by Mary Nichols
He had found Louise sitting in a chair by the window of her room, nursing the baby and looking out at the leafless trees in the lane, the tops of which were bowing in a strong breeze. She turned when she heard him come into the room. ‘Jan! You came.’
‘Of course I came.’ He strode over to kneel at her side and gaze at his little daughter with eyes full of tears, which he brushed impatiently away. ‘She is perfect,’ he murmured. ‘A little cherub, an angel.’
‘She is like you.’
He looked from the baby to Louise and grinned sheepishly. ‘Do you think so?’
‘Definitely. Everyone says so. Especially her eyes. She has a way of looking at me so knowingly, which reminds me of you.’
‘Knowingly?’ he queried.
‘As if she knows what I’m thinking, how I’m feeling.’
‘Do I do that?’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘That’s because I love you.’
‘Oh, Jan!’ She had been feeling emotional herself and the least thing seemed to set her off
‘Hey, it’s not something to cry about,’ he said, leaning over to kiss her. ‘What are you going to call her?’
The tears turned to a watery smile. ‘You said she was an angel, so what about Angela?’
‘Angela,’ he repeated. ‘Yes, I like that, but can we have a Polish name too?’
‘Of course. What would you like?’ She hoped he wasn’t going to suggest Rulka.
‘My mother’s name was Zofia. It’s spelt with a Z, by the way.’
‘Then Angela Zofia she shall be. We’ll have the christening here in the village church the next time you have leave.’ She paused. ‘You don’t object to that, do you?’
‘No. You must do what you think best.’
It was, she knew, a reference to the fact that he would not always be with her and Angela would be brought up in England. Insisting on his daughter being christened in the Catholic faith would not help to bring about a reconciliation with her parents. ‘Thank you, Jan.’
‘Don’t thank me. I have to thank you. It is thinking of you and this little one that keeps me going.’
‘You are looking very tired. Can’t you get a spot of longer leave?’
‘When my turn comes.’ It was said flatly and she wondered if he was talking about leave at all.
‘There’s something wrong.’
‘No, nothing. How could there be?’
‘Come on, out with it.’
‘My friend, Miroslav Feric died two days ago. His Spitfire broke up in the air and crashed into the runway. We stood on the ground and watched it happen. The aircraft buried its nose in the concrete. Mika was half hanging out of the cockpit as if he had been trying to bail out. He didn’t even die in combat. It might be easier to bear if he had. He was one of the best. I had known him for years and I can’t believe he’s gone.’ He paused, gulping back tears, but when she did not speak and simply put her hand over his, he went on. ‘I’ve lost many friends in this war, but no one like him. He was always so optimistic. He kept a journal and everyone was expected to contribute. As soon as we came off an op, there he was with his book and a pen. We teased him unmercifully about it. Now the book is all that’s left of him.’
‘Perhaps you should keep it up in his memory.’
‘We have already decided that. It is a chronicle of all the squadron has been through. One day, when Poland is free again, it may be important.’
Christenings had a low priority when it came to the conduct of the war and Angela’s had to be postponed twice because Jan’s leave was cancelled, but eventually it had taken place on Easter Sunday with Jenny and Edith as godmothers and Stan as godfather. Louise looked for her mother in vain. Jenny had somehow managed a christening tea and a little cake which she said she had made with carrots. Louise would not have believed it if she had not seen the cake in the making. It tasted exceptionally good. Jan had gone back next day and she had not seen him since but letters went back and forth regularly.
The new teacher at the school had enrolled in the ATS, where she would probably be more at ease and a replacement was hard to find. John asked Louise to step in and fill the breech and when Jenny offered to look after Angela while she was at work, she jumped at the chance to be useful again. Gradually she was losing all her evacuee children, either to grammar school, and that included Tommy Carter, or because they had gone home. Now employed by the Norfolk education authority, her pupils were a mix of Londoners and natives of Cottlesham. Her life was full to overflowing and, but for the estrangement with her mother, she was content.
