The Grass Memorial

by Sarah Harrison

  Spencer told himself that whatever the war had in store for him during this week he was going to need every resource at his disposal to get through next Sunday’s engagement unscathed.

  The weather remained perfect and they flew four sorties over the next six days. The whole of northern Europe was spread out like a map under clear skies. The ‘Little Friends’ had a field day and Spencer added a ground kill to his score when they strafed an airfield near Bremen.

  Blue Flight seemed to be untouchable, especially Si Santucci who was out to get his name in the record books. He didn’t only love the flying, he loved the killing. It wasn’t something he chose not to think about: he revelled in it, got off on it, took terrible risks in order to see the faces of the guys he shot down. He was a hotshot, but a liability too, mainly to himself. You could tell that if he hadn’t been doing this he’d have been causing trouble somewhere. He’d already proved that it was possible to catch the damn’ ball in the plane’s underbelly exhaust, in a display of flying so arrogantly dangerous that men had been throwing themselves to the ground, and if the grass had been any longer he’d have blown the heads off the daisies. A roasting from the general was water off a duck’s back to Santucci. Spencer reckoned that if there was one thing war was good for, apart from the P–5is, it was that it got the crazy men off the street to where they could do a bit of good.

  Frank had got himself some kind of plug-ugly dog called Ajax, with muscles like a prizefighter, jaws like a crocodile, slitty eyes and all the fearsome belligerence of Shirley Temple. And, as Mo choicely put it, ‘massive meat and potatoes’. Frank had heard in the pub that the dog’s owner had died and it had nowhere to go. One look at the hideously cute Ajax had been enough for him. It was, as Si put it, love at first flight. As they all stood round outside the canteen staring at the new arrival, his pink tongue lolling sidways from a face-splitting canine grin, Mo gave Spencer a nudge.

  ‘Spence, see? Its a mutt after my own heart, ‘s got it figured. He don’t have a pretty face, but he sure fixes to please. Parts like that, he should worry . . . Next thing you know he’ll be flying the fuckin’ plane!’

  Spencer conceded that such a thing would certainly scare the shit out of the Nazis. But it was good to see how Frank and Ajax got along. They seemed made for one another, a sublime attraction of opposites. The sight of Frank’s skinny, tight-assed figure and the dog’s broad, waddling one going about together became a symbol of normality around the base. And when Frank was just laying around reading, up against the side of the hut in the sun, or at night on his bunk, Ajax would snuggle up close with his chunky butt to one side like a mermaid, and his cock peeping out, and lay his great shark’s head on Frank’s shoulder with such a look of blissful devotion it damn near brought tears to your eyes.

  At the end of that week Spencer had a letter from Trudel, a neatly typed one but with the ‘Love, Trudel’ written in ink to make it personal.

  I’ve been accepted for nursing training in Laramie, starting this September, and I feel I’ve had plenty of practice over the past year or so. Poor Dad died in May and I know Ma doesn’t want me to go but I can’t spend all my life in Moose Draw, you understand that. I’m going to see if I can find some nice body who’d like to live in the house with her, keep her company and help out. I think a lot about you, and hope you’ll be able to write soon.

  Your mom came in the other day and told me she’s hoping you’re going to be able to get to see where her folks lived, perhaps take a picture. She misses you. Spencer, like we all do, and when we pray for ‘our boys’ it’s you I’m thinking of. I know you can’t be safe, but you can be careful . . .

  Spencer did feel guilty about his mother, and about his lack of letters to her and to Trudel. He wrote to both of them, rather hurriedly, on Saturday before the band concert, and assured Caroline that next time he had a thirty-six-hour he’d try and get down to the Oxford area to look up the ancestral place. He meant to do it, had done so ever since he got over here, but when he had time off there always seemed to be other attractions of a more immediate nature that commanded his attention.

