The House at Evelyn's Pond

by Wendy Orr

  But first the men need to be landed, and it’s only a small part of Bill’s mind that is playing with the thoughts of Ruth and what the end of the war will mean. The rest of him is sharply aware that he is near the head of a long—a hundred miles long, he learns later—column of aircraft, with another column the same size on either side; and, just to make sure everyone is paying attention, a great clumsy glider, nearly the size of their Dakota, bouncing along behind on a three hundred foot towrope.

  After rendezvousing just north of London, they are heading north-east towards Aldeburgh and their route across the Channel.

  ‘Skipper, look out!’ he shouts into the intercom but Dusty has seen it in time: the glider ahead of them has broken loose and is hurtling towards the earth, tow rope whipping wildly beside it. Bill imagines certain death for the thirty prisoners of this fragile tomb, but at the last minute it levels out and bounces across the ground in a relatively normal landing. The infantry passengers will be shaken and disappointed but alive to follow in the next day’s armada. No one wants to be left out of something this big.

  As they leave England, the navigation is embarrassingly simple, a child’s dot-to-dot game following the launches strung neatly across the North Sea—though they’re not just direction aids, he realises, spotting the first white glider bobbing perilously on the waves and the ship darting towards it. Their own charge continues its faithful following, but by the time the Dutch coast and the less welcome smoky puffs of flak come into view, several more have ditched and are awaiting rescue.

  Over the flat green of Holland, Bill is reassured to recognise the expected landmarks, rivers and canals, and finally the vital rail and road bridges of Arnhem. Smoke billows up from the devastation of the dawn bombing raid, but Bill doesn’t have time to consider the irony of bombing a town to near-extinction in order to liberate it—as they approach their target, he’s simply grateful that the raid has apparently accomplished its aim of blowing the antiaircraft guns out of existence.

  The gliders ahead of them are casting loose and their tugs heading for home, still flanked by the fighter planes who’ve been guiding them all the way. The sky is thick with aircraft—‘Like Piccadilly Circus!’ the pilot’s voice says in his ear.

  Their turn is next. They watch as the glider casts off its towrope and floats neatly into the orange-marked square on the green field; the men begin to scramble out, waving and thumbs-upping. A white dot that is Willie the parachuting ferret, cause of jocularity and respect as the men boarded, is held triumphantly aloft. The scene looks like some strange kind of holiday camp: the glider parking lot, the waving men in the peaceful fields—a perfect picnic day.

  Dusty detours briefly to drop the vicious snake of a towrope onto a large hotel, obvious candidate for German officers’ quarters, and they turn for home.

  The next morning they’re heading out again. Like migrating geese, the gaggle has gathered strength and their Dakota is now one of 4000 aircraft.

  This time, however, there are no illusions of picnics or holiday camps. Red tracer bullets and grey flak thunder up from all around the target areas; the landing zones themselves pitted and muddied from mortar shells, machine gun sprays, blood and wreckage. The remains of a glider are burning below them; Bill feels a sense of betrayal for the men they are about to jettison.

  They’re well back in the column today, and in the distance they can already see the freed tug planes heading for home. Bill is anxious to join them. He can see the landing zone clearly now. Four to go, he thinks, counting the plane- and-glider combinations ahead of them, the first glider just about to land. Its tow plane turns; Bill pictures their sigh of relief and counts, ‘Three.’

  ‘Christ!’ but he isn’t sure whether the scream is his own or Dusty’s. Where the first tow plane should be is a ball of flames.

  ‘Jump!’ he wills the crew. ‘Bail out now!’ But no parachutes appear, and as the stricken plane hits the ground, an obscene inferno of molten metal, he sees flames coming out of the Stirling behind.

  Its glider releases and lands, followed by the plane. The crew should live, Bill thinks, but they won’t be getting home tonight. And it’ll be some wait, here in the middle of a battlefield, service revolvers against mortars and machine guns. Most of the poor bastards can’t shoot anyway; it’s not a skill aircrew expect to need much.

