Jim’s old seat on the coping beside the lake, where he had done so much of his thinking in years gone by, was no place for meditation now. It was sited within yards of the U.S. Transport Park, and the area around it echoed with the shouts and laughter of at least two hundred G.I.s.
Accordingly, he skirted the lake and pushed on through the wood into the ploughed fields, beyond the last of the trees. Here he sat down on the stile that marked the Kent-Surrey border, and tried to think of his lost boys as part of the inevitable price one paid for the right to live out one’s life as a democrat.
He failed of course, failed wretchedly, and that despite his years and years of stern, political schooling, of so much tract reading, of so many fiery speeches about Fascism as the tool of Capitalism and Teuton megalomania that was a menace to free men everywhere.
The death of his boys, he discovered, now seemed to have nothing whatever to do with the things one preached about international events and just as little to do with democratic responsibilities. One was a tragedy, and the others were jumbles of words and pompous attitudes. A month or so ago his two boys had been clumping about the house, shouting and laughing, thumping him between the shoulders, and calling him ‘Pop’; now they were bags of bone and corruption, lying in shallow graves on the French Coast, or washing about in the shallows among other flotsam of the attack.
The telegram, indeed, made him feel very differently about Dieppe as a military event. ‘Probing’ was all very well, but why probe a hornet’s nest with a bunch of twigs? What was the sense of sending men ashore against fixed guns and then, when their heroism had gained a foothold, taking them off again and abandoning the ground to gloating Nazis? This surely, was no better than the Somme, and Passchendaele. This was Old Haig’s notion of war, war by attrition!
He tried to extract a crumb of comfort from the word ‘missing’ in the telegram but he had never been much good at deceiving himself and he had enough battle experience to know the true meaning of the word. ‘Missing’, to his mind, meant blown to smithereens, or drowned in a shell-crater. He tried to recall a single case of a man being reported missing, who had turned up after the wounded had been gathered in and the attack called off, but he could recall no such a case. He decided that he might as well resign himself here and now to the fact that the twins were dead, and tell Louise so when he broke the news to her. What sense was there in giving her grounds for hope when there were none?
He got up and walked back through the wood, where he suddenly ran into Orrie, the American friend of his twin daughter, Carry.
Orrie hailed him, cheerfully:
“Hiya, Pop! What’s noo?”
Jim stopped, remembering that Fetch and Carry would also have to be told, and welcoming this opportunity to be done with the job as speedily as possible.
“My boys…Bernard and Boxer…they’re missing after Dieppe,” he said, and was ashamed at the wobble in his voice.
Orrie’s good-natured face clouded.
“Gee, that’s bad! That’s tough, Pop! Missing? You don’t figure they might be prisoners?”
“In that shambles? Not a hope, son, but I’d be obliged if you’d break it to the girls. Would you do that for me? I’ll tell their other sisters right away.”
“Sure, sure Pop, you leave it to me. Hell, I’m sorry, Pop, reel sorry!”
Jim patted his shoulder, and for the first time he welcomed the American alliance into his heart. He went back to the Avenue, his steps dragging as he crossed the meadow to Number Twenty, and walked down the alley to the back door.
Louise was hanging out washing, her husband’s and her lodger’s, a comic mixture of coarse woollen underpants and flimsy pink slips. Jim said:
“I’ve got some bad news, Lou, old girl. You’d better come into the kitchen!”
She took the pegs out of her mouth and followed him inside.
“Is it about the boys, Dad?”
He nodded.
“Dead?”
“I reckon so…‘missing’ it said. It was Dieppe, damned shambles!”
Louise sat down and stared hard at the pattern of the American cloth on the kitchen table. Jim waited for a moment and then reached out and squeezed her shoulder.
“I don’t think I was much of a father to them, Lou. I always wrote them off in my mind as gadabouts, with nothing really solid about them. I was wrong…Christ Almighty, how wrong I was! They had more guts than anyone I knew, and proved it!”
