by Mary Gibson
Emerging from the cinema, they sheltered in a doorway, deciding where to go next. They were about to make a dash for a café across the busy street when May bumped into a serviceman. He had his cap pulled down and his head ducked against the rain. They rebounded off each other before he lifted his chin. She knew him immediately, even after all this time.
‘May! Strike me, it’s May!’ His face broke into a broad grin. ‘Fancy meeting you here of all places, May, it’s a miracle!’
May was conscious that her mouth was open, wide enough to catch raindrops. Bumping into Doug hardly seemed a miracle. It felt to May more like an unhappy accident.
32
Ashes and Angels
August–November 1945
Doug insisted they go for tea at the café together and May was glad of Sadie’s presence. The young Canadian seemed to have forgotten the circumstances of their last meeting. He told her he was based at Chittagong airfield and was full of tales of his piloting exploits. He’d only just returned from a sortie across the border into Burma.
‘I’m flying heavy fighters now – Thunderbolts, mostly strafing railway lines or Jap columns, but last trip out I was picking up casualties. It’s tough going for the boys, fighting every inch of the way, and the poor guys that get injured have to rely on being lifted out. But tell me about your war, May.’
He dropped his gaze, as if he’d all at once remembered who he was talking to, and then May knew he hadn’t forgotten what had happened that night at the dance when Bill had intervened.
‘I’ve been a gunner girl for all of the war, on the predictor, made Corporal. Our battery chalked up the most direct hits in the south-east, even managed to get quite a few doodlebugs.’
Doug raised his eyes, impressed. ‘Young May, who’d have thought it! So what brings you out here? Couldn’t you have stayed home now it’s over in Europe?’
He sounded genuinely interested, so May told him.
Doug whistled. ‘Sounds like you’ve had a hard war. I’m sorry about your dad. Your poor mother must be heartbroken. I remember she made lovely little cakes… fairy cakes, she called them.’
May had to smile. ‘Bill loved those too.’
‘So your fiancé, Bill, is that the chap who…’ Doug’s freckled skin could not hide his blushes, and he glanced at Sadie.
‘Yes,’ May answered hastily. ‘My knight in shining armour.’
The barb was not lost on Doug.
‘Look, I never got a chance to say I was sorry about that… I was so ashamed of myself, I couldn’t even say goodbye properly. I’ve been kicking myself ever since if I’m honest.’
Sadie looked awkwardly at May. ‘I’ll just pop out and see if the rain’s stopped, shall I?’
Doug laughed. ‘You’ll be lucky. It’s the damn monsoon – it never stops till it stops!’
Doug was obviously risking his life every day and if this was the last conversation May ever had with him, then she didn’t want to let him go away unforgiven. So in spite of Sadie’s presence she said, ‘Doug, we’ve all done things we’re ashamed of. It’s all water under the bridge.’
At that moment a passing lorry piled high with caged chickens splashed a huge wave of rainwater against the café windows… and they laughed.
‘All right, water under the bridge it is!’ Doug said.
Before they went their separate ways May asked Doug if he could find out anything about Bill. ‘I’m sure he was based here before he went missing. But the RAF’s not told his mum and dad a thing about what happened. It’s left us all up in the air… we just want to know.’
He seemed to hesitate. ‘You shouldn’t get your hopes up, May. The Japs are ruthless and anyone who goes missing in the jungle, well…’
May felt his words like a blow to the stomach and took in a gulping breath, before pulling herself upright. ‘I will keep my hopes up, Doug – and not you, nor anyone else, will convince me to do any different!’
He chuckled. ‘Same old May. What was the name of that film you just saw? I Know Where I’m Going? You always did, May.’ He put his pilot’s cap back on. ‘I’ll ask around at the base. Be seeing you.’
And before she had a chance to pull away, he bent to kiss her cheek, and so that she couldn’t object, he kissed Sadie too.
When he’d gone the young girl widened her eyes. ‘Oohh, he’s a right charmer. You’re a dark horse, May. Two fellers on the go?’
