Just Desserts

by Jan Jones

  ‘Honestly, you should have seen the speed at which they shifted the bags to my car,’ said Penny to Leo later as they both watched Bobby throwing lumps of bread at the ducks.

  ‘You’ll enjoy it. Those old bits and pieces are often fascinating. I’d give you a hand, but I’m off to London. It’s my weekend with Daniel.’

  Penny’s heart softened. ‘Have a lovely time then. Will you stay with your parents?’

  He nodded, his lips tightening. ‘He knows them. It’s ‘allowed’.’

  ‘Leo, you’ve got visiting rights. You could insist on your ex-wife being a little fairer to you.’

  ‘I’m not having Daniel made a pawn. I love him too much. I’ll put up with Kayleigh’s rules for the moment.’

  Leo stared at his ex-wife in disbelief. ‘What do you mean Daniel has got a birthday party this afternoon? I have him one weekend in four – and today is now ruined.’

  Kayleigh lifted one slim shoulder. ‘Do think of someone besides yourself, Leo. He can’t not go to parties when he’s been invited. You don’t want him to be the odd one out amongst his friends, do you?’

  Leo kept a grip on his annoyance. ‘You might at least have emailed to warn me. I had plans for us today.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll find some work to do while you’re waiting,’ Kayleigh said waspishly. ‘I took second place to your job for years. It won’t hurt you to know how it felt.’

  So, here were Leo and his son on the bus to Daniel’s friend Sam’s birthday party. Leo looked at Daniel’s legs swinging with excitement and found it difficult to stay cross. They scrambled off and found the right address.

  ‘I’ll be back at five o’clock,’ he said. After Daniel had gone in, he stood for a moment outside the ordinary semi-detached house, listening to the squeals of excitement every time the door opened for a new arrival, watching the other parents get back into their cars and drive away for an afternoon’s respite from their offspring.

  His heart ached. He didn’t want a respite. He wanted to be with Daniel. And he didn’t have a car and this part of residential Hendon seemed singularly devoid of places to while away an unwelcome free afternoon. Or was it? Leo hunted through his memory for the trigger word that came after Hendon … Aerodrome. Of course. Hendon Aerodrome. Except it wasn’t now, was it? It was Hendon RAF Museum.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said out loud. Kayleigh’s taunt about work came back to him, but he had to do something for the next three hours and he did have a plane crash story to research. If he went home his mother would only fuss over his leg and mention the physiotherapy that he wasn’t doing. And then it wouldn’t be long before she started asking whether he’d made any nice friends in Salthaven yet and who was this Penny that he’d talked about? No, much better to stay out until he had Daniel back as a first line of defence. He sat on a garden wall to check the Maps application on his phone for the RAF museum. There it was! And not that long a walk away either.

  The museum was vast. On enquiry, he discovered that they didn’t have access to old civilian crash records, but apparently the manufacturers would very often still have them in their archives, especially if the aeroplane in question had been a prototype production machine. Leo thanked the receptionist and went to look at the Heritage Collection. As far as he could understand from the sketchy details available to him, Andrew Collins’s plane had been based on the de Havilland Vampire. There was a Vampire in the hangar. It would be useful to see the size of it close up and judge whether it really could have been lost in Long Tarn as the authorities in Salthaven claimed.

  The answer, when Leo located the small jet, was probably. He stared at it, walking around the compact fighter, trying to imagine how it would feel to be in something that size, hundreds of feet above the ground, tearing through the sound barrier. All of a sudden, his car crash came back to him. That split-second of being out of control. He imagined it happening in a plane, he could almost feel himself tumbling out of the air. Sweat sheeted his forehead and he stumbled backwards to a bench.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’ The elderly lady who had been sitting at the end of the bench turned a concerned face to him.

  ‘I … Yes. Thank you. Stupid. I was just imagining something this tiny breaking the sound barrier and … Those test pilots must have been brave men.’

  The woman regarded him quizzically. ‘They were, of course,’ she said. ‘But they didn’t think of themselves as brave. If you’d suggested any such thing, they’d roar with laughter.’

  Leo’s faintness disappeared. ‘You knew them?’ he said, surprised.

