Presently, Esme said:
“Let’s stay here a while, Judy. Let’s light a fire!”
Even his voice seemed to her to have softened. He was no longer issuing an order, as in the past—go here, do this, that’s how I want it, that’s how it should be done! His kisses had elevated her to equal rank and her shield-bearing days were over. Whatever they did now they would do side by side and it was clear that he too was aware of this readjustment in their relationship, for he awaited her nod and when she gave it he at once set about collecting twigs and cones, while she dived into her shoulder bag for old letters and scraps of paper.
They had the fire going in a few minutes and when it had burned up and the larger branches were beginning to splutter, he spread his great-coat at the base of a pine, and they sat on it, looking through the screen of wood smoke towards the Manor. Around them life stirred again. A moorhen trailed across the water and a pair of rooks sailed over the elms behind the mansion. The fire crackled pleasantly and Esme said:
“We ought to have potatoes to roast. We always used to roast potatoes in their jackets, remember?”
She remembered. Of course she remembered. There was nothing that she had forgotten. Sitting here, his head on her lap, she nursed her favourite memories like sleeping babies. She had not known that it was possible to be so happy and serene as this, for her dream had never carried her this far, never to the point of physical contact, of letting her hand slide along his temples and feeling the weight of his head on her thighs.
Her yearning for him swept over her in huge, measured waves, so that sometimes she felt she would drown under them. She cupped his face in her hands and kissed his mouth, gently and constantly and as her lips touched his she read gratitude in his eyes and knew that the majesty had gone from him and that from this point in their lives his need of her was the greater.
She told herself that this was her triumph but there was no room in her heart for triumph, only for fulfilment and harmony. Even the air-gunner’s badge on his tunic communicated no fear. They would be parted soon but never in the sense that they had been separated in the past. She had loved Tim wholeheartedly but never with this certainty or serenity. There had always been something temporary about Tim, even when she had lain in his arms during their brief Cornish honeymoon, and perhaps this was the reason why Tim’s death had ravaged her without surprising her.
With Esme it was so different. Today she was assured that no matter where he went or what he did he would return to her and she knew that she should convince him of this before they parted. She promised herself that she would do this tonight or tomorrow, but not now, not until the red ball of the sun had passed behind the elms, and the sweetness had gone from the day, for by then all the loose ends of their lives would have been tied and they would discuss practicalities like all other lovers. Then they could discuss Elaine, his child, Barbara, and their future generally, but in the meantime, for a little while longer, it could wait. It could wait until the fire died down, and they had recrossed the chestnut-tree bridge, and made their way back to the Avenue.
Only little Miss Baker, of Number One saw their return and noticed that they walked hand in hand.
Their new intimacy warmed and excited her, for she had seen them grow up side by side and had never understood why her plan for them had gone awry. She reflected that perhaps war had something to be said for it after all. It did seem to jolt people out of their grooves, and here were two young people who had profited by it.
She thought, as they passed her window: “There’ll be a wedding soon, and everyone along this end of the Avenue will be glad!” Then she smiled, reminding herself that when Edith Clegg came over with the news it would not be news at all but she would have to pretend that it was, for dear, loyal Edith always derived so much pleasure by imparting information of that sort.
Nobody at Number Twenty was surprised by the news that Esme and Judy were to marry very soon. Louise said: “There now! Just fancy! It’s such a pity you can’t go and do it tomorrow!”
Jim Carver said: “Well, I’m glad for you, I’ve always reckoned you were made for each other!”
Harold Godbeer, his brown eyes misting slightly behind his thick spectacles thought of Eunice and remembered how fond she had been of ‘Esme’s little friend’, but he refrained from mentioning this to anyone, contenting himself with the half-jocular comment to Jim: “This makes me some sort of relation, old man, doesn’t it?”
Esme’s decree would not become absolute until February, so they decided to apply for leave towards the end of that month and marry by special licence in one of the airfield areas.
