“Esme! Oh Esme…it couldn’t be…! It couldn’t…”
Perhaps Esme had had a surfeit of shocks in the last few days and was growing impervious to new ones, or perhaps, subconsciously, he had half-recognised the girl’s voice on the C.O.’s ’phone. At all events he was the first to recover, as the glow inside him spread.
“Hullo, Judy? So you’re the new sergeant the ‘good type’ who’s ‘buttoned up’?”
There was no reason why Judy Carver should have been so overwhelmingly surprised to see Esme. She was aware that he was on the strength at Queen’s Norton, for one of her first jobs, on being posted to the O.T.U. after her promotion, had been to check through a nominal roll of the permanent staff, sent for duplication to the typing pool.
She had been intrigued, but not particularly elated, to come across Esme’s name in the Headquarters Section. Once upon a time such a discovery would have sent her into transports of joy and despatched her fancy along the familiar road that led away from the Avenue, up the Rise to Shirley Church, and from thence to a semi-detached villa, on one of the new housing estates. Here she would have dreamed of Esme’s return on the 6.10, and pictured herself preparing his high tea, and talking to their baby, styled, in her dream, ‘The Cherub’.
This was Judy’s oldest dream and reached back to the long, dry summer of 1919, when she was seven years old, and for more than a decade it had no serious rival. Most of the time between then and now she had lived next door to Esme, and when she wasn’t following him about, rescuing him from dungeons, binding up his ‘grievous wounds’ for the barge journey to Avalon, concealing him in corn stooks from the probing bayonets of ‘Butcher’ Cumberland’s troops, or standing beside him during a cannonade, in which he was killed and spared the gibbet at Execution Dock, she was writing about Esme in her diary. This diary, containing a day-to-day record of her dream, had been long since burned in the dustbin, of Number Twenty. It was destroyed on the day following Esme’s purchase, in the shop where she had worked, of a powder-compact, his Christmas gift to Elaine Frith, of Number Seventeen.
After that they had drifted apart, for Esme was engaged in other, and slightly more adult games of make-believe, and by the time Elaine had left Number Seventeen, and joined her father in North Wales, Judy had replaced Esme with her new and absorbing interest, at the riding school, over towards Keston. Later still, when she had attained her B.H.A. certificate, and gone down to Devonshire to help her employer found a bigger riding school, the Esme-hurt had healed, leaving but a small scar, small enough, indeed, to forget to ache when she fell gently in love with Tim Ascham, drowned off the Lizard within a month of their marriage.
From time to time, during the bleak months that had followed Tim’s death, Judy had returned to the Avenue and heard her sister, Louise talk about Esme, and his prodigal bride, Elaine. Louise said she often saw them going in and out of Number Forty-Three, opposite, and that Elaine now had a child, born on the day that Hitler had invaded Poland, and that the child was a pretty little girl, with dark curls, and was called Barbara.
Louise kept Judy well informed on these things, but no more accurately than she reported upon all the other families in the Avenue. Ted Hartnell, the jazz band man, had won a medal. Young Brooking, the ginger-haired boy of Number Seventy-Six, had been taken prisoner. Grandpa Barnmeade, the Air Raid Warden, had broken his neck, outside Miss Clegg’s. There had been a bomb on the Shirley Rise end of Delhi Road, killing several people. Judy liked hearing the Avenue gossip from Louise, for although she had now been resident in Devonshire for several years, and her main interests were rural, rather than suburban, she was still very much attached to the Avenue and it would never cease to be home.
She was still fond of Esme, too, but in a painless way, in the way one is fond of summers long ago. She could never see foxglove spires in Devon woods, for instance, without remembering how excited Esme had been by the first foxgloves they had found growing in the wrecked kitchen garden of the Old Manor, where they had played so often.
She was fond of Esme, but she no longer linked him with Shirley Church, orange blossom, and confetti, or saw him marching up and down the lawn, pushing a mower among the new houses of the Wickham estate. Whenever she did remember him it was with warmth and gratitude, as a slight, intense little boy, who had sprinkled stardust up and down the Avenue and had lit and trimmed for her a small, magic lamp, that even now was capable of defying the blackouts of wartime winters.
