Gifts of War

by Mackenzie Ford

  We were in the kitchen at the time, making Will a hot drink. Having grown up with condensed milk, he didn’t share Sam’s or my revulsion.

  “The real difference is the parents. In Middle Hill the parents were behind the children. Here, it’s different. Once or twice parents have come in and said that their child is being turned into a dreamer, that we shouldn’t fill their heads with far-off places. So I ask them to sit through a class. The headmistress doesn’t mind. When they see how we teach—what we teach, how the children react—they change their minds, usually. Some of them become quite interested themselves. More and more parents are coming to the school—that has to be good. I say ‘parents’—it’s the mothers, of course.”

  Lottie, meanwhile, had found herself a man at last. His name was Reg and, when she had met him, he had been a trainee policeman. He was nice enough, if creepy-quiet—tall, thin, with very short-cut dark hair and a mustache. Why did Sam’s sisters always seem to go for men with mustaches? Reg liked fishing, so Lottie and he spent hours on river and canal banks, on the edges of reservoirs, filled-in gravel pits, and so on. It got Lottie out at weekends, so that she saw a bit of the countryside on the edges of London. Reg lived in a police barracks and, after a day’s fishing at the weekend, they would arrive home late, usually after Sam and I were in bed, and spend the night together. He would be gone at dawn the next day. I never knew if Lottie thought she was deceiving us, but neither Sam nor I cared. Lottie must find her happiness where she could.

  But then Reg was conscripted into an army unit in Yorkshire. So, more tears as he made his farewells. He and Lottie did not get engaged before he went, so I hoped there would be no replay of the Faye episode. Still, it wasn’t easy for Lottie.

  Sam had made friends with one of the other teachers at the school, a woman called Ellen Smith whose speciality was science. She came round for lunch one Saturday and brought her fiancé with her. He, Edward, was an assistant harbormaster in the Port of London. I liked him immediately and we got on well. We went out to the pub but sat in the garden rather than the bar, because the weather had turned mild and we had Will with us. While Sam and Ellen talked, I asked Edward about his job.

  “It’s pure organization,” he said. “I enjoyed math at school, especially geometry, and it’s just as well. My job is all about timing and layout. Say a ship comes in, from the West Indies, for example. I’m told by telegraph when it’s coming, what size it is, and how long it’s going to be with us. So I allocate a berth. All well and good, assuming, of course, that it’s in a convoy and doesn’t get torpedoed. I arrange the customs inspection, handle any quarantine problems, make sure all the paperwork is in order.”

  “But… ? I sense a ‘but’ coming.” Too right. He smiled. First off, I don’t control the rate at which ships arrive. If the port is full—and it happens—ships have to anchor in the estuary. That’s expensive for them, and so is hardly popular. And it creates work for me, since I have to alert customs, who will keep an eye on them.

  “Then, some ships overstay the amount of time they have told us. Ships are big things, so you can’t just tell them to move. But if they stay, they are fined—and getting the money out of them can be a problem, though they know that if they mess us around they can’t come back. Then, of course, sailors who have been at sea for weeks at a time are apt to go overboard when they reach the shore. They drink, go whoring, get into fights, get arrested, in some cases get sent to prison. I don’t have to deal with all that but I do have to keep abreast of it, insofar as it affects when a ship leaves and we can bring in the ones waiting outside.” He smiled. “As a job it’s more interesting than it sounds, and I enjoy it. Of course, over time, certain ships and certain captains get a reputation and you learn to look out for them.”

  “Can you ban the black sheep from the port?”

  “Oh yes, it happens all the time. We also impound ships that haven’t paid their fees. That’s always a lot of fun.” He grinned.

  “How many ships come in and out of the port each week?”

  “There are between a dozen and two dozen major ports in Britain, depending on how you count. The Port of London is the biggest, of course. About thirty oceangoing ships—not coastal traders—come in and out every week.” He pointed to my glass, which was nearly empty.

