The Light Over London

by Julia Kelly

  Her cousin huffed. “Mrs. Lovell saw Geri Parker kissing an airman on the road out of Trebelzue last Saturday. Now Mum won’t let me go anywhere with Geri or anyone else. She says my judgment is compromised.”

  “And is it?” Louise asked.

  Kate turned her nose up and said primly, “I might kiss the boys, but if they think there’ll be any more than that, they’re sorely mistaken.”

  “And why am I acceptable to Aunt Claire?” Louise asked.

  “Because you’re you.” Kate shrugged.

  Because they all know I would never do something as daring as kiss an airman on a lane in full view of who knows who.

  The thought was thoroughly depressing.

  “Okay then.”

  Kate looked up with a start. “What?”

  Louise crumpled the rag she’d been clutching and threw it on the counter. “Fine, we’ll go. Where is it?”

  “The Village Hall in Saint Mawgan. Oh, darling, you won’t regret it one bit!” her cousin gushed.

  “Saint Mawgan? We’ll have to take the bus,” Louise said.

  “It’s best to cycle,” said Kate with great authority. “At least if it’s not raining. That way we don’t have to stand by the bus stop for an age. We can leave whenever we want.”

  “And stay as long as we like?” Louise asked.

  “Exactly. Now, what will you wear?”

  Louise shoved the errant comb back into place again. “I don’t really know. My green wool is probably best.”

  Kate wrinkled her nose at that. “You wore that to the concert at the village hall two months ago and it was a full two inches too short in the hem then.”

  “I’m nineteen. I doubt I’ve grown since then. Besides, how many people from Haybourne will be there to notice that I’ve worn it again, and will any of them really care?” she asked.

  “No, but there will be airmen there.”

  “Who will spend the entire evening looking at you.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Kate. “I promise you more partners than you can dance with.”

  Louise laughed, knowing full well that her cousin was only being generous.

  But if she expected Kate to relent, she was sorely mistaken. Instead, Kate snapped her fingers. “That’s what we’ll do.”

  “What?”

  “Find you an airman.”

  “I don’t want an airman.” But it was too late. Louise could tell the idea had already taken root in Kate’s mind and would no doubt be impossible to shake free.

  “Come to my house at six on Friday. You can wear my red crepe with the buttons down the front. It’ll look far better on you than on me anyway. I’ve become too busty for it.”

  Knowing that to argue any further would be futile, Louise let her shoulders sag while her cousin stuffed her hair up under her hat and buttoned up her slicker.

  Twiddling her fingers in the air, Kate trilled, “We’re going to catch you a pilot, darling.”

  Louise laughed into her sigh. Friday was bound to be a very long night.

  Louise lifted the latch to the garden gate and hurried through the rain to the front door. On either side of her, the ground lay cold and mostly bare except where her father had erected a cloche to protect his winter vegetables. Digging up the family’s front garden had been the first big battle of her parents’ war within the war. Her mother, house-proud and keenly aware of the image the frontage projected to the rest of the neighborhood, hadn’t understood the need to pull her roses, geraniums, and hyssops out at the root. Her father, never an avid gardener, suddenly went mad, buying seed for all number of vegetables and insisting with great authority that the back garden facing the open sea was too harsh to cultivate enough food in case of rationing. The argument was finally won one spring day when Louise had returned from a bicycle ride to find her father on his knees in the mud, ripping out just-flowering plants, while her mother stood in the front window, arms crossed and face pale.

  Her father, it would appear, had been right, Louise realized as she let herself into the house. Now, a year into rationing and well into the war, no one knew how far it would reach or when it would end. Yet Louise doubted that the fact that every other garden on their street had been given over to vegetables in an effort to “dig for victory” was a comfort to her mother.

  “Louise, is that you?” her mother called from the kitchen.

  “Yes, Mum,” Louise shouted back, shucking her mac and sitting down on the stairs to work off her wellies.

