by Tessa Arlen
FIFTEEN
My grandparents were waiting up for me when I got home. Granny was busily dropping stitches in her knitting. Grandad’s eyes were glued to a newspaper advertisement for baby food. They both threw their props to one side as I came in through the door.
“How was your evening, dear?” Granny patted the space between them on the sofa.
“Cold night. I was just thinking of having a whiskey and soda.” Grandad rarely drank this late at night. They were nervous. Something was up. Granny would not look me directly in the eye, and I prayed we weren’t in for another discussion on ARP patrol being too dangerous for nice young girls of my age. I dutifully sat down, and Granny put her hand over mine.
“Hank Dexter . . . popped over this evening . . .” She stopped and made a silent appeal to her husband.
“Ahem, yes . . . always best to come straight to the point.” Grandad groped for my free hand and held it in a bone-crushing grip that brought tears to my eyes and a strange tingling sensation in my fingertips. “Now, there is no need for alarm, but Griff didn’t make it home this evening with the rest of his squadron.”
No need for alarm? There was a ringing sound in my ears. Random images flashed through my mind: Griff peeling potatoes; throwing sticks for Bess; tinkering with the engine of his beloved Alvis.
But he had told me that good fighter pilots live forever.
I stared at Grandad and he plunged into more explanation. “He was shot down over the Channel. Managed to bail out before . . . before his plane crashed into the drink.” He cleared his throat. “His dinghy inflated when he was in the water, so they know where to look for him. Dexter says they will find him soon.”
But those yellow dinghies—the Americans called them life rafts—were notoriously unreliable. Packed flat for month after month, and now year after year, if they were inflated too quickly they exploded. Not to mention how leaky most of them were. And without a life raft, how could they spot one tiny human head in those miles of choppy gray water? Were they searching with aircraft or boats? How long had they been looking—hours? All day? But I couldn’t get out the words to my questions. My mouth was as dry as sand.
“We are having a particularly warm end to summer,” Granny pointed out. Rain that had threatened all day had finally arrived and was lashing down. People died of hypothermia in the stretch of freezing water that separated England from France. No one swam off the south coast, even on the hottest day in August, unless they were a health nut.
I couldn’t bear the expression of kind concern in Grandad’s eyes; neither could I begin to believe that Griff O’Neal wouldn’t make it back. Bess jumped up on my lap, breaking Granny’s rule about dogs on furniture. I held her to me and for a moment was comforted by her warm doggy body.
My mouth was so dry my tongue felt too big in it. “Did he come down closer to our side or the French coast—do they know?”
Grandad couldn’t take it anymore; he got up and poured two whiskies. I heard the familiar hiss and gurgle of the soda siphon before he put a glass into my hand. “Sip this—slowly—it will do you good.” I nodded and held the drink untasted in my hand.
I repeated my question. “Which side?”
“Hank Dexter said they had just flown over the French coast when they came across a squadron of Messerschmitts. They came up from the west with the sun behind them.”
Then he could just as easily be picked up by Germans as by our navy search team. Griff was probably a prisoner of war right now, his injuries tended to by a German nurse in a prison hospital. That is, if he had survived the drop. I put my untasted whiskey down on the low table in front of me.
“Then we must hope for the best,” I said, no doubt echoing what my mother had said when my father went missing in action almost twenty-four years ago. And I settled in to what so many women did these days: the uneasy business of trying not to unravel as we waited.
* * *
—
WITH NO NEWS of Griff by the end of the next day, I was grateful for the distraction of our air-raid drill. The rain that had been falling on and off since last night had finally let up, and as Bess and I left the lodge, a mist was settling heavy and thick in the meadows down by the river, and the pungent, sharp smell of rotting vegetation scented the damp air. It was a little after midnight as Bess and I stationed ourselves at the bottom of Smithy Lane and waited in the shadows for the air-raid siren on the base to sound its warning.
