She was on the early morning shift and so arrived in the village on Saturday during the early evening and together the three women talked of the arrangements while Chris lay on the settee and dozed. Ed was practice-flying again he told her when she arrived but not until next week, though he had to stay on duty all this weekend. Helen was glad she would not see him because she needed to push her confusion about him to one side in order to deal with something that had already been too long delayed.
They knotted the netting as usual after church but before they all rose to leave Helen stood up. Her legs were shaking but she could not wait any longer to speak as she knew she must. She felt Laura’s hand pat her arm and Mrs Williams murmur, ‘It will be all right.’
‘I wonder if I could have your attention for a moment, ladies?’ Helen began. She looked around, and saw the vicar’s wife look up, her face red with irritation.
‘As Mrs Vane, the vicar’s wife, in her position of billeting officer for the area knows, I am the widow of a German.’ She didn’t look at the women who turned their heads to one another or listen to the murmuring which broke out, she just looked ahead at the clock which had stopped at ten to one.
‘In London we knew great kindness and great prejudice and we survived. My son was the victim of blackmail from a small group of boys when he first arrived here but that has now been solved. Now I see that we must confront the problem again.’
There was silence now and her throat was dry and the hemp made her cough. Mrs Williams passed her a glass of water and she sipped, grateful for its coolness.
‘All Germans are not Nazis.’ She looked now at Mrs Vane. ‘All Germans are not wicked. They are much as we are. They did not protest soon enough. I have not protested soon enough.’ Helen reached into her handbag, drawing out Willi’s letter.
‘I would like to read you this letter.’
Her voice didn’t falter as she read the words she knew by heart but she felt the thickening in her throat when she put it back into her handbag, heard the click of the clasp in the silence which still hung amongst the hemp. She walked through the door back to the cottage but did not mention it to Chris because she did not know what would happen.
During the week she received a letter from Chris and Laura explaining the details for the party. Ed had arranged for Earl to sing and a group from the base would be playing but the letter said nothing of Mrs Vane. The village women were providing some food and the men and children were decorating the hall. It was to be held on Thursday, Christmas Eve.
The noise of the factory was a relief all that week because it made her head ache so much that she couldn’t think, not of Mrs Vane, not of Ed, not of Heine, and at night she dreamt but the images were confused, vivid and made no sense and she awoke each day tired and anxious.
She arrived in the village in the late afternoon on Thursday. She was to be home for two days and went picking holly and ivy for the hall with Mary who wanted her to climb up for mistletoe but Helen said the Americans wouldn’t need it if the street corners in town were anything to go by.
But Mary pleaded and so Helen did and was whistled at by passing jeeps and had to stretch out across a thin branch which whipped up and down beneath her weight. She snatched a small clump from the top of the tree, dropping it down to Mary who cheered. Helen laughed and it was the first time she had done that for weeks.
They dropped it into the village hall and people smiled and nodded at her and so her shoulders relaxed but the vicar’s wife was not amongst them. That evening she tied Mary’s hair into small curls with pipe cleaners, sitting her by a roaring fire to dry it in time. She wet Chris’s hair where it quiffed up, then tied an old stocking of Laura’s on to it but he hid in the bedroom until it was dry.
She painted her own legs and Chris told her the seam wobbled and so she licked her finger and rubbed it off and Mary took the pencil and did it for her while Laura laughed. Mary wore her blackout dress and her hair was a mass of curls.
Planes had straggled back in as they walked from the village hall back to the cottage but Helen had made herself not count and besides no one they knew was flying today. So they laughed as they all stood in the hall, looking in the mirror.
Laura and Mary carried the party cakes made with powdered eggs while Helen carried a cardboard box full of bottles of home-made elderberry wine. Chris walked beside them, carrying nothing because he was still too weak but smiling because his hair had stuck down on the top of his head.
There were no lights visible through the blackout of the village hall but they could hear the music tuning up and Helen looked up and down the road. There were olive green bikes slung around the hall and three jeeps parked with more arriving.
Inside the hall it was warm and the decorations glittered. The table was heaped with hamburgers and hot dogs, Boston cream pie and pumpkin pie. There was coke to drink. It was a gift to the villagers from the GIs.
‘Pails of ice-cream are coming along later ma’am,’ a sergeant told them and Helen and Laura couldn’t say thank you because it was inadequate.
The band was playing now and Laura drifted off to talk to Mrs Williams. Helen looked around but Chris said it for her.
‘Ed isn’t here, Mum.’
‘Maybe he will be later,’ she answered, wondering why she felt tired suddenly, and irritated with the music, the food, the decorations.
Chris and Mary sat on the chairs spaced out along the walls while Helen and Laura poured wine into glasses but still he did not come. Mrs Vane did, though, with her husband. They didn’t stop and speak but walked down to the stage, through the GIs who stood in groups talking to girls, laughing, flirting, smoking, drinking. Helen watched as they mounted the stage to stand in front of the band. The vicar tapped the microphone; it clicked. He coughed and the hall grew silent. He coughed again, his black suit looking austere against the paper decorations, his clerical collar stark white.
