My Beloved Son

by Catherine Cookson

‘Well, haven’t your friends any families or…?’ Len now swung his head to the side. ‘I’m probing I know, but, man, I’m concerned for you.’

  ‘Well, don’t be, there’s no need. If it’ll make you happy, I’ll take a couple of WAAFs out…officers.’ He laughed now. Then assuming the voice of a certain discip. WO that neither of them liked, he clicked his heels together, gave an imitation of a salute and said, ‘Corporal Joseph Bartholomew Jebeau caught making advances to a female of superior rank, sir.’

  ‘What have you got to say for yourself, Jebeau?’

  ‘’Twas an irresistible impulse, sir; couldn’t stop myself.’

  ‘That’s good! That’s good!’ Len was thumping him on the arm now with his fist. ‘You could get on ITMA. Do Colonel Chinstrap…But, on second thoughts, I don’t think you would do on ITMA. But I can see you on the Brains Trust.’

  ‘Brains Trust!’ Joe got to his feet and cast a disparaging glance down towards Len as he said, ‘Whose place will you put me in: Joad’s or Huxley’s?’

  ‘Oh, they’re not so clever; they read up the stuff, man.’

  ‘Yes, and they’ve been reading up the stuff for years. Oh, Len.’ He shook his head. ‘Go on, get yourself packed up and away. And remember me to Alice.’ He bent down towards Len now and pulled a face at him. ‘Tell her that I do exist and that I’ll see her one day.’

  ‘She won’t believe me.’ Len now rose from the bed and began his packing, while Joe, picking up his cap, looked at him for a moment, then said, ‘Well, be seeing you.’

  ‘And you, mind how you go up them there hills.’

  ‘I will.’

  Joe walked down the length of the hut, between the beds, where here and there men were sprucing up ready to grab a few hours’ freedom away from the camp. With the exception of two others and himself, all the men in this section were married. It was odd when he came to think about it, but every now and again one or two of them would be posted, yet the five men who had accompanied him from Cranwell, and whose beds were at the far end of the hut, were still here. Jack Bisley, Sam Temple, Amos Bernstein, Angus McBride and, of course, Len. Even Warrant Officer Gilbert, who had arrived just a week before them, was still here. Sometimes he longed for a posting just to see different surroundings. He wasn’t so much concerned about the men or this particular job, because his work as a corporal instructor was to teach his squads the theory and practice of wireless communication, and especially the operation of the transmitters and receivers used in aircraft. No, it wasn’t this that got on his nerves, but the monotony of his surroundings, the long, long road through the camp, the huts going off here and there, the airfield dotted with little planes, looking like toys, the new hall that was used for entertainments, pictures and the church services, standing out like a sore thumb.

  He turned up a side path to go into the NAAFI. There were very few people in the building and no-one at the counter. The little dumpy girl was one of two serving. He was glad to know that the tall languorous one wasn’t about.

  ‘A cup of tea, please.’

  She poured out the tea, and as she pushed it across the counter to him he handed her the penny. Then she spoke, ‘You must be enjoying this war,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ He put his head forward as if he hadn’t heard her clearly. He had heard her but he didn’t understand what she meant. And she repeated, ‘I said, you must be enjoying this war.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Well, you never seem to be dashing off here, there and everywhere like the rest. I’ve got the idea you’ve fallen in love with the camp.’

  He smiled at her now as he said, ‘Yes, you’re right, I do love it.’

  ‘Aha! Aha! I thought you did.’ She took a cloth and wiped down the counter. ‘And you always look so happy.’

  He closed his mouth and ran his tongue round the inside of his lips. She was pulling his leg. She always gave as much as she got, more, he should say. She was always quick on the uptake but she had never got at him before.

  ‘Brought up in Barnado’s were you? Like the feeling of a large family?’

  ‘Yes’—his face wore a serious expression—‘I was left on the doorstep in the proverbial wash-basket.’

  ‘The what?’ She seemed to be straining her head and shoulders over the counter, and he repeated, slowly and emphatically, ‘The proverbial wash-basket; you know.’