There is something about the damp cold of our island that seeps deep into your bones. I shivered and pulled the collar of my old tweed hacking jacket up around my ears. How long had Griff had to wait, burdened by his heavy boots, flight suit, and leather jacket, in the chilly waters of the English Channel? Trembling with cold and anticipation, I switched on my torch and looked at my watch for the hundredth time. Three minutes to go to half past twelve. The village was darkly silent around us. I looked up at the sky; the cloud cover obscured all light from moon and stars.
The seconds ticked slowly by, and then the silence of the night was shattered by the loud mechanical wail of the air-raid siren. In that split second, I was back in the East End of London. I looked up at the sky and expected to see searchlights, but the sky remained an implacable black. An air-raid-warning siren has to be one of the most awful sounds in the world. There is a dire note of melancholy portent in its warbling wail, almost as if it is signaling doom. It was a sound I had never wanted to hear in our peaceful village.
Bess, sitting quietly at my feet, leapt up, barking frantically, and then answered the siren with a howl of her own. There was no time to calm her as I started up the slope of Smithy Lane to the village.
The siren was still going when we arrived on the edge of the village green to find everyone out in the High Street, standing in groups and staring up at the sky. What on earth did they expect to see? I fumed. If German fighter planes were to arrive, it would take them seconds to strafe the entire street. I blew my whistle, but of course no one could hear it over the wail of the siren.
“Fast as you can,” I shouted to Mr. and Mrs. Angus, who were standing side by side gawking at the empty sky. “Go to your assigned shelter at the Rose and Crown or the crypt.” I went on to the next group.
There was something both demented and comic about the surging group of villagers, as if they were taking part in a scene with the Keystone Cops. They were all heavily laden with an odd assortment of belongings grabbed at random as they left their houses. Mrs. Angus, her hair in curlers, was carrying a carriage clock and a canary in a cage and shouting instructions to her heavily laden children. Her butcher husband, in pink-and-white-striped pajamas, was clutching his fly-fishing rods and a bag of golf clubs. It was clear what was important in Mr. Angus’s life.
Mrs. Glossop, holding the hands of two sobbing children, was yelling at Mr. Newcombe, who, still in his apron, his hands covered in flour, was standing in the doorway to his bakery in a pool of bright light. “Close that door, you fool!” I heard her shriek as I pushed past her.
I felt like an overactive border collie as I divided the crowd into two lots. One group started up the High Street to the church crypt, as Bess and I chivied the rest of them across the green toward the pub.
The siren finally stopped. “Eight minutes!” I shouted. “You have to move more quickly! But don’t run!” A little girl went sprawling on her stomach, sobbing and clutching her teddy. Her pregnant mother was carrying her two-year-old brother. “Come on, you must get to the church as quickly as possible. Don’t stop!” I said to her as I picked up the little girl and walked ahead of her mother up the street to the church. Normally it takes five minutes to get from one end of the High Street to the other. Tonight, it seemed to take hours. People were toiling up the middle of the street with suitcases, bundles of bedding, prams laden with children, and household treasures. Little Buffenden was so heavily burdened with their property it was amazing they
could move at all.
I shooed the last of my neighbors through the church door to find the marvelously efficient Mrs. Martin counting heads and ticking off names on her list. The vicar was helping mothers with their children, which meant he could not go down the street to assist our elderly villagers, which is what we had planned. “Where is Audrey?” I asked Mrs. Martin.
“Twenty-two, twenty-three—yes, Mrs. Pearson, your daughter and her three are already here, not to worry. Miss Wilkes did not turn up, Poppy.”
Why had I depended on the community’s most antisocial member to help if there was an air raid? “Perhaps she went over to the Rose.” Mrs. Martin ticked off the last of her names. “That’s the lot—all accounted for.”