When the C.O. had rung through, and broken the tedium of the night watch, by telling her about an airman who had arrived with a baby, she had been pleased, and excited. It did not seem to her a remarkable thing that a man should walk into camp, at 23.59 hours, with a baby in his arms. Happenings like this were common enough nowadays, with whole households going up in clouds of dust, and men being rushed off on compassionate leave, to scratch among the ruins of their homes for all that was left of their pre-war lives.
She made a bed in the duty W.A.A.F.’s bunk, and slipped across to the billet for a hot-water bottle and a clean pillowslip. Then she heard the poor chap clumping along the passage, opened the door, and there stood Esme, holding the baby she had heard Louise describe so often, but had never yet seen!
As soon as their first greetings were over, they put Barbara to bed and left a low-powered bulb burning, in case she woke up, and was frightened by unfamiliar surroundings. Then the duty cook came in, carrying a cardboard box containing the various ingredients for Barbara’s breakfast, the result of a long and earnest ’phone discussion between the duty cook and a sleep-bemused Catering Officer. Then the C.O. looked in again—he never seemed to go to bed at all—and learned, with mild interest, that his L.A.C. clerk and the new Sergeant W.A.A.F., had been next-door neighbours in London, before the war. He was not taken aback by this coincidence, for his life at sea, before his transfer to the R.A.F., had been full of strange encounters. He had once found himself afloat on a hen-coop off Auckland, with a man who had stolen his watch in Rosyth!
Finally he did get to bed, and left L.A.C. and Sergeant gossiping over mugs of cocoa and plates of sausage and mash. Esme told Judy what a smashing officer Collie was, and how hopeless the volunteer reservists were, and Judy told Esme about life on an operational squadron, during the Battle of Britain, and how pretty Barbara was, every bit as pretty as Louise had described.
At length Esme, who somehow did not feel tired any more, told Judy how his mother had been killed in a hit-and-run raid, and ultimately the truth about how Barbara came to be with him. He remembered, just in time, that the coincidence of their meeting like this was even stranger than it appeared, for his wife’s lover was Judy’s eldest brother. He found himself unable to tell her this as yet, so he described Archie was a nameless ‘civvy’, whom Elaine had ‘run across somewhere’. She would find out sooner or later, of course, but that could wait, and he much preferred her to find it out from someone else.
It was three o’clock before he left her and crossed the silent dispersal area to his billet. He slept soundly until the Tannoy clicked and the men around him dragged themselves from their beds as the first news bulletin of the day began to crackle from the amplifier, and a cheerful riser began to bellow—
“There’ll be blue birds overrr…
The White Cliffs of Dover…
Tomorrow, just you wait and seeee…”
To the other men in the hut it was just another day. To Esme, lying still, and recalling the events of yesterday, it seemed more like rebirth.
His day proved a very crowded one. First there was a succession of ’phone calls and discussions, then a longish session with Flight Lieutenant Dyson, the unit ‘mouthpiece’, and afterwards a quick peep at Barbara who, far from being upset by her succession of moves during the last week, was already queening it in the midst of a circle of cooing W.A.A.F.s, over whom Sergeant Ascham presided, like the senior nanny at a royal christening.
When Esme looked in and they all made way for him, and Barbara cal
led: “Dada!”, reaching out her arms, Esme blushed under the chorus of “Oooos” and “Ahhhs”, but Barbara soon forgot him in the assortment of playthings that were produced, as if by magic, from kitbags and lockers.
Thus he was able to compose a long, explanatory letter to Harold, and enclose with it another for Jim Carver, from Judy. Bewildered reading it made for the Avenue recipients, as Harold, his temperature at last down to normal, sat up in bed, spooning Edith Clegg’s mutton broth into his mouth, while Jim sat beside him, still wearing his lime-dusted gum-boots and read the letters loud, rapidly at first, then carefully, with numerous asides.
