Somewhere Over England (30 page)

‘I guess you must be Mrs Weber. That’s a fine boy you have there.’ His handshake was firm and his smile broad but there
were the same lines of tiredness on his face that there were on everyone’s.

‘I think I have much to thank you for, Captain McDonald,’ Helen said, because Laura and Mary had told her everything.

‘Not a lot, most of it he did himself. Look I can’t stop long, I’ve got to get back to base. We should be training tomorrow.’ He paused. ‘I wanted to get over much sooner but we’ve been kind of busy.’ His smile was wry.

‘It’s enough that you came. He’s been waiting for you,’ Helen said, hearing him rattle the change in his pocket, hearing the hoot of the car outside the window. He moved across and looked out.

‘There’s my lift. I got to go. I’ll come again, if I may?’ He was looking towards Chris and she saw the fine cheekbones, the flickering left eyelid.

‘Please do. Chris would be very grateful and so would I.’

He nodded and smiled at her. The jeep hooted again and he turned towards the door, waving as he went.

Helen watched him and then as she moved towards Chris again she saw the material lying folded on the back of the chair, the lace collar draped across it, and she went running out after him, down the corridor, calling, ‘Captain McDonald, Captain McDonald.’

He stopped and turned.

Helen blushed. ‘I’m making something rather special for somebody but I can’t get any elastic and I’ve heard the Americans have everything.’

She laughed when he spread his arms wide. ‘Well, I guess that’s as good a war aim as any, Ma’am. Leave it with me.’

He came back every other day for the next three weeks and they sat by the bedside as Chris woke and talked, or slept.

He brought the elastic on his second visit and Helen sewed it around the waist of the dress she was making, listening as he told her of the farm in Montana, of the mountains which looked pretty much like Chris’s earlier temperature chart, of the mare he was hoping to breed from. He told her that his mother loved him too much and Helen knew what he meant and so she told him of her own mother but then he said, ‘Oh no, Mom’s nothing like that.’

Mary came the next time, driven by Ed in his jeep. Helen
gave her the dress and she held it up against her and then turned to Chris, who smiled at her and then at his mother.

‘It’s got a waist. I’ve always wanted a waist but my sister said I was too fat. How did you know I wanted a waist, Mrs Weber?’ Mary’s face was eager.

‘Every woman wants a dress with a waist, my dear Mary,’ Helen said. ‘And you have been such a true friend to Christoph. It is so little.’

She sat back then and listened as Ed told the children of the heat a cattle herd would build up, of the cowboys’ fear of storms because they spooked the cattle and he asked Chris how a stampede could be halted. Chris told them and Ed laughed and called him a clever kid for remembering.

Then Chris told Ed the German story of the raven coming ahead, warning by thunder and lightning that the gods were coming and everyone should hide and Helen was glad to hear her son talking of his heritage so naturally.

The next time they talked of the Flying Fortresses because Ed’s hands were shaking but he didn’t say why. But when Chris was asleep he told her of the punishment a ship could take, his face pale, his uniform dark against the white walls.

‘The rounds of gunfire, the blasting of an engine and still the old bus will get us home, or some of us.’

They talked or rather Helen listened as he told her that already there were not enough spare parts, not enough spare crews.

He told her how the planes were pouring from the Detroit plants but they would soon be pouring from the skies too, over Germany. That the crews were so young, too young to be killed, too young to kill. That though they would fly high they would fly in daylight and they would not have fighter escort the whole way. That they had twenty-five missions to accomplish before they could go home. He had flown in a British bomber as an observer last week, and now he knew what they would be facing when the training was finished. The next time he came he brought her candies because he had talked too much, but she didn’t think he had.

It was October before Chris was able to sit up, and Helen left him for two days to travel to London and when she returned she told him that she would not be going back. She had spoken to Mr Leonard and insisted on him releasing her because
Laura knew someone at the beet factory and they would take her now.

She did not tell him that she had threatened to tell Mr Leonard’s wife that he took flowers each Friday to a lady who lived in Harrow but she told Ed, who laughed and said that he reckoned that even if she did box like a southpaw she was a dangerous dame to meet on a dark night.