  “Don’t you tread mud into this house. I’ve already cleaned up after your father once.”

  Louise looked down at the thick layer of earth encasing the boot in her hand. Toeing the other boot off as carefully as she could, she tiptoed in the thick socks she wore to protect her precious stockings to the hall cupboard and wrestled free the mop. It was still damp from its last use.

  Creeping back to the front door, she gave the floor a wipe as her father stuck his head out of the door of the front room.

  “You’re home,” he said. “Good day at the shop?”

  She shrugged, scrubbing away the dirt. “Hardly anyone came in.”

  He grunted and then retreated, happiest sitting in his usual armchair until the meal was on the table. He would have his paper in hand and be plotting on his huge atlas the new troop movements that had been reported, just as he always did after coming home from his job as the local postmaster. She knew he couldn’t help but feel left out of this war, having fought in the last but being too old to be of any use this time around.

  Upstairs in her room, Louise ran a brush over her hair and reset—hopefully for the last time—the comb that hadn’t stopped slipping all day. Looking in her mirror, she noticed that the postcard she’d tucked into the plain wood frame had slipped to a drunken angle, a slight on her normally tidy room. She recentered it, her fingers trailing along the printed rows of brashly colored orange groves, lush under the California sun. She’d bought the card for threepence at a junk shop in St. Ives she and Kate had stolen away to when they were fifteen. Her mother thought junk shops were common, and going had seemed like the height of rebellion at the time. Kate, obsessed with Hollywood, swept up an armful of publicity stills cut out of a fan magazine and pasted to pieces of cardboard. But the allure of glamour hadn’t captured Louise’s attention the way the promise of a warm California day and soaring mountains so different from pokey little Haybourne had.

  Downstairs, Louise set the table as she did every night. Spoon, knife, plate, fork, napkin folded once, twice, three times, water glass. Her father occasionally had a whiskey before the fire, but only after dinner. Her mother rarely joined him in drinking alcohol except when there were guests in the house. Then she’d take a little bit of sherry, “to be polite.”

  Supper arrived on the table just as the mantel clock in the parlor chimed seven. Louise’s mother placed a casserole that, thanks to rationing, was more vegetable than meat in front of her father, who picked up the serving spoon and began to help himself just as he did every night. There was something so unfailingly normal about the whole ritual. Outside, in the rest of Britain, families might be carrying their bedding down to air raid shelters or wrestling with the constant fear of an invasion, but here in the Keene household time marched on almost uninterrupted by war.

  Louise focused her gaze on a faint gravy spot on her mother’s otherwise flawless white tablecloth, every ounce of energy repressing the urge to scream, to run, to do something unexpected.

  “Please pass the mashed potatoes, dear,” said her mother in her deceptively soft voice.

  Louise unclenched her fists from in her lap to hand the warm blue-and-white patterned bowl to her mother.

  “Mrs. Moss called on me this afternoon for a cup of tea,” said her mother. “She mentioned she’d stopped at Bakeford’s.”

  The faint hint of disapproval at the idea of her daughter working in a shop was unmistakable, but there was little Rose Keene could do about it when Louise had her father’s
support. That particular battle had been lost more than three years ago when Louise had turned sixteen and was still smarting from the news that her parents thought her headmistress’s suggestion that she sit a university entrance exam to read maths a preposterous waste of time and money.

  “Mrs. Moss mentioned some confusion about the ration books. Apparently one of hers was issued without the full complement of tickets,” said her mother.

  “That seems unlikely,” said Louise’s father.

  “It’s what she said,” said her mother.

  Father’s and daughter’s gazes met for a moment before sliding back down to their plates.

  “She also said Gary asked after you in his last letter. Have you written to him yet this week?” her mother asked.

  “I haven’t had the time,” Louise said as she cut a piece of parsnip in two.

