The English Girl: A heartbreaking and beautiful World War 2 historical novel

by Sarah Mitchell

  ‘I can’t.’

  To his amazement, she pulls away.

  ‘I’m sorry, Martin. All you need to know is the army medical board diagnosed you with a weak heart.’

  ‘I have a right to know everything!’

  ‘It’s not just about you!’

  He gapes in disbelief. ‘It’s more about me than anyone else!’ He sees her lips twitch, her mouth open, very slightly, yet the seconds pass and still she says nothing.

  He picks up the matches, tosses them aside and strides across to the sink. Outside the window, somewhere on the other side of the world, a bullfinch is perched on the bird table drinking from a saucer. His mother must have put fresh water out that morning, like she always thinks to do when the ponds and puddles are frozen. The notion of her reliably tending to the birds makes him hate himself even more for what he is about to say. Taking hold of the sink, he leans forwards and addresses the bird through the glass. ‘If you don’t explain what happened, I’ll tell Daisy your other big secret.’ The clumsiness of it – his bluntness, his brutality – appals him.

  ‘What other big secret?’

  His knuckles are a row of bony white peaks. The hands of a stranger. ‘That Daisy and I had a brother. An older brother, Frederick, who died when he was four years old.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The anguish conveyed by the single syllable spins Martin on the spot. His mother is crumpled over as if he has kicked her hard and quite deliberately in the stomach, and in a manner of speaking he has done exactly that. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…’ He hurries towards her chair, then halts and rakes his fingers through his hair. Takes another step forwards.

  She is staring in bewilderment, tears falling unchecked, ‘How did you find out about my Frederick? You did go through my things?’

  ‘I found the death certificate. It was underneath the medical report. I chanced upon the paper, that’s all… Please, Mother, I didn’t want to upset you like this, but I must understand what happened. I can’t bear to be kept in the dark. There’s so much it seems I don’t know. If you won’t enlighten me, I shall find out somehow. I simply must, or else…’ The sentence tails away. He draws the back of his palm across his face. His cheeks are wet too.

  The silence stretches to such a length, he is beginning to think she will never reply. Finally, she says in a voice no more than a whisper. ‘I only did it because of Frederick.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘You can’t possibly understand, Martin. I pray you never understand what it’s like to lose a child. The despair, the unending pain of it, the helplessness when you would give anything, anything at all, to hold them in your arms again, to feel their breath, warm against your face, instead of watching their little life slipping away from you. I could never go through that wretchedness again.’

  ‘Is that why you didn’t tell us – because we wouldn’t understand?’

  ‘You were less than two years old when he died, far too young to make sense of it, and Daisy a tiny baby. After your father passed away, I didn’t want to burden you with more loss, more sadness, and I needed to protect myself. Explaining to you about Frederick would have meant me grieving for him all over again when for a long while I could barely cope as it was. Before I found the right time to tell you, the war came along and everyone was suffering so badly it hardly seemed possible to talk about a different tragedy, one from so long ago. And then of course the medical happened, and I couldn’t say anything to make you think, that might have made you suspect…’ Her voice disappears.

  ‘Suspect what?’

  She doesn’t reply.

  ‘Suspect what, Mother?’ The question comes from the pit of his stomach.

  The kitchen has become unnaturally still, the seconds hang like icicles, frozen and suspended. All at once he understands what she is going to say. And a part of him feels as if he has known about the lie from the very beginning. That somehow, he must always have been aware of it, have been complicit in the deception, in his own cowardice.

  ‘You don’t have a weak heart, Martin.’

  For an instant the world stops spinning. He is aware only of the muscle beating behind his ribcage. The steady thud so reliably sound, so obviously regular. Of course, he has always known.

  ‘As far as I’m aware you don’t have dilated cardiomyopathy or any other medical problem that would make you unfit for service.’

