War Brides

by Helen Bryan

  “You’re rambling! Get back to the Carpenters and the church,” ordered Simon. “Interview Lady Carpenter.”

  The camera followed Katie as she walked toward the Mercedes, looking over her shoulder at the television audience. “But let’s get back to the lovely and romantic story of Sir Bernard and Lady Carpenter and the parish church…”

  Lady Carpenter was oblivious to the approaching TV camera. She was trying to chivvy someone out of the car’s passenger seat. “For God’s sake, Graham!” she snapped at a young man in a red-and-white-striped shirt, navy blazer, and flamboyant tie. The Cockney accent of her youth was no longer apparent.

  Her thirty-year-old grandson, successful estate agent and party-going man-about-town, was horribly hungover from a friend’s stag night the previous evening. He sat slumped, ashen, and carsick, wishing he had not agreed to drive down with his grandmother. His grandfather had boasted that he liked his motors and his women fast and had kept a garage full of expensive cars, although he didn’t like driving: they were for Elsie, who adored them even though she drove like a maniac. She never tired of reminding her family that she had driven tractors during the war. Bernard had enjoyed riding in the passenger seat, puffing one of his special Cuban cigars, encouraging Elsie to put her foot down. The smell of expensive tobacco still permeated the car.

  If you weren’t Grandpa, Graham thought, driving with Granny was terrifying, especially when she was in a hurry. The motorway had been a blur of lorries, overtaken at reckless speed.

  “Hurry up, Graham! Your grandfather never complained about my driving.”

  Only because lung cancer got him before you killed him in a pileup, thought Graham but knew better than to say it aloud.

  Lady Carpenter moved aside to let him out, and her eyes narrowed to squint at a bent figure in an ancient Home Guard uniform shuffling along, leaning on a cane and the arm of a girl in a long, flowery skirt. She was clutching a large straw bag, rugs, and a folding deck chair. They stopped near the “Ladies” and “Gents.” The girl unfolded the chair and lowered the old gentleman into it. She settled a battered Panama hat on his head and, despite the sun, covered his knees with a plaid rug.

  “As I live and breathe, it’s Albert Hawthorne,” murmured Lady Carpenter. She watched the girl spread a second rug on the ground for herself and retrieve a paperback, a Thermos, and sunglasses from her basket.

  “Are you ready for your tea, Granddad?” she asked very loudly, in the kind of voice people use to the hard of hearing. The old man nodded.

  Graham’s gaze followed his grandmother’s. Then his mobile phone shrilled.

  Lady Carpenter scowled. It was the opening bars of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and a particularly irritating ring.

  “Sorry! I think we’ve finally got a punter for that old place we haven’t been able to shift,” he muttered to his grandmother, his hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. “Graham here,” he said smoothly.

  Lady Carpenter took out her compact and checked her lipstick. One thing she’d say for Graham, he’d inherited Bernie’s knack for wheeling and dealing. She listened.

  “The Regents Park Property?” he asked smoothly. “Yes, Park Village West. Enchanting house, Nash. Yes, Crown Estate, very exclusive. Well, the queen sort of owns it, but…Indeed they will be impressed back home in Dallas, though you’ll need to act quickly. Those properties are rare, snapped up the minute they come on the market on account of the big gardens at the back…Very unusual for London, yes. There was a canal behind all those houses once…No, no, not any longer, you needn’t worry about the little one falling in. Canal was filled in during the war; they say water reflects light at night and the Germans used it to navigate during the Blitz. Monday at ten…Excellent. See you then. Cheerio!” He pushed the end-call button. “House needs a fortune spent on it and no one’s interested except this American bloke, investment banker moving to London. His wife is keen, she insists on a house with a garden and a park nearby. Have to strike while the iron’s hot. Since we’re early I’ll stretch my legs, see if there’s any weekend cottages for sale. I never understand why people want them—who’d want to be in the country at the weekend? But they’re selling like hotcakes.”

  “Keep an eye open for Auntie Agnes and Uncle Ted,” Lady Carpenter murmured through her powder puff.