Esme did not relish the idea of using the registrar’s office used by Elaine and himself, and as a divorcee there was no question of marrying in Shirley Church. Afterwards, he said, they could make a wartime base at Number Twenty, or Number Twenty-Two, whichever proved the most convenient. Number Forty-Three, across the road, he had already made over to Elaine, whom he had not seen since the night he took Barbara away but to whom he had written during the early stage of divorce proceedings.
He half-expected to meet Elaine during this leave, but he did not, and he was told that she had closed the house and gone away somewhere. Jim informed him that Archie was in some kind of new trouble, something to do with the black market, but when Esme did not press for details, Jim went on: “It’s curious that Archie turned out like that. A chap at the Depot was talking to me about the danger of adopting war-babies the other day. He said one could never be sure how they’d turn out. I told him he was talking a lot of cock, and I ought to know it’s cock, didn’t I? How the hell do we know how our kids will turn out? Take Archie! He’s been a wrong ’un from the word ‘go’, and I don’t know where he gets it! Neither my people, nor my wife’s folks ever amounted to much, but they weren’t wrong ’uns, at least, not so far as I know!”
The night before Esme was due to return from leave, they all made up a party and went to the cinema to see Forty-Ninth Parallel, the Leslie Howard picture that dealt with fugitive Nazis in Canada.
Jim and Harold enjoyed it immensely for it expressed their own sentiments exactly. Edith Clegg enjoyed it too, for Leslie Howard was a great favourite of hers. Esme and Judy found it difficult to concentrate on the film.
The screen flickered and then went dead, but before the murmur of the audience had time to swell a slide bearing a hastily-printed message was thrown on the screen, and suddenly everyone half-rose in their seats, exclaiming and turning to one another with the excitement of a crowd that has just witnessed a spectacular rescue, or a feat of skill.
The slide’s message read:
‘American naval bases at Pearl Harbour in Pacific attacked by Japanese aircraft early today’.
Just that! Nothing about the success, or failure, of the attack and nothing whatever about its repercussions on the war as a whole. The stark fact, however, was more than sufficient to make the continuance of the programme an anti-climax and when the film returned to the screen hardly a word of dialogue could be heard above the babel of speculation.
Within minutes the house lights went up and people began to stream into the gangways and foyer. Stranger addressed stranger beaming at one another, as though Japan had been an ally, and Pearl Harbour, wherever it was, was the capital of the German Reich!
Jim was almost incoherent with excitement and Harold hardly less excited. Poor Edith, who had been very anxious indeed to learn what happened to poor Leslie Howard in the end, and whether or not he was instrumental in getting that horrid U-boat commander behind barbed wire, was forced to admit that even Leslie Howard’s fate was trivial compared with the fact that at last America was well and truly in the war. As Jim pointed out, this was the crowning blunder of the Axis, who now faced the united strength of the civilised world.
“Except for Sweden, Switzerland and Spain,” protested Harold, whose long years in a solicitor’s office had developed in him an insane passion for accuracy.
Jim turned on him with a snort.
“Now don’t be ridiculous, old chap! Who the hell cares a damn about Sweden, Switzerland and Spain? Don’t you see what this means? It means that Hitler has insisted on Japan attacking, in order to stop the Yanks from coming in with us, anyway! It means that the Yanks will now turn everything they’ve got on Japan, and come right out in the open with a flow of war material for us! By God, but this’ll shake up the whole box of tricks, you see if it doesn’t! The U-Boat blockade, the Second Front, the North African situation, and the Russian offensives! This means we can’t lose, no matter what happens! It’s just a question of time now before Jerry is sewn up like a cat in a bag! I tell you it’s wonderful! It’s the best news we’ve had since that dreary little maniac did a mad dog act in Russia!”
He went on talking in this strain all the way home, and all the time Judy was getting their supper, but he was not the only Avenue dweller who was cock-a-hoop that night, for up and down the crescent there were constant comings and goings, with people shouting at one another over back fences, and flagrant blackout offences being committed by the score as neighbours flung open their back doors and exchanged scraps of news heard over the radio.