  Sunday went from hot to sultry. Jenny, the English WVS girl who came with the chuck wagon – tea, rolls and doughnuts – said she had a terrible headache which meant there was going to be thunder, and several wags suggested that the headache had more to do with rough weather last night at the dance hall. She replied a touch frostily that it was nothing to do with that, and could someone please get that brute of a dog away from the van or she wouldn’t be responsible, which provoked a bit more good-natured jeering.

  Whatever the truth of Jenny’s forecast it was stifling when Spencer cycled into the village, and he was obliged to get off the bike up the road from the Ransoms’ address in Craft Cottages to mop his brow and cool off for a bit under a tree by the recreation ground. He’d thought carefully about what to bring with him that would look neither high-handed nor like a bribe, and settled for a tin of cookies and another of ham – good plain offerings for the family. It bothered him that by comparison with the wretched Mr Ransom, on short commons in some distant stalag, the Americans at the base must look like a bunch of spoiled high-school kids, but there wasn’t much he could do about that except be scrupulously polite and not show off.

  The door of the cottage was open and the moment he propped his bike against the garden wall Davey came out with that pink-faced, pop-eyed, tongue-tied look he got when he was excited.

  ‘Hi, there.’

  ‘Hi, champ.’

  ‘Come in.’

  The cottage was tiny, and the door led right into the parlour where the rest of them were waiting for him. In the confined space a round table had been laid for tea with a yellow cloth and flowery china. In the middle of the table was a blue jug with a bunch of simple little flowers like butterflies, pink, mauve and white, that gave off the sweetest scent imaginable. The room felt cool, but the single small window made it rather dark, and the table didn’t leave a heck of a lot of room for manoeuvre. Spencer edged his way in, his feet seemed to have gone up several sizes. The way the family stood grouped together in a kind of reception committee in front of the fireplace made his heart sink. But if the formality of this arrangement accorded with his worst expectations, it was the only thing that did.

  ‘Lieutenant McColl, how do you do? I’m David’s mother.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, ma’am.’

  He shook her hand, which was warm and dry and bone-less-seeming, and looked into her sad face. She was slim and dark, the same height as him and about ten years older, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Like an Indian woman with a European skin. In the crook of her arm, perched on her hip, was a black-haired little girl in a checked dress, with a bright tin slide in the shape of a ladybird in her hair.

  ‘This is Ellen.’

  ‘How you doing, Ellen?’

  ‘And this is my sister Rosemary.’

  ‘How do you do, ma’am?’

  She laughed. ‘How do you do, Lootenant?’

  And this was the aunt? The battleaxe in a hairnet? Rosemary was an auburn-haired and more voluptuous version of her big sister, with a broad smile, a small waist and a voice that could melt butter. There was a resemblance between them, but it was a fleeting, indefinable thing; he couldn’t have described it to anyone. And she might – at a pinch – have been sixteen years old.

  He handed over his offerings which were received with exactly the right degree of gratitude, as the contribution of a polite guest and no more, and then Janet took them with her into the kitchen at the back of the cottage, leaving him sitting on the couch with Rosemary, and David amusing his baby sister on the floor. The three of them looked a lot more relaxed than he felt. He stretched his arm along the back of the couch, tapping his fingers to show that it was a casual rather than a suggestive gesture; he tweaked his trouser leg and rested his ankle on his knee, felt stupid and took it off again. For a moment it was so quiet you could hear a trapped butterfly bumbling abou
t on the windowsill.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘It’s good to meet Davey’s family at last.’

  ‘We’ve been looking forward to meeting you, too,’ said Rosemary, giving him a sunny, open look. She wore a pink and white dress with a Peter Pan collar and short sleeves, and flat, brown, childish sandals. There was a peachy amber down on her arms and legs. ‘He talks about you all the time.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Davey.

  ‘I reckon the base would fall apart without him,’ said Spencer, coming to the rescue. ‘He makes himself so dam’ useful he should be on the payroll.’

  ‘I hope he doesn’t make a nuisance of himself,’ Rosemary said, with mock primness. ‘Janet thinks he spends too much time up there.’

  Spencer held up his hands. ‘I’m staying out of this one. If there’s other things he should be doing—’

  ‘Like school,’ said Rosemary.

