‘A headache? I’ve heard women like you get headaches. Working-class lassies can’t afford the luxury of them.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Ridiculous, am I? But then, that’s how you would see a country bumpkin like me. But for the war, those hands of yours would still be lily-white and soft as silk, wouldn’t they? And when the war’s over, you’ll no doubt make your fine friends laugh at the tales you tell of life with the peasants. I’ve got your measure, sure enough.’
Priscilla felt a curl of fear tighten her breath, but no trace of it came through in her voice as she said, ‘Don’t blame me for your inferiority complex, Peter Crosse.’
He didn’t have the faintest idea what an inferiority complex was, but the term ‘inferior’ stuck in his craw. ‘Oh, you know me name then? That’s something, I suppose.’
‘I’ve had enough of this.’
When she made to swing round, he moved swiftly, positioning himself in front of her, his legs apart.
‘Get out of my way.’ Her voice was trembling now.
‘And what if I don’t want to?’ His voice dropping almost to a whisper, he said, ‘I asked you out proper, didn’t I? Now didn’t I? But I wasn’t good enough for you. You like a uniform, don’t you? I know, I know. And then anyone will do. Black, white – you’re not fussy. You’ve got a name for yourself in these parts, you an’ that friend of yours.’
‘Then why did you ask me out?’
‘Cos I didn’t see why I shouldn’t have a bit of what’s on offer, if you want the truth.’
Through the piercing headache and the lights that were now blinding her vision, Priscilla knew what was going to happen. A power bred of desperation made her suddenly thrust out her hands and push him so hard that, taken by surprise, he stumbled backwards and fell over. Turning, she ran down the lane, but hampered as she was by her physical condition, she’d only gone a short distance when she heard him right behind her. It was then that she screamed, a high-pitched animal sound of terror, but as he threw himself on her and she fell hard to the ground, the breath was knocked out of her body.
Dazed, she felt Peter pull her into the grass verge and down a small slope, to what in winter was a boggy channel, but in the summer months had dried out into a mass of tall ferns and wild plants. He had one hand clamped over her mouth to prevent her screaming again, but, even half-fainting as she was, she fought him. She felt her dress being yanked up over her thighs, and then his hand was groping at her knickers and his fingers were probing at her bare flesh . . .
Kenny didn’t know what it was that had alerted him to Peter Crosse leaving the harvest celebrations so soon after Priscilla. Perhaps there had been a furtiveness to the other man’s demeanour, or maybe it was simply that he knew the farmer’s son had his eye on her, although Priscilla had made it clear she wasn’t interested. Something had made him uneasy anyway, and although he had felt slightly absurd, he had found himself following the broad-shouldered figure of the other fellow, but at a distance.
He had lost sight of Peter in a curve in the lane when he heard the scream, a scream that curdled his blood. And then he was running, his boots sending dust and tiny stones scattering into the warm, still air.
Peter was so intent on what he was trying to do that he wasn’t aware of Kenny until a roar like a charging bull elephant caused his head to swing round. And then Kenny was on top of him, the force of his body knocking Peter sideways, off Priscilla and head-first into a tangle of vicious brambles at the side of the ditch.
Priscilla raised herself to her knees, and in the brief respite as Peter swore and pulled himself free, Kenny managed to haul her as best he could with his crippled hands away from the small gully and up onto the lane, saying urgently, ‘Get away from here,’ as she gasped and spluttered incoherently.
And then Peter was on him, growling curses, and the two men were having a fight that was terribly ill-matched. Not only was Peter taller and heavier than Kenny, but Kenny’s maimed hands – with skin that was still tissue-thin – put him at a hopeless disadvantage. A knockout blow sent Kenny to the ground, and as his head rang, he felt the other man’s hands around his neck as Peter sat astride him.