She had just finished pegging the washing out and was picking up the empty clothes basket, when she became aware of an aeroplane flying very low, almost at rooftop height. Thinking it was a stricken bomber coming in to land at Watton, she glanced up and found herself looking at a huge black cross, painted on the wings of a German Messerschmitt. It was so low she could clearly see the pilot. She grabbed Angela from her pram and dashed for the back door. ‘It’s a Jerry,’ she shouted, and flung herself into the Morrison shelter, followed by Jenny. Outside they could hear the spat-spat of machine gun fire as the pilot raked the village. ‘The cheeky devil,’ Jenny said lightly to cover her terror.
After a while there was silence and they crawled out from the shelter and went outside. One of the cot sheets was in shreds and Angela’s pram had a hole clean through it. Louise stood clutching Angela to her bosom, and stared at it in disbelief. ‘He was low enough to see exactly what he was doing,’ she said furiously. ‘How could anyone who calls himself a human being do anything so callous? I hope he gets shot down and dies a horrible death.’ Until that moment she had not known what it was to hate. Now it consumed her.
Stan, returning from an errand to the post office, came running up the road towards them. ‘Are you all right?’
‘We’re fine,’ Jenny said because Louise was still looking at the pram, still shaking at the thought of what might have happened. ‘Is anyone hurt?’
‘Only a cow belonging to Bill Young. Everyone else dived for cover. Pauline Johns fell over trying to hide in a ditch and it looks like she’s broken her wrist. Edith is taking her to the hospital in Swaffham. It’s a good thing the children weren’t in school. The bullets ripped into the playground.’ He stopped when he saw the pram. ‘God! What happened there?’
Louise found her voice to tell him. He swore softly. ‘No one’s safe in this war, not even babies. I’d kill the fellow with my bare hands if he came anywhere near me. Let’s get indoors and make a cup of tea. A bit of the strong stuff in it wouldn’t go amiss by the look of you. You’re shaking.’
‘I am shaking with fury,’ she said. ‘You can’t even put babies out in prams now.’ She had been in the habit of putting Angela in the garden in her pram for some fresh air while she helped with the housework, assuming she was safe there. She would be brought in if the air raid siren went, which it did sometimes because they were so near the airfield. This time there had been no warning. ‘If I hadn’t been outside myself …’ Now the danger was over, she was crying softly. ‘Oh, it doesn’t bear thinking about. I’ll never be able to put her out again, not while this war lasts.’
Angela herself was unperturbed and continued to thrive. By the beginning of the autumn term she was crawling and investigating everything about her with wide blue eyes and inquisitive fingers. Tommy and Beattie hauled her about like a living doll, treatment she bore with good humour. Louise’s letters to Jan were full of his daughter’s progress. Occasionally he came to see for himself. His daughter fascinated him. He would help to look after her and croon a lullaby in Polish when she was put to bed, and when she slept he would sit watching her. He knew about the German fighter machine-gunning the village and it had affected him deeply. ‘It is for her and all children I fight,’ he murmured on one occasion. ‘They must live in a world at peace, a very different world from the evil we see around us now.’
If he came in the middle of the week, Louis
e, being at school, wasn’t able to have much time with him, but he would spend the day helping out at the pub and wheeling Angela out in her new pram, much to the amusement of the men of the village: such domesticity was not manly in their eyes. He didn’t seem to mind their ribaldry. If he managed a weekend, he would ask Jenny to look after Angela so that he could take Louise to the cinema in Swaffham or for a day’s outing in Norwich, though that had been badly damaged in air raids earlier in the year. He always appeared cheerful, but Louise was not deceived.
The strain he had been under was showing, though he still smiled and joked. She knew he had been escorting bombers raiding German targets and worried about him being shot down. She loved him unreservedly and knew she would do so for the rest of her life, but she also knew that she was destined to lose him. She would rather it was to his wife than to enemy action.
