The Lynmara Legacy

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘Yes ‒ everything’s all right.’

  ‘Good ‒ take care of yourself and the boys. See you soon.’ He too was in a hurry, Nicole thought, after he had hung up. He was in the fight at last, and there was no time for anything else. She thought it might become possible to hate the men who had embraced the war so easily and so well ‒ men like Richard and Lloyd and Ross.

  That June of beautiful summer weather saw the end of fighting on the Continent for some time. Dumbly they listened to the news that Italy had declared war, now the fall of France seemed imminent, and the invasion of Britain only a matter of time and planning. The Germans swept through France and on 14 June, entered Paris. By 22 June the French had signed an armistice with Germany in the same railway carriage at Compiègne which had seen the same ceremony in 1918. Britain braced itself for bombing, and once again Fenton Field was crowded with evacuees.

  ‘What a place to bring them,’ Judy said with a trace of bitterness. ‘We could be having Germans marching across the fields any day now.’

  Ben came home from the hospital and helped pull down all the road signs so that the enemy might be confused as to their location. Churches were forbidden to toll their bells; that was to be the signal for invasion. Farmers sharpened pitchforks, ready for the troops that might descend from the sky. There was still no news of Allan; Nicole began to dread the arrival of Joan Fenton in the big kitchen ‒ the moment of hope when the door opened, and then the sight of the dark gauntness of her face, the silent shake of the head, the shrug. There were still men waiting for evacuation all along the coast of France, men sent there in a last desperate effort to turn the tide of battle. Allan was with the 61st Division. They were at Brest and Bayonne, at Bordeaux and St Jean de Luz. About half a million men were evacuated from France that month. About two-thirds were British, the rest were a motley mixture of French, Polish, Czech, Canadian and Belgian. No official telegram reached Joan at the house along the road from Fenton Field. She coped with her own tasks, and her own evacuees, and no word of Allan came.

  So the remnants of a great army gathered in England, and were almost without weapons. Churchill told the House of Commons, and the speech was reported on the radio, ‘When Napoleon lay at Boulogne, he was told “There are bitter weeds in England”. There are certainly a great many more of them since the British Expeditionary Force returned.’ He went on to his climax. ‘We shall go on to the end … We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.’

  Never surrender. Nicole went to feed the hens and the words haunted her. Never surrender. What in God’s name were she and the boys and Lloyd doing in a place where the thought of bloody battle should even be possible? Surely now Lloyd would see that they had no business here. But now the way was barred. He was locked into his work here, and he would not, in his own fashion, surrender it either. And for her, there was no way out. She stared over the sweet green pastures of Fenton Field and tried to imagine it as she had seen the pictures of the battle-scarred villages and fields of western Europe. It seemed beyond imagination, and yet she knew it was a possibility. ‘There are bitter weeds in England.’

  How she hated all the men who had made this war ‒ the unknown men who were only names to her, and the completely unknown men who had stood behind them, done their planning, written their ultimatums. And what was the use of hatred? It produced nothing. She might turn and hate Lloyd and Richard and Ross and Allan ‒ even Andrew. It produced nothing. They were pawns in this, as she was ‒ she and her children. Far better to turn to what might do some good. So she went about her business in the hen-run. There were much fewer eggs than usual. She scrambled about in the nests, looked everywhere that the hens had ever laid before. The count was smaller. They flocked about her, those hens, as they always did. She listened to their raucous cries for a moment, and then her frustration and fear were let loose.

  ‘Never surrender, you hear? Never! You stupid birds. Don’t you know you have to lay more than ever? Don’t you know? We’re going to be invaded, and you’d better be done with your laying. Oh, why, now ‒ now. You know we need the eggs? What about them ‒ eh? What about them?’

  She brandished her arms and they scuttled back from her in alarm. And then she realized that she had never spoken to them in these tones before, and it could result in a further falling-off in the laying. So she made conciliatory gestures with her hands and stood still. Gradually the agitation among the fowls died down. To her surprise she could hear her own voice, tunelessly croaking because of the tightness in her throat, into that perfect June evening, the Brahms lullaby.