Mr.Baskerville, of Number Ninety-Seven, who was thought by some to be in the confidence of Joseph Stalin, was even more excited than Jim Carver. He ran up and down the Avenue knocking at doors and telling people all that he had heard of Moscow’s bulletin, on his powerful set. He announced that Uncle Joe was overjoyed at the news and had said so, more or less personally.
Edith Clegg slipped across the road to discuss Pearl Harbour, and The Forty-Ninth Parallel with Miss Baker, and even Archie Carver, gloomily locking his yard gates, and reflecting that he had but five more days to complete his case and answer to bail in the matter of Mr. Swift’s gin and whisky, paused to discuss the news with the Air Raid Warden, who had been attracted by the numerous gleams of light that were flickering over the Nursery, behind the even numbers. The warden himself was too excited to take blackout violations very seriously.
“I say, this is a bit of a picker-upper, isn’t it, Mr. Carver?”
“It’ll shorten the war! You can depend on that,” growled Archie, but reflected, as he climbed the steps to his kitchen, that it would do nothing at all to shorten his sentence if they found him guilty of purchasing goods stolen from a N.A.A.F.I.
Judy was glad that the news had come when it did. It had given them all something to talk about, and helped to bridge over the last few hours to morning and a parting from Esme.
They left Harold and Jim still talking, and went into the kitchen of Number Twenty to say good night.
CHAPTER XIV
The Indestructible
CHRISTMAS CAME AND went without incident in the Avenue. The third Christmas of the war and still no trees in the windows or paper chains suspended from centre-lights.
Even Edith was without a tree this year, for Miss Baker was ill with bronchitis and Edith had had no opportunity to repeat last year’s expedition to the woods. She let Becky take her chance with Jean McInroy and the patient pavement artist, and spent most of her time across at Number One with the invalid.
At the corner shop Archie was equally busy. His case was down for January 1st, and long consultations with his lawyer left him no time to check his coupons, which were getting into a dreadful muddle.
Difficulties and irritations crowded in upon him with maddening multiplicity. One of his managers, at the Crowhurst branch, was injured in a blackout collision and another, spurred, no doubt, by lurid press accounts of Russian heroism suddenly threw up his job and enlisted in the Navy. What with one thing and another Archie hardly noticed Christmas, a shopping festival that had always been so important to him. Elaine was away and she had not even sent him a postcard, but he hardly thought of Elaine, he had so much on his mind just now.
The only two Avenue men who could be said to have enjoyed Christmas that year were Berni and Boxer, the Commando twins. The festival coincided exactly with their departure for Vaagso and the prospect of at last directing their tommy-guns upon live targets.
Their unit set out on Christmas Day but the weather was so heavy that their transport had to put into a Shetland Base for last-minute repairs. Here, in company with the few other men who had ridden the storm without loss of appetite, they sat down and consumed enormous helpings of tinned turkey and plum pudding, washed down by Danish lager, a case of which had been thoughtfully shipped home by a luckier unit.
By Boxing Day they were at sea again, huddled in the bucketing hold of the vessel, polishing their weapons, singing their lewd songs, putting last minute touches to their equipment and congratulating one another on the prospect of at last having unrestricted licence to blow things up and shoot things down.
They sat together, their backs to a bulkhead, roaring with laughter, and shouting, “Ooop she goes!” every time the vessel gave a particularly violent lurch.
All about them men were being sick and muttering, between obscenities, that they would make some bastard pay for their discomfort the moment they got ashore, but Berni and Boxer were neither sick nor sour. They had no especial hate for Germans and their stomachs had been subjected to a rigorous pre-war training during their employment as Wall of Death riders, so they sat polishing their grenades and tommy-guns, and shouting, “Ooop she goes!” as the vessel reared and slithered into the northern fogs.