In a way the news was good for Harold. It gave him something to think about, and helped him to forget his loss. Jim, noting this, discussed the situation in detail and persuaded him that Esme’s decision to convey the baby to Elaine’s father, in Wales, was a sensible, if temporary solution to a complicated situation.
Harold, to Jim’s astonishment, was not much surprised by Elaine’s behaviour.
“I’ve had my suspicions for some time, old man,” he croaked, “but it wasn’t for me to say anything, that is, not without some sort of proof. I knew she was gadding about, but then, isn’t everyone gadding about these days? People are coming and going, here, there and everywhere, and all hell’s let loose every night. Just fancy my poor Eunice…I mean to say, how’s a man to know what to do for the best? We send her into the country, and we stay on here, getting blitzed round the clock, yet it’s she who gets it, and we don’t! Sometimes it makes a man feel like packing everything in, and just letting go!”
Jim was not much worried by this pessimistic speech, for by this time he knew Harold well enough to wait for his essential level-headedness to return. People like Harold, who had worked thirty years in one job, and carried their modest salaries back to the Avenue every Friday, were not likely to be bowled over by a single, personal tragedy, no matter how poignant their loss, or how desperate their grief during the days following the first shock. People like Harold, he reflected, invariably survived personal losses, just as they survived the bombardments, the boredom and muddle of war. Jim had no doubts whatever about their staying power, having fought alongside them in the slush of the Somme, and the thin rain of Ypres. Harold would survive, and so would all the other people of the Avenue, and crescents of the suburb, no matter how battered, and scattered were their homes and possessions, when madness had run its course across the Channel. He wished he felt as sure of the stamina of younger chaps, boys like Esme Fraser, but they, poor devils, had had a lot to put up with lately, too much perhaps, as events over the road were proving.
Pondering these things Jim folded the letters, and placed them on Harold’s bedside table, wondering, as he did so, what kind of a man this nameless civvy could be, who would set his cap at the wife of a man serving in the Forces and fighting a war for survival.
Jim need not have worried about Esme. In some ways he was a good deal happier and less worried than he had been for years.
The period of doubting and compromise was over. He had, in fact, already taken his C.O.’s advice. He had ‘scrubbed it’, and was making a real effort to discard the past, once and for all.
After the machinery for divorce had been started by the unit lawyer, who worked from facts told him by Esme at their first interview, he began to experience a sense of relief. From now on, he told himself, Elaine could go her own way, and he would go his, and when Elaine wrote saying that she would not defend a divorce, he found that at last he could study their relationship objectively, and see it for what it was, instead of what he had striven to make it. He was surprised to discover that he felt little or no bitterness towards her, acknowledging the fact that their failure, as man and wife, in no way differed from their adolescent courtship. It had always been slavish adoration and endless extenuation on his part, mild affection and thinly disguised impatience on hers.
He could see that, on the whole, she had been more honest with him, than he with her. Many times she had told him frankly that she was not in love with him, and never would be, but his pride had never been able to absorb this, and he had gone on, month after month, telling himself that sooner or later she would ‘discover’ him and value his love accordingly. He knew now that this was wishful thinking on his part, but it was not merely the end of doubting that brought comfort to him that spring but something that he derived from the active sympathy of the people around him.
Esme had volunteered for the R.A.F. because he had come to believe that defeat by Germany would be worse than extinction. Like Jim Carver, and like Harold, he had weighed the alternatives, and persuaded himself that the British were fighting for survival, not merely as members of an independent sovereign state, but as a people, and a people who believed that life without human dignity was not worth having.
In the year that he had served, since Dunkirk, his views had not changed, but the ideals that he believed himself to be fighting for had struggled free of newspaper clichés.
Like all the other young men who had grown to maturity in the hesitant ‘thirties’, Esme had engaged in hundreds of casual discussions about war in the abstract. Looking back on these arguments in pubs, in offices, and trains, he could now recognise their fatuity. All the talking-points of that period—sanctions, the League, pacifism, democracy, world federalisation, were of no importance. What was important, what gave real purpose to this war, was the fundamental decency of the ordinary people who were engaged in it, men like old Collie, the C.O., and the man in his billet, who made up his bed the night he returned and had stolen a cheese sandwich from the cookhouse, laying it on his pillow in case Esme had travelled back to camp on an empty stomach.