May shook her head; she didn’t feel like explaining. ‘Come on, let’s make a dash for it or we’ll be late for the pickup.’
She ran out into the rain-washed street, and was soaked to the skin in the few seconds it took for another eager rickshaw driver to pull up and hand them into its hooded shelter.
*
In the week that followed May put her meeting with Doug to the back of her mind. But he had obviously not forgotten her, for he tracked her down to her billet. He was waiting beneath the corrugated iron porch that jutted out from the hut. Opening up a large umbrella, he walked towards her, smiling, and May felt oddly guilty, almost as if she were being unfaithful to Bill.
‘Fancy a trip over to the airbase – we’ve got a good servicemen’s club, we could have a bite to eat?’ he asked as he held the umbrella over the two of them.
‘I don’t think so, Doug.’
‘Well, I’ve got news. And if you want to hear it, you’ll have to come for lunch. Deal?’ He tipped his head to one side in a gesture she knew he thought was charming. But she wanted to hear his news.
‘All right then. Wait while I change into something a bit dryer.’
She put on a clean skirt and blouse, then sheltering awkwardly beneath Doug’s umbrella, they made their way to the taxi rank. They rode in a rickety three-wheeled taxi and the driver seemed to have no notion of where the brakes were. May decided she much preferred the slower pace of the rickshaws. She tried to prise the news from Doug on the way, but he refused to give her a hint of it until they were seated in the servicemen’s club with beers and a lunch far superior to anything she could get at her army base.
‘Come on then, tell me. What’s this news?’ she asked impatiently. ‘What did you find out?’
He half stood, peering above the heads of the other diners. ‘Ah, here he comes.’
‘Who?’
‘Someone who knows something about your chap.’
She held her breath, putting her beer glass carefully on the table, steadying her voice as she said hello to the young aircraftman who sat down at their table. He’d brought a mug of tea with him.
‘This is Colin, he’s ground crew. Tell her what you know, Col.’
The young man smiled warmly. ‘It’s like we’ve already met, May. Bill had a photo of you, above his bunk…’
‘You knew Bill!’ A surge of hope rippled through May as she leaned across the table, hanging on to Colin’s every word.
‘Oh yes, we were mates. I’m a gunner armourer too – we worked together in the same fighter squadron. He was a good bloke, decent, you know. And he thought the world of you, May, but I expect you know that.’
She did know it, but to hear it from a stranger made her feel strangely close to Bill, almost as if she were seeing him through a secret window. If only she could call through the window, get him to turn round, come out and find her… but Colin was talking now about the time Bill went missing.
‘Well, there were a few nasty skirmishes over the border round about that time. Me and Bill, we were in a contingent of ground crew, sent over into Burma to set up a temporary airfield. We’d cleared the strip and were getting things operational when a troop of Japs made a lightning raid. Came out of the jungle, yelling bloody banzai, bayonets fixed.’ He shivered. ‘Enough to curdle your blood it is, when they come at you.’
Colin seemed to be talking in slow motion, for everything in the background – people seated at tables, eating, drinking, walking in and out – all melted into a swift blur, their chatter receding, and she listened as intently as when the ord
ers were coming through on the wireless headphones. Only aware of Colin’s voice, she waited for him to go on.
‘It was a matter of minutes. They overran the whole airstrip, killed as many ground crew and pilots as they could. We had no warning, you see, no defences. It was slaughter.’
‘Oh, Colin!’ Cold fear grabbed at her heart and she dug her nails into her palms. ‘But not everyone. They didn’t kill you all... you got out! What about Bill?’
Colin shook his head. ‘I was lucky, but, May—’
‘No, no, no.’ She put her hands over her ears and shut her eyes, trying to hide from the impossible truth.
‘Listen to him, May.’ Doug grasped her hands, pulling them down from her ears, as Colin continued.
