The Grass Memorial

by Sarah Harrison

  Spencer shook his head.‘Can’t say I’ve heard of it.You remember anything of it?’

  ‘Every word, almost, it was wonderful.’

  ‘So you went to the movies – to the pictures – and what else? Dancing? Sports?’

  ‘He was a good dancer.’

  They were coming up by the church now, there was only another half a mile till they were back, he’d better cut to the chase.

  ‘And the two of you fell in love?’

  ‘That’s where we got married,’ she said, nodding at the church. ‘And Rosie was bridesmaid.’

  ‘That’s her in the picture?’

  ‘I made that dress for her. Except for the smocking. Mother did that.’

  ‘She looked cute.’

  Janet shook her head indulgently. ‘She was terribly naughty on the day, up to all sorts. She ran us all ragged!’

  Spencer returned to the subject. ‘Janet – you don’t mind me being around?’

  ‘No.’

  He’d been fishing, hoping for self-excuse, a declaration, an explanation, something, but they were not forthcoming.

  Back at the base his liaison with Janet was not treated with the respect accorded it by the locals. Everyone seemed to know when it became more than strictly social and they were on to him.

  ‘Hey, Spence, how’s the merry widow?’

  ‘Babysitting again, huh?’

  ‘How many shelves you fix last night, Spence?’

  He tried to take it in good part. Most of the guys were sowing a few English oats, it was even rumoured that the Colonel was romancing the daughter of an aristocratic family and might wind up being a lord of the manor if he got through the war and played his cards right. Frank put his finger on what intrigued them all about Spencer and Janet.

  ‘She’s quite a bit older than you. She has all those children. You do jobs around the house. Spence – you’re not exactly painting the town red with this lady.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So are you in love with her?’

  This was something Spencer had asked himself. ‘I don’t know.’

  Frank supplied the answer in his dry way. ‘You’re not in love with her. So what goes on? No, don’t tell me, stupid question, I know what goes on. But be careful, Spence, a woman like that might want a whole lot more than you want to part with.’

  Though Spencer had the greatest respect for Frank’s opinion, he didn’t believe Janet was after anything more. The slight distance that existed between them even in their most intimate moments convinced him of this. And as to why he kept on coming back, there were two reasons, and only one of them had to do with Janet.

  Rosemary was around less often, she was lodging with a friend’s family in town near her work.When she did come by, she’d changed. She was a working girl now with cash in her pocket and a bit of independence. Singing in the choir was a thing of the past, though she said she did the odd number with the Debonnaires, a band made up of workers at the stocking factory. Her attitude to Spencer had altered as well, it had lost its flirtatious edge. She treated him casually, like part of the furniture, but gave nothing away. He sensed, though she had never said anything, that she knew about him and her sister. Sometimes she went to dances and shows at the base, but she had no regular boyfriend and that didn’t seem to bother her. Spencer reckoned most guys were scared of her. There could be no other explanation because she looked sensational, like a young Katharine Hepburn. The sassy natural wit had been brought under control. She had perfected an expression which said she could cream you with a word, but would let you off this time.

  Only once the carapace of new sophistication cracked. They went for a cycle ride with Davey, and she and the boy began fooling around, taking their feet off the pedals and sticking their legs out, yelling things like ‘Scramble!’ and ‘Gerry at four o’clock!’ On the way back as it got dark they dismounted, panting, to push their bikes up the gentle hill into the village. Davey recovered first and went on ahead. That was when she asked: ‘Are you having a thing with Janet?’

  The question was so simple, direct and unexpected that he answered simply, too: ‘Yes,’ and then qualified it: ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What’s a “sort of” thing when it’s at home?’ It was typical of her not to comment on what he’d said, but to pick him up on his choice of words. He was suddenly keenly aware of how carefully he must select the next ones.

  ‘I mean, I think a whole lot of her, I try to make her happy, but it’s not so long since she lost her husband.’

  ‘Oh!’ Rosemary gave a small disparaging laugh. ‘Him.’