Louise caught up his hand and pressed it against her cheek. Jim noticed how rough was the texture of her skin, so different from that of her younger sisters, and it crossed his mind what a strange mixture his children were. Louise, the patient, sweet-tempered drudge; Judy, the open-air dreamer; the younger twins, Fetch and Carry, a pair of feather-brained extroverts; the boys, Boxer and Bernard, a pair of good, solid, friendly, unimaginative fighting men; and finally Archie…he had almost forgotten Archie.
Louise withdrew her hand, dabbed her eyes and then jumped up.
“I must tell poor Pippa,” she said, “she’s upstairs now, I think! Bernard and she love one another, but I told you, didn’t I?”
“I knew they were very thick,” said Jim, “but it wasn’t all that serious, was it?”
“Yes, it was, Dad,” Louise told him. “Bernard wrote and wrote, and he never wrote to any of us! She’s got his photo in her room, and only yesterday she asked me for any snaps I had of him when he was little. It’s funny, I couldn’t find any of Bernard by himself, he was always taken with Boxer.”
“I can imagine,” said Jim, bitterly.
She left him and trudged upstairs. He heard her open the door of the porch room and go in and close it after her, but a moment later they both came out and Pippa, white-faced, burst into the kitchen.
“Have you got the telegram? Could I see the actual telegram?” she demanded.
Jim gave her the telegram and she read it, carefully.
“But they aren’t dead, Mr. Carver,” she said, quietly. “Neither of them are dead. You’ll see.”
Jim marvelled at the steadiness of her voice. He had been aware of her about the house for some time now but had never taken much note of her. She was a strange little thing, he decided, mousy but somehow intense, in spite of a natural reserve. He made up his mind that he ought to tell her the truth and spare her endless misery in the future.
“If they’re ‘missing’ from Dieppe it means they’re killed, Pippa. They don’t take prisoners in that sort of show, it’s always kill or be killed. We shall get confirmation sooner or later, when the full casualties reports come in from one source or another, and I don’t think it’s going to help if we fool ourselves about a thing like this. It’s only far worse in the end, you know.”
“I can’t prove to you they aren’t dead, Mr. Carver,” she said, “It’s just that I’m sure I should know if they were, at least, I’d know if Bernard was, and he isn’t, Mr. Carver, I’m quite, quite sure he isn’t.”
“Well,” said Jim, slowly, “if that’s how you feel I’ll go over to the depot at Acton, and see if I can find out anything more definite. Sometimes you don’t get official confirmation for months, but you can often get a pretty good idea by talking to their mates.”
He paused, regarding her gravely. “Would you like me to do that?”
It was strange, he thought, that he should be asking her a question like this when she was not even a member of the family.
“Yes, you could do that, Mr. Carver, but I don’t care what anyone says at the depot, I’m quite sure they aren’t dead!”
He left it at that. Women were funny about this sort of thing. He remembered how, in the last war, there had always been a lot of silly talk of ‘women’s intuition’ and that it had often led to séances, table-rappings, and God knew what other kind of nonsense. He excused himself and went back to Number Twenty-Two, where he wrote a brief note for Harold and strode off down Shirley Rise to catch a ’bus for Acton.
They were very considera
te to him at the Depot. He saw a young lieutenant first and was then shown into the major’s office. His chat with the officer only confirmed his opinions. They had not heard that any commandos from the twins’ section had been taken prisoner and it seemed very unlikely that they would hear so now. The twins’ troop had escaped very lightly, one dead, several lightly wounded and Bernard and Boxer missing. He would, if Jim wished it, send for the Sergeant in charge of the withdrawal from the Hess battery, and find out if any more scraps of information were available. Sometimes, he said, the men pieced together what happened by talking among themselves.
Jim saw the Sergeant privately and learned that Boxer had been last seen close against the compound wire, immediately prior to the withdrawal. The sergeant’s information regarding Bernard was a little more definite. One of the anti-tank gunners, he said, had seen him fall after a mortar bust, but the man had an idea that he also remembered him getting up again. Bernard’s chances, the sergeant added, should be slightly better than Boxer’s, for when last seen he had been on the fringe of heavy cover and at least three hundred yards from the enemy wire.