  ‘Oh.’ She nodded. ‘Oh, yes, the proverbial wash-basket. Well, isn’t that funny, the same thing happened to me. But it wasn’t the proverbial basket, it was just an ordinary laundry one.’

  Suddenly they laughed together, and he looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time, and he saw that she had a lovely set of teeth. All her good points seemed to be in her mouth, her voice, her singing and her quick wit, and he noticed, too, something different about her: she’d had her hair waved. Previously she had worn it flat, practically plastered down on her head, until it looked as if it was almost painted on her scalp, like that of a wooden doll. Her cap was set well back on her hair today too. For a moment he wondered about her, what she thought of all the ribbing and chipping that she received almost every day in this place. The fellows never seemed to rib the other NAAFI girls very much: they joked with them, but not in the same way as they did with Lemon. And the answer came: she was like a break in the monotony, like a resident jester. At one time jesters were picked for their hunchbacks, or some deformity. But she wasn’t deformed, only dumpy. It was a shame, really, that she should be used as a butt, yet she didn’t seem to mind; in fact, he thought she enjoyed it. And anyway, what was there for a girl like her? In civvy street she would have found it hard to find a fellow to chat with and so she likely considered the war a godsend.

  He showed his surprise on his face now as she leaned still further over the counter and whispered, ‘The sleeping beauty’s at a loose end: she’s off from three.’ She nodded towards the door behind her.

  For a moment he was taken aback as he realised she was so sorry for him she was arranging a date.

  He leaned towards her and in a whisper he said, ‘I don’t think I’ll waken her.’

  She held his gaze for a moment; then, her lips pressed tight, she made a small laughing sound before saying, ‘Not your type?’

  ‘Not really…too thin.’

  It was a backhanded compliment, the best he could do, and he straightened up and nodded to her before taking his cup from the counter and making his way towards an empty table.

  He did not take long in drinking his tea but by the time he had finished it, he saw that she was no longer at the counter, her place having been taken by another girl. He went out thinking that, behind all her brusque banter, she was a kindly little soul. She seemed a thoughtful person, someone of like nature to Mary Smith, but with much more up top. Oh yes, Lemon had quite a bit up top, he should imagine, and all concealed under the cap and bells.

  He cycled out of 3-Wing onto the Hay-on-Wye road that ran through the camp. He passed the technical section and 2-Wing, both looking oddly deserted, except for a figure here and there moving between the Nissen huts and the NAAFI or the discip. buildings.

  By the time he reached Tyberton, which was only three miles from the camp, he was sweating, for the sun was shining fiercely out of a clear sky. It was near the end of August, and for the last few days it had been like high summer. He had reached Blakemere, which was only two miles further on, when he pondered if he should take another direction and make his way to the river, but the thought that even this far out there’d be a number of people on the banks today, mostly youngsters, he guessed, swimming or playing the usual dangerous game of swinging out over the river on a rope attached to a tree branch, deterred him. He wasn’t very fond of the river Wye, for its rocky crevasses had claimed too many young lives even during the short time he had been there.

  Thinking of young lives, his mind jumped back to yesterday, when he had heard about young Harrington. He had been a recruit in his class, a brigh
t young lad.

  He knew now that he himself would never have made a flyer. Regulations said that instructors must go up periodically, but he was always glad when they touched down. And he wasn’t alone amongst the instructors who felt this way: Jack Bisley, Sam Temple, and Amos Bernstein, they all admitted that they hated it; but Angus McBride and Len looked forward to their trips as if they were half-day school holidays.

  It had come to him over the last year or so that there was only one thing that made him different from other men, and that was the weight he was carrying on his mind. It deadened his days and brought him upright in the night, running with sweat and fear, his arms held out clutching the gun with which he had just shot his mother.

  When he set out today it had been his intention to make for the hills bordering the Golden Valley, but when he got through Blakemere the sweat was dripping from his chin and the sight of a stream tinkling its way not three yards from the road automatically brought his legs off the pedals. He hadn’t noticed it before because of the hedge growing along the side of the bank, but here, and for some way ahead, it was open to the road.

