Daisy's Wars

by Meg Henderson

‘Daisy,’ Dotty said gently, ‘you have no idea how you’ve lifted my guilt all these years. If you hadn’t been here as the daughter she wished she’d had I wouldn’t have been able to live the way I wanted. You freed me, do you realise that? I’m so grateful to you for being Mar’s daughter, for caring for her the way I should have, and she was right, Granny’s baubles are yours. I’d only sell them.’

  ‘She said that!’ Daisy laughed.

  ‘I’ll bet she did! You keep them, Daisy, hand them on to your daughter, that’s what Mar would’ve wanted.’

  ‘My girl is a revolutionary,’ Daisy giggled, thinking of Katie in diamonds. ‘She’d have me arrested for betraying whichever cause she currently believes in!’

  ‘Yes, well, we were all like that, Daisy,’ Dotty replied. ‘We all change as we get older, look at us!’

  Two weeks later, just after New Year, with the family – minus Katie – still with them, Peter died.

  He had insisted on taking everyone outside to see the snow-drops that he was always boasting came through earlier in his garden than anywhere else. And he just dropped to the ground. Not a sound, no cry or sigh. A stroke, the doctor said, he hadn’t felt a thing, and he’d died with most of his family around him.

  Katie came home for her father’s funeral, wearing a dress and torturing herself for not being there when he died. She knew he was old, but she’d expected him to go on forever, she said, and she wished she hadn’t argued with him so much and that she’d come home oftener, unaware, as the young always are, that she was saying what every generation has always said and always will on similar occasions.

  David had received the message sent to him and made it home in time, looking taller, broader and more grown-up than Daisy expected; she wished his father could have seen him. She was surprised by how weak she felt. She knew Peter had been getting on, she had been almost nursing him for the last ten years and had thought ahead to this moment more than once, but now it had come she felt so much older than her fifty-four years. And alone; very alone.

  Even so, she insisted that they all went back to their lives to leave her to come to terms with her new status. It had sounded so convincing, too. Not for the first time in her life she surprised herself, but it was so hard to take in, so hard not to keep looking for him, listening for him, and the feeling in the night when she stretched her arm out and found that empty cold space in their bed was too much to bear. She had refused to wash the pillowcase his head had lain on, so that she could have the smell of him still, and she could hug the pillow for the rest of the night, crying and wondering if it was possible to go on with this pain.

  The children were wonderful, of course, but there were things, shared little and big things between husband and wife, that children couldn’t and shouldn’t share. Things that didn’t need words, only a glance, memories that were theirs alone. The nonsense when they had first met and she thought he was insane; their first time in the inn before they were married, when they’d escaped from Mar and Par’s huge, noisy party; the moments immediately after David and Katie were born … and now there was no one to share them with. He had made her into her own person, she had worked that out long ago. He had brought ‘the real Daisy’ back to life and allowed her to blossom under his care. She had so much to feel grateful for, so much to miss.

  It was a letter from Edith in reply to hers telling her of Peter’s death that saved her. They had kept in touch, meeting up on Edith’s three or four visits home in the last thirty years, and they wrote, not weekly, not even monthly sometimes, but every now and again. Edith invited her to come out to Brisbane, saying the sun would do her much more good than a winter in England.

  At first she dismissed the idea. She didn’t think she could make such a long journey without Peter, and part of her didn’t want to leave him lying in the cemetery for so long on his own, though she knew he would tell her that was illogical. It would also have made him laugh, she thought, and that’s what decided her to go.

  She had done a lot of thinking in these last few months, events like this did that. She supposed it was a kind of filing system in the head, and now that something else had to be filed, too, other thoughts were being jostled to the surface. Thoughts about the war years occupied her mind, and how they had all joined the WAAFs because of the flying, the idea of getting up, up and away, escaping from their normal lives. A few of the girls did get into the air, though every WAAF and every pilot who took them up would’ve been on a charge if they’d been found out. There was that one girl who’d persuaded a Fly Boy to take her for a spin in a fighter, if she remembered correctly, and it had crashed, killing both of them. Funny the things you had barely registered originally that came into your mind at a time like this.

