‘Oh, thank God!’ she whispered. ‘It was you, Gordon, wasn’t it?’
‘Me – what do you mean? What have I done?’ He drew the back of his hand across his eyes and blinked.
‘It was you found him, wasn’t it? Did you pull me out too?’
The grin widened as he turned away to go and dry off. ‘Well, you know what they say? One good turn deserves another . . .’
With that, he was gone.
Gordon appointed himself personal nurse to the three of them – Kate, Danny and Squadron Leader Philip Trent. ‘Just don’t let on I’m looking after one of the boys in blue,’ he grinned, ‘or me life won’t be worth living.’ The nurses, overwhelmed by the numbers, welcomed Gordon’s help. Moving among the wounded and exhausted men, the cheerful soldier was as good as a tonic.
An hour or so later, he brought Danny into the cabin, his strong arm under the younger man’s shoulder. ‘Here you are, girl. He’s all safe and sound. And we’re nearly half-way home. Just let’s hope that Luftwaffe don’t find us!’
Danny grinned sheepishly at Kate. ‘I really ought to learn to swim, didn’t I?’
‘I’ve been telling you that for years, but do you ever take notice of me?’ She was smiling at him, so thankful that he was safe. But she knew if she were to fling her arms around him, as she felt like doing, it would only embarrass him. So her mock admonishment covered their deeper emotions.
He sat down carefully on the bed beside her.
‘Are you hurt?’ she asked anxiously.
‘No – just bruised. How about you?’
‘I’m fine. I ought to get off this bed, really. There are far worse than me . . .’
‘You lie still, girl,’ Gordon ordered, ‘You took in a lot of water. ‘Sides, you’ve earned a bed, if anyone has!’
One or two soldiers nearby, less injured than some, heard Gordon and raised a cheer of agreement. Kate felt herself blushing.
Danny grinned at her and then, sobering suddenly, looked up at Gordon. ‘Do you know what happened to me boat?’
‘Sorry, mate, blown to smithereens.’
Danny closed his eyes and groaned. Kate watched him anxiously. What would Robert Eland say when they returned home? That boat was his livelihood.
As if catching some of their anxiety, Philip Trent asked, ‘Is it a great loss to you?’
When Danny didn’t answer, Kate explained quietly, ‘It’s his dad’s. He’s a fisherman.’
Danny opened his eyes. ‘Oh, he’d have come himself, if he could have done, only he had to stay. He’s coxswain of our lifeboat . . .’
‘Oh, so this rescuing business runs in the family, does it?’ Gordon laughed and Danny and Kate smiled. The loss of the boat – even though a big loss to Danny’s father – was nothing in comparison to the many lives they had saved.
Robert Eland would understand.
Their homecoming to Fleethaven Point was greeted in differing ways.
‘Thoughtless, irresponsible, selfish . . .’ Esther Godfrey’s tirade went on. ‘Fancy just telling our Lilian you were going out in the boat with him and then disappearing for nearly a week. We thought you’d been drowned.’
Calmly, Kate said, ‘Him? His name’s Danny, Mother. And if you’d taken the trouble to ask Mrs Eland – she knew where we were. Well, sort of . . .’
Obviously her private thoughts had been right, Kate realized. Not even the safety of her own daughter had been enough to make Esther Godfrey speak to Beth Eland.
Reluctantly, Esther muttered, ‘Ya dad did speak to Mester. He said you’d both gone off down south. We thought it was a pleasure trip and then I find out you’ve been getting yarsen into this!’ Esther rattled a daily newspaper under Kate’s nose. Plastered all over the front page were dramatic accounts of how an armada of ships of all shapes and sizes had brought back thousands of men from the beaches of Dunkirk.
Kate grinned. ‘What – no picture of us on the front page? Well, I’d have thought we warranted that at the very least!’
‘I’ll have none of your sarcasm, Miss,’ her mother snapped, and flung the paper away from her in disgust.
‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to join up next.’
There was a long silence between them; a waiting silence.
Kate met her mother’s fierce gaze. ‘I’m thinking about it – yes.’
