Survivor (21 page)

A couple of women in the cinema became
completely hysterical, yelling out that the Germans would soon be here in England.
Mariette had seen the huge coils of barbed wire all along the coast while in
Littlehampton, and there had been warning signs that the beaches were mined too, but
the German Army looked invincible. She didn’t think mines and barbed wire were
going to deter them from making their way across the English Channel.

The day after that film, the sky seemed
to be full of Spitfires and Hurricanes. Compared with the German planes she’d
seen on the news, they seemed pitifully small.

Rose got herself into a terrible state
at the thought of Peter being shot down.

‘They won’t stand a chance
in those little planes once they’re hit,’ she sobbed. ‘I
can’t bear the thought of losing him.’

Mariette could hardly reassure her that
he would never be shot down in his plane – it was all too obvious that many airmen
would be lost – and yet, when Peter came to the house with Gerald a few nights later
on a twenty-four-hour pass, they seemed untroubled and couldn’t wait to be
sent out on a mission.

‘Aren’t you scared?’
Mariette asked Gerald later, as they sat in the garden alone together.

‘Not of flying, I love it,’
he grinned. ‘But I expect I will be scared when I’m faced with a
Messerschmitt on my tail. Doesn’t do to show it, though, got to keep a stiff
upper lip and all that.’

He asked for a
photograph of her, and she gave him one taken on the night of her surprise party
when she’d left college. ‘I shall kiss you for luck each time I go
out,’ he said as he tucked it into his wallet. Then he kissed her with all the
abandonment of a man who thought it might be his last embrace.

‘I love you, Mari,’ he
whispered when he finally broke away. ‘You are on my mind all the time, I go
to sleep imagining us getting married one day and never having to say goodbye ever
again.’

She couldn’t bring herself to say
she would happily marry him. But his passionate kiss had stirred up feelings inside
her, so she held him close and kissed him back. If he took that as meaning she felt
the same as he did, well, she couldn’t help that. And besides, if he kept
kissing her that way, she might find it was true love.

It was through anxiety for Gerald that
she turned Johnny down when he rang her to ask her out. She really wanted a fun
night out dancing, especially with a man who wasn’t in real danger of being
killed in the near future, but it seemed wrong when Gerald thought of her as his
special girl.

The evacuation of thousands of British
and French soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk began on 27th May. Noah went down to
Dover the following day to write an article about the evacuation. He stayed on there
until 4th June, when the evacuation of the troops was completed. During that time,
Mariette, Lisette and Rose all remained glued to the wireless each evening as
reports came in that, aside from the troopships that had been sent for the
evacuation, hundreds of ordinary people all along the coast had taken out their
little boats to rescue as many soldiers as they could. It was reported that some
people did the forty-four-mile round
trip in heavy seas twice, crossing the English Channel
with German aircraft firing down at them. It was so stirring and heroic that all
three of them listened with tears running down their faces.

They saw it all on the Pathé news at the
cinema, watching the film showing thousands of French and English soldiers patiently
waiting on the beaches of Dunkirk, even though they were under heavy fire. Even more
telling were the images of the wounded being carried off ships at Dover and
Folkestone on stretchers.

Each day, Mariette waited anxiously for
the postman to call, but there was no letter from Morgan telling her that he was
safely back in England. She wondered whether anyone would even know to contact her,
if the worst had happened. His brothers were his next of kin, after all.

On 18th June, they listened to a
stirring speech by Winston Churchill in which he said that the Battle of France was
now over, and the Battle of Britain was about to begin. ‘Let us therefore
brace ourselves to our duties,’ he said, amongst other lines that both chilled
and thrilled, ending with, ‘Men will still say, “This was their finest
hour.”’

The very next day, an exceptionally
brief letter arrived from Morgan, sent from a hospital in Folkestone. It said:

I copped some shrapnel. But I’m OK. Don’t come here, I
don’t want to see you while I’m like this.

Yours

Morgan

She didn’t know if that was just
bravado, or if he really wanted her to visit him.