Helen did not understand but she laughed with him. When Ed left, Chris woke and picked at the crisp starched sheet with thin fingers, his striped pyjamas caught up above his elbows.

‘Mum, I’ve got to tell the village you know.’

Helen took his hand. ‘No, darling. I must tell them. I’m going to be living here too, permanently soon. I shall tell them, but when the time is right. Now, shall we finish this puzzle?’

She carried over the tray and put all the blue pieces to one side. There were planes coming over again.

‘Mum.’

‘Yes, Chris?’

‘Ed’s great, isn’t he?’

‘Ed’s a very kind man.’ Helen said.

‘But he’s more than that, isn’t he?’

Twelve planes had flown over now.

‘Yes, he’s more than just a kind man,’ she said but he couldn’t be more than that for her, because she couldn’t live with the threat of another loss and she still loved Heine.

Helen signed an official contract to work in the laboratory of the sugar-beet factory on Friday 30 October. She had dropped her cases in the small room at the top of the boarding house on the main street of the town. She had stuffed newspaper in the rattling window frame and beneath the door which had been cut to ride over a now non-existent carpet and then left to spend the days of the weekend at the hospital with Chris and her nights at the cottage. She talked to him of the new Commander in North Africa, General Montgomery, who was beginning a big offensive along the coast at El Alamein, of the Russians who were hanging on grimly in Stalingrad, of the American Marines who had made a successful landing on the Solomon Islands.

She fed him ice-cream which Ed had brought and left earlier in a big container filled with ice. There was too much for him and so the nurses took the remainder for the other patients. Helen had not seen Ed, she had arrived too late and Chris asked why.

She told him of the boarding house, the rattles and draughts. The girls who had been smoking in the small kitchen and stubbing their cigarettes out on a tin lid and who had wanted to talk. So she had not been able to arrive any earlier, had she? She didn’t tell him that she did not want to see the big smiling American who made her feel things that she thought had died with Heine.

She arrived back at her digs on Sunday evening carrying the dungarees that she would need for tomorrow. She had heard the planes straggling back as she travelled on the bus and counted, knowing Ed was flying his first mission, knowing that if he didn’t return Chris would tell her, somehow he would tell her.

She climbed the stairs and slept from ten until five without waking. She was satisfactorily full because Laura had brought a picnic lunch into the hospital; chicken and bacon pie and eggs from the hens. The bacon had been a surprise but Laura had said little, only smiled slightly and said that the government allowed the killing of people not pigs in the war but after all, wasn’t it strange how one animal could go missing and turn up in separate joints in villagers’ houses? Helen had felt uncomfortable for a moment but then hunger had triumphed.

She walked to work through cold, wet, dark streets, stepping over mud spun off the wheels of the incessant beet lorries. Overhanging everything was the heavy smell of beet pulp which the boarding housekeeper had told her belched out from the chimneys twenty-four hours a day during the beet campaign. Others were walking with her now but nobody spoke, they were too tired.

She arrived at six a.m. and walked from the cold into a barrage of heat and noise. Within seconds she was too hot and she shrugged herself out of the heavy greatcoat, holding it as she knocked on the forewoman’s door. It was opened but the woman could only nod, the noise was too great to hear any words. Her hair was wound up inside a headscarf and her breath was nicotine-heavy as she came up close and shouted, ‘Follow me.’

The smell of beet pulp was thicker inside the building, too thick to breathe but somehow Helen did, following the woman who did not look behind her once. They passed machinery which roared and rocked and women who smiled before turning back, sweat running from their bandana-wrapped hair and from their faces and arms to drip on to the floor. They climbed up an iron stairway, slippery from the dripping overhead pipes and now there were men who wore no shirts and whose backs were beaded with sweat. One turned and whistled. Helen saw his lips but heard nothing but the clang and the clatter. Her short-sleeved shirt was sticking to her now and she held her coat away from her body.