  I nodded. “Thanks, I’d love another.”

  He picked up my glass. “If you’re interested, come and have a look around one day. Ports are interesting places. They’re a world all their own.”

  “I’d love that,” I replied. “It would make a change from walking Will.”

  “I heard that,” said Sam, standing behind me and placing her hands on my shoulders. “As punishment, you can take us for a walk this instant.”

  I hadn’t been home for Christmas, but I did get down to Edgewater more often now. I still didn’t take Sam. I didn’t think my mother was up to it and my father continued to insist that he didn’t approve of my living arrangements. I might be happy enough but they were a different generation and couldn’t adjust.

  My mother was not good. Her complexion was even more florid than it had been, the coughing fits were getting worse, and though she had always been a fierce character, she was now turning irascible, angry at everyone and everything, even Einstein. I had been as good as my word to my father and Izzy and had found a psychiatrist to examine my mother. She had steadfastly refused to be seen. Worst of all, her emphysema was now so bad that her walks were limited—forty minutes was all she could manage, twenty out and twenty back and that didn’t take her very far. Einstein was putting on weight.

  On one occasion, when we had walked down the lane near the house and were leaning against a wooden gate into a field, she had broached the subject I dreaded, which we all dreaded.

  “Do you think you’ll get married before I die?”

  Fortunately, I was looking across the field at some rabbits when she dropped this little bombshell. I turned to her. “Of course, Ma. No hurry, is there?”

  “You know there bloody well is,” she wheezed. She patted her chest. “These lungs can’t last forever. You’d better get a move on.”

  “Who’d have me?” I said in as pleasant a manner as I could muster.

  “You must have been out with some women,” she said softly. “London’s a big place.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “But, well…” I didn’t want to lie.

  She let a short silence elapse.

  “I suppose, if I was a woman your age, and I got to know you, and liked you, and then it started to get serious—”

  “Ma!” I cried softly.

  “No, let me finish … I don’t want to embarrass you.” She put her hand on my arm. “It would obviously be a problem… I can see that. You would feel you had to say something… and that could be a problem for some women. A big difficulty. But… it’s not unknown for some women to be unable to conceive. If you could meet someone like that… you could both adopt.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “It’s such an important thing, infertility.” She coughed, but not badly. “To be honest, children never interested me much, but I know your father would have been disappointed if we couldn’t have had Izzy and you. Would he have married me if he thought I was infertile? Possibly not.” She smiled ruefully. “There ought to be an agency where infertile couples can meet each other, don’t you think? Maybe there is.”

  I was speechless. Why didn’t I tell her there and then about Sam and Will? I don’t know. I do know. It would have meant explaining why I hadn’t mentioned it before. I might have told her about Wilhelm and our Christmas encounter. She might have insisted on meeting Sam and telling her everything—my mother was a law unto herself and I wasn’t about to take any risks. So I said nothing.

  “Can we drop it?” is what I did say.

  “Promise me you’ll check out if there’s some kind of agency. Then I’ll drop it.”

  I nodded and we headed back to the house.

  O
n the way I turned over what she had said. I came to the conclusion that for her, in her condition, death had suddenly come very close and she wanted to see me settled. She was tidying up her life, or trying to.

  I came home one evening to find Sam, Lottie, Will, and Whisky in the dining room, with bits of paper and cardboard and scissors and glue spread out all over the dining table. “This looks like a military operation,” I said. I had poured myself a Scotch and I sipped it as I looked down and surveyed the chaos. “What is this?”

  “It’s Lottie’s idea,” said Sam, getting up to kiss me. “She found a shop selling travel posters and we’re sticking them to boards, so we can decorate Will’s room.”

  “Look,” said Lottie, unrolling one. It was a railways poster, advertising Snowdonia, in Wales. “Here’s another—” She spread open a second, advertising the Swiss lakes.

  “Lottie knows all about my wanderlust—don’t you think it’s a clever idea, Hal? As Will gets bigger, he will understand more, and he’ll ask questions and we’ll be able to tell him all about far-off places.”

