The Very White of Love

by S C Worrall

  ‘How about a swim?’ Nancy suggests.

  ‘At this hour?’ Pat rolls over. Grins. Then leaps out of bed. ‘Last one in’s a hot potato.’

  Nancy grabs her bathing suit and disappears into the bathroom. Pat hunts for hers, under the bed, on the cupboard, then leans out of the window and hauls it in, like a wet flounder.

  ‘Flipping thing.’ She hops from one leg to the other, balances as she tries to get her right foot into the costume, precarious as the tower at Pisa, tugs at the straps, hops, wiggles her hips.

  ‘Is that some new kind of dance?’ Nancy comes back into the room in her blue and white striped suit.

  ‘Very funny.’ Pat slips the straps over her shoulders, then stands looking down at herself. ‘I look like a porpoise.’

  They throw their towels over their shoulders and head for the door. Pat starts to say something. Nancy raises her fingers to her lips. They tiptoe down the stairs so as not to wake LJ and Peg.

  The path winds down through the village past a squat, Norman church and whitewashed cottages ablaze with hollyhocks and late-blooming roses. They walk softly, like cats. The village is still sleeping. At the bottom of the hill, they break into a run, waving their towels over their heads, the sand cool between their toes. At the foot of the cliffs, boulders spill onto the sand, like giants’ teeth. Caught between them are rock pools left by the departing tide.

  ‘Isn’t this heaven?’ Nancy kneels by a large, circular pool. The water is as clear as glass; the sand at the bottom of the pool is the colour of demerara sugar. Strands of seaweed float like mermaid hair. A crab scuttles under a rock.

  She is amazed that she can still laugh and talk, get up in the morning. But death defies imagination. It is a blank, a nothing, a void. Martin alive: that’s easy to imagine. When she closes her eyes, she can see his dreamy eyes and that lick of hair that fell over his forehead. At night, she lies in bed and remembers all their happy times together. Their walks at Penn. That magical weekend in Cornwall. Martin dead? Those words still won’t sit together in her mind. It is as though he is there beside her, looking down into this rock pool, just as he did last year, when he came home from France, his face reflected next to hers.

  ‘It’s like a miniature world.’ Pat kneels beside her. ‘A better one than this, I reckon, too.’

  ‘With a bit of luck, the war will be over soon,’ Nancy says. ‘Then you can go back to your own family.’ Nancy touches the girl’s arm. ‘Just as long as you promise to come and see us sometimes.’

  ‘Do you really think it will be over soon?’

  ‘It has to end sometime, doesn’t it?’ Nancy looks up from the rock pool, out to sea. ‘Have you ever skinny-dipped?’

  ‘What? Swim in the buff?’ Pat starts to giggle.

  ‘Have you?’ Nancy’s eyes twinkle with mischief.

  They look at each other, then along the empty beach, then back at each other, burst into laughter, then tear off their bathing suits, drop them on the sand, and race, shrieking, towards the surf.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Pat clamps her hands over her mouth.

  As the icy water hits them, they shriek and laugh, kicking up clouds of spray. Nancy races ahead, Pat tramples the waves behind her then stumbles and falls with a loud splash and lies there shaking with laughter. Nancy keeps going, knees pumping, leaping from the waves. Salt spray spatters her face. She kicks and prances a few more yards, then stretches her arms in front of her and dives.

  The world turns green and her skin explodes as the cold water engulfs her body, sluicing over her, caressing every pore and crevice. She holds her breath and swims for a few yards, then breaks free of the water with a joyous whoop, and stands, laughing. Her red hair is plastered to her neck. Her lips are tangy with saltwater. She waves to Pat, both hands raised above her head, like a ground crew bringing a plane in. Then she dives back into the water and swims on, dipping her hands into the waves. She is a porpoise now, a living creature of the sea. She floats on her back. Looks up. The sky is a blue dome. A few clouds scud across it. A seagull hangs motionless on the wind, a white paper cut-out on a sheet of blue paper.