  ‘Lullaby, and good night …’ She didn’t know the rest of the words so she just kept up the melody; eventually the birds settled down and seemed as if they might go peacefully to roost. ‘Lullaby; and good night …’

  A strange piece of news came to Nicole shortly after the fall of Paris. Everyone now scanned the death notices in The Times ‒ there were names of school friends, the brothers, sons, husbands of acquaintances scattered all over England and Scotland. One day Margaret gravely handed the paper to Nicole when she came in from the stables. ‘Gerald Agar,’ she said.

  Nicole snatched the paper. ‘Sir Gerald Agar, 7th Baronet, in Paris …’ The notice was painfully brief. It gave him no service rank, nor the cause of death. Nicole spent an hour trying to reach Charles in his Whitehall office. ‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ he said. ‘Though what the hell Gerald Agar was doing in Paris at that time, I can’t imagine. Perhaps he was waiting for his Nazi chums.’

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you with it, Uncle Charles ‒ but I want to know. He can’t have ‒’

  ‘Don’t be surprised at anything, Nicole,’ Charles said curtly, and hung up.

  He rang back late that night. ‘Best information I’ve been able to dig up,’ he said tersely. ‘Agar wasn’t in any of the services. He simply hasn’t been in England since war broke out. They fished his body out of the Seine. It rather looks as if someone had taken some pretty frightful reprisal against him. You know, not all the French agreed with the Armistice. They thought they’d been sold out. I don’t know where Agar fitted in, except that he was known to be living there apparently without any plan to leave before the Germans marched in. It’s hardly the way an Englishman acts …’ Charles’s tone was tight with suppressed anger. He, like many, believed that Hitler would now move very swiftly to an invasion of England, and the thought of an Englishman calmly awaiting the arrival of the Germans in Paris roused him to fury. ‘It’s taken a bit of time for all this to be confirmed. The body had to be identified. The information came through the Red Cross in the end. Naturally the family isn’t saying much. What can you say about a man whom everyone supposes was collaborating with the enemy? Did you know he’d been kicked out of his London clubs long ago? In absentia, of course.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Nicole said. ‘Not Gerry. I’ll never believe that that’s the whole story.’

  ‘Well, my dear, that’s the official story now, and from what I know, it’s the true one. Don’t grieve for him, Nicole. There are plenty of decent men who didn’t come back. Perhaps he helped in that …’

  The house in Grosvenor Terrace which Gerald Agar had once visited, wore a wartime look of innocence. It was sandbagged and had heavy air-raid shutters on the windows. It now wore a name-plate of the Ministry of Food, Research Division. No ration books were kept there, nor did any of the public ever make routine enquiries there about food, or how to apply for ration books, how to report lost ones. Any who did wander in were directed to the nearest branch by the commissionaire. The man who had once interviewed Gerald Agar still had his office there, and in the basement were enormous steel fire-proof files. The file on Gerald Agar was removed from one, which had been active, and placed in another, which was dead storage.

  The organization knew almost all the details of the death of Gerald Agar. He
had died under torture by the SS, who had, by a freak chance, discovered the game he had played all these years with their high-ranking masters in Berlin. It would not have done to expose the mistakes of their masters, so it was better that a doubt should exist as to why Gerald Agar had died. Reprisals of French patriots seemed an obvious answer, so the body was dumped where it could be found, and with identification. In London there was concern for some time that the SS might have extracted information from Agar before he died, but time went by, and the next link in the chain seemed safe enough, and still covered. They breathed a little more easily, and turned to the task of recruiting more agents who might operate under the eyes of the Nazis. Gerald Agar had been valuable, but he was dead, and his value had ended.

