Runaways

by Carolyn McCrae

  We had been in the garden for a long time and I noticed David glancing at his watch, I wondered how long it would be before Edith and Maureen arrived back.

  David also seemed to be calculating whether he had time to tell me another part of his story.

  “Shall I tell you how I met my wife?”

  Chapter Six

  Since early in the war, when the first codebook had been captured detailing the enemy’s operating ciphers, David had spent his working days interpreting the messages which enabled the Navy to locate enemy ships and submarines. Many of his colleagues were Naval officers and wore uniform but, as a civilian David was exposed, whenever he walked the streets of London, to the unjustified attacks of women with their malicious words and white feathers.

  He felt they should have known better.

  He was not normally required to go into work on a Saturday but January 1917 was a particularly busy time. A message had been intercepted which was believed to be of critical importance to the progress of the war. David had heard enough to know that, if their interpretation was correct, America would have to enter the war against Germany. Such was the pressure that Saturday that David had worked even longer than he had meant to.

  It was nearing the anniversary of his father’s death and he knew his mother and Elizabeth would both worry if he was not back on time so he was running to catch his bus when he bumped into Edith Tyler on the pavement outside Charing Cross station. In the collision the contents of her shopping basket were spilled on the pavement. He remembered two brown parcels, a small bag and a newspaper. He was surprised to see a woman with a serious newspaper, he did not think women were interested in such things.

  As David helped her retrieve the contents of her basket from the pavement he noticed her wedding ring, but so many women with rings were widows that he had no qualms about asking her to join him for a pot of tea, ‘it’s the least I can do after crashing into you like that.’

  His concern for his mother’s feelings were forgotten. It was important to him to get to know this young woman. As they talked he had found that she was interested in current events, and obviously not only carried a newspaper but read, and understood, the contents.

  He wondered whether she was one of those modern women who considered themselves equal with men. He had thought that the recent Act of Parliament giving a vote to women was simply a reward for their work in the war, it implied, he felt, nothing more than that. Women had risen to the occasion of the war and had taken on many of the jobs that had been men’s but when the war ended, they would return to the kitchen as those men who could returned from war. Would they then give up the vote? He found himself asking this young woman what she thought and their discussion lasted as they drank two pots of tea in the Lyons Corner House. They did not talk about themselves, they said nothing about their personal circumstances, but they did arrange to meet the following week.

  It was at that second meeting that Edie told David she wasn’t a widow, her husband was serving in France and she had two young sons. But she also told David of her unhappiness, of how unsuited to each other she and Bert were, how he had changed since his business had failed and how resentful he had become at being recruited in the ranks.

  Her marital status made no difference to David. He wasn’t in a position to support a wife with his mother and sister to support, but he wasn’t averse to developing a friendship.

  Perhaps he should have been.

  They met every Saturday afternoon. They would walk through the parks or, when the weather was inclement, they would visit museums and art galleries. David’s afternoons with Edith were the highpoint of his week.

  In early September they were walking in Kensington Gardens. The trees were turning to orange and gold and they talked about where they would be when new leaves appeared and the walks were once again green. They stood, hand in hand, looking at the grey and lacklustre memorial to Prince Albert wondering if it would ever be returned to the shining gilt that had been removed ‘in case Fritz used it as a navigation aid for their aircraft’.

  ‘Perhaps it was that reminder of our mortality and of the bombs which were falling more persistently over the capital,’ David thought years later, ‘or perhaps it was just meant to be’.

  They had held hands on their third meeting and then, some months later, he had kissed her on the cheek as they parted. It was Edie who had first kissed him on the lips as though she meant it. After that they had always tried to find a quiet corner where they could kiss and cuddle. Many people were shocked to see young couples sitting close together on park benches but it was not an unusual sight in the city so much changed by the war.

  As the months had passed and their need for each other had grown David had been careful not to get into a situation where what they both wanted to happen would be possible.

  As they walked away from the Albert Memorial, and that September afternoon turned to dusk, Edie made no move to end their afternoon. She didn’t mention missing her train, or her children waiting for her at her parents. She just, rather defiantly, walked with David.

  “The park will be closing soon, the gates will be closed.” David had ventured.

  “Let them lock us in.”

  They both knew what she meant.

  Their Saturday afternoons changed after that day.

  David took the lease on a small flat near Kings Cross Station where they could spend their afternoons privately together. News from France was improving and they were both conscious that when the war ended Bert would return. They had so little time left to be together. Neither felt that there was anything wrong in what they were doing. They loved each other and they were simply doing what people in love did.

  They had been philosophical when Edie told David in July 1918 that she was expecting.

  “Bert will know it can’t be his but he’ll take it on. He’d know he’d have to. He can’t do without me.” It was hard for David to take. He couldn’t ask Edie to leave Bert and the boys to live with him, divorce was out of the question and he had his mother and sister to consider.