  ‘It’s pretty obvious they loved each other.’

  She was silent for a moment, breathing steadily as she pushed. ‘But now that he’s gone she makes do with you.’

  ‘If you want to put it that way.’

  ‘Spencer—’ She stopped. ‘What do you see in her?’

  Shocked and discomfited, he laughed. ‘What kind of question is that?’

  For a moment she just looked at him. It was getting darker by the second, all he could see now was the outline of her curly hair, the gleam of her eyes, a glint of mouth with smoking breath, like a small cute dragon, sizing him up.

  Then she said, ‘You’re right, a stupid one.’ And climbed back on her bike.

  If he lived to be a hundred, Spencer thought, he would never understand her. But the less he understood, the more he fell under her spell.

  October ’44, everything went quiet. There was a combat drought while the Luftwaffe lay low, licking its wounds. It was eerie as they flew mission after mission almost untroubled by EAs, sometimes strafing isolated, half-empty airfields unopposed, just for the hell of it. The presumption was that heavy losses over the previous couple of months had sent the Luftwaffe away to regroup, re-eqiup and retrain.

  The skies lowered, the nights drew in. Still there was nothing doing. On Thanksgiving the brass-hats laid on the usual celebrations – turkey with all the trimmings, pumpkin pie, plenty of booze – it was an overpoweringly sentimental time when the Americans pined for home. To make them feel better the enemy returned to the fray with a vengeance, swarming into the skies above the northern European coast in their hundreds, new planes flown by boy pilots with a minimum of training and a near-suicidal desire to shoot the crap out of the Yankees. Spencer’s flight was involved in three missions escorting B–17s on strategic bombing missions against synthetic oil refineries in central Germany. On each occasion they were set upon by hundreds of FWs and MEs as if by killer bees. There was a kind of desperation in these attacks, no guile or tutored skill, just an all-out feeding frenzy. It made a nonsense of their training in cool decision-making; these encounters were about gut reaction, dog eat dog, the survival of the maddest.The Mustangs were fighting for their lives, and there was a heavy reckoning.

  In the epicentre of one of these, with the fire criss-crossing the sky like a spider’s web of shooting lights, Spencer saw Enrol Lovic of Blue Flight exploded from his cockpit. He knew it was Lovic because of Good Time Girl on the fuselage, winking lasciviously over her Manhattan. It had been a moment only, less than a moment, but he could remember the detail. The endless instant when Lovic seemed to hang in the air amongst the debris, turning slowly, his arms and legs waving like an infant in the womb, and then suddenly plunged like a stone down a well, with Good Time Girl living up to her name, hurtling on without him, shedding pieces like confetti as she described her own long, leaning arc to destruction. In his dreams for a while after that he swooped and spun at terrifying speed amid blades of broken metal and long daggers of glass, the smell of burning fuel in his nostrils until he’d awake with a shocking, silent impact, his body rigid, eyes staring into the darkness, thinking for one fearful moment that he was already dead.

  Winter deepened, and with it came some of the worst weather that even the oldest of the locals could remember. Flying conditions were atrocious, with snow, freezing fog, and dark, sleety storms that howled across the airfield, closing
them down. It was the dark that most affected Spencer. Church Norton might not be half as cold as Moose Draw, Wyoming, but it was twice as bleak. He missed the hard, bright glitter of winters at home, the shining expanses of wind-whipped snow, the distant edges of the frozen mountain peaks like flint axeheads against a sky thin and pure as blue glass. In England, whole weeks went by when the sun seemed never to break through at all.