But Lisette said she should take him at
his word. ‘He might be in a lot of pain, and perhaps he can’t walk at
the moment. Some men like being babied, but some hate anyone to see
them looking vulnerable. Besides, all the trains coming
back from there will be packed with wounded men. That’s no place for
you.’

Winston Churchill had been right in
saying that the Battle of Britain was about to begin. On 14th June, the Germans
entered Paris. With the enemy now just across the Channel, and the Luftwaffe firing
on British shipping, suddenly invasion looked imminent.

The newspapers reported that wolf packs
of German U-boats were inflicting enormous damage on shipping in the Atlantic, and
the Italians had joined with the Germans to attack British troops in Egypt. For
Gerald, Peter and their fellow airmen there was no leave now as they bravely set off
in their little Spitfires and Hurricanes again and again to defend England.
Airfields in the south of England were being targeted by the Luftwaffe. Noah
reported, on returning from some business near Brighton, that he’d witnessed
fierce dogfights overhead.

It was clear to everyone that, despite
the indomitable courage of the British fighter pilots, Germany had a huge advantage
in deploying so many more aircraft.

The arrival of thousands of Commonwealth
troops in England was heartening. And yet, at the same time, everyone suspected they
were here because the invasion of England was about to start.

On 2nd July, Mariette arrived home from
work to find Rose and Lisette sitting in the kitchen, both in tears.

‘Whatever’s happened?’
Mariette asked, her stomach beginning to churn with fear. ‘Where’s Noah?
Is it him?’

‘No, Noah’s fine,’
Lisette croaked out. ‘It’s Gerald … he was shot down
today.’

Mariette sank down on to a chair in
shock. She didn’t need
to ask if
he was dead, she could see it on their faces. ‘How do you know?’ she
asked.

‘Peter rang. They went out this
morning with three other pilots,’ Lisette said quietly. ‘Gerald had shot
down a Heinkel, and they were all returning to the airfield in formation when
another Heinkel came out of the clouds firing at them. Peter said Gerald’s
plane was hit on its tail, it went into a spiral and then burst into flames. He
didn’t stand a chance.’

Mariette covered her face with her
hands. She remembered Gerald’s passionate last kiss, and how he’d said
he loved her. If only she’d told him she loved him too, let him go off with
the belief one day they’d get married. She doubted if she would ever meet
another man with such wonderful qualities, and it hurt so much to know she’d
never see him again.

Suddenly the war became very real to
her. Thousands of men might have been killed all over Europe – two women in the
factory at Shoreditch had lost their husbands at Dunkirk, and another pilot, who was
a friend of Gerald and Peter’s, had been shot down on his first mission – but
she hadn’t known any of them. She hadn’t heard them laugh, hadn’t
danced with them, and certainly hadn’t been kissed by them. Gerald’s
death brought the war into sharp focus, right in front of her, and all those
sandbags, air-raid shelters and gas masks had real meaning for her at last. People
were going to die, here in London – not just strangers, but people she knew well –
and life as she’d known it was never going to be the same again.

That night, she stayed up late writing a
long letter home. She was no longer devious Mariette; the words she was writing came
straight from her heart. Alexis was seventeen now, Noel sixteen, and the thought
that her brothers were close to the age when they would be called up made her blood
run
cold. Suddenly her family seemed so
much more precious to her, and she felt she had to tell them. She wrote:

Getting the news today that Gerald was shot down has made me realize what
war really means. It’s being afraid for those you love, realizing that
nothing will ever be quite the same again. I hope I can be as brave as you
two were in the last war. And I wish I’d asked you about your
experiences then. I’ve been awfully self-centred, haven’t
I?

She closed her eyes for a moment,
imagining them all sitting around the kitchen table. She could almost smell one of
Mog’s wonderful meat pies cooking in the oven, and hear the faint hiss of the
oil lamps and her brothers’ chatter. For the first time since she had left
home, she really wished she was back there, with nothing more troubling on her mind
than what she would wear to the next dance.

