I often wonder what her life was like back in Czechoslovakia. The food was different, that’s for certain. She barely touched anything for weeks when she arrived and has been living on bread rolls and jam for the main part. Mama tries to tempt her with bacon or roast beef, but she won’t touch a thing.
The difference between Czechoslovakia and Chilbury, from what I can gather
Czechoslovakia has more chocolate (Silvie adores chocolate, and it’s rare here now the war’s on)
Chilbury has hills with fields and woods, whereas Czechoslovakia has more forests
They both have horses (Silvie loves horses)
In Czechoslovakia, Christmas is always snowy and there are magical Christmas markets
There was no war in Czechoslovakia, the Nazis simply took over one day
All Silvie’s belongings are in Czechoslovakia, in her big house with a veranda
All Silvie’s family are in Czechoslovakia, waiting for her by the front door, her mother wearing a white spring dress like the day she waved good-bye at the station, her father in his suit and hat with a big smile warming her chilling bones, and her baby brother, Mila, giggling in his blue blanket as she takes him from her mother’s arms for one final kiss
With a last look at our reflections in the glass, we decided we were ready, and dashed downstairs, scooping up the picnic basket as we raced through the kitchen and side door into the pale, clear morning.
The tall grass in the meadow was still wet from the rain last night, the multitude of droplets glistening like a thousand fallen stars in the thick field of the brightest green. There was that smell you get after a big storm, a new freshness as if the rain has washed away all the dust and dirt and horrid things that people shout at each other and are left reverberating in the air, waiting for the thunder to deafen it all out.
I decided that we’d go down to the little wooden bridge beside the Dawkinses’ beehives, as there are lots of wildflowers, and you can play stepping-stones across the stream. We went there on a picnic a few years ago when the motorcar wasn’t working.
No one got stung that time.
It was quite a walk, and when we got there, exhausted and ready for our picnic, we were rather peeved to find it already occupied. A boy was building a dam.
“Hello there!” he called. Standing shakily on a tree branch that was covering half the width, then steadying himself, he trotted over to the bank to greet us. He was older than I thought, tall and lanky like big boys are before they become men, his tatty shorts and rather unkempt appearance making him look younger from afar. He had a curious face, kind of spoon-shaped, his chin and forehead jutting out farther than the rest of it. Handsome. Not handsome like Henry, but still not bad-looking for a boy. Clearly enjoying himself, he grinned in the sunshine, putting a dirty hand up to shield his eyes from the sun as he hollered up the bank to us.
“Come down and join in.” His voice was thick and Cockney.
Since Silvie was already halfway down the slope, I felt obliged to add my protection, and we were soon beside him.
“I’m Tom,” he said, still smiling, his mouth open as he panted, hands on hips as he appraised his dam.
“How do you do,” I said, unsure whether to shake hands. “My name is Kitty and this is Silvie.” Silvie actually smiled. Did she like him?
“What are you children doing ’round ’ere?” Tom said.
“We are not children!” I corrected.
“She is,” he said, jabbing his head toward Silvie and laughing.
“Yes,” I relented, infuriated by his rudeness. “I suppose she is. But I’m not.”
“How old are you? Twelve?”
“Fourteen,” I smarted, my hand nudging against Silvie to stop her from calling me a liar. I am almost fourteen, after all. Well, almost-almost. “But more to the point, what are you doing here?” I asked crossly. The land belongs to the farm. As do the bees.
“We’re here for the hop picking.” He jerked his head behind to the hop pickers’ huts by the barn. Every year Dawkins Farm gets about fifty Londoners to come and help out with farm work, then pick the hops when they’re ready. They live in rows of huts. It all seems frightfully squalid to me, but apparently it’s exactly how they live in London—better even.
“How long have you been here?” I demanded, my eyes narrowing with distrust. I was still miffed he’d called me a child.
“I only came last week with me aunty. Me mum had to go help out in a factory, and no one knew what to do with me. I told them I wanted to fight.” He thrust a few tidy punches into the air. “But they said I’m too young.”