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘You do!’

  ‘Give over!’ Davey lunged at Rosemary’s knees in a kind of soccer tackle, and she wriggled and kicked. They were more like a couple of puppies than aunt and nephew. Ellen continued to play with her farm as though nothing was happening, but Spencer, who wasn’t used to this sort of family horseplay, watched a shade nervously. Far from feeling like a showoff who must restrain himself for form’s sake, he was more like a fish out of water.

  Janet came back in with a tray and put it on the table. ‘Whatever’s going on?’

  Davey sat up. Rosemary said, with a sly glance at Spencer: ‘He was trying to kill me, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Looked that way to me.’

  ‘Well,’ Janet held out her hand to Ellen, ‘tea’s ready so he can put it off till after that.’ She took the baby to wash her hands and the rest of them sat down. Before taking his place with (appropriately) his back to the wall, Spencer couldn’t help noticing that he’d be sitting beneath a framed photograph of the Ransoms on their wedding day. Not a white wedding, Janet wore a hat like a fedora with a feather, but there was a little bridesmaid standing alongside whom he realised must be Rosemary.

  Now that he was closer he could see that the sweetly scented flowers in the jug were even more like butterflies because there were fine, winding tendrils sprouting off their stalks and leaves like antennae.

  ‘Tell me, what are those called?’

  Janet came back into the room. ‘Sweet peas.’

  ‘They’re pretty. And they smell wonderful.’ As he said this he caught Rosemary looking at him askance, and decided not to mention the flowers again.

  The tea was good, and substantial. Sandwiches, cake . . . Janet had put some of his cookies on a plate, but more out of politeness than because they were needed to swell the feast. Conversation took a more predictable turn, with Janet asking him about America, his parents and where he came from, and Rosemary about flying, and film stars. The baby ate the middle of her sandwiches and put the crusts in a circle beneath the rim of her plate from where Janet retrieved them, suggesting gently that she try to eat them if she wanted to get curly hair. Davey ate concentratedly, watching and listening as though he were at a show.

  After the baby got down to play. Spencer felt sufficiently confident to ask: ‘Does either of you ladies ever come up to the base – to the dances or the shows?’

  ‘No,’ said Janet, ‘we never have.’

  ‘Yes, we did once, we went to see that play the RAF did when they were up there,’ said Rosemary. She pronounced it ‘raff’. ‘It was terrible. The characters all talked about themselves all the time and the scenery fell to pieces.’

  ‘It did?’ Spencer couldn’t help feeling a touch gratified by this British disaster. ‘What happened?’

  ‘The door came off,’ explained Janet. ‘But they covered up for it very well.’

  ‘No, they didn’t, they got the giggles and forgot their lines.’

  Janet pointed out that it was a comedy after all, and Rosemary repeated, in Spencer’s direction: ‘It was terrible.’

  ‘Did you see it, Davey?’ asked Spencer.

  He shook his head, and shifted his cake to the side of his mouth. ‘Too grown-up.’

  ‘Not grown-up enough it you ask me,’ said Rosemary.

  ‘We had a band concert up there last night,’ said Spencer, edging the conversation sideways to avoid the family quicksand. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but it was pretty good. Some of our guys can really play, they were pros before the war. No singer, but you can’t have everything. When we have another one, maybe you’d like to come up, as my guests.’ He indicated the table. ‘It’s the least I can do after your hospitality.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, you never know,’ said Janet. Meaning get lost, he suspected. But all of a sudden Davey piped up for the first time uninvited.

  ‘Auntie Rosie sings.’

  Spencer thought he saw a reproving look flash across the cake crumbs from Janet’s end of the table, but it was directed at Davey, not him, and this wasn’t the sort of information you could ignore.

  ‘You do? What kind of thing do you sing?’

  Rosemary made a face. ‘Hymns, worse luck.’

  ‘She’s in the church choir,’ said Janet with a certain firmness. ‘Our father had a nice voice but it was only Rosie who inherited it.’