  Graham turned on his heel, aghast. “Bloody hell, Gran! You didn’t invite Ted the Red! You know what he’s like, and Agnes is worse. They’ll drink too much and fall on the food like it’s their last meal, then Ted’ll be buttonholing people and haranguing them about how the Labor Party betrayed the working class. Agnes will pester people to sign some harebrained petition, and they’ll drive the caterers crazy asking are they unionized. I hope you told them no Socialist Workers leaflets or whatever it is they distribute for Class War. And fat cousin Trotsky will…”

  “It’s not Trotsky, it’s Leon,” murmured his grandmother, brushing a bug off her silk-covered shoulder. “I did tell them no leaflets, but you know your auntie Agnes…she’s never got over things. Still, I couldn’t very well leave them out today, could I? Blood’s thicker than water. I owe it to Mum.”

  “I just hope they don’t unfurl any damned banners in front of the TV people.” Graham put on his sunglasses and skulked off.

  Lady Carpenter snapped her compact shut. Something Graham had said on the telephone about that house in London was buzzing in her mind…what was it? A piece missing from the puzzle, even after all the research the private detective had done. She and Bernie had tried and tried to work out what it was. Then she said, “I wonder…” very loudly. She pushed away the microphone Katie thrust at her, got back in the car, rang her personal assistant in London, and asked her to find out more about the area around the house that Graham was trying to sell, the canal he mentioned.

  Graham walked slowly past the girl who had come with Albert Hawthorne. She had slipped off one ballet pump and was lying on her stomach, reading, idly kicking one tan leg and a bare foot up and down.

  Katie looked about frantically for someone else to interview.

  A battered airport taxi pulled up behind the silver Mercedes. Lady Carpenter checked the time on her little diamond watch. It had been a last Christmas gift from Bernie. Just gone ten a.m. She hoped they’d all be here soon. They had a lot to talk about. She retrieved one last item, a leather dossier, from the backseat, as a stout woman enveloped in flowing black jersey, feet bulging out of laced sandals, was helped out of the taxi by the driver, who reached back for her walking stick. Her gray hair was coming loose from an untidy bun and she looked hot and uncomfortable. Two teenagers holding McDonald’s cups got out behind her, a boy in a T-shirt and kippah and a dark-haired girl in jeans and sandals and a baseball cap, who bickered in Hebrew as the woman adjusted a large handbag on her arm and smoothed her clothes. Leaning heavily on her cane, she walked toward Lady Carpenter, followed by the teenagers. The girl in the baseball cap raised her head, and Lady Carpenter exclaimed in surprise when she saw the teenager’s face. She looked exactly like Tanni had at that age, exactly.

  “Is it like you remembered, Bubbie?”

  Mrs. Zayman looked at Crowmarsh Priors. “That’s new,” she said to her grandchildren, pointing at the housing estate beyond the pub, “but otherwise it’s the same. I think.” Perspiration beaded her upper lip, and she looked round for the taxi, as if she were having second thoughts and might decide to get back into it and leave. “You know,” she murmured half to herself, half to her grandchildren, “some things come back to me clearly. Evangeline in the garden and all the vegetables she grew, the sewing basket by my chair in the kitchen, Elsie and her poisons, Alice cycling past to school, Frances hating her Land Girl uniform. Then I can’t remember other things. I can’t remember leaving. But the war was…at the sanatorium they told me to rest and not to worry, that the mind forgets what it needs to, that amnesia is nature’s way of protecting us. So there’s surely a lot of things I can’t tell you. Ah, well,” she shrugged
. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Elsie!” she exclaimed as Lady Carpenter came up and reached out to take her hands, exclaiming, “Tanni!”

  The taxi’s arrival had taken Katie by surprise, but she quickly signalled the cameraman to catch the first minutes of the reunion, bound to be emotional! “Handkerchiefs at dawn,” muttered the cameraman to the soundman, “here we go!”

  The two women clutched hands, looked at each other for a moment, then bent stiffly and hugged.

  “Oh, Tanni! It’s been so long!”

  “Elsie, my dear!” They rocked a little, back and forth in their embrace. The teenagers stood back uncertainly. The taxi driver unloaded a suitcase and two backpacks, then drove off.