  “Will I ever see it?” He had asked trying not to let Edie know how sad he felt.

  But no one ever saw the baby that died almost as soon as it was born in January 1919. Bert was back from France and he knew it wasn’t his, his experience was not unique, others of his pals had returned from war to a larger family. He wasn’t particularly interested in who the father had been as he re-established his rights over his wife, very soon showing her she wouldn’t get a chance to stray again.

  There were so many other things changing now the war was over. The freedoms that women had achieved were removed as soon as the men returned. Edie’s job in the office of the West End store was given to a man who had no experience but since he had lost a leg on the Somme her employer felt he was owed the work. She returned to dependence on her husband, as so many other women had to.

  David’s work necessarily changed.

  He began to concentrate on the next, inevitable, war.

  Everyone in his section knew there would be another, sooner rather than later ‘I’ll give it 20 years’ he had told his mother It’s the small weak states that have been created by breaking up the Habsburg empire, that’s where the trouble will brew.’

  So David had set about becoming an expert on Austria.

  Opportunities for Edith and David to be together were rare but when she knew she could get away from Bert she wrote a postcard detailing a time and they would return to the flat in Kings Cross. She would never know whether he could make the assignation or not but, when he did, their feelings for each other were only stronger. It was the first time they felt there was anything deceitful about their relationship.

  In April 1920 Edie knew she was expecting again.

  David had known he may never see Edie again when he visited the flat and found a letter, several months old, saying simply

  My dear

  You have a daughter. She is healthy and will survive.


  Goodbye, God Bless, I will love her as I have loved you.

  Perhaps one day…

  E

  Chapter Seven

  “They’ll be back soon.” I tried to fill the silence that had followed David’s monologue. I had been fascinated and moved by the story but it had obviously been difficult for David as he faced up to losing the woman I now understood so much better. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

  David sounded very old and tired as he replied “No, Annie, don’t leave me alone. Let me talk. If I talk I cannot think.”

  I wondered what we should talk about, perhaps something less personal, perhaps I could learn more about his work.

  “You said you knew the Second World War was inevitable?” David half shook his head as if bringing himself back to the present and eventually answering with his voice, once again, strong and confident.

  “Before the First War we knew there was conflict coming and the powers in the land prepared for it even though we had no idea what the horrors were to be. Ten years later why didn’t we acknowledge the same signals? Some of us did.”

  “Why didn’t you stop it?”

  “It is so easy for your generation, with the benefit of hindsight, to ask that.”

  “You saw it coming why didn’t you do anything about it?”

  “We did.” David corrected himself. “Some of us did.”

  “Wasn’t it in your minds every minute of the day, every day?”

  “Some of us did see it coming, some of us were worn down with fear and dread, some of us did have it on our minds every minute of every day. But only a few of us did anything about it.” He sounded very bitter. “You and your generation don’t have to imagine the destruction of that war, you’ve seen the endless television programmes and films,” David looked across at me, and smiled sadly “but at that time we had no idea what it would be like. No idea at all. We knew there would be a war but we imagined a war like the previous one, with men fighting away from home, few dying on home soil, the dead being listed in tight columns in the newspapers, carefully arranged by rank and surname, but life for the vast majority of the population passing more or less normally. We couldn’t have imagined how different this war was going to be.”

  “We shouldn’t judge people in history,” I suggested tentatively, continuing when I realised I had David’s attention “because we know what happens?”

  “Thank you Annie, thank you for recognising that. We had a saying in our department ‘Do not judge us too harshly for things we could not know.’

  “I’ve heard that.” I recognised the phrase. I had a vague recollection of Ted using it and also my father and, since they were both lawyers, I had assumed it was some kind of legal phrase probably translated from Latin.

  “Bear that in mind, Annie. Too many people don’t.”

  “Did the fear of war hanging over you affect everything in your lives?”

  “Certainly for some of my generation the answer would have to be ‘yes’.”

  “Did you fear it?”

  “Yes indeed I did. From the very end of the Great War there were some of us who recognised what was going to happen. We knew the German people would never accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. They had been dictated by short-sighted politicians seeking re-election and it seemed obvious they would lead directly to another war. The people seemed unaware, believing that those politicians would not lead us into another conflagration. It was our job to prepare as well as we could.”

  “Our job?” I interrupted.

  “The government, the services.”

  “But you weren’t in the government or the forces.”

  “No, strictly speaking I wasn’t, but I was in a position to watch and influence. Any information that could have led to fear was suppressed. It was important that young men worked to achieve their ambitions despite the fact that we knew their careers would be truncated. We had to make sure they didn’t know that their world had such a very short time left.”

  “So you let people live in a fools’ paradise?”