  ‘You have ambitions in that direction?’ he asked her.

  ‘I haven’t thought about it.’

  ‘She has,’ said Davey, ‘you should see her room, she’s got pictures of singers and bandleaders all over the walls.’

  Rosemary looked daggers at him. ‘David,’ said Janet, ‘will you take the plates out?’

  ‘You should come and sing with our band,’ suggested Spencer.

  ‘Do you think I could?’

  ‘No, Rosie, of course not,’ said Janet with one of those laughs which disguised a warning. ‘You’re not old enough.’

  ‘I was only joking,’ he said. ‘Any way you want to look at it you’d be too good for them.’

  The girl gave him a wary look, for the first time not sure of her ground, unaware that Spencer was even less sure of his.

  When he left, the women came out to see him off, Janet holding Ellen on her hip as before. They stood there looking, as sisters often did, discernibly alike, but completely different and distinct. One dark, sophisticated, reserved; the other red-gold, daring, testing her wings. Both separately and together more fascinating than any women he’d ever met. Janet had picked some of the sweet peas. She didn’t actually proffer them but said diffidently, ‘I don’t know whether flowers are silly, but it you like them . . .’

  ‘I’d love them, thank you.’

  He took the posy, and then Rosemary stepped forward and whipped one out, and stuck it in his buttonhole. Her face was inches from his as she fiddled with it.

  ‘You’re a marked man now, Lootenant.’

  In spite of a sky the colour of a black eye that threatened to justify Jenny’s headache, Davey cycled back up to the base with him.

  ‘That was nice,’ said Spencer. ‘I really enjoyed meeting your family.’

  ‘Swell, aren’t they?’ said Davey

  Spencer smiled. ‘They’re real swell. You must all miss your dad.’ He felt somehow obliged to mention the wretched, absent Mr Ransom, cut off from the houseful of female beauty which was rightfully his. So he was surprised when Davey answered matterof-factly: ‘I don’t.’

  Spencer matched his tone. ‘It’s been a long time. I guess you kind of get used to it.’

  ‘It’s nicer without him,’ said Davey. ‘I’d rather have you.’

  There seemed nothing to do except laugh, but it was a hollow sound. ‘I’m flattered!’

  ‘Will you come again?’

  ‘If I’m invited, of course.’

  They pedalled on for a bit, Davey’s wheels creaking round twice for each turn of Spencer’s, like a stately dance beat.

  ‘You know, she can sing. Auntie Rosie.’

  ‘I bet she can.’

&nb
sp; ‘She sounds like someone off the wireless. She’s really loud. Mum and I have to tell her to put a sock in it.’

  This made Spencer laugh. ‘Well, that’s important. No point singing and not being heard.’ Quickly, before he had time to change his mind, he asked: ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  Well. ‘It must be kinda fun – having an auntie that’s so young?’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  The rain began to fall suddenly, a few slow, slapping drops and then a torrent.

  ‘Go on,’ said Spencer. Git!’

  * * * * *

  As he dragged on dry clothes in the hut, Frank said without looking at him: ‘So how was afternoon tea with the good ladies?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ he mumbled through the sweater he was pulling over his head ‘. . . not bad.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said Frank. ‘Keep them to yourself see if I care.’

  And that was pretty much what he did.

  The next Sunday Spencer went to morning service in the village church. He snuck in and stood at the back, but in truth that made him no less conspicuous because there weren’t that many people at the service and they were all in a block in the middle. Not at the front, of course, he was getting to appreciate that that wasn’t the English way.

  There weren’t many in the choir, either. Four flitty-eyed little boys of about Davey’s age, three elderly men, and four women, including Rosemary. They wore blue gowns which must all have been made in roughly the same size, so that the kids were swamped in theirs, the tallest man looked like he was visiting a barber’s, and the largest of the ladies like a well-wrapped parcel. He thought Rosemary was like an angel in hers – a fallen angel maybe, there was something so delightfully, irredeemably carnal in her grown-up little girl’s face and figure.