by Helen Bryan
“Well, don’t promise till you know what it is.” She gathered her courage and blurted out her request. She held her breath. Immediately she wanted to take it back because she had probably ruined every hope. Oliver’s face was transformed by disbelief. Then joy. “Do you want this? Truly?”
She nodded. “Yes, so much! But only if you…”
“Oh, Frances,” he said, reaching out for her. “It’s like being offered a miracle. If you only knew. Yes, a thousand times, yes.”
Late the next day there was a knock on the Old Man’s door. “Come in,” he said, “and while you’re at it, where in hell has Miss Falconleigh got to? Get her on the telephone at once. Sent for her yesterday but she’d flown.”
The man who had entered was fidgeting. “Out with it!” barked the Old Man.
“It’s Miss Falconleigh, sir.”
“About time! Well, what about her? Gone to keep an eye on the de Balforts, has she?”
“Sir, yes, actually there’s something else—”
“What is it, man? There’s a war on in case you hadn’t noticed and we’ve not got all day!”
“She’s eloped, sir.”
“Ha! Followed orders, married that Hugo fellow, has she! Excellent! Knew we could count on her!”
“Actually, no. It seems she’s married the local parson. Ahem! Our Miss Falconleigh is now Mrs. Oliver Hammet. Most awkward, sir. Makes it impossible for her to marry Hugo de Balfort.”
The Old Man expressed himself with fury and a great many expletives for the next fifteen minutes. When he was told that Mrs. Hammet had said the vicar agreed that their marriage should remain secret for the time being, he was not placated. Married or not, she should not carry on as before while awaiting her posting to France.
30.
Crowmarsh Priors,
September 1942 and After
“Blimey, wot you doin’ ere?” demanded Elsie. She had returned to her and Bernie’s part of the attic to find her sister unpacking a shabby suitcase. Agnes’s things were strewn everywhere. “You’re supposed to be in Yorkshire! Billeted.”
Agnes looked up sulkily. She had gotten taller and her skirt and cardigan were several sizes too small. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“’Course I am,” said Elsie. “You’re my sister. Look at you, taller than me!”
“Well, I’m fifteen now so I’m not billeted no more, am I? Them people in Yorkshire, they was caught, wasn’t they? They just had me and the twins, but they was sendin’ in billetin’ forms to get the allowance for six evacuees. So the magistrates sent ’em to prison. Serves ’em right too.”
“But—”
“Me and the twins was sent to another billet, but they was full to burstin’ already and it was ’orrible. They told me where you was and that you was married an’ all. ‘No more billets for me,’ I says. Twins aren’t ’appy neither. Can I stay wiv you? This ’ouse must be bigger’n Buckin’am Palace, so there ought to be room for me and the boys.”
“Well, I’ll ’ave to see about the boys but…’course you can stay.”
“Won’t be for long. I’m thinkin’ to take a factory job to keep meself. I met a lad at the station, when I changed trains in London, givin’ out leaflets about the Russians and the eastern front. We got talkin’ an’ ’e showed me where to get me ticket and I ’elped ’im wiv the leaflet things for a bit, waitin’ for my train. ’E says nuffink easier than gettin’ a factory job in London, and if I’ve been up in Yorkshire it’ll do me good to be wiv workers and comrades in London, where that ‘urban prole…prole…oh urban wossname’ is.”
“Agnes, you got to be more careful! You mustn’t go takin’ up wiv every strange Tom, Dick, an’ ’Arry in the station!”
“’Is name’s Ted.” Agnes scowled defiantly. “An’ I’ll speak to whom I please!”
All of a sudden Elsie felt much older, more like Mum than she would have thought possible. She sighed. “We’ll make you a bed on the floor ’ere in our room for the time bein’. Rest of the house is requisitioned. They’re turnin’ us into a convalescent ’ome, for the wounded. Can’t ’ear yourself think for the poundin’,” she said as the workmen resumed hammering somewhere in the house. She gathered up Agnes’s things. “’Spect you’ll be wantin’ a barf.”
“But it’s only Tuesday!” exclaimed Agnes, who bathed only on Saturday night.