She saw the colour drain swiftly from her mother’s face and Esther put out her hand to steady herself against the table. A small gasp escaped her open lips and her green eyes – so like Kate’s own – stared at her daughter.
Kate felt a stab of remorse. She hadn’t meant to be quite so blunt, and yet, she had to make her mother understand. She turned and began to pace up and down the kitchen, spreading her hands. ‘You don’t understand, Mam. It was awful over there. All those soldiers trapped on the beach and in the water – thousands of them. There were bodies too . . .’ She gulped and closed her eyes for a moment, then she went on strongly, ‘We’ve all got to do our bit – even the women this time, Mam. We can’t let Hitler just walk into our country and take it over. And he will – if we don’t stop him. You don’t understand, Mam . . .’ she said again and then stopped.
Her mother had sunk down into a chair on the opposite side of the kitchen table and was resting her arms on the scrubbed surface. Wearily, she said, ‘Yes, I do, Kate. It was the same for me when I went to France after the last war.’
‘What? You – you went to France?’ Kate could not hide the surprise in her voice, and hearing it, her mother smiled. ‘Yes – can you imagine me leaving Fleethaven Point to go all the way to France?’
Kate lowered herself into a chair and faced her mother across the table. ‘Tell me about it, Mam?’ she asked softly.
There was silence in the kitchen, the only sounds the ticking of the clock and the singing of the kettle on the hob.
‘I went out there with the Squire. His eldest son had been killed and he was trying to find his grave. I – went to try to . . . She stopped, glanced swiftly at Kate and then dropped her gaze again. She took a deep breath and continued. ‘When I saw their land . . .’ Esther’s eyes took on a faraway look, as if she were not here in her warm kitchen in 1940 but out on the battlefields of France in 1919, ‘absolutely devastated, gouged with trenches as far as you could see. Not a living thing for mile after mile – not a blade of grass; trees, blackened and dead; no birds – only rotting bodies and rats!’ She shook her head, murmuring, ‘Those poor folk, they can only just have recovered from all that, and now it’s happening to them again.’ She raised her eyes and met Kate’s gaze steadily. ‘Oh, I understand all right, Kate, just how you feel. I saw for myself what all our men fought for – and died for – last time. It’s just that—’ She reached out with fingers that shook slightly to clasp Kate’s hands. ‘You’re my daughter and I – I don’t want you to be in danger . . .’
Into Kate’s mind came the words ‘you’d still have Lilian’ but they remained unspoken.
Already, Kate thought, she had said more than enough to hurt her mother.
Esther levered herself up from the table. ‘Well, I’spose ya’ll do what ya like, whatever I say. But ya’d best go in an’ tell ya grandad what you intend.’
‘Oh heck!’
The two women looked at each other and the comical expression upon Kate’s face at the thought of having to tell her grandfather what she intended, made them both burst out laughing.
Twenty
‘Grandad?’ Kate opened the door of the front room quietly. Are you awake?’ she asked softly.
‘Aye, lass. Ah’m alius awake for you. Come in, come in, dun’t stand there dithering in the doorway. There’s a draught!’
Kate smiled, stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. She sat on a footstool at her grandfather’s feet and smiled up at him.
Will Benson now lived at Brumbys’ Farm. In the winter of 1936 he had caught influenza and had developed severe bronchitis. Kate smiled as she remembered how it had hap
pened. All the time Will had been really ill, Esther or Jonathan, often with Kate along too when she had been at home, had driven in the pony and trap every day to the village of Suddaby, some thirteen miles inland.
‘You’re too old to be going about on the front of that carrier’s cart any longer,’ Esther had railed. ‘You’re just a stubborn old man who won’t realize it’s more than time he retired.’
‘Shall you retire from the farm, girl, specially now you own it, just ’cos you get old?’
‘That’s different . . .’
‘No, it ain’t. What’ll I do shut up in me cottage all day with only Minnie Raby and her gossiping tongue for company?’
The next day Esther had returned hands on hips, ready to do battle. ‘Me and Jonathan have talked it over. You’re coming to live with us at Brumbys’ Farm. I’ll turn the front parlour into a bed-sitting room for ya. And dun’t think I’ll let you be idle, ’cos I shan’t. Ya can mek ya’sen useful about the farm. And I won’t have no argument, it’s only right you should come to us. We’re yar only family. I won’t tek no . . .’