“How old are you?”
“Nearly fourteen. Strong as any man—probably stronger.” He showed us his biceps, which were puny, but we didn’t say anything. I felt sorry for him. His face was so open and funny that you couldn’t possibly think he was up to no good.
“Come and help me with the dam,” he ordered. “Get that branch there and bring it along.”
Fortunately, the dam was stable enough for us to totter to the halfway point.
Unfortunately, we’d quite forgotten about the bees, which suddenly surrounded us, buzzing furiously at Silvie.
“Tom to the rescue,” Tom cried, flailing his arms around like a deranged orangutan.
“No, not like that,” I cried. This city idiot clearly hadn’t got a clue about bees. “Keep still. Keep still, and they’ll go away.”
I trotted as fast as I could back to the bank, almost falling in once, picked up a long, narrow branch, and held it out to Silvie for her to make her way back without panicking too much—although I must say she was the calmest of us all, an amused little smile on her lips like the Mona Lisa having some kind of private joke.
Once on land, I opened our basket, found a jam sandwich, and as the bees headed straight for it, I flung it as far as I could up the bank, in the direction of the beehives. It did the trick all right, luring the bees away, although one of them stung me on the elbow as he went past, the monster.
I screamed, and Tom came bounding over, grabbing my arm in a most ungentlemanly way. We all looked down at the growing mound of pink.
“You’ll need some vinegar on that,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said sharply. Didn’t this boy know anything? “We need honey.”
“If you want honey, I know where to get some.”
“Do you?” I asked warily. Honey wasn’t easy to get these days. He brushed down his rather tatty shorts and then pointed out his arm. “Step this way, young ladies.”
We collected our things and followed him up the bank, giving the basket to him to carry since my arm hurt and Silvie is too small. He led us back along the side of the orchard to Peasepotter Wood, and at the cusp of the wood, he turned, glanced around furtively, then headed in. We hurried in after him.
After a short walk, he pushed his way into a massive bush, the type that is hollow on the inside and packed with tiny close leaves around the edge. After a minute or so of rummaging in the shrubbery, he reversed back out.
In his hand was a jar of honey. It must have been home produced as it had a blue gingham cover and a white label saying Allicot Farm—I couldn’t help wondering where I’d heard that name before. He took off the top and stuck a grubby finger in, stuffing the yellow fingerful in his mouth. I wanted to stop him. He was tainting all that honey. It was disgusting!
“It’s honey all right.” He chomped his mouth about, savoring the flavor. “Try some.”
Silvie stuck her finger in and tentatively put it in her mouth, and the look of pleasure on her face finally made me give in and try it, too.
It was the most divine honey I’d ever tasted, all rose petals and syrupy sweetness. We all took another fingerful, and I smeared a little on my sting.
“What’s it doing in the bush?”
“I’ve seen Old George put it there,” Tom said. “He’s an old crook who stays in one of the hop huts. We don’t bother him much.” He bit his lip awkwar
dly. “He’s got a knife and things. Threatened our Charlie, so we leave him well alone.”
“Should we be taking his things?”
“S’pose not,” Tom said, with a small lilt of a skinny shoulder. “It’s black market, of course. I only take a few bits at a time. Nothing he would notice.”
A noise in the bracken startled us. We looked around, but there was nothing there. It could have been a fox, but the trees were so dense it was hard to see.
“Should we go?” I whispered.
The rustling became louder—it was definitely a person—and we crept quietly behind a broad tree. When I turned, I saw a fat, angry-looking bald man stalk into the clearing, his whiskers gray and scraggy, a greenish stain on his shirt. With him was Mr. Slater, of all people. I always suspected he was up to no good. I wonder if Venetia knows about this.
“It’s Old George. Let’s get out of here,” Tom said urgently, pulling me away.
As we turned, I saw Mr. Slater’s face look round to us. Did he see us?