With blood leaking from his crippled hands, he grappled at the hands locked in a stranglehold at his throat, but his clawing fingers didn’t have the power to make any impression. He thought how strange it was that he was going to meet his end like this, on a quiet lane in England, after surviving the horrors of the last years, when a thwack above him released the iron vice on his windpipe and brought him back from the edge of unconsciousness. And then Priscilla was cradling his head in her lap, screaming and crying, and he heard muffled shouts somewhere in the distance.
Kenny just managed to turn his head and see Peter Crosse spreadeagled beside him, knocked out by the massive lump of wood that Priscilla had wielded like a club, before he relaxed into the blackness that was rushing to meet him.
PART FOUR
The End of the End
1945
Chapter Thirteen
Eliza McGuigan stared at her son, and Caleb stared back at her. The two of them were sitting in the kitchen enjoying a last cup of tea before they turned in for the night, after Eliza had listened to Evening Prayers on the wireless. She always listened to Evening Prayers because Caleb’s father, Stanley, was in the artillery somewhere in Germany, and she felt it was a way of staying in touch with him. She liked to imagine him, wherever he was, listening too and thinking about her. Not that she knew for sure whether it was broadcast in Germany, but she didn’t want to know. She preferred to think it was, and feel comforted. Now she said weakly, ‘Did I just hear what I thought I heard?’
Caleb nodded, his cup halfway to his mouth, as it had been during the announcement. A few seconds before, just as Evening Prayers had been due to start, the familiar voice of Stuart Hibberd on the BBC’s Home Service had said, ‘Here is a newsflash. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead. I repeat, the German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.’
There had been no further comment; no speculation as to whether the report was correct or a figment of wishful thinking, and no change to the normal schedule of programmes. Evening Prayers was already beginning.
‘They wouldn’t say something like that if it wasn’t true, would they?’ Eliza asked shakily.
‘It’s the BBC.’ It was answer enough.
‘So you think he’s really dead? That it’s over?’
Caleb nodded. ‘This time it really is the end of the end.’ There had been so many false expectations, but as the new year had come into being, the colossal investment and sacrifice of D-Day had started to pay dividends. Thousands of fighting ships, assault craft, merchant vessels, aircraft and more than three and a half million men had been flung into Europe, and as the sixth year of the war had begun, victory had seemed within sight. For the next three months epoch-making events had followed one another in breathless succession.
Remembering these, Caleb said now, ‘It was on the cards, Mam, from the time the Allies crossed the east bank of the Rhine and Montgomery penetrated into the Ruhr. Mussolini’s gone and the German forces are surrendering unconditionally. Aye, it’s over.’
‘Oh, lad, lad.’ Eliza burst into tears. ‘I want to believe it, but I’m scared to.’
‘It’s all right, Mam. It’s all right.’ Even as he spoke, Caleb asked himself how it could possibly be all right: for them, for Britain; even for the ordinary people in Germany, who had been fed a tissue of lies by a madman who had caused such unbelievable sorrow. Countries had been all but destroyed, and for what? For what?
His mother must have read in his face something of what he was thinking, because she took his hands, saying through her tears, ‘It’s the future we’ve got to think of now, lad.’
He couldn’t answer her as he would have liked to. His mother was a good woman and he loved her, but the terrible discoveries that had been made by the Allied troops advancing i
nto Germany were beyond her comprehension. Everyone knew that Belsen, Buchenwald, Nordhausen and other concentration camps existed, but few could imagine what had gone on within those places. And the truth, as the newsreel cinemas were portraying, was unimaginable. Caleb had chosen to go and watch those newsreels because he had needed to know the stark, unvarnished truth. His mother had not. And he understood. Still, it coloured his hope for the future – any future – in a world where such things could take place. He wouldn’t insult the animal kingdom by calling the perpetrators of such unspeakable crimes ‘animals’. They were monsters, fiends, demons. But ones who walked on two legs and were made in the image of their Creator. How was that possible? Such thoughts kept him awake most nights and haunted his days, until he thought he would go mad. He had read the reports from the BBC correspondent, Richard Dimbleby, who had been the first reporter into Belsen, the world of nightmares. And they had given him nightmares, sure enough. The ghastly bestiality was unthinkable to the human mind, and yet it had happened.
