Shifting her position slightly, in order to ease her aching shoulder, Judy silently cursed the war. It was, she reflected, no longer a crusade but simply a dull, dreary habit. People no longer talked of Hitler and Himmler as sadistic monsters but simply as bores, responsible for bull, blackouts, cheerless journeys in uncomfortable trains like this, shortages, sweet rationing, the price of cigarettes and the cost of trunk calls that were poor substitutes for lovers’ meetings!
Even inside the R.A.F. and the W.A.A.F. the old Battle of Britain spirit had disappeared. In 1940, everyone had been a volunteer, and the time-honoured rejoinder to a moan about service life had been: ‘Shouldn’t have joined!’ There was no sense in that remark now, not with the steady intakes of thousands of sullen National Service recruits, yet all the time the months were passing, and everyone was getting older. If Esme was a prisoner for any length of time it might even be too late for them to have children!
She thought, objectively, of the child they might have had, for her child, Esme’s child, had always played a prominent part in the dream, and now it seemed more important than anything else. She wondered why this should be so. Was it because the dream itself had never been anything more than an urge to renew her childhood and his, and to repeat, through a child, the sweet, sunlit patterns of those summer days in the ‘twenties’, when they had been growing up in the Avenue? As this fancy struck her she wished with all her heart that Esme’s quip about a “Clause Eleven” discharge had not been a joke. She wished that she really could qualify for a pregnancy discharge, and get away from kitbags, railway warrants, and heavy, shapeless uniforms. She wished that she could exchange the whole of it for a red kitchen-fire, looking over the old Nursery, where the time would have passed quickly, caring for Esme’s baby.
The longing made her eyes prick and she groped for a handkerchief and blew her nose, for in that instant she remembered that her decision to settle for Esme being alive, and a prisoner, was also a fantasy, that it was more than probable that he was already dead.
When she had elbowed free of the Waterloo platform crowds, and queued for an unoccupied telephone booth, she put in a call to Harold’s office, in St. Paul’s Churchyard.
She knew the number, having passed messages from Esme to him on several occasions. She was fond of Harold in the way that she had been fond of Eunice. He had always seemed to her such a very gentle person, whose very stuffiness and professional caution were endearing.
She was aware now that Esme meant much to him, and that he meant as much to Esme. Their mutual regard for one another reached back to that day on Shirley Hills, when he had championed them in the matter of Judy’s half-crown, stolen by the hucksters at a confetti booth. Since Eunice had been killed they had all three grown closer to one another, and she did not relish the task of breaking the news about Esme, remembering how shaken Harold had been by his wife’s death at Torquay. She nerved herself to speak casually, however, and decided to make an appointment for his lunch hour.
“Mr. Godbeer? It’s Judy! I’m in town and I’d like to see you right away. No, Mr. Godbeer, Esme isn’t with me, I’m on my own. It’s…it’s really about Esme…I’d like to have a…well, a sort of chat about things. Will that be all right?”
Of course it would be all right, and she knew that she ought not to have stalled, for Harold, who was so used to having ‘little chats’ with people, would be certain to jump to the conclusion that she needed advice or sympathy. Her nerve had failed her at the final moment, however, and she could not bring herself to blurt the truth over the telephone. He had sounded so pleased to hear her voice, and his own voice had been so warm and welcoming. She said:
“No, not at your office…let’s meet out somewhere…let’s have a coffee and a sandwich.”
They met some twenty minutes later, in a Ludgate Hill snack bar. He came in carrying his rolled up umbrella, and his brown eyes twinkled at her from behind his thick-lensed spectacles.
“My…my! But this is a pleasant surprise, Judy! I thought you were hors-de-combat, for at least another week, and were then due back in Cornwall! Does this mean you’re better? What a nuisance it all was, getting crocked like that, and after all the trouble you’ve been having getting together!”
“We shouldn’t have had long together in any case, hardly time enough to get married by special licence.” She told him. “Esme only had a few hours, there was a flap on.”
“When did he go back?”
“Saturday night.”
“He’s heard about Bernard and Boxer?”
“Yes, of course, Mr. Godbeer.”