‘I would like to welcome our guests tonight. Some sort of a reception was long overdue, and for that we must apologise, but somehow there has been rather a lot to think about during the past year. We are enormously grateful too for the wonderful refreshments. It is as though Father Christmas has come just a few hours early.’ He laughed and so did those in the hall.
‘Before we begin, though, I have something I wish to say. Mrs Weber spoke to the ladies of our village hall last Sunday and reminded us that we are all human beings, that we all suffer in this war and I am grateful to her for her words.’
Mrs Vane said nothing, just smiled with tight lips.
The vicar continued, looking towards the back of the hall at Helen. ‘My wife and I and the other villagers welcome you and your son to our village.’
Helen felt the heat in her face and looked at Chris. He smiled at her; the shadows had gone.
She looked back again at Mrs Vane and knew that there would always be people like her and that nothing on God’s earth could change them, but perhaps they could be isolated and contained as she hoped this woman had been.
There was dancing now, gentle, cheek to cheek dancing and Helen sat with Laura watching. Still Ed had not come but Chris was laughing with the boys who gathered round and was not unhappy so it didn’t matter, did it?
Earl hadn’t come either and so there was no singing yet, just music and the vicar came and talked to Laura who nodded and asked Helen to come down to the stage, telling her quietly as they went:
‘The vicar has asked if you will sing. There is a problem.’
Helen stopped. A GI took her arm and said, ‘Come and dance, honey.’
‘No thank you,’ she said and he passed on. ‘What do you mean? I’ve never sung in front of people.’
Laura took her arm. ‘Nonsense, Helen, you’ve sung in the crypt. What about the choir? Now come on, we’ve worked so hard to make this a success, you can’t let us down.’
‘But what about Earl? He’ll be along.’
Laura stopped. ‘No, he won’t, not now, not ever. He was on a mi
ssion today, taking the place of a sick gunner. He’s dead.’ Her voice shook.
Helen looked at her, not speaking, not seeing the couples dancing, not seeing the band playing. Earl was too young to die. He was far too young and too nice. He had helped Chris. He was too nice.
She sang then, for fifty minutes without a break, drifting into ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, reading the words of ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ before repeating it three times for the GIs who whistled and stamped; but all the time there was a pain in her chest for the young German American. And all the time she sang for him. Ed came in when she was singing ‘White Christmas’. She saw him enter, saw him stand and watch, but didn’t wave. She just looked and knew that he also grieved and that there was no time in this war to turn aside from love.
Ed watched her on the stage. She was thinner but still beautiful. He watched her and loved her and drank deeply from the glass he had been given. He listened to the words and thought of the snow falling in Montana, clear and white, not like the fog of this morning. Fog which had cleared to visibility of about a mile and so Earl had smiled and gone. Ed took another drink, nodding to Laura but not seeing her, seeing instead the B-17s leaving, one after another, but it had not been clear enough for accurate bombing, or so James Roten had said in his debriefing. Only Earl’s ship had made a hit. God damn it, that damn Norden bombsight could drop a bomb into a barrel from Californian skies but how the hell could the bomb-aimer penetrate this damn European mist? What would it be like when the bombing runs really got underway? He drank more wine. He recognised it as Laura’s and looked around, finding her, nodding and grinning, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes and Helen saw that as she wove her way towards him, standing in front of him, letting him take her in his arms, hold her with those strong hands as they danced.
He talked, his breath soft on her neck. He told of the men in the Nissen hut who had thrown lighter fuel on the meagre coal in the centre stove and how the chimney had got so hot it had kept them warm all night. He did not talk about Earl whom he could not get out of his head.
She talked about the vicar’s wife and how she hoped it was all over but not about Heine who she had loved but who, she had now accepted, was dead.
He talked of the interminable mud on the airfield. She talked of the smell of sugar beet which clung to her, although he said it did not.
She asked how Earl had died but instead of telling her of the burning plane which had plummeted, ripped in half, from the sky, emptying the crew into the factories they had just bombed, he told her how strong the Fortresses were, how they were called the battleships of the air, how you could land on one engine. While he said this and held her warm body against his he remembered Earl’s grin in the copse with Joe and Chris and held Helen tighter because now his friend would never write his name in candle grease on the ceiling of the pub when he had finished his twenty-five missions.
Helen was called back to the stage during the refreshments and sang ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ and ‘We’ll Meet Again’. Chris came up to the front of the stage then and asked her to sing ‘Silent Night’ and stood there while she sang the first verse in English and the second in German, his eyes on hers, their thoughts on Heine and Grandpa and Oma.
She left the stage again after that, taking Ed’s glass from him, leading him out on to the dance floor, holding him to her, leaning her face against his neck, talking of the pain she saw in his eyes and he spoke now of Earl and how it hurt to know he was gone. Helen knew now that there could be a great love between them, if the war gave them enough time.
CHAPTER 15
In January and February of 1943 Ed flew only training missions and those were only possible when the weather permitted. Dawn take-offs were abandoned and he was still a million years from the twenty-five missions he needed for his ticket home but he didn’t want to go home, he told Helen. He wanted to stay with her.