  Why didn’t she give herself to him completely, that week in Cornwall, when he came home from France? Married or not, why didn’t they leave his uniform and her dress on the beach, dive under the water and swim away together? She could cry a sea of tears. But tears were never a part of what they had. She floats, like a water lily, buoyed by his love.

  Back on shore, the air nips at her flesh. She breaks into a dance, kicking her feet out in front of her, like a Lipizzaner. Pat claps and laughs, tries a few mock-pirouettes, then collapses in a heap on the sand. Nancy points her right foot, hooks her bathing suit with her toe and launches it skywards. She leaps forward and catches it in mid-air, swings it round her head like a lasso, then hurls it up into the sky again with a banshee shriek. Pat leaps up, grabs her own suit and flings it up into the sky. They stand with their hands on their knees, laughing so hard their sides ache. Then Nancy pulls herself erect and runs, leaping and prancing into the morning light. Tears stream down her face. She throws her arms out wide, twists and turns, spun by the breeze, and kisses the sky.

  Afterword

  When my mother was an old woman, bent like a question mark, with thinning, snow-white hair, I would sometimes accompany her on walks through the countryside near Penn. On one of those walks I remember crossing a stubble-strewn field, the mud clinging to our boots. Was that the field she lay in with Martin on that golden September day, so many years ago?

  I had always known of Martin’s existence. Right up to her death, under the glass on her dressing table, next to pictures of my father and her three children, she kept a faded photograph of him, sitting on a bench in a cricket blazer, his face turned to the right and one hand resting on his knee. Dark shadows under his eyes give him a dreamy, faraway look.

  Once, when I was a child, my mother took me to visit Martin’s beloved Aunt Dorothy, at Whichert House. We were only there for an hour or two, having tea in the garden, but fifty years later every detail of that afternoon – the way the pine tree in the corner of the garden threw pools of cool shade on the lawn; the way the sun slanted through the mulberry bush by the back door; Aunt Dorothy’s cornflower-blue eyes twinkling under a straw hat – is still bathed in a special light, as though lit from within by love. On another occasion, she took me to see Aunt Dorothy’s grave in Penn churchyard: the church another sacred site in the geography of their love, as I now know: the place where Roseen got married in 1940, and where my mother and Martin frequently walked from Knotty Green.

  My mother did not dwell on the past. She was too engaged with the present: bringing up three boisterous boys, running a home, shopping, cooking: the daily train-train, as she called it. But Martin went on affecting her, and all our lives, in subtle, subterranean ways. My father’s people were from Somerset. But even after he had retired from his job in London, she refused to move from Buckinghamshire, clinging, like a barnacle, to the landscape of her youth, within the orbit of her first, great love. She died in Bourne End, on the River Thames, in 2005.

  Untarnished by the daily rub of marriage, Martin became for my mother the incarnation of perfect love; an ideal my father could never match. When things were rough at home, if she and my father had had a row or if the dark winter days had sapped her essential cheerfulness, she would take the car and drive up to Penn for a walk. Now I know why.

  For me, this other man, who had once occupied such a significant place in my mother’s heart, was both a stranger and an intimate. A shadow from the past. An enigma. An alternative narrative. Sometimes, if my father and I had had a falling-out, I would wonder what it would have been like if Martin had been my father. Reading his letters seventy years later was like meeting a long-lost family member. The mysterious young man in the photograph had acquired a voice; a character. It was a writer’s gift. By telling the story of this brief and beautiful relationship I wanted to rescue it from oblivion; and make
good on the hope expressed in one of Martin’s letters from France that this love ‘can’t all be there for nothing’.

  And my father? The first question everyone asks is: how did your father feel? As though Nancy’s lifelong remembrance of another man she loved was, somehow, hurtful to him; tantamount to infidelity. I cannot know for sure, as I was not party to their private conversations, but I believe my father never begrudged his wife’s lost love. Why should he? He was a war hero himself, one reason she married him. And he was secure enough in his own identity not to be concerned about the distant past. Martin’s story was something I think he accepted as part of her life before he knew her, as it was for me; part of family lore; her ‘baggage’. Like everyone, he had his own secrets and regrets. War shuffled the cards of millions of British lives in unexpected ways. And in the early 1970s, they travelled together to Hazebrouck so that Nancy could lay a wreath at Martin’s grave. Martin and the rest of the casualties were initially buried by the town gardener in Hazebrouck. Later, the bodies were exhumed and re-buried in the town cemetery where they lie today.