“That’s all right,” said Elsie grandly.
“La-di-dah!” muttered Agnes under her breath. “A barf on Tuesday! Don’t mind if I do.”
Next morning Agnes looked a bit brighter for a good night’s sleep, being cleaner, and some clothes of Elsie’s that were much nicer than her own, if a bit short still. She insisted on following Elsie when she went off to her rat catching and stuck close by until, exasperated, Elsie said she was going to get poisoned too unless she gave her a bit of room.
That night Agnes was there in the room when Bernie returned. He was not best pleased. “Can’t you put ’er somewhere’s else?” he muttered. “Ovverwise, how we s’posed to…you know…”
The next day Elsie went round the village, knocking on doors to see if anyone had a space for Agnes. The Barrowses offered their box room temporarily but not for long as Edith was expecting again. Agnes collected her things and went off grumpily, muttering “A copper! You’re jokin’!”
“It’ll ’ave to do for the time bein’, Agnes. There’s a war on.”
As October approached the workmen completed a fire escape outside Frances’s window in the attic. As Elsie and Bernie were wrapped up in each other they never noticed when she slipped out nights to join Oliver or that a visitor climbed up to her room when she was in. Even during the day she was often to be found wherever Oliver was. She said someone had to distract him from what had gone on in the churchyard.
Meanwhile Hugo had become very tiresome indeed, hanging around her during the day, inviting her to go for a drink at the pub, offering to give her lifts whenever he had one of the farm vehicles. One day when she refused, he cornered her in a barn and begged her again to marry him. He did not take her rejection kindly. A few days later he burst unexpectedly into Oliver’s study and found her flushed and Oliver distracted. Thereafter he found excuses frequently to call at the vicarage on Home Guard business.
“He suspects something,” thought Frances, so next time Hugo invited her to have a drink with him she agreed, and even flirted a little, to throw him off the scent. It backfired. Hugo took this as encouragement to propose again, and this time he didn’t trouble to hide his fury when she turned him down. He stared at her coldly and told her it was plain who his rival was.
“Rival? What on earth do you mean?” bluffed Frances.
“Oliver Hammet, of course.”
“Really, Hugo, how likely am I to become a vicar’s wife?” said Frances coldly, then stalked away.
Tanni was a bundle of nerves, hollow-eyed and jittery. Sister Tucker told her not to think of getting out of bed and not to pick up Johnny or Anna. Evangeline, who was getting bigger herself, had her hands full trying to cope with all of the children and was exhausted by the end of the day. When Alice came round one afternoon with Woolton pies and pallid turnip jam, she burst into tears. “What would we do without you, Alice?”
Alice patted her on the back. She had never got over her dislike of Evangeline, but it was her Christian duty to forgive.
Evangeline was too pregnant now to go hunting, but hungry as they were, no one could face whale meat or the indeterminate “poison mince” available at the butchers. Frances surprised them all by going out into the fields and coming back having snared some pigeons fat from harvest grain; Evangeline stuffed them with windfall apples and roasted them.
In fact, Frances realized her hunting expeditions were excellent cover and an excuse to roam with a weapon. Military Intelligence had narrowed the radius in southern England from which they believed Manfred’s signals were being sent, and she was under orders to search country houses whose location near the c
oast made them a convenient hiding place for any Germans who slipped into the country. She had been issued an official firearm. “He’s there somewhere. Keep looking,” she was told.
Though she thought it was pointless to include Gracecourt and said so, her superiors disagreed. The Old Man’s revenge, thought Frances crossly. But whenever Hugo was on Home Guard duty with Oliver, she broke in and made a methodical check of all the rooms and outbuildings, but found nothing. Afterward she hurried back to Glebe House, yawned ostentatiously for the benefit of Elsie and the sharp-eyed Agnes, and disappeared to her end of the attic. Then she would slip off to the vicarage or wait for Oliver to creep up the fire escape steps to her. Their time together was so precious that they never wasted it sleeping. They were blissfully happy, if very tired.