‘Me and Bill, we just had time to grab our packs and run off into the jungle. Half a dozen of us ground crew escaped, but somehow we got separated. I’m not sure, May, but I think Bill might have got hit. He was lagging behind and when I looked back one time, he seemed to be limping, but that was the last I saw of Bill. By the time we’d stopped running, he wasn’t with us.’
Now the young man gave her an anguished look. ‘I’m so sorry we couldn’t go back for him, May. It’s our training. If you’re separated you have to just keep going, hope you’ll meet up at the rendezvous point. But he wasn’t there either and we walked all the way back to India, took us days. We got back, half-starved, in a terrible state really.’ He paused, looking down at his tightly clasped hands. ‘I’m sorry not to have better news for you, May.’
She stared at Colin for a brief moment and had to shake herself back into the present. She had been in the jungle with Bill, living his terror, urging him to run, run faster, her heart thudding as though she’d been running for her own life.
‘No, don’t be sorry, Colin. I can’t tell you how much of a relief it is.’
Doug looked puzzled, but May couldn’t explain that though it wasn’t the best news, it was good enough. If Colin had seen Bill killed she would have cause enough to mourn, but the last time anyone had seen him Bill was alive, and that was one more reason to hope.
‘He could have been taken prisoner,’ was the best she could do.
‘May, if that happened, then I’m sorry, but you should know it might have been better if he’d died in the jungle,’ Doug said.
Colin looked as if he disapproved of such bluntness, but May’s hackles rose. ‘Don’t you dare say that!’
She hated Doug at that moment, but he looked at her with weary eyes. ‘I just don’t want you to have false hope,’ he replied dully.
‘There is no false hope,’ she said.
*
As it was, the war ended before the monsoon did. May was in the communications centre with Sadie when she heard the news. The tin roof was exploding with the thundering downpour and the sergeant had to turn up the wireless and call for quiet. They gathered round the set, listening intently to the tinny voice which came through, announcing that the Americans had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan and that the Japanese had surrendered.
‘What’s an atomic bomb?’ Sadie asked.
And as the sergeant turned off the set, she replied, ‘Imagine a million heavy explosives, landmines, doodlebugs, V-2s, artillery shells, then times that by a million… get the idea?’
As the news sank in some people cheered and ran out into the compound, while Sadie and some of the other girls formed a Conga line, singing as they snaked out of the door. But May sat immobile as tears began to trickle down her cheeks. Others might take them for tears of happiness if they wanted to, but now that the long years of war were over, she found she could not rejoice at the destruction of someone’s world. All May could think of were the homes – all those Japanese homes, flattened, crushed, reduced to ashes, just like her own.
The war might be over, but of course she wasn’t going home. They were sending her to Singapore. Doug insisted that she come over to the airbase to say goodbye and she supposed she owed it to him. After all, he had helped give her that lifeline of hope, which had kept her going over the past weeks, but now she was leaving Chittagong, she felt it slipping through her fingers. Soon she would be adrift again, and she had to admit it had been a long way to come for such a slender promise.
She took one of the lethal three-wheeled taxis out to the base, where Doug met her at the gates. As they made their way to the servicemen’s club they passed rows of American bombers and British fighter planes. The camp was still full of airmen of all nationalities.
‘It looks busy as ever. Why won’t they just demob you?’
‘The British Empire still has a lot of tidying up to do in Malaya before any of us get out! The only way you get a fast ticket home is if you’re ex-POW or come down with malaria.’
After lunch Doug took her on a tour of the place and she saw the bamboo huts, with open sides, which she recognized from photos Bill had sent her. She saw the wooden bunks, swathed in mosquito nets.
‘Oh, I recognize those huts. Bill used to hate the mozzie nets, couldn’t sleep at all! Said as you turn over you get caught up in the bloody things and he’d rather get malaria!’ she said, with a half-smile of reminiscence.
Doug looked at her for a long moment. ‘You’re still in love with him, aren’t you, May?’
She blushed.
‘You don’t have to say anything, and I know I’ve got no chance. But, May, I want you to know there’s been no one for me, not since I made a mess of things back in Essex. If you could ever forgive me… well, I’d like another go at it.’