He would drive her from the boarding house to the village on Saturday evenings. Always they stopped halfway at a pub with oak settles. She would only drink a little and so would he, sipping at the weak beer he had bought, his sprinkled with salt to give at least a little flavour, hers without. They would sit together, his shoulder touching hers.
He would kiss her when they returned to the car and his lips were tangy with salt and beer and his hand would stroke her face and then they would drive home to Chris who was now allowed to go to school and into the playground where they played convoys, lining up, waiting for the submarine attack from behind the bike sheds, the toilets, the dustbins.
In February the campaign at the beet factory was over and in March 1943 Helen prepared to begin work at the farm five miles from the village. At the same time Ed was promoted to Major and given the post of Air Executive which meant that, for now, he stayed on the ground.
Laura cooked omelette that night with real eggs to build Helen up for the morning and to celebrate Ed’s safety, she said, smiling at them while Mary nudged Chris and winked.
The next morning Helen lay awake, listening to the predawn warm-up at the air base but there was not the familiar knotting in her stomach or the tension in her back because at least now, for a while, she could be sure he was not flying. She stretched, running her hands down her body, wondering what it would be like to feel him close to her, touching her, and suddenly she allowed herself to feel like a girl again, eager and young, because she knew he would not die today, tomorrow or the next day and what came after that was ‘the future’ and the blitz had taught her not to think of that.
At five-thirty she dressed and sat at the low window, looking out on to the rear garden, seeing the grass of the orchard fresh and pale green in the thin light of the dawn. Mist drifted over the grey meadow beyond. There had been no frost so would that mean deep mud on the farm? But that didn’t matter because the air would be fresh, there was no machinery to clang and grind and pipes to drip into her hair, her son was better and the man she loved was close.
She stopped by Chris’s door, opening it, seeing his hair, still so blond, and she smiled, walking down the stairs in her woollen airmen’s socks which Ed had given her to wear inside her boots. She put the kettle on the stove before feeding the pigs and the hens, feeling the cold on her hands, seeing the layer of heavy dew thick on the cabbage, the grass, the shed, undisturbed yet by the rising of the sun. But later her bike marked a long thin line across the ground as she took it to the road.
She rode to the farm, her dungarees clipped at the ankles, her old jacket buttoned tight against the wind. The farmer had told her last week where to leave her bike, pointing to the old barn.
As she approached the farmyard she dismounted and pushed at the gate, hauling the bike through mud, pushing it to the higher concrete where it was almost clear, then propped it inside the barn against an old mangle. The air was thick with the scent of hay. Already she was tired and it was only seven-thirty but maybe she would see Ed tonight and so what did it matter?
She stood in the entrance looking out on to the yard and then walked through the mud, hearing it squelch beneath her feet and splatter up her legs. There was a smell of manure and steam rose from a heap beyond the yard. Laura would love that for her garden. John met her then, coming round the edge of the long cow-shed which he had built just before the war, he told her as he led the way inside. It was limewashed and bright and he pointed to a Friesian which stood tethered to the manger.
‘Just get on and milk that one will you, me old girl, but wash your hands over in that basin first.’
The water was cold and the towel rough and full of holes. John stood watching, his face lined and weatherbeaten, his shoulders hunched from his thirty years on the farm. He had been born here, he had told her, and helped his old dad as long as he could remember.
‘Now you come on over and let’s get this old girl finished.’
Helen nodded and sat on the stool, waiting for him to leave, but he didn’t. The cow’s udders were milk-swollen. She closed her eye
s and tried to remember what he had told her last week, then took hold of the two front teats, pulling gently together. Nothing happened. She pulled one at a time. Nothing, and John was still standing there, his shadow falling on her hands, his breathing audible.
This is ridiculous, Helen thought. For God’s sake, I’m a woman of thirty and I can’t even milk a cow. She leaned her head against the animal, feeling its quivering flank against her forehead.
‘That’s better,’ John said. ‘You get right in next to her, she likes to get the feel of a person, our Daisy does. You’re more than just a pair of hands to her, you know. She’s got to like you.’
Helen tried again but still nothing, she pushed her head deeper into the cow’s side. Like me, you stupid cow, just like me.
John moved then, bending down and yanking at the teats. ‘Naughty old girl’s holding back, give her a good pull like that. Don’t you go pussyfooting around.’
Helen watched the jets of milk flooding into the pail and then took the warm teats in her hands again and at last some milk shot out, but not much.
‘I’ll go and start in the other shed then, now you’ve got the hang of it.’
The evening seemed a long way away as Helen tried again. She had not got the hang of it. She pulled and squeezed, banging her head against the cow, feeling her hand cramping.
‘You damned old cow,’ she swore. ‘Holding back, how could you on my first day? How could you?’ She looked into the bucket. There was still very little.
John came back in thirty minutes. He had finished two cows. He laughed and took her place and she watched and listened to the squirting jets, seeing the frothing milk, hating Daisy, hating the farm. All her fingers were red and sore.
She was sent out to help the men chopping out the sugar beets on the four-acre field. It was a long walk before she even reached the field and the hoe was hard against her shoulders and now she knew why John and the others wore folded sacks on their shoulders.
Somewhere Over England Page 25