  ‘But the report…’

  ‘The report isn’t true. I asked Dr Dandy to find you medically unfit and…’ – her voice snags – ‘and after some persuasion he agreed. Apparently, Dr Sands was a colleague in a London practice; because Dr Dandy knew that Dr Sands was dying, he signed the report in Dr Sands’ name to protect himself if the report should ever be challenged.’

  Martin takes a large pace backwards. ‘How could you do that?’

  ‘Martin—’

  ‘How could you turn my life into a lie? When everyone we know sacrificed so much, suffered so much.’

  ‘I did it to protect you!’

  ‘No’ – he is reversing towards the sink at speed, as if he might turn the years back too – ‘you did it to protect yourself! I may not have wanted to fight, but I didn’t want to be an invalid either, to consider myself useless, unable to play a part in defending my country in our darkest hours. You prevented me from seeing and doing terrible things, you may even have spared me from being killed, but you also stopped me from being brave, from having the chance to feel proud, to look back at the war with honour and dignity and…’ He closes his eyes. All those ridiculous daily walks to keep his heart healthy. He is even more laughable, even more pathetic, than he believed.

  He opens them again to find his mother fixing him with a dry-eyed stare. ‘War isn’t about honour and bravery, Martin. It’s about people having to survive the most inhuman conditions you can imagine, commit unspeakable crimes. It’s about young, wonderful lives being thrown away, torpedoed at sea or bombed or machine-gunned, or jumping into oblivion with parachutes on their backs. It’s about agony and destruction. And death. Over and over again. I couldn’t bear for your life to be wasted. I simply couldn’t bear to lose you as well.’

  Outside on the bird table the bullfinch has been joined by a mate. Both are dipping their wings into the saucer of water, bathing companions amidst the chill. The chirruping and beat of feathers are audible even within the kitchen. Martin remembers his continual sense of exclusion, the pointed remarks he tries to ignore – the attack in the alley. He wonders if Dr Dandy has remained as discreet as his mother thinks, what the price of his silence has been. And for how long his mother has had to bear the cost. Presumably, he supposes, the night visitor he heard was actually Dr Dandy demanding his next instalment.

  ‘I don’t suppose this Dr Dandy falsified his medical report for nothing, did he? I imagine he charges a good deal of money for his services. How long do you have to keep paying him until he finally lets you off the hook?’

  ‘That’s not your business, Martin.’ Her tone is low and steely. ‘I don’t regret what I’ve done for a moment and I won’t apologise to you for it either. Here you are, standing in front of me with years stretching ahead of you, instead of a name etched upon a memorial and all those days of living, feeling, breathing, loving, thrown away—’

  The front door clunks shut.

  ‘I’m home! I do hope lunch is ready, I’m absolutely starving. I would have come back sooner, only Barbara has developed the most idiotic crush on her piano tutor and wanted to… Oh!’ Daisy stops in the entrance. ‘Have I interrupted something?’

  ‘Not at all. We’re quite finished.’ Their mother gets to her feet. ‘Martin and I were having a little reminisce, and I completely lost track of the time. The soup will only take a few minutes to warm through.’

  As his sister pulls off her gloves, she searches Martin out with her gaze. He can see a whole host of questions practically printed in black ink across the middle of her forehead. Dipping his head, he hurries towar
ds the door before she can ask him any of them.

  ‘Martin!’ Daisy’s voice, light and quizzical, floats across the kitchen and lassoes him in the hallway.

  He pauses, but he doesn’t turn around.

  ‘Don’t you want your matches? You’ve left them in the middle of the table.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  10 January 1947

  ‘Fran!’

  Stumbling against her bicycle frame, she squints into the coal-dust gloom of the camp. Pockets of light from windows of the Nissen huts reveal only the white-tipped field and husky outline of two parked lorries. Yesterday, as the sky began again to empty of feathers, the respite of the last few days from fresh snowfall seemed merely an illusion. They were back in the full grip of winter, the roar of the cold louder and angrier than ever.

  ‘Over here. Behind the lorry.’