  The day before Daisy was due to fly out she was reading a newspaper when her eye was caught by a single paragraph down in the corner. She almost dropped the paper on the floor. The RAF Air Historical Branch was appealing for friends or relatives of two gunners who had served on a Lancaster Bomber in the war. The plane had been shot down over Normandy on the way back from a raid on Italy in August 1943, and had recently been recovered during road-works. The remains of several of the crew had been identified, among them the skipper, Flying Officer Calum R MacDonald of the RCAF – Calli! – and Flt Engineer Graeme Shaw, also of the RCAF – Bruiser! She had just been thinking back on those years, so the appearance of that tiny piece of newspaper almost made her collapse.

  The boys had been found after all these years and would be buried in Normandy where they had died. Once she had gathered her thoughts she wondered what to do. Should she cancel her trip to Australia and go to Normandy instead? Did she have any right to go there? What would the boys’ relatives think and what was she to say to them? And she wondered if Eileen knew, and, if she did, how she was coping. Daisy had just lost Peter, and for Eileen this news must feel like losing Calli all over again.

  In a strange way she still thought of them as she had last seen them. What was it that poem from World War One had said? ‘They shall not grow old,’ and it was true. She imagined going to Normandy and meeting them again, all of them as they were, jumping about and teasing each other, and saying, ‘Daisy, how come you’re so old?’

  Eileen’s lovely boy with the dark, serious eyes. Calli. She had kissed him on the cheek before they left on that last mission because he said he was spooked, and he looked it. And Bruiser had leaped to his feet in his usual mad way, proclaiming that he was the most spooked of all, so where was his kiss? She could still hear their voices in her head, see the two replacement gunners watching them rolling about the NAAFI floor, wrestling over Bruiser’s missed kiss. The two new gunners had just arrived, she remembered them standing back and laughing, feeling not enough part of the crew yet to join in. They never did reach that stage, she thought, they died a matter of hours later, and, though she never got to know them, she still had a snapshot of their faces, their young, young faces, in her mind.

  She should have given Bruiser his kiss, but to have relented then would have spooked Calli more because it would have been so out of the ordinary. Although the kiss she had given him was, too, wasn’t it? Bruiser would look at her with those big, soft eyes and that silly smile, and he always blew her a kiss. It had been one of Peter’s habits, too.

  It was too much, she thought, crying again, after going through losing and burying Peter she couldn’t watch the boys being buried, too, even after all this time. She would send flowers, she decided, and now she would definitely find Eileen when she came home.

  On the flight to Australia, Daisy slept a lot of the time, and being able to afford to fly First Class helped considerably. She told the stewardesses she was taking a sleeping pill and not to wake her, then wondered if they might think she was about to commit a very expensive suicide.

  Every time she closed her eyes she found a jumble of images waiting for her in her dreams, with Peter and Frank, Calli and Bruiser, and all the shot-up, crashed planes she had ever encountered
, and the voices of the pilots crystal-clear, asking for permission to land or to die. On the few occasions when she woke during the long journey, she wondered if she had made the right decision. Perhaps she should have gone to Normandy; after all, Brisbane would still be there another day. Then she thought again about the reason for the gathering in France and knew she couldn’t have handled it at the moment.

  Brisbane was hot, too hot really, though it was famed for its balmy climate and it was the end of summer there. Edith was used to it, she even spoke with an Australian accent, and she and Doug had four huge, sun-bronzed men they claimed were their sons, and a whole host of grandchildren. It was good to be with a family again, and they were a friendly lot, demanding to know if it was true their mother had run the entire RAF throughout the war, as she claimed, or had she made the whole thing up? Though they were teasing Edith they were more impressed than they had expected when Daisy told them some of the old stories.

  Even though everyone was welcoming, Daisy felt odd being on her own and only stayed for a full month so as not to offend Edith. She longed to be at home in Oxford, though, where the summers were kinder and cooler than Brisbane winters, and she was glad when a respectable four weeks had passed and she could make plans for her return.