  “Let me help,” I said, sitting down.

  “Yes, you help Lottie, Hal. I must get started on dinner anyway.” She went through into the kitchen.

  Will came and sat on my lap, as he sometimes liked to do. I unrolled another of the posters—this one was for Imperial Cruise Lines, advertising the splendors of Bombay and Madras.

  “That’s a trip Sam would love,” said Lottie, busy cutting cardboard to match the size of the posters.

  “Not you, Lottie? You don’t share her love of travel?”

  She made a face. “After what happened to our mother? I don’t think so.”

  “But you have a lovely singing voice… they have concert halls and theaters on these cruise ships, you know. You could travel and get paid for it. You never know… after the war… there’ll be a lot of things you could do.”

  “You think there’ll be many changes afterward?”

  “Of course. Wars change people, entire countries. But you don’t always know what will happen. For instance, you women will change—”

  “Oh, how?”

  “Well, for a start, women will do more jobs; I mean they will work at a bigger variety of jobs. They are doing so much already, because of the war—driving buses, lorries even. There’ll be more policewomen after the war, more women doctors; more universities will admit women.”

  “I’m not so sure … Are men going to change, will they let women onto their turf?”

  “They’ll have to, Lottie, because there will be fewer men around. In that sense it won’t be so much fun being a woman.”

  There was a brief silence as Will and I watched Lottie put glue at each corner of the piece of cardboard she had cut and begin sticking the Imperial Cruise Lines poster onto it.

  “Will you go back to the theater, after the war?”

  She nodded. “It gets to you, the theater. It seeps into your blood. The weird hours, the superstitions, the spiky rhythm of successes and flops, the smells, the tantrums of the actors and directors, the bitchy reviews, the backstage parties, the props, the music … I don’t think I could do anything else.”

  One corner of the poster was giving her difficulty—wouldn’t stay stuck down—and she leaned on it. “I’m very grateful for all the help you’ve been, Hal—you know that, don’t you?”

  I smiled.

  “But I’m not sure I want the world to change. I liked the world as it was in 1914. I liked my life in the theater. London was the center of empire, and Soho was—is—the center of London. There!”

  The poster had finally remained stuck down. She held up the card with the poster stuck to it. It was a brilliant blue, with patches of red and white—the imperial colors.

  Will’s large eyes stared up at it. He liked what he saw.

  “What will you do after the war, Hal? Will you stay in the army?”

  “With this wound? I don’t think they would have me. In any case, no, I don’t want to stay, even in intelligence. My family was in publishing till they sold out. I’d like to go back in. There are some new printing techniques about at the moment, producing new colors, so I think there’s scope for a new kind of art book, showing what paintings look like. I’d like to try that.”

  “Do you think Sam and you will ever get married?” She had started cutting a second piece of cardboard.

  “Sam knows the score. I’ll marry her whenever she wants.”

  “You’re willing to … you know, just hang around, waiting. Isn’t that a bit… humiliating?”

  “I don’t see it like that. I love her. Surely you know that by now.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, cutting away.

  “One time, when we were girls, six or seven—”

  “Remember our agreement, Lottie.”

  She nodded. “This is just a story, from our childhood. When we were nine or ten, Sam and I ran away from home. Our father was being particularly awful to our mother and neither Sam nor I could stand it. We took a change of underwear—that’s all we could carry— and our savings, a few shillings each, and we walked to the Bristol docks. The idea was to catch a boat to somewhere far away, far away and exotic, of course, like Zanzibar, or Egypt, or Samarkand—I remember Sam was in love with that word. Once we were in this exotic and faraway place, we would become rich and powerful and come back to rescue our mother from our wicked father.”

  She looked up, but still cut at her cardboard.

  “We got as far as the docks—we knew how to sneak in. We asked the man on the gangplank of the first ship we came to where it was going. Dublin, he said. That wasn’t exotic enough for Sam. We asked at the next ship: Liverpool. And the next: Glasgow.”