We fled, our legs pounding the ground like a whirl, the bracken and dead leaves crackling under our feet, darting deeper into the wood, nipping around heavy trunks and tucking between dense bushes until all we could hear was the sound of our own rhythmic footsteps in the silent surroundings.
Suddenly, as if a heavy curtain had been swept open, we tumbled out of the wood, and the vast expanse of English countryside lay before us, a colossal spread of multicolored hues bathed magnificently in the brilliant golden sunshine.
We fell down, gasping for breath, laughing, checking behind us for the shadow of Old George on our trail, but there was nothing, only the light whisper of the leaves as a breeze lifted them to and fro, and the songs of the birds flitting busily around the edge of the greeny-gold field of wheat before us.
“We’d better go home,” I said.
“You know where to find me,” Tom said, helping us up. “At the hop pickers’ huts.” And with that he turned and began a wide-strided walk down the hill to the river.
“Bye,” Silvie said quietly, which meant that she liked him, and I had to admit, as we picked up our picnic basket and headed home, that it was rather fun having an adventure of our own.
As we trotted around the edge of the wood, I asked Silvie if she’d ever seen anyone sneaking around the wood.
“Proggett,” she replied.
“Proggett? Where?”
“In Peasepotter, behind trees, in the Pixie Ring, down by Bullsend Brook,” she said quietly in her taut Czech voice. I know she disappears off by herself quite a lot, but I never knew she’d been wandering all over the countryside. “He meets men,” she added.
“What kind of men?”
“Just men.” She glanced away. “Boring men.”
“Were you scared?”
She shook herself up, running ahead of me with bravado. “No.”
As I sped up behind her, I remembered where I had heard the name Allicot Farm. It’s a place on the other side of Litchfield. Mrs. Gibbs started selling their honey in the shop last month. I wonder how Old George came across his assortment of goodies—how Mrs. Gibbs got her hands on it. And how exactly Mr. Slater was involved. I have decided not to inform Venetia quite yet. Let her come crawling to me. Or, better still, keep it tucked away for a time when it might be put to good use.
Wednesday, 29th May, 1940
Who’d have thought such a disaster could happen! And that I would be caught up in the midst of it! Tonight I am in Dover, working fast to patch up the soldiers coming off the boats from Dunkirk. Hundreds of thousands of troops surrounded and trapped on a beach in France, the Luftwaffe strafing them with bullets, and all we can do is get everyone who has a boat to go off and rescue them, from fishing boats to ferries and yachts even. It’s as if we’ve gone back to medieval times!
Dover is a mass of activity. Teams of men pouring off boats of all shapes and sizes and tramping through the town to the railway station. Most of them, thank goodness, seem to be in good humor, overjoyed to be home. But many others look like they’ve been through a nightmare. Then there are those on stretchers, bleeding and delirious, or silently dying.
The thick mess of fresh blood, fresh casualties, is relentless in our surgery, an old workhouse converted into a hospital, reeking of human death lightly confused by the acidic stench of sterilization. The medics are too few for so many brutally wounded men. But we are trying our best, working from one patient to the next with gruesome practicality.
They picked me up at dawn in a bus packed with available doctors and nurses from the area, and we’re here for a few days at least. It’s now well past midnight, and I’m sitting in a dusty back room with an hour off to catch whatever rest I can. They’ve set up a few beds, but every time I close my eyes all I see is blood and gore, and I can still hear the screams of men as the pain gets too much, or worse, the sudden disconcerting quiet of death.
I’m trying not to think about David, but it’s like a throbbing beacon at the back of my brain. I know he was in France—almost all our troops were—so he must be somewhere in this chaos. I hope.
We have some desperate cases here. Earlier today I was called to help a bloody mess of a young officer by the name of Berkeley who had a vast gash of shrapnel in his side. I quickly realized that it was too late for surgery, too late for anything. His bleeding was relentless, spurts pulsating into the drenched poultice that I pushed desperately into his rib cage.
“You’re going to be all right. You’ll be just fine,” I said softly.
“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” he murmured, his refined tones sounding very young indeed. He must have been just out of school, the same as David.