That was all Jim was able to glean and he carried the information back to the Avenue and passed it on to Louise. Then he sat down to write to Judy and when Harold came home he found his friend weeping over a half-completed letter.
Harold was the ideal man in this kind of crisis. Gently he removed the letter, made Jim some strong tea, and then coaxed him up to bed.
Afterwards he sat down himself and wrote the letter to Judy.
Judy received the news of ‘R-for-Ronnie’s’ failure to return to base on the morning after she received Harold’s letter.
One of the orderly-room corporals of the squadron put through a call to her, after sorting through Esme’s kit at the billet.
It chanced that he was acquainted with both Judy and Esme, having served with them on the Northampton station, prior to Esme’s remustering to aircrew. He notified Judy twenty-four hours before sending the official telegram to Esme’s next of kin, given on Esme’s Form 1580 as ‘H. Godbeer, Stepfather’. The orderly-room staff sometimes strayed outside the limit of official procedure in this manner, and the more intelligent officers encouraged them. It was often kinder, they felt, to notify someone outside the family with the facts, so that the arrival of the casualty report was buffered.
Judy did not answer the ’phone but the corporal insisted on speaking to her personally, so she hoisted herself out of bed and came downstairs without waiting to find her slippers and dressing-gown. She thought that it must be Esme at the end of the line and that Maud had got the name wrong.
The corporal said: “Is that Judy Ascham, the Waaf sergeant who used to be at Queen’s, Norton, the one who’s engaged to Sergeant Fraser?”
Judy said that it was, and asked who was speaking.
“You probably won’t remember me,” said the voice, “but I was with you at the Northampton dump and I’m an old oppo of Fraser’s, in the orderly-room. I’m in Fraser’s squadron now, at Scratton Wold.”
Judy’s heart gave a violent leap, but she said, quite quietly.
“Are you ringing for Sergeant Fraser? Is he there?”
The corporal at the other end of the telephone, hesitated before saying:
“It’s like this kid, his kite hasn’t shown up! We’ve got no confirmation so far, so I wouldn’t take too dim a view yet awhile. They might be anywhere…on the run, in the drink, or paddling home. You know how it is, all kinds of crazy things happen on ops!”
“When was it? When did it happen?” she demanded.
“What was that? I can’t hear you!”
“When was it and when did it happen?” she shouted.
“Oh, night before last…we waited a bit, in case they force-landed at another airfield. One of our kites did in this case. Point is, can you get in touch with his next of kin? They’ll be notified as usual, of course, but finding a letter addressed to you in his billet we thought you might like to help by softening up the folks a bit! I rang because I remembered you from Queen’s Norton, and because, well, because you’re one of us I guess.”
Judy said hoarsely: “I’ll do that…thanks for ringing…I’ll tell his stepfather. Just ring me if there’s anything fresh!”
“You bet,” said the voice and rang off, with an audible sigh of relief.
Judy went slowly upstairs and sat on the bed. She was not overwhelmed with the shock because, strictly speaking, it wasn’t a shock at all, but confirmation of weeks and weeks of anxiety about Esme, leading up to a virtual certainty in her mind that she would receive news of this kind at some time or other.
She had certain advantages over her father. She was familiar with this war and did not confuse it with the last. She knew that a percentage of bombers failed to return after each raid, and had never pretended to herself that Esme’s might not be one of them. Perhaps this was the reason that the shock of hearing that such a thing had, in fact, taken place, was not as painful as the news that Tim had been drowned en route for Egypt nearly three years before. That had been so early in the war, and had seemed more like an unlucky accident, whereas Esme’s loss was now part of the pattern of life, like a deepening of the conspiracy to cheat her out of the future and deprive her, not only of the fulfilment of her dream, but of its background, its Avenue background where the dream had been born.