‘Caleb?’ His mother shook his hands gently. ‘Do you hear me? You have to think of the future now.’
‘I know, Mam. I know.’ He extricated his hands from hers and finished his tea. If any good at all could come out of those concentration camps, it was that their existence alone justified the war. No one could have any doubt – after Belsen and Dachau and Buchenwald and Ravensbrück, and all the other terrible names that were going to be engraved in the history of infamy – that the sacrifices that had been made to stop the Nazis were worth it.
He glanced down at his legs. To all intents and purposes he looked whole and, since he’d had the prosthesis, his outlook on life had changed at a personal level. True, the stump was sore at times, and he had the occasional stubborn ulcer on it, which he had to bathe in neat methylated spirit, the most effective and cheapest way to avoid infection; but he’d come to terms with that. He could walk tall again, and felt like a man rather than a cripple. He’d said the same to Esther in one of his letters, and she had written back that he had always been a man, as far as she was concerned. His heart had jumped at that, and then he’d read on and she had added, ‘Same as Kenny and Harold and the others.’
He glanced at his mother, who was now sitting with her eyes shut listening to Evening Prayers. He had told her about Esther and her circumstances – all of it, except the way he felt about her. But he dared bet his mother had cottoned on anyway; she was a canny old bird, his mam.
He waited until the programme had finished and his mother had switched off the wireless and dampened down the fire in the range with slack and wet tea leaves, before he said casually, ‘I was thinking I might suggest to Esther that she looks for somewhere round here, once she leaves the farm. It’s familiar territory to her, being from Chester-le-Street, and with her being on her own with the bairn, a friendly face or two is no bad thing.’
His mother stopped what she was doing and turned to face him, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘I thought she’d got this servant of hers – Rose – with her?’
‘Aye, she has, but Rose isn’t really a servant any more.’
‘So she’s not on her own then.’
He shrugged.
Quietly Eliza said, ‘Be careful, lad.’
‘Careful?’
‘Aye, careful.’
Caleb raised his eyebrows. ‘Meaning?’
‘Look, lad, I don’t want to state the obvious.’
Caleb’s eyes narrowed. ‘Humour me.’
His mother sighed. ‘She’s not of our class, lad. You know that. Furthermore, she’s a married woman with a bairn – a bairn that’s . . . well . . . ’
‘You can say it, Mam. A bairn that’s black, or at least a different colour. And that’s the real problem here, as far as you’re concerned, isn’t it? Admit it.’
‘Don’t take that tone with me, Caleb. It is part of it, aye, but not all, so don’t put words in me mouth. You might not believe it, but I’m thinking of the lass and the bairn here, an’ all. She’s one of the gentry, and you said yourself she talks different. Add to that the bairn, and how do you think folk round here are going to see her?’
Caleb’s voice was clipped and hard when he said, ‘I don’t know, Mam, but as you seem to have all the answers, you tell me. How are folk going to see her?’
‘Like a creature from a different planet, and you know it at heart. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s the way it is, and human nature will never change. Until the war, when the GIs came over, no one round these parts had even seen a black man, unless you count the Arabs in the East End or the occasional glimpse of a black sailor down at the docks. But not in these streets, not living as one of us. And if a lass went with an Arab, then she was as good as dead to her family. She would have to live among them, in their quarter. Now you know that, Caleb, so don’t shake your head like that.’
‘I know it, but it’s wrong, don’t you see? Damn it! Mam, what have we fought a war for, if not to do away with such thinking? And I don’t care what you say. Times are changing. The black GIs did come, and things have been shook up.’
‘Maybe in London and the big cities, but here?’ Eliza glared at the son she loved with all her heart and was inordinately proud of. ‘You say Esther looks white, so there’ll be only one conclusion, as far as the women round here are concerned. They’ll dub her a loose piece, one who enjoyed her war to the full and got caught out. The number of men she’s had would double every time they gossiped on their doorsteps, lad, and when she opened her mouth, it would make things ten times worse. Her with all her privileges to sink so low, they’d say – she’s a bad lot. Pity the man who gets mixed up with her.’