  In truth, she hadn’t wanted to write Gary back. What did you say to a boy who’d taken you to one dance and to the pictures twice but who seemed to have little interest in you? Gary’s letters were polite but uninspired, as though he wanted to write those battlefield letters as little as she wanted to receive them.

  “You be sure to make the time,” said her mother in her too-polished voice. “Good young men like Gary Moss don’t come by the dozen in Haybourne. If you’re smart, he’ll come back and ask you to marry him. His prospects are the best in the area, with him set to take over his father’s business one day.”

  “Leave the girl alone, Rose,” said her father.

  “Arthur—”

  “He’s fighting a war, not attending a garden party. Louise can’t be hanging all of her hopes on him, even if he does manage to come back.”

  “What a perfectly wretched thing to say,” said her mother.

  Her father shrugged. “It’s the truth. There’s no telling who might be killed out there.”

  Her mother huffed. “Well, I for one don’t understand why they can’t simply send more soldiers and have it done with.”

  “Perhaps you should tell the generals that,” said Louise’s father with a laugh.

  “Perhaps I should. It really is a disgrace. Just think of all the girls left behind like poor Louise.”

  Louise dug her fingers into the flesh of her thighs as the familiar urge to scream roared back. Poor Louise. That was who she was here. All she’d ever be. She had to find a way to leave Haybourne and this house where her future was lined up neat and orderly and inevitable without a word from her.

  “Kate wants me to go with her to a dance in Saint Mawgan on Friday,” Louise said, hoping the change in subject would keep her mother from prodding her about Gary any further.

  “Saint Mawgan?” her mother said. “But that’s two villages over.”

  “We’ll ride our bicycles. They’ll be more reliable than the bus,” Louise said.

  “Who is invited?” her mother asked suspiciously. “Will there be servicemen there?”

  “Of course there will be,” her father interjected. “The entire county’s crawling with them.”

  “I really don’t know if that would be entirely appropriate,” said her mother.

  Her father lifted his brows. “We met at a tea dance. Was that appropriate enough for you?”

  Louise’s mother opened her mouth, then shut it again. Her mother never spoke of it, but over the years Louise had gathered enough of the details to know the story. Rose Wilde, daughter of a local fisherman, had gone to the dance in her one good dress. Her father, Haybourne’s newly appointed postmaster, had caught her eye. They’d danced all night and three months later they’d been married. Louise had always thought her parents had married in August, but once, when her father had indulged in three whiskeys instead of his usual one, he’d let it slip that they should really celebrate their anniversary at the start of October. Louise had been born seven months later, on the eighth of May.

  “I just think that with Gary serving, Louise could show a little deference—”

  “She’s nineteen,” her father cut in. “She wants to go out and have a bit of fun with her cousin.”

  “Kate asked me just this afternoon. I haven’t spoken to anyone else about it and I don’t know who else will be there,” said Louise, trying to soothe the tension in the room.

  “Go,” said her father, before her mother could protest again. “Enjoy it.”

  The rest of the meal was held in strained silence, her mother punishing her father for overruling her objections, and her father no doubt enjoying a meal without the constant interruptions and observations of a difficult wife.

  Louise wiped the last plate clean and set it in the cupboard to the right of the sink. She was just folding up the dish towel when her father shuffled in.

  “This could do with a wipe,” he said, holding up a glass.

  Louise took it, cleaning it inside and out.

  “Thank you, Lou Lou.”

  “You’re welcome, Da,” she said, using the pet name she’d used for him until she was five and her mother had decided it wasn’t proper.

  He made as though to turn but then looked back over his shoulder. “About this dance—do you want to go?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Kate wants me to go.”

  “That’s not the same thing as wanting it yourself.”

  “Sometimes it feels like it should be when Kate’s pushing,” she said.

  He smiled.

  “I suppose it will be a change,” she said with a sigh.

  “Do you know what I think, Lou Lou? You should go and dance with every man who asks you.”

  “And what if they don’t ask me?” Her tone might have been light, but there was no mistaking the little quaver in her voice.