  Any trouble with the heating, and the cockpit of Crazy Horse became bitterly cold. He got a cold that was so heavy he had to plug his nose when he was flying, and it developed into an ear infection which gave him some pain and discharge and made him partially deaf. With numbers down there was no chance of any but the seriously sick being rested, so they knew to shout at him over the pilots’ frequency. But the deafness still gave a kind of unreality to events beyond Crazy Horse. It affected his spatial awareness and his judgement of speed – the deadening of sound meant that an enemy fighter could be a dot one second, a hurtling behemoth the next. And like thunder and lightning there seemed to be a minute, dislocating interval between sound and vision, so that the heavy, reaching boom of a hit pressed painfully on his eardrums just after the splintering sunburst of explosive light had dazzled him. In a dive, the pressure in his ears was such agony that they bled and he almost blacked out. The juddering airflame and flapping wings of the stressed plane were like extensions of his own body, about to fall to pieces. Every sortie felt like a series of near-misses, so that he returned shaking and bathed in sweat, his nerves shot.

  But the top brass weren’t stupid. When in early December he asked for a thirty-six-hour pass he got it. He secured the use of an old black Austin – it was hired out by a guy on the base on a cheap rate, user’s-risk basis – and intended to drive down to Kinnerton, near Oxford, to look up his mother’s family place. He’d asked Janet if she wanted to go with him but was glad in a way when she said no. He wanted to take things at his own speed in his own way, to get an angle that was entirely his own.

  ‘You want to go to the local church,’ she said, ‘they’re bound to have all sorts of records there. And the town hall, and the local paper.’

  He was holding Ellen on his knee, helping her put a coat on a doll. ‘You know a lot about this kind of thing.’

  ‘No, no,’ she’d said, blushing almost as if he’d caught her out at something, ‘I don’t. But you pick these things up.’

  ‘Anyhow, what I want to do most of all is find the house, number fourteen Waverley Road, if it’s still there.’

  ‘I’ll keep my fingers crossed,’ she said.

  The journey from Church Norton to Oxford that Saturday took four hours. Spencer almost wished he hadn’t declined all other offers of company – Frank had offered to come along, and pool gas coupons, but he’d held out. He didn’t want to have to accommodate anyone else. But the old car was touchy, with a sharp clutch and a tendency to stall in a low gear. Also, the day was bitterly cold with a whining wind off the tundra, it felt like, full of small gritty flakes like ground glass, too minute to settle but enough to form a rime on the windscreen, and penetrate the ill-fitting doors. By the time he reached Oxford his hands and feet were frozen, and he was damn’ near hallucinating about one of the Diamond Diner’s hamburgers, the soft fragrant bun and the sizzling hot meat, inches thick with everything on it, oozing fried onions, ketchup, mayo, prime beef gherkins . . .

  The pallid corned beef sandwich he actually had was no substitute but he smothered it in mustard, and the pint with it was good. He was getting to like the blood-temperature English ale with its colour like stewed tea and its hoppy, nourishing flavour, more like soup than beer.

  He went into a newsagent’s, not to buy anything but to sound out the storekeeper who he guessed, from his own experience of the Mercantile, would be a mine of local information. The man was more than helpful, and gave him detailed instructions which he wrote down.

  In a spirit of camaraderie, Spencer said: ‘My mother’s family used to come from there.’

  ‘That right?’ asked the man. ‘My wife too. Whereabouts, do you know?’

  ‘Waverley Road.’

  ‘Yes, yes, Waverley Road,’ said the man, as though the name conjured up a host of happy memories for him. ‘It used to be nice along there.’

  It wasn’t nice now, Spencer discovered. Kinnerton was no longer the pleasant treelined suburb of his mother’s memory because that part of town had become a great sprawl of factories – aircraft parts, car tyres, service boots, tinned foods – a big ugly snapshot of wartime life in Britain.

  Because it formed the western perimeter of a two-mile-square complex of similar roads, Waverley must many years ago, as his mother had described, been the nicest of them. Now it was the least attractive, because what had once been the meadow that its gardens backed on to was a works sports ground, studded with desolate tattered football nets and a single rickety stand, with a storage depot at one end and the brutish blind brick walls and narrow chimneys of the factory beyond. At the southern end of the road, where Caroline had described picking bluebells with her friend in a wood, there was at least a small gritty park, grandiosely named Victory Gardens. Spencer left the car by the park gates, and began his pilgrimage by taking a turn round its cinder paths. On this bitter afternoon he was the only one there except for a uniformed park keeper raking leaves and twigs.