‘I don’t care what they would say,’ he said grimly.
Eliza stared at him as she prayed silently. No, God, no, not this. Not on top of everything else in the last six years: her lad getting injured, and Stanley still away out there somewhere, and Prudence’s husband dead. She’d gone through enough. She didn’t want her Caleb to become an object of derision, for having been snared by a lass they’d label no better than a dockside whore. Her face working, she murmured, ‘If you take up with her, you’ll be the talk of the streets, a laughing stock. They . . . they’ll show no mercy.’
Her distress, which he knew was motivated by love for him, melted Caleb’s anger. Reaching out, he drew her into his arms, speaking above her grey head as he whispered, ‘Don’t cry, Mam. Please. And I’m not taking up with her – not like that. She . . . she doesn’t see me in that way. All this with her husband has put her off men for life. We’re friends, that’s all, but I’d never forgive myself if I wasn’t there for her. She . . . she needs me.’
Far from comforting Eliza, Caleb’s words only increased her anxiety. This lass had brought out his protective side, and what man doesn’t want to slay the dragons and rescue the beautiful young maiden? Esther had played him like a violin, that much was obvious, whether or not her story was true. And, by her own admission, she was still married to this pilot bloke, a man of her own class. If the child was her husband’s and her tale was true, then she was half-black, however she looked on the outside. And – Eliza’s breath caught in her chest in a hard lump – she didn’t know how she felt about that. She had never thought of herself as prejudiced, but now, faced with this . . . And if Esther’s story was fabricated to get Caleb’s sympathy, and she really had been messing around with a black GI while her husband was away fighting, then she was a bad lot. Either way, she didn’t want this lass for her lad. It might be true that Esther wasn’t interested in him in a romantic way, although she doubted it, but Caleb certainly wanted her. A blind man could see it. And, with a bairn to take care of, she could well see him as a handy meal ticket.
Above her head Caleb’s voice rumbled on. ‘Anyway, she might not want to come and live in these parts – a lass like her. We’ve never really talked about when the war is over, and I haven’t seen her in months, don’t forget. You can only say so much in letters. For all
I know, she might have other plans. But . . . but I need to find out. That’s all, Mam. All right?’
‘I can’t stop you.’
‘No, Mam, you can’t.’ They were facing each other again, Eliza having pulled away from him. ‘And I understand your concerns, I do – whatever you think to the contrary – but my course is set on this. I’d like it to be with your support, but if not, it won’t make any difference to what I do.’
‘That’s told me then.’ Eliza turned and walked out of the room without another word, still visibly upset.
Caleb swore softly, running his hand through his hair once he was alone, the news about Hitler forgotten. He hadn’t seen Esther since the day he had left for Roehampton. He had stayed there for some weeks, before being transferred to Sunderland Infirmary, where he’d had the operation to remove the final pieces of shrapnel from his body. He’d requested that this be done in the original hospital in Yorkshire and had been told this was not possible. Once he left Sunderland Infirmary, a doctor had informed him, he could go straight home, so that was good news, wasn’t it? And in the meantime arrangements were under way for his official discharge from the army. It wouldn’t be long and he could start making a new life for himself.
He had thanked the doctor, knowing he meant well, but a new life without Esther in it was merely an existence. And he was frightened – terrified – that with so many miles between them, they would lose touch. It happened to so many folk, for wartime friendships were transient things. And so he had written his letters and waited impatiently for hers, fretting and worrying and snapping at his poor mother, who was patience herself, putting Caleb’s ill temper down to his physical trauma. And throughout all this he’d had to endure hearing from Kenny how well his romance with Priscilla was progressing. Not that he begrudged his friend a bit of happiness, he told himself now; and Kenny had certainly proved his mettle that day, when he’d fought that big oaf of a farmer’s son. But Caleb just wished his own love life was that uncomplicated.
The Colours of Love Page 17