“I am going over to the Wilkeses now. Will you tell the vicar I’ve borrowed his bike?” And with Bess running at my side, I sped back down the High Street and bumped across the green’s uneven grassy surface to see how many people had made it to the pub’s cellar. I thought at one moment I saw Audrey shouldering her way through a group of giggling and shrieking Girl Guides, but it wasn’t her. She was probably with her family in their farm’s Anderson shelter, which is where those who could not get into the village were to go if there was an air raid. The noise in the pub was overwhelming: everyone was gathered in a tight knot around the bar.
“Don’t stop in ’ere—you need to get down them stairs to the cellar.” Bert Pritchard was brandishing a shotgun. I prayed it wasn’t loaded.
I directed Mrs. Angus with her birdcage to go down the stairs into the cellar, followed by a stream of flustered and unkempt villagers. “The animals went in two by two,” Mr. Angus said in his wheezy, asthmatic voice.
“Watch who you go calling animals.” Mrs. Pritchard shrieked with laughter. She was wearing a cherry-colored dressing gown over something lacey and pink. Mr. Pritchard followed her and closed the door to his cellar behind him.
For the first time in fifteen minutes all was gloriously quiet.
I went outside and stood alone on the green and looked at my watch, and even though I knew it was just a drill, I scanned the sky for the first planes. According to our schedule, the Luftwaffe would have dropped their first bombs three minutes ago, eliminating half the village as they ran up and down the High Street. And if they had been in the mood for a bit of strafing, their Messerschmitts would have finished off any stragglers on the green with the greatest of ease.
“Poppy.” I turned to find Sid standing next to me, Sten gun in his hands.
“Sid, why aren’t you with your mum in your Anderson shelter?” I was staggered to see him standing there, scanning the night sky.
“Mum’s all right. She was in that shelter with Dr. and Mrs. Oliver before you could say Jack Robinson. Seen anything yet?”
“No . . . nothing.”
As always, Sid was fully armed with the facts. “It takes fourteen minutes for the Luftwaffe to fly from the south coast to London. Give them another four at the most to get to Wickham. We should have heard them by now.” He turned to me with none of his usual diffidence. “What are you doing out here, Poppy? You should be down there”—he jerked his head toward the Rose and Crown—“keeping order.”
“What about you?”
“I am waiting for Jerry—I’m going to shoot him out of the sky.”
The all clear sounded and Sid turned a face toward me that was so shocked I almost laughed.
“What happened? Why the all clear? Where are the Germans?”
“It was a drill,” I said and watched his face fall. “An important one, because if it had been a real raid, half the village would be dead and the rest badly injured.” It started to rain, a thin, cold drizzle. I turned to go back into the pub.
“You mean everyone had to get out of their beds in the middle of a night in the rain for a drill?” He sounded incredulous.
“Yes, Sid, because the next time the air-raid warning goes, it will be the real thing and everyone must know exactly what to do. This drill was a fiasco.”
But he wasn’t listening; he was running ahead of me toward the pub porch to get out of the rain. His heroic gesture on the green minutes ago as he readied himself to wipe the German air force from the heavens had gone completely. After all, God knows what would happen to his delicate system if he caught cold.
* * *
—
I WAS GREETED by a hubbub of outrage as I walked into the village hall at ten o’clock the next morning. Cedric Fothergill was standing on the dais, his right hand lifted in an ecclesiastical plea for silence. Mrs. Glossop was standing in the middle of her group of Women’s Institute friends holding forth, with condemning accuracy, on everything that they had done wrong during our air-raid drill. Every one of her sentences started with “What were you thinking?” or ended with “What’s wrong with you?”
The talk and exclamations finally died down, and the vicar could make himself heard.
“Now, settle down, please, settle down. There now, that’s better.” He looked at my grandfather, who was standing with his hands behind his back frowning at everyone. “Anything you would like to say about last night, Major Redfern?”
Grandad cleared his throat. “Like all of you, I believed it was the real thing. My wife and I went immediately to our Anderson shelter. And I wish I could say the same for all of you. If that had been a real air raid last night . . .” He glared around the room and waved his swagger stick at us. “The whole bally lot of you would have been wiped out.” I could see why Grandad was so popular with his Home Guard, who were all in uniform and standing to attention down one side of the hall, their faces stern with judgment. He emanated authority and his timing was perfect.