From early August enemy raiders had begun
targeting convoys in the Channel and Dover harbour, then moving on to bomb
aerodromes and dockyards. Britain was fighting back with all the force it could
muster; from every airfield in the south of England Spitfires and Hurricanes flew
out to intercept enemy planes and shoot them down. Doris from the office, who lived
in Kent, reported that the sky was full of RAF fighters at first light, bravely
setting out in tight formations. But the casualty figures were high, and each time
the pilots returned there were fewer of them.

Then, on 19th August, there was a heavy
attack on the docks in the East End of London. Mariette heard about the attack at
first hand, from Johnny, because he’d been there fighting the fires.

Two days after the bombs dropped, he met
her from work to take her for a drink. His eyes were still red-rimmed from the
smoke.

‘I can’t even describe how
bad it is, just that it’s bloody terrifying,’ he admitted.
‘I’ve got to get back there tonight an’ all, cos it’s still
raging. You think you’ve put out one fire, then up it pops somewhere else. The
old hands reckon it’ll take us a fortnight to put it out
completely.’

Mariette had met up with Johnny twice
since Gerald’s death. The first time had been the day after his funeral at the
church in Finchley that his family had always attended. Rose, Lisette and Noah were
with her. Peter and his parents were there too. Gerald’s CO and two of his
closest RAF pals had
a few hours off to
attend the service, and the rest of the congregation were family, neighbours and
Gerald’s childhood friends. To see his parents, grandparents, two sisters and
a younger brother all bowed down with grief was heart-breaking. It was clear to her
that Gerald must have told his family that she was the girl he was going to marry;
when they bravely put aside their own grief to offer her their deepest sympathy, it
made her feel such a fraud. But her tears were real that day. She couldn’t
believe he’d been snatched away so young, before he’d had a chance to
fulfil any of the ambitions he’d confided in her. They were such simple ones
too. He wanted to learn to ride, because he loved horses, to go sailing with
Mariette and to ski in Switzerland. She wished so much there had been time to do all
those things with him, and that she could have truly loved him.

Johnny had telephoned her at work the
following morning, catching her at her lowest ebb, when she was dreading going home
that evening. She knew Rose would want to talk about Gerald and her fears for Peter.
So she agreed to meet Johnny when she finished work.

She was glad she went because he took
her out of herself. He didn’t take life seriously and he saw no reason why she
should either. First he took her to a little restaurant on the Marylebone Road, and
during the meal he told her funny stories about the firemen he worked with, then
they went to a nearby pub where he plied her with drink.

She told him about both Gerald and
Morgan. ‘One is dead and the other doesn’t want me to visit him,’
she said glumly. ‘I feel bad because Gerald cared far more about me than I did
about him. What does that make me?’

‘Honest,’ he said, and
grinned at her. ‘There’s some who would’ve made out he was the
love of their life just to milk the sympathy. You liked him, cared about him, but
you can’t make
yourself fall in
love with someone just because that’s what they hope for. As for this other
geezer that don’t want to see you because he’s injured, I reckon he
either thinks he’s being a hero, or he’s got some other girl he
don’t want you to run into.’

‘I really don’t think
he’s got another girl,’ she said indignantly.

Johnny raised one dark eyebrow
quizzically. ‘Well, thinking he’s a hero is just as bad. He ain’t
got his leg blown off, has he?’

She didn’t know whether to be
offended by his bluntness or glad of it.

‘If he has, he hasn’t told
me so,’ she said. ‘He said it was just some shrapnel.’

Johnny shrugged. ‘I ain’t
got much time for people that can’t be straight. If you want my opinion,
you’re wasting your time worrying about him. A man don’t tell his girl
not to visit him for nothing, it don’t make sense.’

Although Johnny’s lack of sympathy
for Morgan seemed heartless, he did have a knack of putting things into perspective
for her. She didn’t love Morgan – he’d killed that off by his behaviour
towards her – and if Morgan cared for her, as he claimed to do, he should be totally
honest with her. Whether that meant admitting his injuries were worse than
he’d said, or that he had another girl.

