‘Oh, Lloyd, don’t get so het up. I deserved it, I expect. Everyone’s nerves are a bit on edge. And Richard ‒ he’s wound up tight as a wire and all he wants is to get back into the air again. You’d think he enjoyed shooting it out up there ‒ and being shot at.’
‘Some of them do, Nicky. Some of them do,’ Lloyd answered soberly. ‘I don’t know about these fighter pilots … Strange lot. Some of them come to visit their buddies here. I wonder how most of them are going to come back to earth when it’s over … Well, I’d better go. Take care of yourself. Take care of the kids. I love you.’
Then he was gone, and the flush of excitement which had accompanied her thought of meeting him in London for a few days’ leave died into dull disappointment. She sat beside the telephone for a while. Then she looked at her watch. It was coming up to the time for the evening milking. But before she went out she went back to the kitchen and sat with Margaret and sipped the rest of the gin she had left when she had walked out on Richard.
‘No leave for Lloyd,’ she said, slumping down in her chair. ‘It was rottenly selfish of me to ask it. He’s probably busier now than he’s ever been in his life.’
‘Why don’t you let yourself be a bit selfish now and again, Nicole? We all need it, you know. Very few of us were born saints.’
‘You say that, Aunt Margaret. I’m pretty certain you’re one of the ones who was born nearly a saint. The trouble is, I’m terrified of people finding out how selfish I really am.’ She poured herself another gin. ‘So I lean over backwards so no one will notice. But Richard has seen it. He always knew me pretty well.’ She looked at her watch and drained the gin. ‘Time for the milking. If Richard comes in, tell him I’d love to go for a drink at the local with him, if the invitation is still on. And tell him I’ll wear my nicest dress, and perfume. The warriors are at least entitled to that, aren’t they?’
Margaret watched her walk across the farmyard towards the milking sheds. She was back to that dangerous degree of thinness she had possessed in those few days when she had waited here with Lloyd before her marriage. Her face now, though, was that of a woman, not a girl; it had gained strength and maturity and therefore the lines of strain were more threatening of real danger should she break. Margaret wondered how it would be possible to make her stop this compulsive routine of hard and distasteful tasks she had set herself. She must try … she must find something else for Nicole to do, something with a little more gaiety in it, something to make her smile. Then she looked at the clock and knew in half an hour she was due at a WVS meeting. She scribbled a note for Richard and went out into the scullery to find Wilks. He was peeling potatoes, something that would have been unthinkable if there had been other help in the house. ‘You’ll make sure that Master Richard gets it, won’t you? I must fly now …’ And she was off, on a routine just as binding as Nicole’s was, and at her age, far more wearying.
Nicole bathed and dressed with care, and they walked in the summer twilight to the pub in Stokeley, a mile away. The place was packed and thick with smoke; the windows sealed with black-out curtains. There were many veterans of Dunkirk there, and some, like Richard, wearing the insignia of Fighter Command. All of them had their own stories to tell. Richard was hailed by some of the regulars who knew him, and pressed for details on how the fight was going. ‘Don’t know,’ Richard said cheerfully. ‘I only know what our own chaps shoot down ‒ and that’s been a fair few. Don’t worry ‒ we’ll blast them out of the sky.’
‘Didn’t see so many of your lot about when I was on the beach at Dunkirk,’ one young soldier grumbled.
‘You didn’t see us because we were keeping the Stukas from dive-bombing you,’ Richard answered. He appealed to the company around him. ‘Look at him ‒ back here and fit as a fiddle. Well, some people are never satisfied. I think he wanted to be flown home.’ And the half-implied taunt was turned into a laugh.
‘Well, here’s someone who seems to be bagging his share. They say he got eight Jerry planes in the last ten days.’ The newspaper was passed over, and Richard and Nicole bent to look at the picture and read the caption underneath. ‘Squadron Leader David, Lord Ashleigh … recommended for DFC.’