  Spencer was looking for clues, something that would link this cheerless space with his mother’s childhood memories. There were few features: an expanse of tussocky grass broken by round, banked-up flowerbeds which looked at this time of year like giant molehills; a pond full of circling goldfish; a wooden shelter with seats, of the kind found on station platforms; a kind of arch over the path, pointed at the top like a church window; and a monkey puzzle tree.

  There being no chance of bluebells in December he crossed the grass to the edge of the park and studied the trees. Apart from the distorted black limbs of the monkey puzzle it was possible that some of these were original inhabitants, granted a stay of execution to provide shade and shelter for the users of the park. He’d identified oak, ash and larch when he heard a shout and turned to see the park keeper prodding the rake in his direction.

  ‘Oy!’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Now the rake prodded a small sign at the edge of the grass. ‘Can’t you read?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t see that.’

  ‘It says, “Keep Off the Grass”.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He returned to the path, the park keeper watching him every step of the way as if he might at any moment break into a wild ran up, kicking tip divots and scattering flowerbeds. It seemed a further flouting of the past that this paltry patch of green should be so meanly proscribed, but he was in uniform, and if he’d been in the wrong he’d better be civil.

  ‘My apologies, must have missed it.’

  The park keeper made a sound that indicated they all said that, but close up Spencer could see that he was elderly and frail-looking, with tears of cold running from the outer corners of his eyes.

  ‘Do you know much about this park?’ Spencer asked. ‘I mean, how long it’s been here?’

  ‘Just after the first war.’ The man jerked his head. ‘Date’s on the gate.’

  ‘Something else I missed.’ Spencer smiled but got no response. ‘The reason I ask is that my mother was raised down this road – she can remember picking bluebells in a wood here.’ ‘That’s right.’ The park keeper’s expression did not change but his voice unbent a little. ‘Barton Wood.’

  ‘It must have been pretty here in the spring.’

  ‘Park looks nice, too, right time of year.’

  ‘I bet it does.’

  The old man linked his hands, in fingerless mittens, on the handle of his rake. ‘Where’s your mother now?’ ‘In America.’ ‘Married a Yank?’ There was no point in details. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good job you’re over here.’ Whether this was a comment on Spencer’s personal errand or
the American war effort was hard to say.

  ‘What’s the arch made of?’ he asked. ‘Is that some kind of timber?’ ‘Go and take a look,’ replied the park keeper with a hint of pride. ‘There’s a plaque tells you all about it.’

  Conscious of being watched, Spencer walked round the path. The arch might have been twenty feet high at its tallest point, and was planted in the grass at a distance of some three feet to either side of the cinders. On the inside of the left upright was an engraved metal plaque.

  ‘The jawbone of a large blue whale, caught in the southern ocean by Thomas Adolphus Peake, 21 April 1900, and kindly donated to these gardens by his widow Lucilla on her husband’s death, 7 June 1928. “O hear us when we cry to thee. For those in peril on the sea”.’

  ‘Incredible . . .’ Spencer walked around the arch, awed by the thought of a creature big enough to have a jaw this size. He looked across at the park keeper. ‘It’s incredible!’

  ‘Big enough for you?’ replied the old man. ‘Got anything like that in America?’

  ‘No, sir!’

  Number fourteen was exactly like every other three-storey, semi-detached house in the street – narrow red brick, with a bit of garden at the front, a bay window on the ground floor and the number in black lead on the fanlight over the door. Except that it also had a name, ‘Charlmont’, and a sign propped in the window between the net curtain and the glass, with the word ‘VACANCIES’.

  So it was a rooming house these days. He stood on the pavement staring, absorbing this fact. As he did so the door opened and an elderly woman appeared.

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘No, thank you, ma’am. I was just looking. My mother lived in this house a long time ago.’

  ‘Really? Would you like to come in and have a look?’

  It was cold and the woman, unlike the park keeper, was friendly and welcoming.

  ‘If you’re sure it’s no trouble?’