She had almost forgotten poor old Bernie and Boxer in her new grief, but she remembered his kindness now and added:
“It was very nice of you to write for Dad. How is he? Has he taken it fairly well?”
“No, I’m afraid he hasn’t,” admitted Harold, helping the waitress to unload her tray on to the marble-topped table. Then, quietly: “Here you are, my dear, I expect you’re hungry. I’m glad you’ve come home though. I daresay you’ll find some way to cheer him up. Your sister Louise took it very well, and so did Pippa, Bernard’s young lady. She’s an odd little thing, she simply won’t believe the worst, and keeps saying that we’ll hear better news shortly.”
Judy realised that she couldn’t keep staving it off like this and his remark about Pippa gave her a lead. She took it recklessly.
“I think Pippa’s right,” she said. “After all, to have someone missing is bad enough, but it’s a jolly sight better than hearing they’re dead, and it’s right to go on hoping as long as you can, don’t you think?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Harold, stirring his coffee with a pencil because the snack-bar no longer issued spoons. “Your father doesn’t think so, he thinks it’s better to face the facts and get them over and done with. I don’t think the twins could be alive, or we should have heard by now. After all, it’s nearly a month….”
He broke off, suddenly and what little colour he possessed left his cheeks. Perhaps he had noticed something hesitant in her manner, or perhaps he suddenly remembered the quaver in her voice when she had telephoned from the station.
“What is it, Judy dear? Is it…is it Esme?”
She nodded, unable to speak and watched his eyes mist behind the heavy spectacles. “He’s not…dead, is he?”
“His aircraft is missing,” she managed to say, “it didn’t come back from a raid on Hanover the night before last. We lost fourteen that night, remember? I got an inside tip from Esme’s station…you’ll probably be getting the usual gen. from his squadron today, or at latest, tomorrow. I…I just thought I’d try and break it to you first!”
He stopped stirring and bent his head low over the table. They were silent for a moment, then, without looking up, he said:
“Tell me, Judy dear, tell me everything you know.”
She braced herself and recited the various alternatives, stressing the number of operational crews who had been saved by parachute, and whose names had eventually filtered through to casualties via the Swiss Red Cross.
“Sometimes we hear that more than half of them dodged the chop that way,” she said. “It’s about a fifty-fifty chance, I suppose, much better than old Bernard’s or Boxer’s. You see, Esme as a prisoner would be a Luftwaffe pigeon, and they don’t get badly treated, not even when they’re captured over the target. There’s still a bit of chivalry left about the air war!”
Harold raised his head and she could not help noticing how terribly old and lined his face looked. The hair above his small, flattish ears was quite white now, and she remembered that before the war it had been sleek blue-black.
“You must be feeling terrible, Judy, with this coming right on top of the news about the twins! Can’t I take you home? I don’t have to go back to the office unless I want to.”
She reached across the table and gripped his long, thin fingers. His unselfishness helped her to get things back into a firmer and saner perspective. He must,
she was aware, be utterly devastated by the prospect of losing Esme, who was all he had now that Eunice had gone, yet he could still spare a thought for her misery, push his own into the background and grope for the crumb of comfort on her behalf.
“I’m all right, Mr. Godbeer, really I am! It can’t be as bad as it seems. They can’t all be dead…it’s just that, well, I got to thinking in the train, I only wish we’d been able to get married after all and that I was having Esme’s child. If anything had happened to him….”
An infantryman, loaded with kit, squeezed past the back of her chair and jarred her shoulder. She winced and Harold jumped up.
“You oughtn’t to be moving about among people with that bad shoulder,” he said, “you ought to be home and resting it.”
“It’ll heal much quicker this way, the doctor said so! Shall we go now?”
He paid the bill and they went out into the street, looking up at the jagged unfamiliar silhouette of Ludgate Hill. The vast bulk of St. Paul’s towered above them, magnified enormously by the desolate acres that surrounded it.
“Just look at that,” said Harold, pointing. “I was thinking only yesterday, this ground hasn’t been open to the sky since Wren began rebuilding, after the Great Fire! Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to take you back to the Avenue?”