Soon after dawn they were summoned on deck and leaned together on the rail, looking with keen interest at the spectacular snow-covered hills on the other side of the fiord. As the landing-craft were being slung out the guns of the naval escort opened up and the sound was like organ music to Berni and Boxer as they bobbed about waiting their turn to descend.
“Let’s be first ashore! Let’s be the first! Whadysay Berni, whadysay?” screamed Boxer, his face split in his habitual grin.
What Berni replied was inaudible, for all hell had broken loose before, behind, and on either side of them.
They were almost separated when an officer bellowed: “No more in here!” after Boxer had jumped into the landing-craft and Berni was still negotiating the net, but the twins had not stayed side by side all these years, or travelled such a distance in order to be separated at the moment of action. Berni made a flying leap as the bows of the landing-craft turned away from the transport and landed squarely on Boxer’s broad shoulders.
Boxer, somehow anticipating this, absorbed most of the shock as they sprawled face foremost across an ammunition box. Far from resenting the impact he shouted with laughter and when they had struggled upright and had freed themselves from the arms and legs of their comrades, their boat was running close inshore and a flight of Hampden bombers was roaring overhead, dropping a stick of smoke bombs.
They were not the first ashore but they were among the first half-dozen. They went racing through the smoke-screen into the broad main street of the town and whooping down on a house where Germans were lobbing percussion grenades from windows and doors.
Their orders had been the kind that always recommended themselves to the twins, namely, “Go in and keep pounding the bastards until they pack it in!”
They took these orders literally and the next hour proved the jolliest of their lives. First they blew up a small factory, from which a garrison was obstinately sniping the main street. Then they replenished their stock of grenades and used them on the office of a timber yard, where half a dozen Germans continued to maintain resistance after they had been surrounded on all sides. Then, when everyone inside the office was dead, and the yard itself a mass of flames, they answered a call for reinforcements at the far end of the town and attacked an isolated timber building reported to be Vaagso post office and telephone exchange.
Firing from the hip they joined a squad in rushing the main door and having won entrance went blithely from room to room shouting, singing and bundling their prisoners into the street, until a distant whistle sounded and the firing nearer the landing stage be
gan to die away.
Berni said:
“I reckon they’ve about had it, Boxer! We’d better get back along.”
Boxer, sensing the end of the adventure, was reluctant to go.
“We’d better blow the bloody place up, Bernie,” he protested, and when Berni pointed out that they were now alone and had used up all their demolition charges, he conceded: “Okay then, but I gotter get Pop a souvenir! I just gotter get Pop a souvenir!”
They hunted around for a souvenir and came upon a dead German officer, his helmet still strapped under his chin. The helmet had a swastika badge and some other flashy insignia, so Boxer said that this was the very thing to take home to Pop in the Avenue.
He gave Bernard his gun and knelt down to unfasten the strap. Bernard watched him tolerantly, noting, with clinical interest, that the German officer lacked an eye and had gold fillings in his teeth.
At that moment there was a slight movement in the passage beyond them and Bernard looked up just in time to see a grenade roll into the room.
He screamed: “Watch out, Boxer!” and flung himself sideways, behind an up-ended table. There was a roar and a bright orange flash as the room disintegrated. Bernard was instantly half-buried under fragments of splintered planks and shattered furniture. The heavy pine table saved his life and in seconds he was on his feet again.
He turned his head to the right where Boxer had been kneeling but Boxer was gone; so was the dead German; so was the righthand wall.
Automatically he reached for his knife and at that moment a German soldier suddenly appeared in the ragged gap that had once been the door to the passage. He was a small, thin-faced man, and was holding both hands above his head.
Bernard blinked at him, his will-power consciously resisting the enormous weight of knowledge that Boxer was now dead, blown to pieces by this little snipe’s grenade. He knew this to be so, but his mind fought and fought against it, for he was aware that, once it was fully acknowledged, his own life would be meaningless.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 20