  “There was no alternative. What would have happened if woman had known there was to be a war in 20 years time?” David continued without giving me time to answer. “They would not have had children, they would not have had the next generation of cannon fodder. There were few enough men around to be fathers anyway and there were serious concerns in government that the birth rate would drop so low that there wouldn’t be enough young men to allow us to fight the war when it came.”

  “That is awful.” I couldn’t believe a government could be so cynical.

  “I’m afraid that was what we were required to do. They wouldn’t rearm, they wouldn’t invest in developing modern techniques of war. In our department we did what we could, quietly and without fuss, but also without any support.”

  I was intrigued. I had never thought of the world my mother and grandparents had grown up in.

  “What did you do?”

  David was about to answer when we both heard voices and David leant forward, put his hand on my knee and spoke quickly. “Annie, you will learn many things in the next years. Some of the knowledge will not be comfortable, you must approach your work with no pre-conceptions. Just because we are your family does not make what we did right. What you learn, and what you do with that knowledge, I leave in your hands.”

  What David said just made me want to learn more but I had no chance to ask anything further.

  Maureen had arrived home and, judging from the look in her eyes, she did not bring good news.

  Chapter Eight

  I had no chance to keep in touch with either Maureen or my grandparents during that first year working with Joy. I travelled to Austria and Germany several times and the work was very time consuming. When the year was up and I became a student again my life hardly changed.

  I was determined to use the years that Max had given me well and so spent my time working for my degree and still undertaking specific tasks for Joy. David and Max could give me some help but I knew I had to know more about Europe in the 1930s to both ask the right questions and understand their answers.

  I had little social life, soon finding that I had little in common with those students, only a few years younger than me, who were happy to waste their student years partying and drinking.

  There was always so much to do that I never got around to visiting Maureen or my grandparents. I sent them postcards and wrote short letters but I hadn’t visited them since beginning at Sussex. The phone call from Maureen just after the end of my first year examinations was short and to the point.

  “You must come back. Your grandmother has taken a turn for the worse. Get here quickly.”

  I drove up the next day feeling guilty that I hadn’t made the short journey many more times in the two years I had been away. I arrived at Maureen’s cottage to be told I was too late.

  “She knew it was coming, she was very brave.”

  “Long illness bravely borne.” I quoted dryly.

  I was more upset than I could explain. I hadn’t known Edith very well at all but I had liked her, and having learned what I had through the previous years there had been very specific questions I knew she could have answered.

  “Somehow you think people are a fixture don’t you?” I asked Maureen as we sat in her unchanged kitchen drinking tea. “You think they’ll always be able to tell you what you want to know, answer your questions and just be there. There was so much I could have asked her and I didn’t, I always thought there’d be more time.”

  “David is bereft. I really don’t know how he’ll cope being on his own. They’ve loved each other for so long. We must keep an eye on him, you must visit him. We both will.” Maureen was urgent in her concern for him.

  “You knew them well.” I had never really questioned Maureen about how she came to be a friend of my mother’s parents and I hoped she’d tell me. I didn’t believe that she had just met them by chance on the train on the way to their daughter�
��s funeral. They had seemed to know each other a great deal better than that.

  “I knew David better than Edie.” Maureen rarely answered a question directly.

  “Had you known him a long time?”

  “I was surprised to see them on the train to Liverpool on the way to the funeral. I recognised him but I wasn’t sure he knew me at first. It had been a long time, over 25 years.”

  I did a quick calculation. “So you must have known him during the war? Tell me about him.”

  It was some years before I realised what an opportunity I had lost by asking Maureen about David and not about herself.

  She nodded briefly. “David is a wonderful man,” she said firmly “but he had to do many difficult things in his work. So much he couldn’t tell anyone, so many secrets…”

  “Was he a spy?” I interrupted. David had talked of politics and intrigue.

  “Such a silly word ‘spy’.” Maureen sounded weary “There are many different kinds of jobs that we hear so little of. For every James Bond there are ten, twenty, thirty people whose work involves nothing more exciting than commuting to sit at desks in gloomy rooms in narrow streets off Whitehall or in ornate rooms in grand houses tucked away in the country.”

  “You sound like you know a lot about it.”

  “It’s where I worked too.”

  “I thought you did something academic.”

  “No you didn’t, Annie, you thought I did nothing. That’s if you ever thought of it at all. Those days around Alicia’s funeral must have been incredibly difficult for them both. David and Max worked together for years but had never liked each other, and then of course Max had married David’s sister …”

  “What?” That really was a surprise and diverted me from the fact that, again, Maureen had not taken the opportunity to be honest with me. Perhaps I hadn’t asked the right questions.

  “It’s not common knowledge of course. Elizabeth had been left a widow quite early in the war. Max married her. I’m not sure whether it was a marriage of convenience or a love match. There was a daughter.”