  He laid his bike on the grass verge and went down to the water’s edge. Kneeling down, he bent over and sluiced his face with handfuls of the surprisingly cold water. He did not immediately dry his face but knelt over the stream, looking down to where the sun was glinting on the pebbles, turning them momentarily into stars. His mind became still. This was the kind of moment when words formed into meanings and, when you transferred them to paper, they turned into poetry. He hadn’t put pen to paper since the day before Martin died, and he doubted if he would ever do so again. But this was the moment when it should happen.

  As he continued to gaze down into the sunlit water a sound intruded into his mind. If he had been alert to everyday things he knew he would have heard it sooner. He lifted one knee from the ground and turned his head slowly and looked up the slight incline to the path, and in his sun-blinded vision he saw a shape. It was a small broad shape dressed in blue and the face was topped by a straw hat. He had the vague impression that the face was of an oriental and was beautiful in a strange way.

  As he took his handkerchief out and wiped away the water that was still dripping from the front of his hair, a voice said, ‘I wouldn’t drink that if I were you; the cows wash in it just round the corner.’

  He twisted himself to his feet and looked in amazement at the girl standing above him. He had recognised the voice and he had her in focus now. She was wearing a slack blue dress and a straw hat pushed to the back of her head.

  ‘Oh! Hello, there.’ He sounded embarrassed, as though he had been caught in some misdemeanour.

  Having climbed the bank he looked down on her and smiled as he said, ‘I didn’t recognise you in civvies. Well, they make a difference…’

  ‘Partly.’

  He stared at her. What could one say to that? It was her habit of disparaging herself.

  ‘I’ve never seen you along this way before,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve never been this way before. I was making for the hills, and hoping to come back through Peterchurch.’

  ‘Well, you’re on the right road, but I would say you had chosen the wrong day.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been thinking that myself.’ He was smiling at her again. Then looking around, he said, ‘Are you out walking?’

  ‘Well, you could say that…compulsory walking, I’m looking for Simon, our dog. He’s gone out on the razzle again.’

  ‘Is he a labrador, a yellow one?’

  ‘Yes, that’s him. Have you seen him?’

  ‘I passed one just as I was coming out of Blakemere.’

  ‘Oh, that’s where he’s got to. Oh well, I needn’t trouble: he’ll be back. He’s got a lady friend down there.’

  ‘Do you live near here?’ There was a surprised note in his voice.

  ‘Yes, over there.’ She pointed into the distance, and when he said, ‘I never knew,’ she answered on a small laugh, ‘Well, why should you?’

  Yes, why should he? It was a silly thing to say. He felt a heat rising to his face that wasn’t caused by the sun. He was always awkward in women’s company, girls’ company. There had only ever been one with whom he had been at ease. He didn’t think of her as often now, except perhaps on a long weekend when he was off-duty; the rest of the time he had things to occupy his mind.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘I said, could you do with a cup of tea?’

  He hesitated just a fraction of a second before saying, ‘Well…well, yes. Thank you.’ And he immediately told himself there was no compromise in accepting a cup of tea; RAF men were invited into all kinds of homes in the district.

  She was walking on ahead up the narrow path now, he following behind pushing his bike, when he said, ‘Your people live here?’

  ‘An aunt. She has a cottage.’

  The word cottage conjured up in his mind the Smiths’ dwelling; but a few minutes later, when he saw what she had called a cottage, he realised it was as far removed from the Smiths’ dwelling as Screehaugh had been, in that it was a substantially built house. Its side wall was covered with the dead fronds of a massive wisteria; the front showed six large windows, and the front door appeared to be at the end of the house. The roughly cut lawn led right to the stone doorstep and was bordered by a flower garden at one side and a summer house at the other, beyond which was a yard showing some outhouses.

  The door of the house was open.

  He paused in the doorway and watched her go into a dim hall, calling, ‘Hoo-hoo! Where are you?’