  She laughed. ‘Not all of them, there were too many. As soon as the war ended, the demobbed RAF boys all wanted to get back into aviation. There were plenty of companies developing aircraft around then, willing to take them on. I worked at one of the bigger ones – Hawkers.’ Her smile faltered. ‘They missed the exhilaration, you see. Never considered the danger and wouldn’t have thanked you for pointing it out.’

  ‘What did you do there? Sorry, I’m Leo Williams. I’m a journalist looking into an old crash.’

  ‘Betty Dawson, dear. I was what we called a computer.’ She chuckled. ‘My grandchildren always laugh at that. It was long before the days when we had machines to do the job. We used to analyse the test data after crashes. See if we could work out why the planes had failed.’

  ‘Good heavens.’ Leo was genuinely astonished. ‘And did you?’

  ‘Sometimes. Fatigue fractures were common. It was understandable with the new designs and the new alloys. Nobody quite knew how they’d cope with the strain, despite the tests in the wind tunnels. The engineers got better at it – but it didn’t help those poor boys. Not that they’d thank you, as I say. They’d lived life so fast during the war, you see.’ Her faded eyes twinkled, belying her years. ‘Being a civvy was boring.’

  Leo snorted. ‘It’s a point of view.’ But underneath he was thinking it probably wasn’t so very different from the way he’d felt about missing his job when he was forced to convalesce after his accident.

  Betty’s gaze rested on the Vampire. ‘The de Havilland 110 was developed from this. That was a beautiful plane. Flawed though, to begin with. My husband and I were at the Farnborough Air Show in 1952 when it broke up in front of our eyes.’

  Leo felt a jolt of pure horror. He looked at his companion, but she was sixty-odd years in the past, her eyes misting as she remembered.

  ‘It had just gone supersonic – very thrilling and low – and was starting to climb when it just ripped apart. The elevator came off, the wings ripped away, and the vibrations shook the structure so much that the two engines became bullets. One came down in the crowd. The other fell into the car park. We could see the inside walls of the engines where they lay. Thirty-two people dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry, said Leo inadequately.

  Betty shook her head, remembering. After a moment, she said, ‘They changed the rules after that. No more low-level flights at air shows.’ Then her expression lightened. ‘Hello, love. Did they want them?’

  An elderly man was approaching them. ‘They did. Not on display – they’ll go into the collection.’

  ‘That’s all right then.’ Betty turned to Leo. ‘My husband, Jim. The children said that they don’t honestly know what they’d do with his medals, so he’s been seeing if the RAF want them. He was a pilot too, all those years ago – but I talked him out of being a daredevil and kept him.’

  Leo walked with them out of the hangar. At the car park, he gave them his card and scribbled down their phone number. ‘Always useful to have a mine of first-hand information to call on,’ he said with a smile. But as he made his way back to collect Daniel from the party his brain was telling him he’d missed something. Something important. It wasn’t until he was jolting back on the bus listening to his son telling him about the party games that he realised what it was.

  Betty had mentioned fatigue fractures. She’d seen pieces of aeroplane where it had ripped apart. If Andrew Collins had
crashed in 1953, the likelihood was that he wouldn’t have come down tidily in one piece. So where had the rest of the aircraft been? And who had cleared it up?

  Penny gazed at the piles of WI records on her dining room table. It was all very well organising them into order, but how was she ever to compile it into a history? There was too much of it!

  She glanced at her watch: it wasn’t late. She’d text Leo. He must have sifted through this sort of thing before in search of a story. Maybe there was a knack to it.

  She was surprised when he rang back almost straight away. ‘What’s the problem?’ asked Leo.

  ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not. Daniel’s gone to bed and my parents are starting to look at me worriedly because I’m not working. They’re not used to it.’

  Penny heard laughter in the background and felt better. ‘It’s this Women’s Institute paperwork. I just don’t know where to start. The first entry in the minutes gives the names of those attending the inaugural meeting – including my grandmother, by the way – and the date of the next. But that’s just facts, Leo, and stilted little newspaper reports. A history shouldn’t be completely boring, should it?’