  She was packing one day, ready for the off, the TV playing in the background, and though she was only half-listening she heard something about World War Two. Like all of those who took part in the war, to Daisy those years were the most intense and productive of her life. It was something to do with the close relationships and the kind of responsibilities they knew they would never have again, a feeling that they were doing something of supreme importance and the lives of others depended on them. So, hearing the commentator talking about those days, she shouted to Edith who was baking in the kitchen, stopped packing and sat on the arm of a chair to listen and watch.

  Films of D-Day were being replayed. Would anyone of her generation ever forget those pictures of young boys with anxious expressions jumping from landing craft into the water, with those French houses in the background? The boys fighting ashore or dying in the water and on the beaches were, the commentator said, supported by ‘planes from all over the world, including the only all-Australian Spitfire Squadron based in the UK’, and Daisy’s heart was in her mouth. ‘They were stationed in the remote Orkney and Shetland Islands to the far north of Scotland,’ he was saying, as she desperately examined the faces on screen for the one she knew.

  They were all so impossibly young, you knew that at the time, but looking back at them now brought a lump to the throat, especially when you had a son of a similar age. ‘One pilot, who had previously survived the Battle of Britain, and also lasted almost to the end of Operation Overlord before being shot down and badly burned, was Queensland man, Frank Moran, from Dalby in the Darling Downs,’ said the commentator. Daisy watched the old film footage on the screen, hardly able to breathe, then a voice came over the images, before the camera picked up the owner of the voice.

  It was Frank. He was much older and the scarring from the burns had rendered him only barely recognisable as the boy he once was. As if to reassure the viewer that it was him, a picture was shown of him as he was before he was shot down.

  But it couldn’t be him: Frank had died in 1944, she knew that.

  Daisy’s heart was beating in an odd way. She couldn’t focus her eyes properly, and, simultaneously, the words coming from the TV seemed to be echoing in a cave. Then her legs fell away from her body and she was on the floor, with Edith’s voice coming from a long way off, telling her it was just the heat, she wasn’t used to it and not to worry, everything was OK.

  But it wasn’t OK. She’d just seen a man who had died thirty-one years ago, and he was talking on TV in the present day. And not just any man, but Frank. Frank! She got up and sat on the chair.

  ‘Did you see him?’ she asked Edith.

  ‘Who? Oh, the Spit pilot? Yes, I saw him. What terrible burns, but then the Spit guys always got the worst burns, didn’t they?’

  ‘But did you see Frank?’ Daisy asked desperately, then remembered that Edith had never met him.

  ‘Was that his name?’ Edith asked, applying an ice-cold compress to the back of Daisy’s neck. ‘I didn’t hear that. Look, I think you ought to lie down.’

  ‘But it was Frank,’ she kept murmuring, ‘and Frank’s dead, but he was alive.’

  ‘I take it you knew him?’ Edith asked, and Daisy nodded.

  ‘It was Frank,’ she repeated, allowing herself to be led to her room to lie down.

  So what was she supposed to do now? she wondered, lying in the blessedly air-conditioned room. Within a few months she had buried Peter, then heard that Calli, Bruiser and the others had been found in their Lanc, over thirty years after they had died, and were about to be buried in Normandy. And here she was in Australia, watching a man she was sure was dead talking on TV. Was there some sort of etiquette that covered these situations?

  She lay in the bedroom for a long time, she had no idea how long, and when Edith popped her head round the door to check on her, she asked, ‘Where are the Darling Downs? Are they far?’

  ‘Do you want to go there?’ Edith asked. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, it’s where everyone in this area goes to escape the heat. It’s the very place for you.’

  ‘So it’s near?’

  ‘A couple of hours away, maybe. It’s an agricultural area.’

  Daisy nodded. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Been reading up on it, have you?’

  ‘Yes, something like that.’

  ‘It’s that pilot, isn’t it?’ Edith asked quietly. ‘The one on the TV?’