“Darling, I look forward to the day when we can behave like a respectable old married couple,” said Frances one night. “It’ll be so lovely to get up and have breakfast together. I never imagined anything so simple could be something I’d look forward to. I can actually make tea and I can probably manage toast for you.”
“Won’t it? Vicars don’t normally climb into their wives’ bedrooms like thieves. Rather fun, this, though it is a bit short on sleep. The bishop would be horrified. I’m not sure being married is meant to be this…this jolly!”
“Bother the bishop!”
Twice she nearly had an awkward confrontation. One night in early October Hugo came back to Gracecourt unexpectedly and nearly caught her climbing out of the cellar. Hugo called, “Hullo? Anyone there?” several times. She flattened herself in the shrubbery, held her breath, and prayed Hugo didn’t have a torch…that made her remember the upstairs bathroom and the airing cupboard in which she had found one. Perhaps she should check it next time.
A week later she was back. She had seen Hugo cycle off, so she climbed in through a back window and slipped upstairs. In the bathroom the gilt frames were gone and the airing cupboard door hung open. She crept closer and felt inside to see if the torch was still there. It had gone. Instead there was a radio set. Frances frowned, thinking what an odd place to keep it, then jumped as she heard the front door bang shut and Hugo call to his father that the meeting was postponed. She slipped down the back stairs and out through the window she had left open, and was creeping outside under Sir Leander’s study window when a heated argument broke out.
“I tell you she is!” Leander was pounding the floor with his cane. “There’s too much at stake. It’s your job…persuade her! I’ve been in touch…they’ll deal with Hammet, get him out of the way…”
Frances stopped thinking about the radio. It sounded like she and Oliver were in serious trouble. “They’ll deal with Hammet” could only mean the bishop and the church authorities. Someone must have noticed the amount of time she and Oliver spent together and complained to the bishop that the vicar was having an affair with his parishioner. Then there would be an almighty fuss about why they were keeping the marriage a secret, and Frances would have to think of a way to avoid revealing her Auxi status to everyone but especially to Oliver, who still didn’t know.
Bloody hell!
Frances strained to hear Hugo’s response, which was something like “Hold on, I’ve…something else they’ll pay for.” Frances wondered why the church would be paying Hugo for information, that seemed off a bit, but mainly she was worried about how to warn Oliver about the bishop without explaining how she knew.
Rachel rang and said she’d heard Tanni was expecting twins. Definitely, she said. She felt it in her bones. They ran in Tanni’s family.
It was the signal they had been waiting for: it meant “tonight.”
Alice took the message. She rushed her mother through tea and hurried back to the others. She found Frances had gone off on one of her rambles, Agnes was hovering around Elsie as usual, and Evangeline was lying down. She got up and helped Alice to cope with the children. They could have a bath holiday just this once, she said, as long as they went to bed early.
“Not unless we have a washin’ holiday too!” demanded Tommy and Maude.
“Washing too,” Evangeline agreed, too tired to chase them with a soapy cloth.
“An’ no brushin’ teef!”
To make matters worse, the previous night’s Home Guard meeting at the village hall with two other local Home Guard units had been postponed to tonight. They would be coming and going just across from the churchyard. The girls would have to be very careful that they weren’t seen.
“Bloody ’ell! What’ll I do about Agnes? She never goes back to the Barrowses’ before bedtime,” muttered Elsie to Bernie. At least he was home and could fetch the car he had hidden in a disused barn straightaway. That meant the girls could go straight to London while it was dark. By morning they would be safe.
First, though, they had to deal with Agnes. Elsie was desperate to give her the slip to collect blankets and make the flasks of cocoa.
“’Ere,” said Bernie. “Give ’er these.” He produced two little tablets.
“I can’t poison me own sister!”
“It’s not poison, it’s sleepin’ pills.” Bernie looked sheepish. “I got some from…a man I know when Agnes was sleepin’ in our room…”
Elsie kissed him, and when Agnes came in a few moments later, she gave her a large mug of cocoa, with the pills dissolved in it.
By nine o’clock Agnes was snoring, her head on the kitchen table. “Best get her upstairs,” said Elsie. “You take ’er shoulders, I’ll get ’er feet.”
“Not our room again!” said Bernie.