  ‘Try fast-forwarding through the routine stuff until you get to anniversaries. One year on, five years, ten years. Quite often those are the times when reports are compiled. No sense you working things out from scratch if someone who was actually there has already written it up for you.’

  Penny was stunned at such a simple solution. ‘That’s brilliant!’

  ‘I know,’ Leo said modestly. ‘It’s not foolproof, but it’s a good start.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll let you know how I get on. Are you having a nice weekend?’

  There was a slight pause. ‘Yeah. It’s good. See you next week.’

  ‘OK.’

  She put the phone down. He wasn’t very happy, she thought. Oh, but what a good tip about looking for already-written accounts of the WI history. All of a sudden, the project had become far less daunting.

  Penny didn’t have to work too far forward to strike gold. At five years in, she found a history written by a Mrs Ingle, who had apparently been the one to put forward the idea of forming a Women’s Institute in Salthaven in the first place. Young and lively – to judge by the energetic tone of her writing – Henrietta had been off visiting friends and brought various cosmopolitan ideas back with her. She was at pains to point out in the account that the WI was a complementary organisation to the Women’s Voluntary Service. Penny guessed there had been comments about diluting the war effort! She hadn’t been the president, though. That honour had gone alternately to Lady Ribblethwaite and Mrs Barnes for the first few years.

  Penny sat back at that point. How interesting. The Ribblethwaites had owned Thwaite Hall for generations before death duties had forced them to sell it to be used as a retirement home. The Barnes family were prominent in the local business community. Neither set of descendants were friendly with the other and it looked as though, in those early days, the WI presidency had been a power struggle between old families and new money. It wasn’t the sort of tussle that could go into a sober account of the history of Salthaven WI unless she worded it very carefully. It was a pity Grandma Astley was no longer alive to ask. She’d have known the ins and outs of it for sure.

  Penny returned to Henrietta Ingle’s report. The first few years of the WI seemed to have been a lot livelier than they were now. There had been worthy lectures on Wartime Cooking, Make Do and Mend, and Writing Diaries in Code. But there had also been morale-boosting dances, birthday parties, and – intriguingly – exercises in diverting the enemy forces.

  Penny eyed the piles of paper on the table that she’d skipped over. It was no good. Her appetite had now been whetted. She was going to have to read through them anyway!

  ‘I might have found your Famous Daughter, but you’ll have to work for it,’ said Penny on Monday. ‘I’m not going to have time to go through this lot, what with the show at the end of the week.’

  She was amused to see Leo look greedily at the Women’s Institute records. ‘Just my sort of thing,’ he said. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Henrietta Ingle. Only they all called each other Mrs and Miss in those days. Mrs Ingle got them fired up to start the WI and seems to have been the prime mover in some of the more adventurous escapades.’

  ‘Escapades?’ Leo’s voice rose in disbelief. ‘Adventurous? The WI?’

  Penny chuckled. ‘You may well be startled. Listen to this: ‘May 1941: At this week’s meeting, Mrs Ingle and Miss Fell demonstrated the anti-tank device. It was not an unqualified success and more development is needed. It was agreed that a puncture repair kit should be purchased so that volunteers can get home.’ Isn’t that fabulous?’

  Leo was laughing. ‘An anti-tank device? And a puncture repair kit?’

  ‘That’s what it says.’ Penny looked at him expectantly. Had he missed the name of the other woman?

  He frowned and took the book from her. ‘Hold on a moment. Mrs Ingle and Miss Fell? As in Grandad Fell’s sister?’

  ‘I reckon. Do you fancy a trip up to the farm?’

  ‘I certainly do. I want to rattle his cage about that plane as well. Jack Scrivener must have seen more than was in the paper. Mr Fell may know what.’

  The old gentleman was delighted to see them back. When Penny asked about the ‘anti-tank device’, he wheezed so hard he had to be revived with a fresh brew of tea.

  ‘That were Mrs Ingle’s idea, that were. Not but what our Elsie wasn’t as bad. Powerful fired up, they were, thinking what they could do if the Germans landed and the Home Guard off protecting the gasworks. Daft women came up with the idea of strewing tin tacks across the road.’

  Leo yelped with laughter. ‘Tin tacks? Against a tank?’