  ‘Two more ahead of us, Skip,’ he calls mechanically, though as the wing tip is shot off the third plane, and the one directly ahead of them shudders with a hit he’s unable to determine, he’s not sure whether he’s commenting on the landing zone or their own imminent deaths.

  Miraculously, both the gliders land safely and when theirs joins it they are somehow still unhit and in the air, and ‘Bloody glad to see England,’ Dusty says as they head towards the mess several hours later.

  There is a feeling of dread as they set out again the next day. The Met Office has promised three clear days for this operation, but the clouds haven’t listened to the weather reports and come in thick and heavy on the nineteenth. The Polish Brigade, waiting anxiously in the midlands, will wait another twenty-four hours before their drop into what becomes a suicide mission. Of the planes and gliders leaving southern England, many will have to turn back when the glider pilots are unable to see their tug in front of them. Bill’s crew, dropping relief supplies instead of more troops, is one that makes it through the fog to reach the hell that is Arnhem.

  That it’s a disaster is now obvious, though it’s another six days before it’s over, and longer before they learn the full extent of it: more than 17 000 men killed, wounded or missing; another 6000 captured. The war will not be over by Christmas, least of all for the Dutch starving in retribution for the Allied attempt at liberation. What Bill never knows is that none of the supplies his crew nearly died to deliver were dropped to their own men. Their painstaking accuracy had delivered them all to the enemy.

  My dearest Ruth

  If you’ve been worrying about me, you can stop now because I’m here, all in one piece, and so is everyone else on the crew.

  One of the unexciting bits of news I probably didn’t mention in a letter is that I got my boots resoled last month. The result was right heavy and clumsy; I was none too happy but the shoemaker said I’d ‘wear them out fast enough anyway’. If he only knew how right he was!

  You’ll have guessed where I’ve been the last few days, and yesterday we dropped supplies, medicine and blankets and such, to some friends of ours by parachute in those big wicker baskets, you’ve probably seen them. You can imagine how low and slow we had to come in, and I’d have to say that it was about the unhealthiest place I’ve ever seen for that kind of flying. I was some proud of our skipper, he just stuck to the directions I gave him, cool as anything, like it was a training exercise, but now it’s over I can tell you it was like driving through sleet, except this sleet was hot and coming up from the ground. There were a few fighters too, but it was the ground stuff that gave us the problems.

  So finally we were circling the field and pushing out the baskets. I went back to help because the way Dusty had to hold her nose down, the rollers were rolling the baskets back into the cockpit instead of out the doors, and by the time we’d gone around once we still had two of them on board. When I told Dusty he just swung around again to get back to the target. I had the doors open, pushing out this basket of blankets, with our new wireless operator behind me (a young American guy, Steve Crocket so we call him Davy; it was the first time he’d crewed with us and very nearly the last). All of a sudden my leg was thrown up in the air; I landed flat on my back and figured I’d probably lost a toe at least; the bullet had gone straight through my shoe and it stung like blazes. A second later a cannon shell tore a huge hole in the port wing, but Dusty finished his circle and we got both the baskets safely out. I guess we all knew how desperate those fellows were, and however bad it was up here, it was a lot worse for them down there.

  I took the controls, which wasn’t easy as it t
ook me a while to allow for the extra drag from the wing, and Dusty checked the damage. It looked fairly grim, I don’t mind telling you; we’d lost our trim tabs, brakes and hydraulics, and even you, my darling Spitfire, probably prefer to land with some combination of the above. However, Dusty was just as determined as I was to get back to his girl and keep out of a POW camp, and apparently he’d read something in an RAF magazine the other night that he figured might be useful. I think we ought to send a bottle of whisky to whoever wrote that article. Though after this, we might want to keep a spare bottle of whisky on board ourselves.