But she’d begun to realize that
few people were totally honest. They might not lie exactly but they dressed things
up to be more palatable. Noah wouldn’t have approved of Morgan, if he’d
met him. But on hearing he’d been wounded at Dunkirk, he put on a show of
concern which she knew he didn’t feel. She’d heard people at
Gerald’s funeral say that he would have preferred to die a hero, rather than
live a long and ordinary life. That was rubbish: Gerald had wanted an ordinary life,
the war just got in the way of it.

Noah and Lisette wouldn’t approve
of Johnny either. ‘A cockney spiv’ would be Rose’s opinion, and it
was true that
he was a bit rough around
the edges and not even devilishly handsome like Morgan. But he was bright, funny and
it took as much courage to face huge fires and deal with them as it did to fly a
plane. So maybe he wasn’t going to be Mr Right, but she liked his green eyes
and the mischief in them, she liked the way her hand felt very small in his big one,
and she knew she wanted to see him again.

His red-rimmed eyes and his obvious
bone-weariness at their second meeting had made her like him even more. There was
something very gallant about a man who had been fighting a fire for two days and
could have opted for dropping into the camp bed at the school which had been pressed
into service as a fire station. But he’d found the energy to rush off to meet
her. He even insisted on escorting her home after their supper together, and when he
kissed her at the corner of the street she’d wanted it to go on for ever.

‘I don’t know when I can see
you again,’ he said, running the tip of his finger around her lips and looking
right into her eyes. ‘These bombers aren’t going to give up, I’ve
got a feeling it’s going to get a whole lot worse too. But I’ll ring you
when I can, and next time I’ll take you dancing.’

Soon after it was the congested
commercial areas of the City, and then on 5th September the enemy bombers turned
their attentions to the huge oil installations at Thames Haven and Shell Haven, at
the mouth of the river, setting one tank alight with an incendiary bomb.

Johnny rang her the day after and
described how he’d been standing on the roof of an oil tank, aiming his hose
to cool the other threatened tanks, when a Messerschmitt roared in low with its
machine guns blazing.

‘Most of the blokes ran for
cover,’ he said quite cheerfully. ‘But I was up higher and didn’t
have anywhere to go. And
besides, if
I’d dropped the bleedin’ hose and tried to scarper, the tanks might have
caught fire, and then my mates would all have been trapped, surrounded by fire, so I
had to stay put. Luckily, I didn’t cop it.’

Just that morning, at breakfast, Noah
had been speaking about the attack on the oil installations. He said that, because
of the good safety record enjoyed by the oil companies in the past, there were few
firemen in England with experience of fighting oil fires. He had gone on to say that
the men who’d been dealing with this fire were true heroes because, if it had
spread to the other tanks, it could have led to complete disaster.

Maybe she should have admitted then that
she knew and liked one of those heroes. But coming so soon after Gerald’s
death, it didn’t seem right.

The next morning the air-raid siren
went off. Mariette leapt out of bed and went out on to the landing to see Noah in
his pyjamas, looking out of the window.

He looked round at her. ‘It must
be a false alarm,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a beautiful morning,
the sky is completely clear and cloudless.’

Mariette looked out of the window with
him. As Noah had said, there was nothing in the clear sky to warrant any concern.
‘Maybe bombers are heading towards the area south of the river again,’
she said. ‘Or even the coastal towns. It must just be a general
warning.’

They all went downstairs for a cup of
tea, and it seemed that Noah was right. Everything was calm outside, there were no
people rushing around, and there was the promise of a warm day ahead.

‘Shame you’ve got to work
this morning, we could have gone for a picnic on Hampstead Heath,’ Rose
said.

‘I’m only working until one. And Mr Greville always gets in by seven on
Saturdays, so if I get there early maybe he’ll let me off by eleven,’
Mariette said.

‘It’s funny they
haven’t sounded the all-clear, if it was a mistake,’ Noah said pensively
a little later.

‘I don’t suppose they are
allowed to, as long as something is going on somewhere,’ Rose said.

The plan for a picnic was very
appealing. Leaving Rose to organize it, Mariette got dressed and hurried off to
work. The streets were very quiet still; she didn’t see more than five people
on the way to Baker Street, and they all looked totally untroubled, just going to
work as she was.