  The man who had once talked with him in that room reviewed the file for the last time, before it went into its dark storage place. Agar had been a rather special case, a case of a man who had been willing to appear to be a traitor in the eyes of his own countrymen in order to serve them. The man who had given him orders thought that that required a rather higher order of courage than the type displayed by men who won medals for gallantry in the heat of battle. Only if Agar had survived the war, and only if Germany had lost, could his reputation ever have been salvaged. And the man knew human nature well enough to know that no medal from the King after the war would ever have erased from people’s minds the memory of Agar spending the war in a German-occupied country. It was still possible that it might be done, when the war was over. But to the man the war looked as if it might go on for a long time, and so Gerald Agar’s file would remain hidden and highly secret. To the man’s way of thinking Gerald Agar had been the only kind of patriot that mattered, the one who was willing to do the dirty and dangerous things, with little chance of recognition. But Agar had known that, had taken his risks, and finally lost. He had given his life, and his good name as well.

  3

  The Battle of Britain began in a quiet, almost unnoticed fashion. It was the strategy of the Luftwaffe to draw the squadrons of Fighter Command out over the Channel by attacking the convoys of ships passing through it. The shorter range of the German Messerschmitts made this desirable, and there was the hope that a British pilot shot down over the sea would never return to fly another plane. Early in July the attacks on Channel convoys began, and the RAF went up to intercept. The losses were heavy, more than Fighter Command could stand, but they had the advantage over the Germans of the possession of radar, in an early form. This let them keep their fighters on the ground until the last moment, conserving fuel and saving their pilots from the task of having to seek out their enemy. To the Luftwaffe these air battles over the Channel were part of the plan to destroy Fighter Command and leave the way open for invasion. They envisaged the coasts of England across the Channel unprotected by fighter aircraft. It was a dream that drew them to destruction.

  Now the skies over Fenton Field sounded almost hourly with the drone of planes, coming and going from their stations. For the family there was the added anguish of knowing that any of those planes might be piloted by Richard, who was part of Eleven Group, the group whose aerodromes covered the whole slice of south-east England from the Isle of Wight up to Suffolk. The teasing attacks on the convoys continued, and Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding began to protest the very presence of the merchant ships there. His strength was being wasted, he said. Eventually it was decided that the convoys would sail only at night. The Luftwaffe then turned its attention to the Royal Navy, and the news came that German troops intended for the invasion had begun massing in their newly-won French ports across the Channel.

  It was then that Margaret Fenton made one of her few gloomy remarks. ‘I feel as if I just stretched out my hand far enough, I could touch them. They’re just such a few miles away …’

  That also was the day that Joan Fenton burst into the kitchen with the telegram form in her hand. ‘He’s alive! He’s a prisoner ‒ but he’s alive!’ Then she broke down and sobbed in hysterical relief, and Nicole went down to the cellar and, without compunction, poured half a tumbler of Gavin’s precious malt whisky and made her drink it. The telegram had said that Allan had been wounded, but not seriously. It would be possible, later, to have direct contact through the Red Cross. They did not yet know where Allan was imprisoned. Nicole looked fearfully at the kitchen map. Hitler owned so much of Europe now.

  The pace of the air battles stepped up. The German dive-bombers attacked the shipping, while individual battles went on between the RAF and the Luftwaffe fighter planes. Richard, whose squadron had been stood down for three days’ rest, decided to come down to Fenton Field. He seemed to them all to be in quite impossibly high spirits. ‘This is it! We’ll beat them in the air, and they’ll never invade. Give us just a little more time, and we’ll be chasing them back across France.’ No one believed him. Nicole thought he had about him an air of euphoria, almost as if the action he was engaged in was some kind of powerful drug. He spent, in those three days, when the weather was ironically beautiful, most of his time out of doors, field glasses in hand, watching the planes that went over. Almost as if he could not bear to be away from it, he hitched a lift to Dover to watch the battles over the Channel. ‘We’re not doing badly,’ he pronounced. ‘Not badly at all.’

  They did not know that Hitler had given his directive. ‘The German Air Force is to overpower the English Air Force with all the forces at its command.’ Goering issued a timetable for his Luftwaffe. RAF fighter defences in the south of England were to be smashed in four days, and the whole RAF must be defeated in four weeks. Then the way would be open for Hitler’s Operation Eagle, the invasion of Britain.