Now it was his turn to blush. His eager big-boned face was deadly serious, though, and she felt a pang of utter hopelessness. She would rather stay in love with Bill, in this world or the next, than launch out into the unknown with Doug. Perhaps it was a decision she’d regret. Perhaps that was how life was supposed to be – you let go the dream in order to grasp the reality. But she couldn’t do it.
‘I’m sorry, Doug,’ she said gently. ‘I do forgive you. It’s not because of what happened back then. I just can’t let him go…’
*
Singapore was like a transit camp for the whole world. It was as if someone had shaken up all the military personnel in South East Asia and thrown them down in a heap on the island, where they were being shuffled around until they could find their rightful place again. Everyone seemed to be waiting. British and Commonwealth troops were in makeshift barracks and billets, waiting with their demob numbers until a ship became available to take them home. Australians and New Zealanders were flying out, as were the GIs. The wounded in Red Cross centres and hospitals were convalescing until they were declared fit. But it was the POWs fit enough to travel who were ushered out first. One leave day, May and a group of signals girls went to the harbour to see the allied fleet of ships that had amassed there. They stood back letting a pathetic line of POWs, liberated from the island’s Changi Jail, troop past them. They were dressed in new uniforms, clean-shaven, trying to hold themselves erect and proud, but there was no disguising the gaunt skeletal frames beneath the khaki. They all looked so old to May and yet she knew that many of the wizened faces belonged to young men the same age as Bill. She searched every face for his and when the girls wanted to move on to a nearby café frequented by GIs, she made an excuse that she wasn’t feeling well. When they were gone, she stood in the same spot, till the whole column of POWs had passed and she was absolutely certain that Bill was not amongst them.
Afterwards, her dreams were full of home. It was always summer in the Southwark Park Road house, as she dreamed of those hot childhood days when her mother would fill the grey tin bath with cold water and let them splash around in the backyard. She dreamed of the chicken run that her father had made and how she’d cried when she realized the connection between her feathered friends and Sunday dinner. Over and over, she dreamed of the kitchen, with the Ascot and boiler, the deal table, scrubbed white. But sometimes the dreams would take her where she didn’t want to go. The table would be hol
ding back a ton of rubble from crushing her sister; sometimes she would find herself trying to move a pile of crushed stone and slate with her mother’s old soup ladle. She would wake in a cold sweat and find herself longing for the old familiar comfort of that place, which no longer existed. And then she would get up and look into a sky filled with foreign constellations, and wonder if there was anywhere on earth she could still call home.
*
She should have known the army’s ways by now. Only two months after her posting to Singapore she was given her demob number and had joined the displaced souls all over the island in the long wait for a ship. Her sergeant pulled all sorts of strings to get the signals girls on the same troopship home, but some POWs had to be squeezed on board at the last moment and May had to wait for another berth. So it was she found herself, and a few other ATS stragglers, squeezed aboard a hospital ship taking home a large number of refugees and wounded. Rather than spend the entire voyage kicking her heels, she decided to volunteer to help out the Red Cross nurses. She made beds, emptied bedpans, and even learned how to change bandages after a little training.
She’d received a stack of letters just before embarking and tried to adjust to the idea of a world that was fast moving on from war in Europe. Peggy had decided to keep the nursery going and her mother had come back to Bermondsey to live in Fort Road with her. Pat had returned to Angelcote with Mark and they were now living with the major.
May was pleased for them all; they were already inhabiting a future she was frightened to imagine, because for her, it would be a future without Bill. In Singapore she’d experienced a curious sort of loneliness. The place was full of people, yet sometimes she felt locked in a solitary prison of invisible, impenetrable walls. Sometimes she would go dancing with the girls, dance with young men, just for the illusion of not being alone, but always she’d come back to that prison. Like a street mime artist she’d once seen on Tower Hill, she put out her hand and touched those invisible walls and wondered how they could be so strong.