  She grinned. “I can’t tell you how disappointed we were. Well, Sam was disappointed. To tell the truth, the shine of the adventure was starting to wear off for me, and I was beginning to think about a change of plan—and going home.”

  Will was fidgeting and I let him down to play on the floor with Whisky.

  “But not Sam. We stayed in the docks overnight—sleeping under some tarpaulin in an old tugboat in dry dock. Sam, although she was only a girl, knew the times of the tides at Bristol—it was part of her wanderlust—and she knew that high tide that night was about three in the morning. Sure enough, two boats slipped away in the night, and two other boats came in and tied up. The next morning, as soon as it was light, Sam was up and talking to the new crews.”

  Lottie finished cutting the second piece of card and started gluing the Swiss lakes poster to it.

  “And… one of the new boats had come in from somewhere in Africa that neither of us had heard of, but was bound for Cape Town. Sam was delighted—Cape Town for her was next to heaven—but I was thoroughly alarmed. I was hungry, my hair needed combing, I was dirty, and ships, I now knew, were big, smelly things full of strange men who were none too clean themselves. Cape Town was the last place I wanted to go. I had no idea how we were going to smuggle ourselves aboard ship and neither did Sam, but just then a policeman appeared in the docks. I saw him talking to one of the port officials; he was obviously asking if anyone had seen two young girls. At that moment, he saw us—and Sam saw him. She yelled at me, ‘Come on, run!’ And she ran back toward the tugboat where we had spent the night.”

  Lottie leaned on the poster, to make it stick to the card. “But I didn’t run. I just stood there as the policeman hurried toward me. By then, I wanted to be caught.”

  Lottie looked at me directly. “Sam was the youngest of us sisters, but in some ways the toughest. Maybe she had to be tough because she was the youngest—she was the smallest while we were girls and had to assert herself.”

  A pause, while Lottie began work on the third piece of cardboard. Will was wrestling with Whisky under the table.

  “I understand what you are saying, Lottie.” I swallowed what remained of my Scotch. “Thank you for the warning.”

  She leaned across, placed her hand on
mine, and squeezed it.

  Dear Hal,

  Full marks for going home again. As for what you say about Ma—well, to be honest, I knew it. Pa has taken to writing me secret letters, without telling Ma, so I know all about her condition and how worried he is. I should really try to get some leave but I’ve been told it’s out of the question.

  Alan has told his wife about me. I said I thought it was a bit premature, unnecessary even. I mean, what if he’s killed tomorrow? His wife will be doubly bereaved. And if I’m killed… well, she need never have known about me. But Alan’s Alan. An upright Presbyterian with a fierce Highland conscience. To be frank, his conscience frightens me from time to time.

  Since I can’t get home just now, you’re going to have to do the work of two and get home a lot more than you have been doing. Why don’t you try and see old Dr. Barnaby and ask him what the prognosis is? I’ve asked Alan and he made a face. But I don’t think he wants to alarm me and he is hundreds of miles away, with other things on his mind.

  God, I’m getting gloomy. I’ll try to be more cheerful next time.

  Love XXX x OOO = XXXOOO

  Izzy

  I think it was about now, just after this last letter from Izzy, that we received a visit in Northumberland Avenue from the Blood Transfusion Service. They came round quietly and addressed us in small groups. They explained, as Izzy had explained that evening in Stratford, that there was a new science of blood, that the blood running in all our veins and arteries can be divided into four groups—A, B, AB, and O—and that, if someone who has lost blood, in an accident, say, or of course in war, was given blood of the same type, then his or her body would accept the new blood and not reject it. The man doing the explaining—a young doctor with melancholy brown eyes—said that a way had been discovered to prevent blood from coagulating, which meant that we, in the comparative safety of Northumberland Avenue, could now do something direct for the war effort: give a pint of our blood, which would then be rushed to the Front, to help our boys wounded in the trenches.