“How many of you thought to put on your gas masks?” he barked. A few tentative hands were raised in the air, their owners looking smug. “Keep your gas masks handy at all times.”
His frown deepened. “I don’t know what use fishing rods, caged birds, and perambulators full of family photographs would be to anyone during or after an air raid.” He stared at Mr. Angus, and the butcher’s face deepened in hue.
“The reason you leave your house for the safety of a shelter is that it wouldn’t take much to flatten this village in an undefended attack. So, don’t waste your time loading yourself down with useless possessions. When you hear the air-raid siren, pick up your gas mask, get your children out of bed and wrap them in something warm, and make your way to the shelter designated to you in an orderly fashion. And absolutely no running; you will have time to reach safety if you leave your house the minute the siren sounds.”
He stared at us for a moment as if we were particularly slow. “Now, if you live next door to a woman with small children, be neighborly. Help her carry them. I do hope that I am being clear. That’s all I have to say, Reverend, thank you.”
The vicar nodded and glanced at a piece of paper handed to him by his housekeeper. “Mrs. Martin said that once you were all in the crypt, everything was all very orderly. But we need more blankets as we go into colder weather. If any of you can donate a blanket or two for the duration, please let Mrs. Martin know.” He looked around the room and nodded at Bert Pritchard. “Anything you have to add, Mr. Pritchard?”
“Apart from the fact that it was bloo— excuse my French, pandemonium? The most important thing is to help each other get to safety. I didn’t see much of that last night. Women and children first, in an orderly fashion!” He glanced at his wife and she gave him an approving smile.
The vicar cleared his throat. “That was our one and only drill. So, remember: the next time you hear the air-raid siren, don’t stop to ask if it is the real thing—pick up your gas mask and get yourself and your neighbor to safety. Thanks to all of you for coming!”
“But we’re not all here for your debrief.” Mrs. Glossop’s voice was critical. As the leader of the Women’s Institute, she often goes head-to-head with our v
icar on points of accuracy. “Where’s Audrey Wilkes? Isn’t she in charge of the kiddies that go to the church? Where was she last night? That’s what I want to know.”
“All the farms and outliers have Anderson shelters,” Mrs. Pritchard corrected her. “They don’t need to come into the village.”
“Of course the Wilkeses are not here; they aren’t village!” called out Mr. Angus in his wheezy voice. “It’s only village that use the crypt or the Rose as an air-raid shelter.” He was right, of course. If there was an air raid, Audrey would go with her parents and Percy to their Anderson shelter. Her helping Mrs. Martin had only been for the drill.
Perhaps Audrey had forgotten that it was a drill. I walked over to Mrs. Martin. “Audrey didn’t turn up at the vicarage after the drill, did she?”
“I didn’t see her all evening. I thought she might have gone to the Rose and Crown.”
“I didn’t see her there. Not even after the all clear.”
As I pushed my way through the crowd to the door, I wondered how Mrs. Glossop knew about my enlisting Audrey’s help at the church crypt for the air-raid drill.
* * *
—
“OF COURSE, WE had no idea it was just a drill. Audrey told us she was on her way to the vicarage to help Mrs. Martin organize for the jumble sale. Then when the siren went, I thought at least she’s safe down in that crypt. It was raining heavily when the all clear went, and we assumed she was spending the night at the vicarage—she does that sometimes if she’s been helping Mrs. Martin.” Mrs. Wilkes was chopping carrots and cabbage at the kitchen table.
“But Audrey didn’t turn up at the crypt for the drill, Mrs. Wilkes. When did you last see her?”
“She had her tea as usual, and just as it was getting dark she said she was off to help Mrs. Martin with the . . .” I watched the color drain from her face as she realized what she had just said. She slumped down into a chair, her face as white as chalk. “Oh dear God,” was all she said.