  Richard, sharing with his family in the kitchen the three bottles of gin he had managed to bring with him, talked laconically about Celia. ‘Well, she’s gone and done an officer training course, and has landed herself at Stanmore, under Dowding in Fighter Command. Funny to think my little wife might be one of those cool and efficient ladies who send the signal that gets my squadron into the air. Of course, “dear Daddy” had some pull in getting her there, but she seems to be making out all right ‒ if I’m to believe those very precise little notes she writes me. So discreet. No information given. She isn’t an Air Vice-Marshal’s daughter for nothing. Funny, the mouse is turning into a lion, but the lion isn’t very feminine. There isn’t even the mouse to come home to any more.’

  Nicole blazed at him. ‘If you’d paid her a little more attention, she might still be here for you to come home to.’

  He looked at her with the kind of gaze that seemed to take in everything she now was that she hated ‒ the tired, unglamorous, half-washed tender of pigs and cattle and hens and cabbages. ‘Well, you’ve made yourself into a nice, good, quiet, little hausfrau, but you don’t notice Lloyd here every half-day he gets off … Perhaps you should have done what he wanted. He would have a beautiful memory of a beautiful woman waiting for him snugly in a house in Boston. The trouble with you, Nicole, is that you’ve overplayed your hand. You’ve made him feel guilty by staying here. You’ve become the super-patriot, denying yourself everything, going around looking like a hag, just to let him know what he’s done to you. You’ve made him feel guilty, and men don’t like to feel that way about women ‒ especially not their wives.’

  Her nerves, which every day seemed to grow more taut, snapped. In full view of Margaret and Andrew she reached across and slapped Richard on the cheek. The sound seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet of the kitchen.

  But her anger could only be sustained for an instant; she was filled with horror at what she had done. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said immediately. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I shouldn’t have done that …’

  ‘Please forget it,’ he said. ‘I asked for it. It’s none of my business. Listen, why don’t you get a dress on and we’ll go down to the local. You don’t ever leave this place. That’s part of the trouble.’

  ‘I can’t … thanks, Richard.’ And she turned and fled
out of the kitchen and straight out to the pigsties. She no longer went even to the orchard when she wanted to be alone. It was too hard to go there, the memories were of better times, and the contrast was too painful.

  The big, cheerful-faced animals came to the fence to greet her, even though she wasn’t carrying the swill buckets. ‘Of course he’s right,’ she said to them, and the grunts seemed to be agreement. ‘I’ve turned myself into a drab martyr, showing him and everyone else what a good little girl I’m being. I should have had a few extravagant weekends in London with Lloyd. Got to a hairdresser. I’ve got all the clothes I brought over last year. Why do I think I have to live in dirty pants and a sweater?’ She looked at the big pink bodies crowding on the other side of the fence. ‘Well ‒ shall I do it? Shall I break out? Now that Ben’s back Andrew could spare me …’ They grunted back, and that also was agreement.

  But when she finally reached Lloyd by telephone at the hospital near Fighter Command base at Maidstone, he was discouraging. ‘I just don’t think it can be managed, Nicky. Since all this new activity started, we don’t get more than a few hours to sleep even. There are pretty heavy casualties ‒ a good few of those who bail out survive, you know, but with some pretty shocking wounds. I’m back doing just routine general surgery most of the time. Trying to save arms and legs. Occasionally we get something in the spine that I go to work on. Of course there’s still a lot of the chaps who were brought in after Dunkirk … Honestly, Nicky, things are so busy here I just can’t even ask for leave, much less expect it. You understand, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said dully. ‘I understand. It was just a thought. We just don’t seem to have had any time to ourselves for so long … You’ll let me know when you can get away, won’t you? I’ve just had a lecture from Richard on looking like something that came in with the cows ‒’

  ‘Richard? And what damn business is it of his how you look?’