Richard looked at her and smiled. ‘You still got the better man …’
She examined the face, somewhat blurred by the grainy newsprint. He was still the golden, beautiful young man, photographed beside his aircraft, helmet in hand. He was smiling, as if his whole life was some amusing adventure which he revelled in. It was the sort of picture which the newspapers these days were full of ‒ the Ministry of Information propaganda picture, meant to boost morale. ‘We’ve heard of him,’ Richard said quietly. ‘He’s stationed at Hawkinge. Actually, that number might be less than he’s actually bagged. He’s the genuine article … an absolute honest-to-God war hero, and quite becomingly modest about it. One of the beautiful boys who never gets it wrong. He’ll get his DFC ‒ and bar, I’ll bet.’
‘He looks as if he’s enjoying himself.’
‘I’d be looking that way if I’d brought that many down.’
‘Is he married, do you know?’ She had often wanted to ask, and her tongue had always stuck on the words.
‘Yes ‒ I did see something about it a few years ago. Big London wedding. Nothing at all like the one ‒’
‘The one we were going to have. Don’t be afraid to say it, Richard. I did get the right man. I would have been cheating David if I’d married him. He looks as if he hasn’t suffered.’
‘Wouldn’t be too sure. When you get yourself out of those farm overalls, you’re still beautiful enough to make a man stop and think thoughts he perhaps shouldn’t have. Oh, hell, why not? Lots of thoughts, and little action …’
‘Time, gentlemen. Time, please …’
They were turning out the lights, hurrying to wash up the empty glasses. Nicole and Richard edged around the black-out curtain at the door and went out into the last of the twilight glow of this midsummer’s evening. It was fragrant and warm as they walked along the road to Fenton Field, and overhead was the sound of bombers.
‘Sounds like Jerry,’ Richard said. He slipped his arm about Nicole and drew her close to him. ‘You know, the thing I find hardest to imagine now is that some Stuka may actually come down on Fenton Field. They went for civilian targets in France ‒ why not here? I always thought I’d be doing my fighting somewhere else. It’s unreal when the squadron goes up, and I can actually look down and see places I know ‒ and there’s a battle going on over them. From up there it all looks so beautiful down here ‒ like the toy farm I used to have when I was a kid. It’s so easy to forget that beautiful girls boil up pig swill, and their hands …’
‘Please, Richard, not that again. I try. I’ll try harder in the future. But it’s just not possible not to get yourself and your hands into a mess ‒’
‘Shut up,’ he said quickly, and turned her to him and kissed her hard on the mouth. ‘I was trying to apologize. You’re very beautiful, Nicole. I would have been sick if I’d gone away without …’
She tried to draw back from him, and his arms resisted. ‘You’re not going to act the offended lady just because I kissed you? I used to kiss you. You didn’t mind it then.’
‘You said it once yourself, Richard. We’ve all gone our own ways. We’ll never go back to that summer when it was all such fun.’
He shrugged, and released her. ‘I should know better ‒ and yet it isn’t an insult when a man wants to make love to a woman. But then you’re married to Lloyd Fenton. And I never saw a woman so much married to her man. You really don’t live except through him, do you, Nicole?’
She sighed. ‘Life might be easier if I didn’t care so much about him. But I do care. It’s as if I’ve never got over being in love with him the way I was when I first knew him. We’ve been married nearly six years, and I still go weak at the knees when I see him after we’ve been away from each other. I suppose I’m terribly jealous and possessive and all the wrong things.
I just can’t help it.’
He paused to light a cigarette. He shouldn’t have done it at this stage of darkness, but Nicole couldn’t make herself say anything about it. ‘And no other man will ever have you while he’s there. This is war, Nicole. Things come and go quickly. Like making love …’
‘This is war,’ she repeated, ‘and I hate every single second of drudgery it has brought to me. The time drags like lead every minute I’m not with him. And when I’m with him, it’s gone in a flash ‒ like making love. No, Rick, there’ll be no one else … ever.’