“Of course,” said Judy, “I got this far on my own, didn’t I?” and then, moved by an impulse born of his gentleness, she leaned forward and kissed him softly on the cheek. Before he could speak again she had turned away, leaving him standing on the kerbside.
She caught a train at London Bridge and was back at Woodside inside the hour. She had meant to go straight home, and tell Louise, but when she reached the corner of the Avenue she changed her mind and pushed on up Shirley Rise into open country.
She wanted to make contact with Esme on familiar ground and she knew that the Manor Wood would be full of Americans, who would probably whistle and make friendly approaches, backed by offers of gum and candy. They usually behaved that way towards unaccompanied Waafs and she had never resented it, for their cheerfulness and generosity seemed very welcome in the Britain of 1942, but she knew that today it would get between her and Esme. So she avoided the wood and sought a tiny island of trees that still stood in the ploughed field, beyond the church and could be reached by a beaten track that branched off the main road.
This spinney had been a favourite spot of Esme’s who had used it as a headquarters for their varied activities. It had been, among other places, Crusoe’s island, the buccaneers’ lair at Tortuga, a besieged castle, and the Isle of Avalon. Beyond it, and within two hundred yards of the field in which it stood, they had commenced a new building site, but the outbreak of war checked its development. As soon as war ended, field and spinney would be swallowed up in a vast, housing estate. The war, that had taken so much from the Avenue children, had given the spinney a temporary reprieve and she was grateful.
The beeches, and the larch trees in the little wood were still wearing green. The foxgloves had gone, but there was convolvulus in the hedge and campion growing beside the bank. She sat down and leaned her back against the tallest beech, looking westward, where the afternoon sun lit the suburb beyond the wood.
Her instinct had not been false. Here she felt closer to Esme than she had felt for a long time, closer perhaps than during some of their fleeting meetings of the past few months, for here it was very easy to picture the Esme she had known and loved since the beginning. Here she could see him once more as the earnest, excitable little boy, in grey flannel shorts, who rushed here and there among the trees, calling her, urging her to hurry and take cover, before the cavalry pickets detected them. Here he had taken her by the hand and dragged her down in the brambles, while his eyes swept the line of Manor Wood for troopers, excisemen, Bow Street Runners and ‘pitiless dragoons’!
As the afternoon wore on, and the first chill of an autumn evening stole across the stubble, she came to terms with her grief, much as she had been able to do at the corner of Hayes Wood after Tim had been lost and she had at last found refuge in tears.
She did not weep now or feel like weeping. Instead she prayed, as she had so often prayed for Esme in the front bedroom of Number Twenty-Two, after recording the day’s progress with him in the diary that she had kept hidden under her clean vests and knickers in the chest of drawers.
It was several years now since she had offered up a prayer of any sort. She remembered that she had not even seen the inside of a church since marrying Tim, and she had never had a thought about religion in the interval. For all that, her prayer came easily, as she sat with her back against the smooth, grey bole of the beech, her hands limp on her lap.
“Give me something to hope for, give old Harold something to hope for! If Bernie and Boxer are gone, then save Esme! Let me have Esme when it’s over! Oh God, give me a chance to be a good wife to him, after all this time! Amen!”
White clouds came drifting, the sun dipped, and a stiff breeze whipped the stubble, dislodging a leaf or two from the branches above her. She shivered and got to her feet, retracing her steps to the road and going on down the hill to the Avenue. She had no key, so she knocked at Number Twenty and was admitted by Jack Strawbridge, her big, red-faced brother-in-law.
“Gordamme, it’s Judy!” he called back to the kitchen and Louise, her hands dripping, hurried from the sink into the hall and embraced her, delightedly.
“Oh, I’m glad you’ve come, love!” said Louise, a little breathlessly. “We been having a rare time with Dad, haven’t we, Jack? Such a pity it is, such a pity!”
“I met Harold Godbeer in town,” Judy told her, “and he told me that Dad was taking it pretty badly. There’s more news about them, I suppose?”
Jack Strawbridge spoke from the foot of the stairs, and Judy was struck by the foreign note of bitterness in his easy, countryman’s voice.