She had stopped as she had heard Will Benson’s wheezy laughter. ‘I aren’t arguing, lass. It’s what I want to do.’
‘What? Well! Well – I never!’ Esther’s face had been a picture while Kate had clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter. But it had gurgled out until she was leaning weakly against the wall. The crafty old devil, Kate had thought, he’d engineered that very cleverly.
So here he was now, installed in the front room that was scarcely ever used anyway; a single bed in one corner and an armchair set in front of the window overlooking the front garden and the flat fields stretching to the setting sun. He had his privacy, yet his family were only a step away, and a little work about the farm when he felt like it kept him feeling useful and needed.
Will Benson was a contented man, it was written on his face for all to see. Yet he was still a force to be reckoned with within the family, which was why Kate found herself sitting at his feet and taking a deep breath before telling him of her plans.
Before she could begin, he said, ‘You had us worried, girl. Whatever did you go off for like that with young Danny?’
Kate told him – in far more detail than she had described to her mother – all that had happened to her and Danny since they had set off from Fleethaven Point. She omitted nothing. She told him all about Gordon and the airman and how at the end of it all they’d lost Robert Eland’s boat.
When at last she fell silent, she felt Will Benson’s gnarled fingers touch her hair. With a catch in his voice he said, ‘I’m proud of you, girl. I wish I’d bin there mesen.’
She looked up at him again, holding his gaze with her steady green eyes. ‘Grandad, I’m thinking of – of joining up.’
His fingers, still against her hair, trembled slightly. ‘Aw, lass. Are ya sure?’
‘Oh, Grandad, if you’d seen it out there. Seen our soldiers coming back bedraggled and beaten. And yet,’ she added with the ghost of a smile as she thought about Gordon Stratford, ‘they didn’t act like they were beaten. They were still shaking their fists at the enemy planes and promising to go back.’
‘And you reckon you want to lend a hand, eh, lass?’
‘I want to “do my bit” as they say.’ She smiled up at him, trying to be light-hearted about it, but there was no deceiving the old man.
His face was sober as he asked quietly, ‘Danny going too, is he, lass?’
She looked squarely into the watery, faded old eyes. ‘I – think so, Grandad.’
Slowly, the old man nodded.
‘What did your dad say about the boat?’
‘He was very good about it,’ Danny answered her. He grinned at her. ‘Said he wished he’d been with us.’
She smiled back. ‘That’s just what me grandad said. Oh, but your dad’s so good. He never says much, does he? But he’s a wonderful person.’
‘Aye,’ Danny murmured. ‘An’ he’s been good to me.’ There was silence and Kate knew they were both thinking about the same thing; that he wasn’t really Danny’s father.
‘He loves your mam so much. You can see it in his eyes when he looks at her, even now, after all these years.’
‘Aye, an’ it can’t have been easy for him.’
‘But she loves him,’ Kate reassured him. ‘I know she does.’
‘Aye, well . . .’ They were getting into dangerous waters, touching on a subject that they had not openly discussed for years. Yet always it lay between them.
As if deliberately to change tack, Danny said, ‘By the way, can you have a word with Rosie?’
‘Rosie?’ Kate was surprised. ‘What about?’
‘She’ll be getting herself into trouble if she dun’t watch it.’ When Kate still looked puzzled, he went on, ‘It’s them Army lads that’s billeted with me grandad.’
Beth Eland’s father, Dan Hanley, was the coastguard at Fleethaven Point and, living alone, was the only one with room to spare for the soldiers who manned the gun emplacement on the dunes facing the North Sea.
‘Oh.’ Now Kate understood. ‘What about her mam or Grannie Harris? I’d have thought she could make young Rosie toe the line.’
‘She’s grown into such a pretty little thing,’ Danny murmured.
‘All those blonde curls and big blue eyes,’ Kate laughed. And Rosie’s figure too, she was thinking, all curvey in the right places.
‘She’s so innocent, though,’ Danny was saying. ‘Living here at the Point all her life, she ain’t had much to do with men. She just won’t know . . .’