“Look, if she’s comfortable she’ll sleep better. Stands to reason. Put ’er in our bed. We’re not likely to need it tonight. And we can ’ardly carry her to the Barrowses, can we, like she was drunk or dead or somefink.”
By nine thirty Agnes was tucked up in Elsie’s attic bedroom, dead to the world. Bernie told Constable Barrows she hadn’t been feeling well and Elsie wanted to look after her.
Then Elsie, Bernie, Alice, Evangeline, and Frances gathered in the churchyard. Bernie had hidden the car a mile down the lane behind a hedgerow. The Home Guard meeting had ended, and Hugo de Balfort was the last to leave, looking around him as he walked away. Then the village was quiet, tucked up behind its blackout curtains. It began to rain—a blessing.
They were all on edge. Alice kept checking her watch. Finally she said, “Low tide in two and a half hours. Frances, it’s nearly time you and Elsie started down.”
“Right.”
“Blankets an’ sandwiches and fings ’ere in this bundle.”
“We don’t know how long it’ll take to get them back from the entrance. They may have been drugged and we’ll have to carry them.”
They tried not to think about what might be happening to the children as they got closer to safety. Alice had told them what the parish record said about how the smugglers towed contraband in barrels under the water. The idea of the twins lying drugged in the bottom of a boat dodging mines in the channel was bad enough, but if they had to be dragged under water…they might suffocate or drown, like unwanted kittens, if anything went wrong.
When it stopped raining, a nearly full moon was emerging from behind the heavy clouds as they unwound their ropes and checked their torches, emergency candles, and matches. “Oh, no!” The rope was tangled and had to be unwound. “I wonder if anyone can see us with this moon,” Alice said.
“Everyone’s probably asleep.”
When Elsie checked the lever, the tomb slid easily open. “Glad this ’as got easier to shift. First time we tried it, it wouldn’t ’ardly budge.”
“Concentrate and keep calm,” muttered Frances. “Damn this bloody rope!” She had told Oliver she could not see him tonight—it was one of those times when he had to trust her. In that case, he had said, smiling at her, he would get some sleep, he was exhausted. Frances hated to think of him sleeping alone.
Then, after twenty minutes of frantic picking at the knot in the rope in the darkness, u
nbelievably, they heard the drone of planes coming toward them from the channel.
“Oh, no! Oh, bloody hell!” said Frances. “They’re coming straight over us.”
They all looked up. “Keep your faces down so the light doesn’t shine on them! Get down!” ordered Frances, and they flattened themselves in the shadow of the church waiting for the planes to pass overhead and hearing distant antiaircraft fire from Brighton.
Closer and closer the planes came. A bomb fell on the downs, then another, and another. The earth shook. “Why’re they dropping bombs on the downs? They normally fly on north!” The earth shuddered.
“I’ll have to go back. Tanni and the children need to get down to the cellar and she’ll never manage on her own.” Evangeline ran off as fast as she could.
“Bernie, you get home with Elsie,” Alice ordered. “Agnes will be terrified if she wakes up.” Elsie and Bernie needed no urging and ran for Glebe House where Agnes was sleeping in the attic, the most dangerous place.
Alice watched them go. She knew she had to get home to her mother, so she didn’t pause to think of the danger. With the ground shuddering beneath her feet and flashes all round her she sprinted for her bicycle hidden in the bushes and leaped onto it. She could be home and back within an hour.
Frances raced for the vicarage as the planes roared closer. “Oliver!” she screamed. “The shelter! Hurry!” But Oliver was already at the door, shouting, “Frances!” just as the first plane flew low overhead. He grabbed her and pulled her inside, then under the staircase just as the explosion knocked them off their feet and shattered the vicarage windows. “The church,” said Oliver in disbelief, his arms tight round his wife. “Why are they bombing the church?”
On the floor Frances clung to him, burying her head in his shoulder. He held her tight, bracing her against another explosion. The ground shook violently as another bomb hit the churchyard. They heard glass shattering, and the bell pealed incongruously once as the tower crashed down. Masonry and gravestones were flung into the air and thudded back to earth.