“Ar, but it’s not only the twins as’ve got ’im down, it’s that other bliddy brother o’ yours, Archie! We got word of ’im today, leastways, your father did! His case comes up Monday and they want your Dad to go down. Derned if I would! Jiggered if I would, not fer that scow!”
“Shhh, Jack,” said Louise, “Judy doesn’t even know about it yet! Dad didn’t tell her, you great fool!”
Jack looked stupidly at her, clenched his mottled fists and flushed.
“Is that so? Well, I didn’t know did I? I thought everyone hereabouts knew!”
Judy looked at Louise, who turned and went back into the kitchen.
“What’s happened to Archie?”
“Nothing ain’t yet, Judy,” mumbled Jack, “but I reckon it will! He was tight, terrible tight must ha’ been, and drove into a flock o’ people, knockin’ ’em all ways, an’ now he’s up for manslaughter!”
“Where? Where did this happen?”
“I dunno, ‘Win’ something or other, down your way somewheres! On ’is way to see ’is missis he was, ’er that’s left ’im, so they say!”
For a moment Judy felt she wanted to scream and stride about smashing things. The entire world was going relentlessly and malignantly mad! Berni and Boxer dead! Esme shot down! And now Archie up on a manslaughter charge! What else could happen to make a mockery out of the quiet, humdrum lives they had once enjoyed in this little house?
She checked herself and asked, stiffly: “Where is Dad, now?”
“He’s in next door,” Louise called from the kitchen, “but I wouldn’t go in, not yet! I’ve sent for Miss Clegg, at Number Four, and she’s in there, talking to him. Let me get you some tea, love! You must be real starved, coming all that way and you not well!”
Judy handed her attaché case and great-coat to Jack and went into the kitchen. She decided to say nothing for the moment about Esme. God knows, she thought, there’s enough trouble for everyone, without adding to it!
She sat down near the glowing range and watched Louise busy herself at the gas-stove. She was not in the least hungry but she knew that
Louise would insist that she ate a cooked meal. Louise, she thought, is so lucky that way, she can always put her miseries into a saucepan, a frying-pan, or stir them in with the weekly wash at the copper.
CHAPTER XXII
Edith As Rod And Staff
EDITH CLEGG, OF Number Four, was a deeply religious woman. The daughter of a country parson she had been brought up not so much in the fear of the Lord as in fear of the Lord’s elect.
As the elder of the rector’s two daughters, reared in a remote Devon parish, she had been aware from earliest childhood of the necessity of setting a good example to her father’s rustic parishioners, and her behaviour, up to the hour of her sister, Becky’s return home after her elopement with a wandering landscape painter, had been exemplary.
She had, until then, taken a leading part in all parochial activities. She had led an utterly blameless private life, and had sat through her father’s long, rambling sermons, nodding her head whenever he made a point and doing so, it appeared, in order to demonstrate to the less attentive that her father’s interpretation of the Word found favour in her sight.
She was thus, in every respect, a model daughter, and continued so until the sad end to Becky’s elopement had presented her with a choice of loyalties. In the furore that had followed Becky’s reappearance she discovered, to her great dismay, that the battalions of the elect were in one camp, and that poor Becky was alone in the other.
Up to that moment Edith had taken her New Testament lessons very literally. In so doing she had assumed that her father, his bishop, his churchwardens, the sidesmen, and all the parochial workers, took an equally uncomplicated view of the teachings of Jesus—that is, they would have been ready to vie with one another and the Good Samaritan, in ministering to a traveller who had fallen among thieves. This, for Edith, had been the beauty of the Christian Faith, its stark simplicity, its insistence of hastening at once, and to the exclusion of all personal demands, to the succour of the fallen and distraught. It seemed to Edith a perfectly natural thing to clothe the naked, to bind up the wounds of the afflicted, and to visit the sick, as natural, in fact, as going to bed at night, and getting up in the morning. She was therefore both hurt and astonished when she made the discovery that no one in the parish, not even her father, a professional dispenser of Christianity, appeared to take these injunctions very seriously; as far as poor Becky was concerned not one of them experienced the slightest joy over the reclamation of a sheep that was lost and found again!
The Avenue Goes to War Page 35