  The theory was we had to collect every drop of fluid we could find, so when we came to land we could pump it manually onto the wheels, a kind of do-it-yourself hydraulics. We had half a tin of oil, three quarters of a thermos of coffee, and my dear, I won’t offend you by describing what the other fluid was, so let’s just say that every man contributed what he could and we filled two more thermoses. Young Steve was ready to man the emergency pump, so I sorted through my maps (for paper thickness rather than topographical accuracy) and made a funnel.

  We radioed ahead and they had ambulances and fire trucks waiting, but in the end we disappointed them and sent them home unused. Dusty went into a dive and pulled up sharply to make the wheels drop; he didn’t know if they were locked, but there was nothing we could do about it by then except trust in God and our home-made hydraulics, which now went into action: I funnelled fluid straight into the pump and Steve pumped away for all he was worth. Dusty came in low over the fields, lined up the runway; we ran off the end of it and into a ploughed field—and stopped.

  I’d forgotten all about my foot by then, and it wasn’t till we were in the mess later and Wing Co asked if any of us had been hurt, that Dusty reminded me I’d taken a bullet. I took off my shoe and the bullet rolled out; my toe’s turning a lovely colour yellow, but it hadn’t even drawn blood. The shoe will have to be resoled again, but I won’t mind the chance to thank that cobbler!

  The other thing I didn’t tell you is that the way young Steve was standing behind me, the bullet would have got his face if it hadn’t hit my foot.

  So I was feeling pretty lucky when we were in the mess, but now I don’t know. What’s so special about me? You know, of the guys I was buddies with going through the training program, only two of us are left alive, and the other one’s in prison in Germany. Maybe I just didn’t know the lucky ones.

  I guess I’m just feeling this way because I can’t stop thinking about the guys we dropped three days ago, the ones who were laughing and joking, and now I don’t know how many of them are dead. Probably I shouldn’t be telling you all this, but we’ve made that commitment to know each other as well as one person can know another and maybe now you know me a little better.

  The postscript came the next day:

  I think I wrote you a strange letter last night when I was feeling low. I talked about our commitment, but sometimes I wonder if I pushed you into it when you were vulnerable. I’ll understand if you don’t want to continue.

  The only thing he’s right about, Ruth thinks, is that they don’t know each other very well. She’d definitely fail a ‘How well do you know your hubby?’ quiz: How does he like his tea? No idea. Don’t North Americans prefer coffee? Favourite food? Definitely not powdered eggs, but that’s as close as she can get.

  She’d have better luck guessing what most of the Hamble groundcrew take in their tea or preferred for dinner, than the man she wants to spend her life with. Selected snippets of family life and history; his looks, his feel and smell; the sound of his laugh, his voice, the way she feels when she holds his unopened letter in her hand. In this uncertain life, those things are more than enough.

  Cursing wars, distance and censors, she writes immediately.

  My dear, my dearest dear, I want you to see inside my mind so that you will never again doubt how much I love you.

  The simple truth is that I am happy when I am with you, and miserable away from you. I know that you are the best, the truest and most honest man I’ve ever met.

  No, not just my mind; you need to see inside my soul, for although I love you with my mind, it’s my soul that cries out for you. And my body emulates it; our bodies have a wisdom of their own and mine knows that it belongs to yours.

  Can you know how, in these bleak lonely nights, I comfort myself with your image? When I feel so lost that I don’t know who I am, when in spite of my rage I could pray that Mama and Papa were still alive, not just to ask them the questions I need to know, but simply to have them there a little longer; then my soul lets me rest with you. You open the dark wings of your soul as I lie against you, letting me sink into your chest, into your body; I am encircled, encompassed; absorbed by you and your love. So how could you ever think that I could exist away from you? Without you, I cease to exist.

  My body weaves its own dreams. It remembers the look in your eyes as they discovered my breasts in the silver dress, and it knows what that look meant. It wants to wear that dress again for you, and shed that dress for you, it wants to stand naked in the moonlight before you and give itself utterly up to you. And my body’s stories of our lying together are the complement of my soul’s, for it sees your face above my own and feels your body over me, and it dreams of your body entering mine, till you in your turn are encircled, encompassed, absorbed, by me and my love.

