he had admitted that he’d never slept with a girl. His mother sent him a homemade cake almost every week, his father sent him weekly reports on the local football team’s games. They had been so proud that their only son had been accepted as a pilot.

It wasn’t bloody fair. John was a first-class pilot, he didn’t have a mean bone in his body and everyone liked him. He’d got Michael out of the doldrums many a time with his jokes and sunny nature. He had so much to give. Why did it have to be him?

*

Honour stood in the garden shading her eyes as she looked up at the planes fighting in the sky. She was glad it was over Dungeness today, for at least if any of them crash-landed there were no houses out that way.

In the last six weeks, since the evacuation of Dunkirk, she had lost track of how many such dog-fights she’d seen. Winston Churchill had dubbed this battle in the air ‘The Battle of Britain’, and to Honour it seemed unbelievable that the average age of these young pilots who fought with such skill, courage and grim determination was only twenty.

Even when she couldn’t see planes above her, she knew they were fighting somewhere, as the drone of the Spitfires and Hurricanes flying out woke her almost every morning. She would look out of the window and watch them flying off bravely towards the French coast in tight formation, only to see them coming back later in just twos and threes. At first she tried to keep a tally, to check if they all came back. But it made her too dejected when some were unaccounted for.

She’d seen two crash-land: one of the pilots came down on his parachute unhurt, but the other burned to death. What she’d seen was almost nothing, however, for there had been countless fatalities all over the South of England. Bombers slunk in unseen to drop their deadly cargo on air fields, killing ground-force crews and civilians. As for the bombers that couldn’t make it to their intended target, they ruthlessly dropped their load anywhere, not caring if they hit hospitals, schools, villages and towns.

Six weeks earlier Honour had taken heart to see how ordinary people took to hundreds of little boats to rescue soldiers stranded in Dunkirk. She had believed that no one could conquer England when its subjects were so brave and determined. But now, seeing these fighter boys in action day after day, reading the casualty lists which grew longer each week, she was very afraid England hadn’t got the manpower or weapons to win the war.

She went to sleep filled with anxiety, woke with it still there. At first her prayers were just to keep Adele and Michael safe, but now she felt it was wrong to think only of those she loved. Every single soldier, sailor or airman was someone’s grandson, son, husband, sweetheart or brother. She felt for all of them.

‘Watching the sky won’t get the weeds pulled out,’ Jim the postman called out jovially as he dropped his bike out in the lane to bring her some post.

‘It certainly won’t,’ Honour said with a rueful smile, glad of a diversion from gloomy thoughts. She liked Jim. He was sixty-seven, with a shock of white hair and the bandiest legs she’d ever seen. He had fought in the first war, but although he wasn’t in very good health, he’d taken over the post round from his son when he was called up. He said it made him feel useful and the exercise was good for him. ‘But the weeds can wait a little longer if you’d like a cup of tea.’

‘I hoped you’d offer one, I’m parched,’ he said. ‘And it’s a red-letter day for you. Looks like this one’s from your granddaughter. It’s got a London postmark.’

Jim sat himself down on the bench by the door while Honour went in to make the tea. As she waited for the kettle to boil she had a quick read of the letter. ‘
Dear Granny
,’ she read.

I haven’t got much to report, everything is fairly quiet right now, only emergency cases to deal with as everyone else is being sent out of London. All the wards on the upper floors are closed and they’ve made new ones in the basement for safety in an air raid. I’ve taken up knitting on night duty, because there’s so little to do, and nearly finished the back of a cardigan. It’s awful that Paris has been taken by the Germans, isn’t it? I sometimes wonder if our men can really stop them.

I wish I could come home for a holiday, London’s so horrible in the summer, and the food here is terrible. I suppose it will get even worse before the war is over, there’s shortages of almost everything now.

I’ve been to quite a few dances with Joan and some of the other nurses recently. It’s funny how people seem set on enjoying themselves more now than they did in peacetime. You’d think they would all be scared and sombre. The West End is really jolly at night, despite the blackout, even if they have got Eros all boarded up. We stayed up there late one evening and you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face out on the streets. But it makes people talk to each other more and help one another. I’m sick of carting my gas mask around though!

There’s a great many more children back in London now, I do think their mothers are a bit foolhardy bringing them back, however much they miss them. I helped at my first caesarean birth the other night, the mother had been in labour at home for two days until a neighbour finally called an ambulance. It was an incredible thing to watch, and it made me much more interested in midwifery. The baby, a little boy, was fine, but his mother is still poorly. Her husband is in the army and she’s got three other children to take care of. Some women have it so hard, don’t they?

No other news I’m afraid. We’re all a bit bored really with so few patients. How is Towzer? I’m really glad you have him, if a German drops out of the sky I’m sure he’ll savage him for you!

Look after yourself and don’t work too hard on growing vegetables. Just sweet talk the rabbits so they have more babies. Give Misty a cuddle, and Towzer a stroke from me. Keep safe.

Love,

Adele

Honour smiled, and tucked the letter into her apron pocket to read again later. She worried so much about Adele, but each time a letter came she could feel a little easier for a while.

At midday, as Honour was weeding her vegetable garden, Rose half sat up in her bed in London to reach for a cigarette.

‘Damn,’ she muttered on finding the packet empty, and slumped back on the pillows.