  A figure fleetingly emerges from the cover of the nearest cab. The powerful shape of the silhouette is familiar and so, all at once, is the voice. She breaks into a jog, yanking at the bicycle so that the pedals bang and scrape against her leg. There is the smell of escaped diesel and then the blue of his eyes searing through the dark. She stops. Recalls, aghast, the promise she has made to herself.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be inside? Won’t they be doing the roll call soon?’

  ‘Someone is covering for me. He will say I have a special job to do. And I do have a special job to do – meeting you.’ Hunching slightly, he tucks his hands under his armpits and stamps his feet.

  How long has he been waiting for her? She delayed leaving for at least an hour, hoping the snow would stop, and only gave up when she realised if she dawdled any longer she would never be ready for Martin in time. Now, seeing Thomas and thinking of the evening ahead, her body starts to vibrate as if the pieces might fly apart.

  ‘Come here. Nobody will find us.’

  Looking around, she sees he is right. A half-hearted attempt at security has led to search lights being strung around the perimeter fence, but they are angled towards the lane, designed to catch absconders and visitors, not a rendezvous within the camp itself. Tucked into the lee of the truck’s black shadow, they are entirely lost to the glare of the beams. She moves closer, hauling the bicycle after her like a dog.

  ‘I so much wanted to see you, Fran. Since Christmas I can think of nothing else.’ He stretches out a hand, pulls off a glove and his frozen fingertips graze the outline of her face.

  She tilts her chin away. Clenches her jaw. ‘Christmas was a long time ago, almost three weeks.’

  ‘I wrote a letter to you. Maybe you didn’t receive it?’

  She shakes her head decisively, and untruthfully. The note had been contained in the kind of envelope used for a card. Anyone who happened to spot it on Fran’s desk would have thought nothing of her receiving belated Christmas greetings. Now the piece of pale blue paper is held between the pages of a bedside book, the words read, and reread so many times that the message – I love you, Fran – barely seems to matter anymore, only the connection between the writer and the recipient, between Thomas and herself, made tangible and tactile by the indent of his pen, the smell of paper embedded with his breath as he inked the sentence she already knew to be true.

  His brow furrows, ‘I left an envelope—’

  ‘I made a mistake! What happened at Christmas was wrong, I should never—’

  ‘No!’ He grabs her elbow. A heartbeat of silence. Then, more quietly, ‘There was no mistake. How we feel about each other is not a mistake.’ His gaze is fervent. Fervent and entirely certain.

  ‘I am English, and you are German. Our countries have been at war for six years. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t be together. Nobody would accept us, our families, our friends, our communities would never understand.’

  ‘Even if we wanted to…? Of course, we want to! It is all we want!’

  His fingers seem to burn through the sleeve of her coat, melting her resolve. She shakes free her arm. Although she can’t meet his eyes, she forces herself to look at his cheek, his left ear, a lock of hair curled and darkened by melting ice. ‘That’s not true, Thomas. You might want to be with me, but’ – a breath, ragged and shaky – ‘I don’t want to be with you. The garden, the kiss. It was all a mistake.’

  He stares at her.

  She feels a stain seeping upwards through her stomach. A horrible black treacle rotting away her core. And when she opens her mouth, more poison, more lies, will spill out of her. A sob pounds her throat, the ache pushing for release.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ The light of his eyes intensifies. ‘This is not you. Someone else is making you do this.’

  Fran remembers June’s outburst in the kitchen, her anger and contempt. It would be the final straw for Father. She swallows hard, ‘My sister saw us together in the garden. She was standing by a bedroom window.’

  ‘So, I am correct. It is your sister who is making you say these things!’

  ‘She’s right, Thomas! My sister is right! We have no future together.’

  ‘We can make a future. We will find a way. We love each other.’

  The pull of him is extraordinary, like gravity, like quicksand, a rope around her waist dragging her inexorably towards him. She hauls away her gaze. In the distance glimmer the metal bars of the exit gate and the rifle butt of the guard. The barriers are there to restrict the prisoners, but she feels no less trapped than they are.