  Her father reached over and tugged a lock of her hair gently. “They will. If you let them.”

  She watched him leave and touched her hair comb, not minding that it had slipped once again.

  13 February 1941

  The Spitfires are flying again today. I can see them from my desk, where I write this, but it’s impossible to tell whether they’re engaging in exercises or patrolling for submarines.

  It’s strange to think that in such a short time, we’ve all learned how the different engines sound and we’re all able to pick out a bomber or a Spitfire. Children playing in the street still stare up at them or chase the planes down the road, but the rest of us hardly stop what we’re doing. Da says that people can become accustomed to anything, and I believe him. Our gas masks hang on hooks by the door, half-forgotten even though it sometimes feels like most of the village has gone off to fight.

  We shouldn’t be so complacent in thinking we’re safe. St. Eval was hit several times last summer. The worst was in August. From my room you could see the flames when the Germans hit one of the pyrotechnics stores. Betsy, who works near the base, said it looks like they’re still repairing the damage to the hangars from the October hit. I asked her if it bothers her being so close to a place that the Luftwaffe is trying to bomb, but she simply shrugged and told me it’s nothing compared to what those poor people in London are experiencing in the Blitz.

  I wonder sometimes if we shouldn’t all be a bit more like Mum. She might fight the entire German army herself, if only over the rationing of tea, sugar, and butter. She says that when eggs go, it’ll be the beginning of the end. Those aren’t rationed yet, but it’s so difficult to find them that we heard Mr. Nance at Bolventor Farm has taken to locking the chicken coop at night and standing guard at the farmhouse window with a shotgun in case anyone comes to steal from him.

  I asked Da why Mum is so bothered by the rationings, and he said it’s just because she remembers it from after the last war and that reminds her of her older brother who died. It’s strange to think I had an Uncle Monty whom I never met and only know the sight of because Mum keeps his picture on top of the piano in a silver frame she polishes every Saturday.

  The one thing we can’t ignore even in our sleepy little village is the soldiers. There are rumors that as
soon as the Americans join the war—God willing—they’ll be four deep on the streets of every town from St. Eval to St. Ives. But until then, it’s just our boys. A truck painted olive green and covered in canvas rolled down the high street today. I rushed out of Bakeford’s just in time to catch a glimpse of the soldiers out of the open back of the truck. They weren’t at all like the men you see in the newsreels, all scrubbed clean with rosy cheeks and a wink for the girls. They stared off into space, not quite seeing us, even though Mrs. Latimer’s boys ran out after them, shouting and trying to earn a wave.

  The men in uniform are, of course, a topic of great interest among my friends. We may’ve all left school, but they still laugh and twitter and touch up their lipstick like schoolgirls whenever they think a serviceman might be near.

  Kate can’t contain her excitement over the dance tomorrow. Sometimes I can see people trying to work out how we could be so close when we’re so very different. Blond and brunette. Bubbly and shy. Tall and short.

  Mary Hawkley once asked me how I can stand being around Kate when she’s so popular. “Doesn’t it just kill you that the boys all talk to her?” But then she stopped herself and laughed. “It’s a good thing you have Gary, isn’t it?”

  She flitted away before I could say anything.

  3

  LOUISE

  “Oh, my hair is an absolute wreck,” said Kate as she stared into the mirror of the village hall’s powder room and rewound one of the pin curls that had become crushed under her hat.

  Louise stopped plucking at her cheeks and glanced at her cousin. “Stop your nonsense. You look like Betty Grable.”

  Kate rocked back on her black patent leather heels and dropped her hands to her sides. “Do you think so?”

  With Kate’s hair piled on top of her head sharpening her cheekbones and her mouth painted vermilion, it wasn’t too outrageous a jump to make, so Louise nodded and then squinted at herself in the mirror. “The best I can hope for right now is Bette Davis.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Kate, but she’d gone back to twirling curls to reshape them.