It was a year and five months since she got the thousand pounds from Myles Bailey, and at the time she thought she was set up for life. But then war broke out and her plans fell apart.

Everything was so good for a while, she didn’t even want to drink much. Following advice from a businessman who used to eat in the restaurant where she worked, she bought a very cheap eight-room house in Hammersmith. He said she would make more money letting out rooms than she could earn anywhere else, and she’d still hold on to her capital. It sounded like good advice, and although she had difficulty finding a plumber to put in another kitchen and bathroom for the lodgers, she finally got it done and decorated too.

She toured the secondhand shops and haggled for furniture and other stuff she wanted, and once it all came together, for the first time in her life she really felt she was going somewhere.

It was bliss to have a real home of her own, a bathroom all to herself, a little garden, and enough money to splash out on clothes, perfume and getting her hair done. The first lodgers were perfect too. Two married couples in the two biggest rooms, and two older businessmen in the other two smaller ones. They all paid their rent every week without fail, the wives kept their own rooms and the kitchen and bathroom clean. The two businessmen went home to their wives at weekends, and they didn’t even use the kitchen.

It was all so harmonious and peaceful – the most noise Rose ever heard was laughter and chatter between the two couples who had become friends. In her naivety Rose assumed they would all stay indefinitely – the two older men were past the age for call-up, one of the younger men was a fireman, and the other did something in the Civil Service which gave him an exemption. But Rose hadn’t really considered that the start of war would affect civilians the way it did.

The man in the Civil Service got moved away from London and of course his wife went with him. The couple she replaced them with fell out with the fireman and his wife, and they used that as an excuse to move back home with her mother. Then the two businessmen left one after the other as they both felt they would rather commute to London each day and be home with their wives and children at night if bombing began.

Rose soon found she couldn’t be so choosy about tenants as so many people were moving out of London that there were hundreds of flats and rooms to let. Before long she was letting the rooms to anyone who wanted them, and trouble quickly followed. She had Jewish refugees from Holland and Germany who couldn’t speak English. Rough, noisy men who skipped off owing her rent. She had women with children who upset the other tenants. She had one man who used to smash things up when he was drunk, a woman who turned out to be a prostitute, and any number of fly-by-night characters who were in trouble with the police.

Still lying back on the pillows, Rose surveyed her bedroom with jaundiced eyes. She had been thrilled when the decorator put up the pink and white wallpaper – after what she’d been used to, it looked like a film star’s bedroom.

The big window offered a view of leafy back gardens and the early morning sun made the walnut bed, wardrobe and dressing-table gleam with amber and gold lights. They suggested much-loved family heirlooms, as did the fringed pink and sage green carpet, but they were all secondhand. Rose had kept this room as if it were for royalty until quite recently, smoothing out the pink satin quilt, even putting a few flowers in a vase on the dressing-table. Sometimes she just sat in here, savouring how pretty it was, but she hadn’t done that for some time now.

Clothes were dropped on the floor now, the sheets were none too clean, and a film of dust lay on the shiny furniture.

Rose was by no means destitute. She still had a couple of hundred pounds tucked away in the bank, and the rent she did get covered her living expenses. But she was demoralized. She had believed she knew every trick in the book that tenants could come up with. She thought she could recognize a shyster immediately, and she was also convinced she was tough enough to face up to anyone, but she was mistaken.

She felt like crying when she saw the damage some of the tenants did to their rooms and was revolted by how dirty some of them could be. But over and above all that, she was terribly lonely. She couldn’t get friendly with people in her house or they would take her for a ride. Jobs like unblocking the sink or changing a washer in a tap were beyond her, and when she had to be ruthless and throw someone out she felt physically sick with nerves.

Yet worse in many ways was the guilt. Not about taking the money from Myles Bailey – she believed he owed her that – but about what she’d done to Adele.

It hadn’t come to her straightaway, at first she was too cock-a-hoop about getting the house to care about anything. The guilt crept in almost unnoticed, just a little pang when she saw young airmen and their girls walking hand in hand, or if she saw a nurse from the local hospital. But she felt it more and more now, and however much she told herself she had to prevent her daughter marrying her brother, she knew Adele must see her as the most despicable woman in the world.

Rose was thirty-nine now, and when she looked in the mirror she could see for herself what time, drink, loveless affairs and selfishness had done to her. No amount of money would bring back her looks – money could buy company, but not real friends. It could buy material comfort, but not affection. Who would care if a bomb dropped on this house and killed her? There wasn’t one person who would come forward to say something good about her.

She would lie awake at night remembering the holidays she’d spent as a child with her parents in Curlew Cottage. She could recall her parents’ laughter as they made supper in the evenings, walking between them holding both their hands, sitting on her mother’s lap by the fire while her father read to them. If Adele ever looked back on her childhood, Rose doubted she’d have even one good memory of her mother.

For so many years Rose had viewed those years of her own childhood on the marsh like some of her father’s charcoal sketches, everything just shades of grey and black. Cold, gloomy and miserable. But maybe it was because she went back that day in bright sunshine that the charcoal sketch had gone, replaced by a picture in glorious Technicolor. In her mind’s eye she saw waist-high meadowsweet swaying in the breeze, emerald-green grass studded with golden buttercups and purple clover. Darting kingfishers made brilliant flashes of turquoise along the river bank, and yellow wild iris grew in the boggy places.