Chapter Four
Afterwards, Nicole was never able to sort out in their exact order the events of those weeks of August and September when their whole world nearly came to an end. She could remember the weather on 13 August when the real attack came inland from the Channel and headed for its targets of the Fighter Command bases. It was heavy and rainy, with clouds which obscured the German bombers as they went overhead, and also obscured them from the covering of their own fighter planes, who turned back. But that was the last time they turned back. The German planes, both bombers and fighters, came from France, and even from the coast of Norway. At Fenton Field they lived, it seemed to Nicole, off the news bulletins. The reports were broken and fragmentary, and the totals of losses on both sides did not tally. They heard of the vital radar stations being attacked, but which still were kept functioning. The Fighter Command bases were bombed until it was impossible to use some of them. The wave of battle swept over the skies of Kent and Sussex, and seemed to leave Fenton Field behind, in some kind of no-man’s-land of confusion and fear. They went about their tasks, as they had to, and didn’t talk much. There was the farming routine to keep going somehow, the children, their own and the evacuees, to feed. ‘I wonder,’ she said to Judy, as the motley crew gathered around the table in the kitchen, ‘why they sent evacuees here? We’re the front line already ‒ or has it passed us?’ Margaret wrestled with the ration books, and attempted to produce filling meals. She steadfastly refused to keep back any of the farm produce for their own use. But the hens had stopped laying. ‘How can they lay,’ Nicole demanded, ‘with all this noise going on over them?’ They bickered and fought over small things because the bigger, greater danger was too great to bear talking about. They didn’t hold the frayed tempers, the hasty words against each other. It was taken as part of life during which they were, in a sense, under attack. Suddenly the Ministry decided to move the evacuees away. They breathed a sigh of relief at Fenton Field; they had enough young children to worry about. ‘I wonder,’ Judy said, ‘if we couldn’t get our own lot sent too? Suddenly Cornwall seems like some remote and wonderful desert island.’ Anxious letters reached Nicole from Boston. ‘Isn’t there any way you can send the children back here?’ Liz wrote. ‘You know we’ll all take care of them. Uncle Pete says he thinks he might be able to get a passage for you all on one of the Palmer line. Mostly they go in and out of Liverpool. Not luxury but at least you’d be safe since they’re an American line.’ Nicole only let herself consider the prospect wistfully for a few moments, and then put it out of her head. For the time being, they were locked in here ‒ locked in by her own stubbornness, and her refusal to leave Lloyd. And at this moment, it was too dangerous to think of sending the boys off alone. She doubted that they could, in these desperate days, be got to Liverpool to wait the hospitality of the Palmer line which the Fenton influence in Boston, and their American citizenship could give them. By the time she might safely think of sending them back to Boston, Nicole knew the question of invasion this year would have come and gone, successful or defeated. She looked at her small sons with a sense of shame. Her selfishness and possessiveness had kept them here, and they had become, in a way, a terrible weapon of guilt against Lloyd. She acknowledged that Richard had been right. She should have gone back. She should at least have sent them. Then she shrugged and went on with her work. The question was academic. If the Boston Fentons blamed her, and through her, blamed Lloyd, it must all now wait until time and events decided what would become of them. Distantly they heard the aircraft ‒ always the aircraft, and that was the true reality of those days.
One date she remembered, Sunday 8 September, was designated as a day of prayer. They had heard reports of Hitler’s address, ‘In England they keep asking, “Why doesn’t he come?” He’s coming. He’s coming.’ On the Saturday night teleprinters and telephones passed on to the Eastern and Southern Commands the code word ‘Cromwell’. This code word was one stage removed from the actual declaration of invasion, but in some places it was taken to mean invasion. Church bells pealed, and farmers blew up bridges. Nicole walked to the village church the next morning with Dan and Timmy, and found that she was too dry-mouthed with fear to join in the hymns. All she could think of was her argument with Lloyd a year ago on her right to remain here, among these people, trying to sing the hymns in their church while the bombers flew overhead. They knew now that the night of the 7th the first wave of bombers had hit London, and the war of the blitzkrieg was on. They didn’t know until long afterwards, when the final score was reckoned up, when the true losses on both sides were tallied, when the great mistake of changing the battle plan away from bombing the airfields to bombing London was made, that the battle was already won. Exhausted pilots climbed back time and again into their aircraft which, repaired, refuelled, the long shiny bands of ammunition fed into the magazines, took off to intercept the bombers and their covering escort. But the airfields were still usable and the battle carried on. It was actually a day of deliverance on that Sunday when they prayed in all the village churches and in the great cathedrals of England.