  “We’ve just been watching the second war bride arrive,” Katie confided on camera. “That’s Antoinette Zayman with two of her grandchildren, Shifra and Chaim, who have flown in from Israel. Just before the war, she married Bruno Zayman, the distinguished historian, and came to England. Professor Zayman was unfortunately too ill to make the trip from Israel, so Mrs. Zayman is escorted by two of her—let’s see—twelve grandchildren! We’ll go over and speak to the ladies now!”

  Albert Hawthorne tapped the girl on her shoulder. “What is it, Granddad?” she asked, looking up from her book. He was pointing a shaking finger across the green. “They was both slips of girls when they came—right when the war started, that was. All big eyes, scared to death. It was that Mrs. Fairfax brought them here. Always meddlin’, that woman.”

  Just then, on the opposite side of the green, a wooden door opened. It was set in the mellow brick of an old garden wall that enclosed the Princess Elizabeth Convalescent Home, with its fire escapes and ugly double glazing that marred the Queen Anne façade. A slim figure in a red dress and hat slipped out, letting the door bang carelessly behind her.

  Katie whirled round. “And that is the third war bride, Mrs. Evangeline Fairfax, an American who married a British naval officer she met in the States before the war, now making her way across from the convalescent home, which before the war was…was…the home of…” Katie checked her notes but couldn’t find it. “Somebody in the village,” she finished lamely, “now sheltered housing for ex-service personnel and their spouses…”

  Mrs. Fairfax was wearing a large straw hat with a bunch of fake cherries pinned to the brim, which wobbled disconcertingly as she walked. Up close, the hat was somewhat battered, as were the leather clutch with a rhinestone clasp and the open-toed shoes.

  Ignoring Katie and cameras bearing down on her she cried, “Elsie! As I live and breathe!” She threw her arms round Lady Carpenter, who said “Blimey!” as she was engulfed in a fog of cheap sherry and Chanel No. 5.

  Mrs. Zayman, breathing heavily and leaning on her stick, moved forward and threw her arms open. “Evangeline!” She hugged and kissed Mrs. Fairfax, then wrinkled her nose. She stood back and prodded the two teenagers, who stepped forward and shook hands awkwardly.

  “Chaim,” said the boy. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Hello, I’m Shifra,” said the girl.

  “You don’t half resemble your grandmother,” Lady Carpenter exclaimed to Shifra. “And I’m so glad you could come. Nice to have the younger generation here. My grandson Graham’s there somewhere,” she said, waving vaguely in the direction of the cottages.

  Mrs. Fairfax’s head swivelled back and forth on her wrinkled neck. She had had a mild stroke two years before, and the local doctor had warned her to stay off the drink unless she wanted to court another, massive one, but she hadn’t paid any attention. Now she smiled broadly and said, “Well, what nice-lookin’ grandchildren you’ve got, Tanni. Anna’s two youngest, aren’t they? Hmmm?” She hiccupped. “How’s Bruno doing? I heard he wasn’t well. And what’s Johnny up to?”

  “Bruno’s about the same,” said Mrs. Zayman. “The surgery went well, thank God, but he has to keep quiet. Johnny’s the same as ever, working too hard like his father, happy with his family. Expects to be a grandfather himself in a few months.” She frowned at the fluffy microphone that hovered over their heads. The soundman ducked back just in time as she raised her stick and aimed a swipe at it. Shifra and Chaim stared at their grandmother in amazement.

  “Well, hasn’t it been such a long time since we were together! Everbody got scattered, Elsie and Bernie livin’ abroad so much of the time, Tanni and Bruno in Israel, and Alice in the States…but here we are together at last!” Mrs. Fairfax struggled to regain her train of thought. “My condolences about Bernie.”

  Lady Carpenter’s face became a mask. Evidently she was trying not to cry.

  “Read his obituary when the papers came. Lung cancer…terrible…those awful Woodbines he used to smoke, until the Americans came and he got all those cigarettes from the PX—made a fortune reselling them, remember? Never missed a trick, Bernie didn’t. We’ll sure miss him today, won’t we, Elsie. I heard rebuilding the church and this whole VE Day was really his idea, y’all having got married here and everything. He was a man of surprises, wasn’t he?”