  And my heart? Well, my dear, that’s the strongest of all, because my heart doesn’t need reasons, it simply loves you.

  I love you, Bill: heart and mind, body and soul; I’m yours, and nothing in the world can ever change that.

  Of course she doesn’t send it. Honesty about true passion carries the risk of convincing the reader that the writer is insane or wanton, or both. The fifth attempt, careful breathless spontaneity, seems to capture a balance between the veracity of love and terrifying the lover, and that’s the one he receives.

  Idiot! My dear, dearest idiot. I fell in love with you the first time I saw you; I would have married you then if you’d asked. If I could rewrite history and erase the night of Mama’s admission, I wouldn’t do it, because the discovery of our love outweighs that misery by far. Your being there for the terrible day of their deaths was simply proof, if proof were needed, that this was right. I don’t believe that I would have been strong enough to survive it without you—but you must never think that gratitude had any part in my decision. Even well-brought-up English girls don’t carry gratitude to that extent.

  You say that we don’t know each other very well, and I can hardly deny that truth. I don’t know what you like for breakfast or if you’ll ever be able to face spam again at the end of the war. We haven’t even discussed religion, and it strikes me now that you may be Catholic while I am C of E, and perhaps we have been remiss in not discussing such an important point, but I can’t believe even that will be a problem. Sometimes I think that although it’s the last way one would choose to conduct a romance, these letters have given us an extraordinary gift, of following up that coup de foudre with enforced platonicism, while our minds have become so intimate that I wonder if many long-married couples can say they know each other so well as we do.

  So the answer, if I haven’t made myself clear, is that I want to marry you, not to honour ‘our commitment’ but because I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to be close to you, my love, in every way, and while the only way now is through these letters, sharing our thoughts and hearts, the rest will follow when we meet again in the flesh.

  There is no more talk of releasing her. Daily, he reveals more of himself, his desire sometimes so lightly veiled—when I lie awake at night I see again your bare shoulders in that silver dress, the beauty of your body beneath it—that she smiles at how nearly he’s echoed the unsent letter, and refuses to let herself think beyond that until she too is lying awake in the dark. The need for privacy, never outgrown in years of school, has taught her to lie absolutely still, breathing gently and regul
arly as she retreats ever deeper into herself, until her body feels as if it is floating slightly above the bed’s surface and her mind roams free. Now she lingers over the words in Bill’s letter, her weightless body touched with heat, sometimes with a feathering of kisses so real that she feels they must truly be his and longs to ask if he’s dreamed of her at the same time. But she never quite dares—as he said, they really don’t know each other very well.

  Leaving the car park, Mary drives quickly and competently around enormous roundabouts and down the motorway, past the council flats and dreary industry of Slough, on to narrow winding back roads that make Jane realise with a twinge of excitement she’s in England again. Glimpses of mansions through gateways, and then they’re in the village and pulling into the short driveway of Mary’s white house.

  The child Jane, seeing the address ‘White Cottage, Cherry Tree Lane’ on Christmas letters, had realised instantly that Mary was in fact Mary Poppins in disguise. This also very satisfyingly explained the extraordinary coincidence of the two older Banks children being named Jane and Michael, though she was never sure who had been named after whom.

  ‘I never told anyone. I always hoped that if I kept your secret you’d give me a magic reward one day—a picnic on the ceiling, something like that.’

  ‘Tea on the terrace might be the best I can do at the moment,’ but they are interrupted by a burst of aggrieved barking as the front half of a large black head thrusts itself through a cat flap on the side door. ‘Barney,’ Mary explains. ‘You haven’t gone so Australian that you won’t have dogs inside the house?’

  Jane, long married to an Australian who believes exactly that, can’t think of anything more comforting at this moment than the warm fur and companionship of a dog. Although this does sound a particularly noisy one.