  ‘I don’t love you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I became carried away at Christmas, swept up in the romance. That’s all. There’s no special connection between us.’ She watches the snowflakes slip between his neck and the collar of his coat. ‘Perhaps I needed my sister to make me realise it. I don’t love you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry if you believed my feelings were different.’

  ‘You can’t mean it.’

  But she can hear he is starting to believe that she might.

  ‘I do mean it. And I must leave now. I have to get ready to go to the cinema with someone. Another man.’

  She manages not to cry until she has wheeled her bicycle to the gate, bid goodnight to the guard and is so far from the camp that she can no longer sense the incredulous blue-eyed gaze beating upon her back. When she’s certain the darkness is empty, that she’s entirely alone, she slides off the seat and lets the frame crash to the ground. Crouching on her heels she buries her head in her arms. Her body feels in shock. She imagines Thomas returning to the hut, frozen not with cold but with stunned disbelief. If he doesn’t hate her now, he will by morning, once he has spent the night reliving her rejection. And already her words seem so alien, so ridiculous, she can only believe that somebody else must have spoken them for her.

  * * *

  A radio is playing in Martin’s car. Frank Sinatra is crooning a gentle sort of jazzy number and the volume is perfect. Fran hadn’t noticed the radio the last time she was in the Crossley or anticipated such luxury. She imagines Martin fiddling to get the sound exactly right before he picked her up. Not so loud they can’t talk over the top of the record but not so low that when Martin picks up the lyrics, as he does every chorus, he can’t slip easily into the song. Five minutes more, five minutes more… as if the words reflect his own contentment with the present moment.

  Fran glances sideways. The singing is steady and melodious and appears to be entirely natural, as if something Martin always does when he is in the car and is barely aware of his own habit. Whatever the reason, the music is making it hard for Fran to act as she planned. She had intended to tell Martin before they got to the cinema that, while she was happy to step out with him as a friend, she wasn’t, after all, ready for a closer relationship because she was in love with another person and couldn’t imagine ever loving anyone else – not, of course, that she could possibly say the last part out loud. Now, she would have to switch off the radio and make such a serious announcement into a tense and startled silence.

  She stares in desperation out of the windscree
n. They are driving into a curtain of white, the wipers beating back the snow in steady, heroic sweeps, but the inside of the car is comfortable, the tune catchy, and when Martin breaks off from humming the refrain to murmur how pleased he is to be with her, how happy he would be to think they might, perhaps, go regularly to the pictures together, she hesitates one moment too long and before she knows it the comment has slipped away unchallenged.

  When they get to the cinema, he drops her at the door, telling her to wait somewhere warm while he parks the car and queues for tickets. She is doing exactly that, standing beneath a poster of James Stewart with her hands on a radiator when a voice drags her away from her anguished thoughts.

  ‘They say we’ll have to make do without electricity.’ An older woman wearing a felt hat is regarding her through prominent, rather orb-like eyes.

  Fran takes a small step sideways. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘If this weather keeps on, it won’t be long before the coal won’t be able to get through and then the government will have to cut the electricity.’

  Fran gapes at the woman in alarm. ‘Gosh, I do hope not.’ No electricity would mean searching out every last candle stub, dinner cooked on the camping stove, no coal for her father’s bedroom, or any fireplace come to that, and a permanent veil of ice on the inside of the windows. And the lovely new heater in the office would be useless.

  There’s the tiniest of pauses. Then, ‘I just love him, don’t you?’

  It takes Fran a second or two to move from the threat of power cuts to James Stewart.

  ‘Every picture he’s in, I make my hubby take me the moment it comes out. I shall count down the days to It’s a Wonderful Life, cross them out on my calendar. Is your hubby buying tickets too? Which one is he, or shall I take a guess? I can always tell these things. It’s a knack I have, practically a sixth sense. Now let me…’

  Fran gestures at Martin quickly. ‘My…’ she hesitates, reaching for an appropriate word, ‘escort is over there.’ Wishing the woman would disappear in a puff of smoke she watches as Martin slides three shillings across the booth.