  The voice that came back to him was unlike hers in tone but matched it in substance, ‘Where do you think I am? Up the pole?’

  She turned to him, smiling widely now, and beckoned him into the hall. It was quite a large area for this type of house, being all, he imagined, of sixteen feet square. He noticed, too, that it was stone floored, and immediately he took in the feeling of clinical cleanliness.

  ‘I’ve brought a visitor.’

  He didn’t move from the middle of the hall, but watched Maggie standing in a doorway to the right, and she turned her face to him, laughing now as the voice from the other room came to him, saying, ‘Male or female?’

  ‘Male.’

  ‘Thank God for that! Haven’t seen a man for a week.’

  Maggie now beckoned him towards her, and somewhat reluctantly he followed her along a short passage and into a long sunlit kitchen, where a woman was standing at a wooden table mixing some ingredients in a bowl. On the sight of him she stopped immediately. Her mouth opened and shut; then looking at Maggie she said, ‘You silly daft lump, I thought you were joking and it was Simon you had brought back.’

  ‘Well, he’ll bark for you if you ask him nicely, won’t you?’ She turned and looked up at Joe, and he, smiling now, said, ‘I’m always willing to please.’

  ‘This is my Aunt Elizabeth, otherwise Mrs Robson. And this, Aunt Lizzie, is Corporal Jebeau.’

  It was the first time he had heard his name pronounced correctly since coming into the camp. He was generally called Jabbie or Joe-boy.

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Corporal Jebeau.’

  He was shaking hands now with the woman, who was the exact antithesis of her niece, being thin and bony; even her arms, showing bare where she had her sleeves rolled up almost to the armpits, looked fleshless.

  ‘How do you do?’

  ‘I do nicely, thank you. I bet you could do with a cup of tea? I’ve got a batch of scones in the oven; I must have known you were coming. You look hot; have you ridden all the way? Sit yourself down, or better still go into the sitting room. That’s it’—she waved them both away—‘get yourselves into the sitting room, out of this.’

  He found himself smiling widely as he went to obey her and for a moment he felt he had dropped into a home which was familiar to him. Then Maggie’s fingers touching his sleeve lightly stopped his departure as she said, ‘Don’t take any notice of her, sit
yourself down there.’ She pointed to a high-backed wooden chair, adding, ‘If she makes you sitting-room company she cuts your rations.’

  He hesitated for a moment as to what to do; then looking again at the woman at the table, who was now smiling at him, he sat down in the chair, and for the next ten minutes he listened to the banter between the two of them. There was no pause between exchanges; all the while their tongues wagged their hands worked, for the woman at the table went on making her cakes, while Maggie walked back and forth into and out of what he took to be a pantry at the far end of the kitchen, bringing out all that was necessary for a tea. She looked so different in the blue dress; still fat, but more like a schoolgirl might do, and she seemed as light on her feet as a dancer. There were things he consciously noticed about people which he brought to mind long after he had ceased to watch them, but now he noted for the first time that she had very small feet—they could have belonged to the oriental he had imagined her to be through the sun haze.

  Also, strangely, he noted there was a similarity in the faces of the aunt and niece. Yet their features were as different as chalk from cheese. The woman at the table had, he should imagine, once been quite good-looking, even beautiful, whereas no-one, not even with the kindest instincts, could attribute any beauty to Maggie’s features. Yet looking from one to the other, he now realised where the similarity lay: it was in the eyes. But where the older woman’s eyes lay in elongated hollows, the younger one’s were round, lying almost flush with the unlined skin. Again he had the impression that she was a young girl, for there was a smoothness about her skin that one sees in the young before the face reaches the border of adulthood. Yet why, with such skin, such eyes, and that good mouthful of teeth, did she still appear so very plain? What constituted beauty? The bone formation, how each feature was set? He didn’t know. All he did know at this moment was that it seemed a shame a girl such as Maggie here, with brains, because she was no fool, and a talent such as she had, should be encased in a body that held no appeal.