“No, you’ll be fine,” I lied, inwardly panicking. What should I do? Should I tell him he’s going to die in case he has something he needs to say? I felt so utterly unprepared: What was I doing here? What was I playing at?
“If,” he stammered quietly. “If I die, w-will you give my ring to someone?” He tried to raise his hand, and I saw the gold band loose on his finger.
“Of course,” I said, slipping it off and holding it out in my hand. It was a man’s signet ring, heavy, old, valuable.
“Give it to Carrington,” he murmured, his voice breaking as he spoke the name. “In Parnham, near Litchfield.”
“That’s close, I can get it there,” I said gently. “Is there a message?”
“Say I love you,” he choked horribly.
“Of course I’ll give it to her,” I said.
“He’s a man,” he whispered, his eyes looking into mine, large with dread, scared that he’d asked too much, said too much. He could be hanged for this. If he wasn’t dead already.
A surge of blood rushed to my face. I’ve never met a homosexual before. I’d heard of them, of course, but always thought they were different, living in an underworld, as if they didn’t really exist at all. But here was a gentle, handsome, dying youth telling me to send his last message to his friend, who he loved. I was speechless for a moment, unraveling the dense mesh between morality and reality.
“I’ll tell him,” I whispered.
Then, as if something had suddenly occurred to him, he opened his eyes wide and gasped, “You won’t, you won’t hand him in, will you?”
“No,” I said, meeting his gaze. “You can trust me.”
“I, I wasn’t thinking. I forgot that I could land him in trouble. I couldn’t bear for anything to happen to him.” His lean body began to shudder with tears.
I wanted to wrap my arms around him, but I couldn’t take my hands away from the thickening maroon of blood flooding the dressing. All I could do was find his hand and squeeze it tight.
“You’re the brave one,” I said. “You’re the hero. Carrington will be fine. Don’t worry about him. Just rest and breathe easily.”
And his breath became easier, and easier, until it stopped. I looked around for help, someone to tell, someone to acknowledge this death.
But no one was
there. They were too busy.
Another life just begun and already over. A faraway star glows brighter and then disappears into the void.
What an insignificant, unprepared army of souls we are.
AIR BASE 9463, DAWS HILL,
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE.
Tuesday, 4th June, 1940
Dear Venetia,
My darling, I can’t tell you how incredibly hard we’ve fought these last weeks, keeping the Luftwaffe from bombing the men being rescued at Dunkirk. The last boats left today, and we flew wearily back to base to celebrate our successes, and my name has been bandied around as something of a hero, no less.
Our dogfighting happened mostly inland, heading off the Luftwaffe before they got to Dunkirk, and it wasn’t until the fourth day that I went after three Messerschmitts into the fray, shooting them all down. They’re making a tremendous fuss about it back here at the base, even though I keep insisting it was nothing.
I will be home on leave in a month or so, and have asked Mother to arrange an engagement celebration of sorts. I can’t wait for our honeymoon, my dearest, when you will finally be mine.
All my love,
Henry
Wednesday, 12th June, 1940
Nothing for ages, and now we’re right in the midst of war!
Dunkirk was astounding! We rescued almost all the British troops and most of the French troops, too. Far more than anyone had hoped. Everyone says it’s all thanks to the “little ships,” all those ordinary people dropping everything to hurry off in boats and pick up our soldiers off the beach. Daddy took his yacht over and says he saved over three hundred soldiers. “Bombed all the way!” he says. He has been incredibly pleased with himself, with people lining up to shake hands in the village square.
“We small boats were central to operations,” he told a gathering. “We could go right up to the beach, carry the men to the big ships in deeper waters ready to head for England. It was a fearful scene. Crowds of men crawling the beach like ants, wading into the water, sometimes up to their shoulders, while overhead Nazi planes strafed us with bullets. I’ll never forget hauling those men out of the murky water, some badly wounded, all exhausted, the bullets pummeling the choppy sea around us.”
The Chilbury Ladies' Choir Page 12