  ‘Yes,’ Daisy smiled. ‘That’s where he lives, or did. But even if he’s not there any longer, someone there must know where he is.’

  ‘We could try the phone book.’

  Daisy shook her head. ‘I want to go there.’

  ‘Do you want me to go with you?’ Edith asked, perplexed by how serious and determined Daisy sounded.

  ‘No,’ she laughed, ‘just point me in the right direction.’

  Edith sat on the bed beside her. ‘I’ll drive you there, Daisy,’ she said. ‘If we find this, er, Frank?’

  Daisy nodded.

  ‘If we find him there I’ll drop you off and come back for you. Don’t argue, you don’t know the way or the area, I’ll drive you there.’

  Dalby looked like anyone’s idea of a farming town, the kind of place that moved slowly, and everyone seemed to know everyone else. Daisy and Edith stopped at what looked like a general store and Daisy got out of the car and bought some soft drinks that were, thankfully, ice-cold. The man behind the counter, about her own age, fair hair going grey, blue eyes, stocky build, was friendly, wanted to know where she came from and how she was enjoying her stay.

  She said she was looking for Frank Moran and the man became slightly more suspicious.

  ‘You’re not one of those damned reporters or TV people, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Daisy replied, opening a bottle of juice and drinking it.

  ‘It’s just that we’ve had quite a few of them here since Frank did that TV thing a while back. Can’t think why he did it, he was always a bit shy after he came back, with the scars and that, didn’t like people staring at him. Then he goes and does that TV thing, never did understand that.’ He shook his head. ‘Now it’s been repeated and it’ll all start up again,’ he said peevishly.

  ‘But they must spend money when they come here, so what’s the problem?’

  ‘No problem, really, I don’t suppose,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Just don’t like them taking their photos and making him look like a freak.’ He looked at her, still not sure about her.

  ‘I was a WAAF during the war,’ she explained. ‘I worked in the tower at an RAF station. I knew Frank then. I thought he’d died when he was shot down, but I saw him on TV and realised he was alive. Couldn’t belie
ve it, it was quite a shock.’

  ‘Nearly was dead,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘Even after he came home it was a long time before he looked like he might live. Broke his mother’s heart. I remember him from when we were kids, he was always so good-looking. I almost cried myself when. I saw what they’d done to him. I was in the army, came through without a scratch. But he got married, a local girl, had kids. He’s widowed now, still living on the farm, but his son works it now.’

  ‘Is there somewhere I can call him from?’ Daisy asked, opening the other bottle. ‘I don’t want to just walk in on him after all these years.’

  The man nodded to a phone. ‘I’ll give you his number. Tell him you’re at Isaac’s.’ He put out a hand. ‘I’m his cousin.’

  She smiled; they’d crossed some sort of barrier. ‘Thanks, Isaac.’

  The phone was answered after what seemed like hours. ‘Can I speak to Frank?’ she asked.

  ‘This is Frank,’ the voice replied, but she didn’t recognise it.

  She turned to Isaac. ‘This doesn’t sound like him!’ she whispered.

  He smiled as he took the receiver from her. ‘Hi, Frank, it’s Isaac. Got a lady here looking for the old man, not you. Yeah,’ he chuckled, ‘that’s right, an old flame, but this one’s from England.’

  Daisy glared at Isaac as he returned the receiver, then she heard a voice. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Frank?’ she asked.

  There was a long silence. ‘Frank?’ she said again. ‘Frank, it’s—’

  ‘I know who it is,’ he said quietly. ‘How are you, Daisy?’

  ‘I’m fine, Frank,’ she replied. ‘How did you guess who it was?’

  ‘Remembered the voice,’ he said, and she pictured him smiling, not as he was now, but as he had been.

  Her mouth was dry. She motioned to Isaac for another drink. ‘Would you believe I was just passing and—’

  Frank laughed. ‘—thought you’d stop off for a chat with an old friend?’ he asked.

  When she put down the receiver she stood with a hand over her mouth, trying to compose herself. Isaac handed her a drink.