Ever since he had packed up his civilian clothes at the Receiving Depot, Esme had been touched by the kindness and thoughtfulness of the majority of the men around him, touched also by the easy, unselfconscious way in which they shared things. He had acquired that sense of belonging that the uniform seemed to give all who wore it. It was as though every man who dipped his ‘irons’ in the trough of hot-water that stood outside the cookhouses, performed, by so doing, some mystic ceremony that made him a permanent member of one huge, sprawling, joke-cracking, grousing family.
This was something he had been unable to find in civilian life, though he had looked for it at school, at his work, and on his travels about the country. He had always been a solitary person, and the sense of belonging brought him relief, and an end to the loneliness that his marriage had intensified, rather than banished.
His natural shyness, inherited from his Scots ancestors, had made him seem aloof, and slightly pompous, particularly with women, but the easy comradeship of the forces encouraged him to develop two aspects of his character, the ability to spin yarns, and a strong sense of humour. These characteristics made him popular among the men, and when the story of his domestic trouble leaked out, as it was bound to do in the circumstances, he discovered that he was more popular than he had imagined. The strong sympathy of the men about him was not demonstrative, but it was undeniably there, and he could sense it in the billet, and orderly room. It was a kind of closing of the ranks against the outsiders, the scroungers, the civvies, and in a curiously final way it helped to heal his pride.
Barbara remained in the camp two days, while Esme was engaged in trying to contact Edgar Frith, his father-in-law, in Llandudno. Edgar and his wife, Frances, were away from home, and it was not until the evening of the second day that Esme spoke to him, and was invited to bring the baby at once.
He went into the C.O. for his pass, and was surprised to find Judy in the office.
“The Sergeant has applied for escort duty,” said Collie, with a grin. “Does that appeal to you?”
“I should be very glad of her company, sir,” said Esme, adding, with an answering smile, “I did feel the most awful clot, walking in here carrying the kid the night before last, sir!”
“You looked one, too,” said Collie, handing over the passes. “Here
are two forty-eights, and you can pick up early chits from the W.O. If I were you I’d thumb the station wagon, I daresay we’ve got something to fetch from the station!”
“Thank you, sir,” said Esme, saluting.
They went out, and stood for a moment in the winter sunshine, alongside G.H.Q. flagpole.
“I suppose it was cheek of me to ask the C.O., without consulting you Esme,” said Judy, “but it’s a long way to Llandudno, and I didn’t like the idea of you coping on your own. Besides…” She smiled, wrinkling her nose, “I could do with a crafty forty-eight myself, and I’ve never seen North Wales!”
He thought how trim and taut she looked in her best blue. The colour suited her, and so did the cap that made so many of the girls look like clippies. Judy’s was set at the slightest angle, and a long roll of chestnut curls escaped from the back, defying regulations and touching her shoulders. He had never thought of her as a pretty girl, and indeed she was not, for her nose was short and slightly snub, and her mouth was too small, but her brown eyes were alight with friendliness, and as he looked more closely at her he remembered, so clearly, the first day they had smiled at him, the day she had followed him on his solitary exploration into Manor Wood. He remembered too how they had climbed the broken wall to the lakeside, and played Sleeping Beauty in the old summer-house, and as the scene returned the curious rhythm of life struck him, a chance encounter between two children, more than twenty years ago, and now here were these two facing one another on an airfield, waiting to share the job of conveying a child across the country.
“We did some curious things together in the old days, Judy,” he said, smiling, “but I imagine this tops them all! I’ll find the W.O., and get the early chits. Is our W.O. authorised to sign one for W.A.A.F.s?”
“Why naturally, the C.O. fixed it, didn’t he? I say, Esme, he’s a regular sweetie isn’t he? I’ll wait for you here, and if the station wagon comes by I’ll hold it. We can pick up Barbara on the way out. She’s all ready, the girls are seeing to her!”
The Avenue Goes to War Page 13