  ‘Told you they were daft. I knew nothing about it until afterwards. They were that much older than us and Elsie said we boys wouldn’t say what we were up to, so why should she tell me her doings? They tried it out down at St Mary’s, then the pair of them hid by the side of the wall lying in wait for the butcher’s boy – he’d cheeked Elsie twice that week and she reckoned he needed taking down a peg. They heard his bell, lobbed the tacks over the wall, then blow me if the Ministry farm inspector didn’t overtake the lad on the corner and bust his tyres!’

  ‘Oh no! What did they do?’

  ‘Do? They legged it. Mrs Ingle biked for home as fast as she could and my fool sister scurried up here by the back way and was near through feeding the hens when the inspector finally arrived. Did Fellrigg Farm a favour though. He was that grateful to me for mending his spare and to Ma for giving him a bottle of beer and a bite to eat he wasn’t nearly so particular about us from then on.’

  ‘The Ingle Cup,’ said Penny suddenly.

  Leo looked at her enquiringly.

  ‘Sorry. I’ve just remembered. One of the novelty classes in the Salthaven Show is for the Ingle Cup. The best use of unusual ingredients. I won it one year for chocolate-dipped mackerel.’

  Grandad Fell chortled. ‘She’d have liked that, all right.’

  ‘I suppose she moved away, did she? I don’t know anyone nowadays by the name of Ingle.’

  ‘Her husband got promotion and was shunted on after the war. She and Elsie always wrote though. Letters were always full of some madcap stunt for charity.’

  Leo was scribbling in his notepad. ‘I don’t suppose you’d have an address? She sounds just the subject for a column in the Messenger. Even if she isn’t with us any more, her family might have memories.’

  Rachel Fell had come into the kitchen while they were talking. ‘She’s on the Christmas card list, Grandad. Will I take it off the computer?’

  ‘Do that, lass.’ He chucked again. ‘Haven’t thought of those days for years.’

  ‘It’s doing you good,’ said Rachel. ‘Are you going back via Lowdale, Mrs Plain? Can you drop this envelope off for Tom? He needs to sign some forms.
I was going to do it myself, but I’m that busy with orders for ice cream, not to mention my entries for the Salthaven Show.’

  Penny was aware of Leo stirring alertly at the mention of Lowdale. ‘Call me Penny, please. I’ll be happy to take it. What are you entering for the show?’

  ‘Cakes. Loaves. Some of my hedgerow jam. To tell the truth I was going to give it a miss this year, what with the ice cream taking off, but your Lucinda gave me a rare talking to about use-it-or-lose-it and the money for library books benefiting us and the kids. Billy and Grandad still say I’m mad, but she’s right. You have to support the show, don’t you? Otherwise it folds. I’m having a trade stall too, so I ought to have faith in my own products being placed. It all gets the word out there and helps in the long run. Here’s Mrs Ingle’s address. London. Funny to think of her and Auntie Elsie getting up to all those antics, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very strange,’ said Penny.

  ‘Talking of London,’ said Leo casually. ‘I was in Hendon with my boy at the weekend and went to the Air Museum. They had a plane just like the one that crashed up here. Tiny thing, compared to today’s aircraft. Tell me again what Jack Scrivener said about that night?’

  Grandad Fell’s eyes unfocused. ‘It would have been round about this time of year, but dark and overcast. No more harvesting that day, so there we were in the Drovers when Jack comes in. That was a surprise in itself, because he didn't usually turn up until near closing. He might get caught for a round otherwise! ‘Plane’s come down,’ he said, jerking his head up the road. He said he didn’t hear it at first, what with the noise of the waves crashing, but then he looked up and saw a dark shape, then it seemed like a bit of it flew off, then there was this hissing boiling burst as it came down in the tarn.’

  ‘A bit flew off?’ said Leo. ‘That wasn’t mentioned in the newspaper.’

  The old man cackled. ‘That would be due to Jack Scrivener having a win on the football pools next day and being rare confused when it came to the questioning.’

  Leo grinned. ‘It happens. There must have been a number of you in the pub. Did you not go up to the crash as soon as you heard? To see if anything could be done?’