The war had now rained many blows on the Avenue and many of them had been mortal. It had claimed Eunice, Esme’s mother, for whom Judy had had a strong affection. It had taken Boxer and Bernard, Esme’s schoolboy companions and her brothers. It had altered the very shape of the Avenue, and destroyed its symmetry by blasting away the three houses opposite and it had, almost in passing, swept away a string of familiars, like Albert Dodge, of Number Ninety-One, and young Hooper, of Number Six. If it went on long enough what would be left for the survivors like herself?
Maud Somerton found her struggling breathlessly into her clothes and at once protested.
“If you leave here you can’t do anything, Judy! You can only set yourself back! Why don’t you send off the doctor’s certificate and ask for an extension of sick leave?”
“I’m not going back to camp, yet,” Judy told her, “I’m going home to London! I’ve got to, Maud, I’ve got to be where it all happened, because I might be able to get hold of myself there! I know I won’t anywhere else, I’ll give up and be a damned misery to myself and everyone around me!”
Maud did not argue with her. She felt tired and helpless in the face of this fresh disaster. She was discovering something new about The Gel every day now, a new facet of character, or temperament, that had been quite unsuspected all the years they had worked side by side. She kissed her, roughly, and went downstairs and out into the yard to the stables. She understood horses and she was understanding people less and less as the days went by.
During the tedious train journey back to the Avenue Judy took stock of Esme’s chances.
She went about it rather like a castaway, turning out his pockets after struggling ashore from the wreck. She examined and weighed each item that might or might not contribute to his survival. She was, of course, working in the dark as far as Esme and Esme’s aircraft was concerned, but she had been closely involved in the air war for two and a half years now, and if her assessments were guesses they were at least realistic guesswork.
A good deal, she knew, would depend on where the incident had happened. If ‘R-for Ronnie’ had been shot down over the target, for instance, she knew that its crew’s chances of survival were slight. In that case it had probably gone down in flames, before anyone had a chance to jump, and there were also some disturbing rumours lately about the lynching of air-crew who succeeded in getting down alive.
On the other hand, if the aircraft had been winged by flak, and had limped part-way home, or had been jumped by a night-fighter over France, Holland or Belgium, then it was not impossible that some of the crew might turn up as prisoners of war, or even
get home by making the Long Walk.
Such a thing was rare but it had been known to happen. There was a flying officer, at Tangmere, who went out on a fighter sweep in August, 1940 and came breezily into the mess, haggard but jubilant, in April of 1941! She wondered if Esme had the nerve and the physical stamina to imitate such a feat, even if he was presented with the opportunity. She doubted it, for although she had detected a definite stiffening in his character during the last few months, she had no confidence in his luck or her own. Such a thing might happen to another member of the crew, but not to him. Esme was much more likely to have died at twenty thousand feet or, at best, to have descended safely and been scooped into the bag to be packed off into Germany for the duration.
The journey home was a tiring one. She had a corner seat but her shoulder ached every time the train stopped and started, and it seemed always to be stopping or starting with a series of violent jolts. It was so difficult to forget the war during a railway journey these days. The carriages were always jammed with servicemen and service girls, and their bulky assortment of kit. All the newspapers they held in front of them carried screaming headlines about the war in the Far East. Posters on the hoardings outside, that had once advertised Bovril and Guinness, now pleaded with passengers to fly with the R.A.F., to save money, to dig for victory, or to guard very jealously any information they might have that would be useful to the enemy.
Judy closed her eyes and began yet another inventory. Death? Capture? Escape? Afloat in a dinghy? She decided to play for safety, and settle for capture, although even that meant that they could not be married now until it was all over and who could tell when that was likely to happen? The Japanese were running amok in the East, and the German armies were still surging into Russia. People said that the arrival of the Americans would make a great difference, and that soon the Allies would assault the Fortress of Europe and defeat Germany in France, but suppose such a miracle did happen? Were there not vast areas out East still to be recovered, before men and women who wanted to get married were proof against the threat of being torn apart and sent off in different directions again?
The Avenue Goes to War Page 34