  The expression on Lady Carpenter’s face told Mrs. Fairfax she hadn’t said the right thing. She changed tack. “And look at your outfit!” She rushed on, like an express train going nowhere but unable to stop. “I declare, it’s so pretty…and that hat…well, it’s hard to believe it’s been so long since we all lived here together. It’s been, well, just ages!” she gushed. The cherries bobbed and jiggled.

  “Evangeline, pay attention! The Women’s Institute said they’d leave refreshments for us in the new parish hall at the church. Nobody else has been allowed in yet so we can be private. As soon as Alice gets here, with some things she looked up,” Lady Carpenter muttered, “I have something to show you, because we only have this one chance—oh bloody hell, that girl with the microphone is a nuisance!”

  Lady Carpenter saw that the cameraman and the blonde woman babbling into a microphone were edging closer again. “Where do you suppose Alice is?” she interrupted, loudly enough for Katie to hear.

  “That will be Alice Osbourne Lightfoot,” said Katie, forced to turn to the camera, as the old ladies had their backs to her again, “who became a war bride when she married a US Air Force pilot in 1944…”

  Just then a gray Ford Fiesta with a hire-company sticker crunched noisily to a stop on the gravel and parked. A moment later a tall woman with curly gray hair, wearing a well-cut beige trouser suit and clean white sports shoes got out and fished an expensive cream leather shoulder bag, a camera, and a raincoat from the passenger seat. She looked at the sky, then folded the raincoat neatly and put it back. She locked the car and headed for the three women by the marquee.

  “This is Mrs. Lightfoot’s first trip back to England since she left on a transport ship full of war brides bound for the USA in 1946,” Katie warbled as the camera panned to a photo of a liner with women crowded at the rails, waving handkerchiefs. “And here are Colonel and Mrs. Lightfoot on their wedding day!” The camera rested on a black-and-white photo of a smiling young woman in a matching coat and skirt, her hair in a victory roll, holding a bouquet and the arm of a tall man in uniform grinning down at her, with a carnation in his buttonhole and his hat under his arm. They stood on the steps of a dark Edwardian church, framed by an arched doorway. In the right-hand corner there was what looked like the hem of a vicar’s cassock, and his feet were visible.

  Now another old man came wandering into the camera’s field. He paused and tipped his hat to Katie, revealing a lopsided face disfigured by old scar tissue and partially obscured by a long shock of white hair. “Forgive me. Hugo de Balfort,” he said. She knew immediately who he was: he had been badly injured trying to rescue his invalid father during the terrible fire that had destroyed Gracecourt Hall. Katie’s note told her that Sir Leander’s body had been retrieved in the melted wheelchair.

  “Oh, Sir Hugo, just the man to speak to,” Katie said gamely. “You spent the war in Crowmarsh Priors, didn’t you? You were medically unfit for the services,
but your wartime work was just as important, farming the family estate. I’m sure most of our viewers know that feeding the country was crucial to the war effort. You also served in the Home Guard with Mr. Hawthorne there. Can you tell our viewers about the Home Guard? Was it terribly dangerous?”

  Sir Hugo paused, leaning on his stick. He shook his head deprecatingly. “All a long time ago, my dear.”

  “Tell us what the Home Guard did.”

  “We were supposed to drill, so we did for a bit—though with so few of us there didn’t seem much point in marching up and down the green in formation. We started out drilling with broom handles. After a while we gave it up. Churchill ordered that we were to ‘fight them on the beaches’ when the Germans came. Not sure what with. They promised us Sten guns. Teapots with a barrel, we called them. Jolly useless. It all seemed pretty hopeless.”

  “Now I believe, Sir Hugo, that the Home Guard were also responsible for finding any German pilots who were shot down. Weren’t there some camouflaged antiaircraft gun emplacements nearby on the downs?”

  “Useless,” muttered Sir Hugo. “There were, but they weren’t usually manned. The gunners were needed on the coast, and we’d found in the Blitz the ack-ack guns weren’t very effective, you know. Didn’t seem possible we could hold out much longer. The invasion seemed a sure thing. Expected it every minute.”

  “And did your Home Guard unit ever capture any Germans?”

  “Bombers sometimes got shot down or crashed on the downs, but the men in them were usually killed, I believe. We did find two chaps dead once; the vicar insisted we bury them at St. Gabriel’s.”