Mr Greville was already in the office
and, judging by the crumpled state of his clothes, she thought he’d probably
been there all night. Perhaps he’d been out with friends and couldn’t
make it home. He never said anything about his private life. She knew he lived near
Epping Forest, and that he had a wife and two sons, both of whom were in the army.
But Mrs Greville never came to the office, and Mariette had a feeling they
weren’t very happy together.

She explained why she’d come in
early, and he merely grunted his agreement that she could leave at eleven. So she
sat down at her desk and began typing the letters he’d dictated to her the
previous day.

She hadn’t been there more than
fifteen minutes, when the telephone rang. Greville answered it, and she saw his face
blanch at whatever he was being told.

He thanked whoever he was speaking to,
then put the receiver down. ‘They’ve struck Thames Haven again,’
he said. ‘There are squadrons of bombers supported by hundreds of fighter
planes. Ford Motor Works has been hit, and Beckton Gasworks. They are making for the
docks now and dropping incendiaries.’

‘Oh no!
Then that siren this morning wasn’t a false alarm!’

‘If the factory takes a hit, then
I’ll be finished,’ he said, wringing his hands.

Mariette thought this was a very selfish
worry. She had walked around that area many times now and had seen huge warehouses
full of foodstuffs and other goods vital to the war effort. There were large cargo
vessels, moored like sitting ducks in the bright sunshine, grain silos, flour mills,
tar distilleries, chemical works, paint and varnish works, and acres of timber
stacks which, if once set alight, were likely to explode and spread the fire for
miles. But worse than that – and what Greville ought to have been thinking of – was
the number of houses in that area with so many, many people about to be killed or
injured.

It was then she heard the thudding of
bombs in the distance.

‘Our Johnny!’ Greville said,
dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘It will break my sister’s
heart, if he loses his life.’

Mariette thought perhaps her boss had a
heart after all. She hadn’t let on to him that she and Johnny were more than
passing acquaintances. But as her fear for him began to mount, she wished she could
admit that she cared for Greville’s nephew, if only so they could share their
anxiety.

But this wasn’t the time to tell
Greville such things.

‘The warehouse is quite a way from
the docks,’ she said, getting up and laying a hand on his arm. ‘It may
be safe. As for Johnny, he’s been trained to fight fires, so I’m sure
he’ll be fine. It’s the machinists we should be afraid for; an awful lot
of them live down by the docks.’

Mariette made tea for them both. But as
they drank it, the sound of the bombs grew louder and louder. They heard the drone
of British planes flying overhead too, clearly hoping to fight the enemy planes and
make them turn back.

‘You’d better go home,’ Greville said. ‘And I must go and
see what I can do at the factory.’

‘I’ll come with you,’
she said, without stopping to think what that might entail. ‘It’s the
sturdiest building around there, people might go to it for shelter. There is a
cellar beneath it, isn’t there?’

He looked at her, almost as if seeing
her for the first time. ‘Yes, there is. We might be able to get some of the
goods down there for safety.’

She hadn’t been thinking of the
bales of cloth or sewing machines at all, only the people, but she could work out a
plan on the way there.

The taxi driver turned them out at the
start of Whitechapel High Street. They could hardly expect him to go further as
acrid black smoke was billowing over from the docks. The drone of planes above and
the thud of bombs dropping below, mingled with the sound of ambulance sirens, was
enough to make anyone turn tail and run.

Greville hesitated as they turned into a
narrow side street. ‘Perhaps we should go home while we can,’ he
said.

‘No, we go to the factory,’
she insisted, taking his arm firmly. ‘There have been no bombs here yet.
We’re safe enough.’

It looked to Mariette as if all the
people had fled to shelters, or were cowering indoors, as the streets were totally
deserted. She was afraid now. The black smoke, the fumes of chemicals, the thumping
sound of bombs, the noise of ack-ack guns and the wail of fire and ambulance sirens
made her think they were making their way into Hell.