Kate stifled a snort of laughter. It was Danny who was the innocent one, she thought. If what she had heard was true, then young Rosie Maine knew exactly what she was doing.
When Rosie had turned fifteen, she had found a job in Reynolds’ store in Lynthorpe. She was still the same bright chatterbox and, as Danny rightly said, had now blossomed into a very pretty young woman. She was always smiling and friendly and was liked by customers and the other staff as well. It was impossible not to like Rosie Maine, and strangely, even though she was so pretty, she did not seem to cause jealousy. Now, at nineteen, Rosie still had no steady boyfriend but seemed to run a string of them, carefully balancing the attentions of several, never deliberately hurting anyone. When she went dancing in the town on a Saturday night, she was never short of partners. And now her partners were in uniform.
‘I’ll have a word with her,’ Kate promised.
‘Aw, thanks, Kate,’ Danny said.
It was more than likely, Kate thought wryly, that young Rosie could teach her a thing or two instead of the other way round.
‘You’re getting yourself a bad name, our Rosie,’ Kate said, with some of her mother’s bluntness coming to the fore.
The girl fluffed her blonde hair and then smoothed down her skirt with the palms of her hands. ‘Oh, Kate, I’m only having a little fun. I’m not doing any harm.’
‘It’s the harm that might come to you, Rosie, that we’re worried about.’
Kate heard the girl draw in her breath sharply. Rosie whirled about to face her. ‘We? Who’s we?’ Suddenly, her eyes were shining with an extra brightness.
‘Danny and me.’
‘Danny? Danny said something about me? What did he say?’
‘He’s worried about you – and the soldiers billeted at the Point.’
‘Who – Taffy and Don? Don’t be daft, our Kate. I’m only friendly with them. They’re a nice couple of boys and a long way from home. They’re lonely.’
‘That’s the whole point, Rosie . . .’ Kate persisted.
‘What else did Danny say about me, Kate?’
‘Nothing – he just said he was worried about you. We both are.’
Rosie pulled a face and turned away. ‘Well, you’ve no need. I can tek care of mesen, ta. Tell Danny he – he’s no need to worry himself about me.’
If she hadn’t known her better, Kate could have sworn there was a t
earful catch in Rosie’s voice.
When Kate reported her talk with Rosie to Danny, far from being reassured, he frowned. ‘She’s too flirty for her own good, Kate. I’ve tried having a word with her brothers, Mick and Jimmy, but all Mick can think about is joining up in December when he’s eighteen. Not even going to wait for his call-up papers, he ain’t.’
There was a deep silence between them as they walked side by side along the beach, close by the water’s edge.
‘Kate . . .’ Danny began, stopped and let out a deep sigh as if he had been holding his breath.
She linked her arm through his. ‘Come on, out with it.’
‘I – I’m going to volunteer.’
‘I know.’ She stopped and turned to face him. Checked by her hold on him, he too stopped. Slowly they turned to face each other. She smiled at him and was amused by the look of surprise on his face.
‘I guessed you would,’ she whispered.
‘You – you did?’
She nodded. ‘After Dunkirk – I guessed . . . No, that’s not quite right, I knew you’d want to go.’
His grin was sheepish. ‘I thought you’d throw a ducky fit.’
Kate laughed softly. ‘Not really, Danny, because I am going to join up too.’
They looked at each other and Danny said quietly, ‘Just like our dad did the last time, eh?’
Kate smiled and pressed his arm. Rarely did they speak of the father they shared, and yet now at this moment, it seemed right to think of him.
They walked on together in silence. A silence that was companionable and yet now held an added poignancy. Not for the first time, they were to be parted. But this time it might mean they never saw each other again. Hardly realizing it, Kate tightened her hold on Danny’s arm, and he placed his hand over hers.
At last he said, ‘Shall we go and join up – together?’
‘Of course – don’t you dare go without me!’ She aimed a playful punch at his shoulder. ‘Where is the nearest recruiting office, by the way? Is it Lincoln?’
‘I’m not sure – I’ll find out, though.’
‘Well, wherever it is, we’ll go together,’ she said, softly now.
The Fleethaven Trilogy Page 58