Privacy was hard to come by in the Pheasant, especially in the evenings when the bar was crowded, so on one visit towards the end of July, she suggested going for a walk after Angela had been put to bed. Leaving Jenny in charge of her they strolled, hand in hand, through the village to their favourite place on the common. It was a warm evening and would be light until late. The grass on the common was turning brown, the blackberry bushes were laden with green fruit and elderflowers spread their heady scent. It was a peaceful summer evening in rural England, but the peace was illusory.
‘How long have you got?’ she asked. It was the first question anyone asked when loved ones came home on leave. It was as well to know when the next parting would be and cram everything into a few hours.
‘I must go back tomorrow.’
She looked at his face. He looked thin and gaunt and there were dark pads of fatigue below his eyes. Was it his work, the daily brush with death that caused it? After all, the Polish airmen had been enduring it longer than most. Or was it worry about what was happening in Poland? ‘Any news from home?’ she asked.
‘Of Rulka? No, none. We know the Polish people are resisting and we hear of dreadful atrocities, but neither your government nor ours seem able to do anything about it. I don’t think they believe it.’
She put a hand on his arm. ‘I’m sorry, Jan. I do understand.’
He took her hand and put it to his lips. ‘I know you do. You are still my anchor. When I am here I can relax. Let’s not talk about it anymore.’
‘Are you still on escort duty?’
‘Some of the time, but just lately we have been training American flyers in aerial combat.’ He paused to smile at her. ‘They are even more wet behind the ears than the Britishers were, but they are learning.’ He did not add that they had also been escorting American bombers in daylight raids over Germany. They called it ‘precision bombing’ and maintained that going in daylight gave them a better chance of finding their target. Jan didn’t think they were any more accurate with their bombing than the RAF who went at night and their chances of being shot down were a great deal higher. The Spitfires of the Polish squadrons did not have enough fuel to take them all the way to distant targets and back, but even so, escorting the slower bombers as far as they could, they were vulnerable and their losses were high. The heroics of the Battle of Britain were behind them and the fickle public forgot them to embrace the new arrivals.
‘There are some stationed near here,’ Louise said. ‘They seem so well fed and even the privates dress like officers. And they are generous with their presents of chocolate and nylons, is it any wonder they are popular with the girls, if not the men?’
He laughed. ‘They have quite put our noses out of joint.’
The way he had picked up colloquial English amused Louise and his accent had improved considerably. She sometimes forgot he wasn’t British, then something he said or did would remind her of his roots and she found herself dwelling on her situation. It was not unique; there were other women who had children by Poles and some had been lucky enough to marry them. At times like that she would wonder if the fact that Jan had no news of his wife meant she was no longer alive. She told herself sternly that it was unchristian to wish anyone dead but, like Jan, she wished she knew for sure.
Occasionally, when something triggered off a memory, she thought of Tony. Their love for each other had been genuine, she did not question it, but he seemed to belong to a different world, and though he had died in action, it was a kind of peaceful, pre-war world which would never come again. This was borne out every day when the BBC, to which everyone listened for reliable information, spoke of losses and bereavement. But then it came closer to home. Agnes Carter arrived one Sunday morning to break the news to her son and daughter that their father had been lost on an Arctic convoy taking supplies to Russia. The news of the loss of two-thirds of the convoy and thousands of lives had not been kept from the public and there were many who questioned whether the supplies were worth the loss of men and ships. Seeing the white-faced Mrs Carter, twisting the handle of her handbag while she waited for Jenny to fetch Tommy and Beattie, Louise wondered it too. ‘They don’t stand a chance once they’re in the water,’ Agnes said. ‘It’s the cold you see …’
Beattie had never seen much of her father even before the war. He was a shadowy figure her mother and brother talked about and she received the news with a kind of indifference which upset her mother. Tommy, on the other hand, had idolised his father. When he was at home between voyages, they had gone to football matches together, fishing and camping. It was for his father he worked hard at school, to make him proud. He had stared at his mother for fully a minute, then rushed out of the house. He was gone for hours.