There were no telephone communications in those weeks. No one dared to lift a receiver unless it was an emergency. Everything, it seemed to Nicole, was geared to emergency. She knew that Lloyd’s hospital near Maidstone stood in the middle of several Fighter Command bases; as the casualties from civilian bombing mounted, he must be working as long as he could stand on his feet. The news of the bombings of London grew worse. The East End was devastated; a bomb fell on Buckingham Palace. They heard, and re-heard, on the wireless the words Winston Churchill had spoken in the Commons on 20 August, speaking of the battle between the young airmen which raged over their heads. ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.’ He had not meant it to be a rousing speech; to him it was a simple statement of fact.
By telegram the news came of Richard. Shot down, over Kent, wounded, but alive. Margaret and Celia were given special facilities to get to see him at the hospital at Hastings. Margaret came back ashen-faced, after two days of sleeping in the lounge of one of the local hotels. Celia had gone back to Stanmore. ‘He’s alive,’ she managed to say when she reached Fenton Field. She had been brought by car by one of the farmers who had chanced to notice her sitting in the waiting-room of the station nearest Fenton Field. ‘He’s got a smashed leg ‒ and head injuries. His sight …’ She swayed and clung to the table for support. ‘They think he might not be able to see again. He’s … he’s out of danger.’ When she collapsed on the kitchen floor, Wilks was the first to reach her, it was he who attempted to revive her. Andrew, her husband, was helpless.
The bombings of London continued. Fighter Command flew inland every day to intercept the German bombers. From the bombed and collapsed cellars of London, a spirit, almost tangible, seemed to arise. People gathered themselves up, after a night in a shelter, and, for the most part, went to work that same day. Many returned to the ruins of their homes. Many did not reach the shelters, despite the orders and injunctions of the air-raid wardens.
The telephone ringing at Fenton Field could mean only good news or bad. This time it was Charles, talking briefly from his office in Whitehall. ‘Nicole, it’s about your Aunt Iris. You know she took on this extra job of being an air-raid warden for our district. Well … last night a house at the back of us was hit by an incendiary bomb. It was full of people. You know we’ve been takin
g in everyone we can pack under the roof from the East End. Well … your Aunt Iris …’
‘Yes … she was an air-raid warden …’ Nicole knew that she had been much else beside, but it was typical of Iris that she should undertake this additional task. The time had to be fully filled; the extra duty always volunteered for.
‘She went into the building, and brought out a young mother and her child. It wasn’t until they were out safely that Iris learned that the grandmother was left inside. The building was going up very quickly. But Iris had her gas mask. She evidently thought she could still go in. The firemen hadn’t reached the building, and there was no one in authority to stop her. They don’t know whether she ever reached the grandmother. The stairs came down.’
Nicole reached London by train and bus, and the journey took twelve hours. She walked from Charing Cross to Elgin Square. Charles was there, in full military dress, wearing his decorations. Neighbours from Elgin Square and people from the mews houses behind came to speak to him. ‘Never really knew her until these last few weeks. A real demon for getting things done.’ One of the temporary evacuees from the East End said, ‘A proper old sergeant-major, she was. Got our cards in order. Got one of the kids to the hospital. Got the old lady evacuated to Devon. She’ll hate it there, but at least we don’t have to listen to her moaning … Oh, sorry, Sir Charles. You have your own problems. A real good lady she was. Tough as they come …’
Other people, closer friends, said more gentle things, but none more real. Nicole went with Charles to Highgate Cemetery. The strange, rigid woman of her girlhood had turned into a heroine. ‘She was very high in the Red Cross,’ Charles said. ‘I’ve had a telegram from the King.’
Nicole put her hand in his. ‘I wish she had let me come to see her ‒ just once. It would have made it easier now. I’m left feeling guilty, and yet I could never have said to her that I was wrong. I suppose in the end we all think about our own feelings, not about the person who’s dead.’
The Lynmara Legacy Page 40