How could these people work like this, how could they bear the noise, the smell? How could she? The woman was walking more quickly now, lengthening her stride, checking her watch, walking down half a flight of stairs, turning left. Helen caught
up, taking shallow breaths, looking at the small grey office they were approaching. There were white stencilled letters on the door and she saw that they said ‘LABORATORY’.

The supervisor walked in and Helen followed, shutting the door, reducing the noise by a fraction, but even that was welcome. The woman was beckoning to her, talking to a small man in a paisley tie and starched collar, soiled now where it rubbed against his neck. When Helen approached she shouted into her face again.

‘This is Mr French. He is in overall charge of the laboratory. You will take your directions from him.’ Her fingers, which she ran through her damp hair, were nicotine-stained but her grin made Helen smile. ‘I’ll see you down in the canteen for lunch. Half an hour, that’s all we get.’

Helen stood watching as Mr French tucked his pen behind his ear and pointed to her coat and then the rack on the wall. He smiled as she walked back, having heaped her coat on top of two others.

‘Tea break of ten minutes at nine o’clock. You’ll need that on the first day.’

Helen nodded, looking round. Three other girls were working in dungarees and short-sleeved shirts, their heads down, their hair lank and wet.

Mr French tapped one of them on the shoulder and when she turned he said, ‘Take Mrs Weber through the procedures please, Marjorie, I have to get on.’ He smiled. ‘Marjorie’s our charge-hand.’

Marjorie rose then and stuck her hands into her pockets, leaning back against the bench she had been working on. She grinned.

‘Right, they’ll already have told you how long you have to put up with this bedlam. We knock off at two p.m. sharp and leave prompt for our breaks. That way maybe we stay sane. They’ll also have told you that there are three shifts. We do two weeks on each. The graveyard shift is ten p.m. to six a.m. but I’m not going to tell you about it, I’ll let you wait and enjoy its delights at first hand.’ She laughed but it was sucked away by the noise as Mr French opened the door and left the room.

Marjorie jerked her head in his direction. ‘He’s OK. Pinches a few bums from time to time but he’s never tried mine. Fancies
them blonde and giggly.’ Helen smiled and watched as Marjorie waved her hands along the benches.

‘We’re supposed to check that there is the correct standard of sugar in the beet and not too much going out into the waste products. Each result you get should be within just a few degrees of the standard.’

One of the girls rose from her bench and left and again there was an increase in noise as the door opened. Helen’s head already felt as though it were bursting.

‘Frances has gone to collect the samples. We have to take turns; it gets to be quite an art arriving back not dripping with the damn stuff. Once we get them here the waters are filtered and polarised, the beet pulp is dried out and weighed, then we record the results in the book. Sweet water and diffusion juice are brought up every couple of hours and five diffusion juices in bottles once every shift.’

Marjorie crossed her arms and nodded towards the other girls. ‘That’s Penny and Joan. Frances will be back soon and then I’ll show you what to do.’

It was twenty minutes before Frances appeared. The waters and juices were thick; cloudy and dark grey. Like the weather, Helen thought, but thank heavens the East Anglian clouds didn’t smell like this mixture. She watched as Marjorie added lead and distilled water to the samples, leaving them to filter, after which the liquid came through quite clear.

She wrote it all down on a notepad, her pencil slipping in her sweaty hand. It was HB and smudged black across the paper.

‘Don’t worry too much,’ Marjorie said. ‘It all seems strange at first but you’ll soon get used to it.’

Helen thought she never would. She looked round at these people she didn’t know and missed London, the crypt, her friends, the routine of the bank. The noise drilled through her head, the strangeness made her feel like a new girl at school. For now she had no home, just a room with newspaper stuffed in the cracks but her son was close, his heart murmur was improving and that was all that mattered.

She watched now, pushing her discomfort from her, making herself pay close attention as Marjorie poured the samples which had given a low reading into a polarimeter through a long tube with a funnel at the end. Those samples which had given a high reading were poured down a shorter tube with a
funnel in the middle. She wrote this down. Then Marjorie took a reading by looking through an eyepiece which was like a telescope and turned a screw on the polarimeter until no shadow was in evidence on the screen. She copied out the reading from the scale at the top.