‘If he’s not back by teatime, we’ll go looking for him,’ Louise said. ‘He won’t have gone far. It’s just his way of coping.’
‘I’ve got to get back tonight,’ Agnes said. ‘I’m on early shift tomorrow.’
‘Can’t you ask for some time off?’
‘What would I do with it if I had it? I’d only mope about the house. It’s better to keep busy. I’ve got mates at work. We keep each other going.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Tommy came back at four o’clock, dawdling up the lane, kicking viciously at stones as if every one of them was a Jerry. Ignoring those who had been watching his progress, he went straight up to his room. His mother followed him. There was silence for a few minutes and then they heard the unmistakeable sound of sobbing. ‘He’ll be all right now he’s got it out of his system,’ Jenny said.
Louise knew it would not be as easy as that and she might very well be called upon to try and soften his anger in the days and nights to come. She went to telephone Bill Young to ask him if he would run Mrs Carter to Swaffham station in his car. Being a farmer, he had a petrol allowance. Mrs Carter was coming down the stairs as she rang off. ‘I’ve arranged a lift for you to the station,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Try not to worry. I’ll keep an eye on the children for you.’
‘I should think you have enough to worry about without concerning yourself with my children,’ she said, looking down at Angela who had crawled after her mother and was trying to hug her leg.
Whether it was a reference to her single state, Louise neither knew nor cared. She picked Angela up and opened the door just as Bill’s car drew up. Beattie ran out to kiss her mother goodbye, but Tommy stayed in his room. He came down the following morning, dry-eyed but subdued. Breakfast over, he took Beattie by the hand and set off for school. Louise saw to Angela’s breakfast, kissed her goodbye and followed. Like everyone else she was feeling the weight of her responsibilities.
It was obvious the men of 303 Squadron, especially those who had been with it since the beginning, could not go on much longer without casualties escalating, not only through enemy action but as a result of accidents through fatigue. They were taken off operations for rest and recuperation. Jan’s leave coincided with the school’s summer holiday, so he took his little family on holiday to the Lake District, hiring a small cottage tucked away on the sl
opes above Lake Windermere.
It was a wonderful two weeks, the longest they had ever spent together. Jan put Angela in a sling on his back and they walked all over the hills, taking picnics, even swimming in the cold water of the lake, returning to the cottage to eat and go to bed to make love and go to sleep in each other’s arms. They didn’t talk about the war or the future, what might have been or what might yet be. The present was all that mattered and they made the most of it. They returned to Cottlesham, refreshed and ready to carry on with the work they had to do. Jan went back to Northolt and Louise set about preparing her lessons for the new term.
The first person Jan saw when he arrived back was Witold coming out of the mess.
‘I’m being posted,’ he said after they had greeted each other.
‘When? Where?’ Jan knew that Witold had asked to be assigned to a special RAF squadron that had begun smuggling supplies and men into occupied Europe, Poland included. ‘Special operations?’
‘No, more’s the pity. I’m going to America.’ It was said bitterly. Witold had been in at the start and worked his way up from pilot to command the first Polish fighter wing and the posting was not to his liking.
‘America? Why there?’
‘I am being attached to the Polish Embassy in Washington and I’m supposed to go round drumming up support for the war. Apart from the ones who have come over here, the Yanks have little idea what it’s all about.’
‘I’ll miss you.’
One by one Jan’s old comrades were disappearing, either killed, injured or moved on. A few new flyers had arrived in Scotland, freed from Soviet camps, and Witold and Jan had had the job of training them in RAF ways, just as they themselves had been trained, but the old comradeship was slowly being eroded.
‘When do you go?’
‘Tomorrow. Jan Zumbach is taking over from me.’
‘So soon? We’d better have a celebration tonight, then.’