  She never did find out exactly how he died. But by the time she received official confirmation of his death from the War Office, her researches had yielded a partial narrative. She knew about the patrol in the small hours; the names of the four men that accompanied Martin; the encounter with the enemy; the Bren gun. Trevor Gibbens sent several cards from the POW camp, updating her with the latest news. Martin’s four companions and several others, who had heard second-hand narratives of the events that night, were interviewed by Red Cross officials. Not all the details tallied. According to Jenkins, the driver, in a postcard from the camp, Martin was twenty yards ahead of the others when he encountered the Germans, ‘who opened fire and we immediately got the order to retire’. The card ends with the bluntly evocative words: ‘I never saw any more of him.’

  Seventy-three years later, I crossed the Channel to retrace his journey towards death. It was another bitterly cold winter and, as I climbed the plateau towards the town of Albert, the snow lay deep on either side of the road. I visited the cemetery at Pozières, where Martin had stopped and seen the snow-covered graves from the First World War. In Wahagnies, the mining village near Lille, where he spent five months waiting for the action to begin, I found the house on Rue Jaures where he first stayed with Mme Dupont, before moving to the Chateau Lallart. I visited Le Leu Pendu, the restaurant where he, Hugh Saunders and Trevor Gibbens, the medical officer, ate many meals. It’s still there, though the word ‘Cabaret’ painted on the wall below the roof gable has long since faded. In Lesdain, I walked in the pépinières where Martin dug trenches and visited the site of the battle at the Escaut Canal. At Gaurain-Ramecroix, near Tournai, I found the exact location of the horrific bombing that obliterated the circus and much of the convoy. At the side of the road, under apple trees laden with snow, I found the headstones of the men who died there. Many had no names, such was the ferocity of the inferno.

  I had brought a packet of Martin’s letters with me. Some of them had words scrawled on the envelopes by my mother, in different inks. Commentaries on a lost love. Reflections on what might have been? But written when? The day she got the letter? A week later? Years? Decades, even? On one envelope, dated 14 October 1940, and postmarked Newbury, where Martin was at training camp, she had scrawled words vertically down the envelope, over the address, like a mesh.

  It took me nearly half an hour lying in my hotel room near Wahagnies to decipher the script. Some words and phrases seemed almost random. And with each word I deciphered, I felt more and more uncomfortable, as though I was a trespasser in someone else’s house. ‘I love you so much,’ she writes in the first line. ‘Thought of men anxious for infinity, of mothers listening to the breathing of a child, I love you past all . . . immeasurably and in the heart of God. Martin, I love you in the shape of everything, the bright moon, weaving among the lights of winter. I love you in the sound of voices, streams, wheels, wind and the swish of grain ripening to gold, and pheasant’s wings.’

  Her handwriting, fused with his. Ink on ink. Heart to heart. But when did she write this? The ink of this script is quite different from Martin’s – the original is black, this is green – and the handwriting seems more like the script I remember from letters sent to me as a child, in the 1960s, when I was at boarding school, not from the letters of hers returned from Germany. But the sentiments – the swoon at the moon, the swish of the corn – seem like the stuff of teenage poems, not a mother.

  Or did she nurse these feelings all those years, rereading the letters on bleak winter nights at home in Buckinghamshire, when her spirits were low and her marriage had a hit a rough patch? Was she twenty-five when she wrote this? Or fifty-five? Had Martin only recently disappeared? Or was she now a mother with three children, pouring out her feelings decades after Martin’s death? For her sake – and my father’s, as well as my own – I hope it was not the latter.

  A week later, I arrived at the convent of Wez Vavrain, near the Belgian border. As I journeyed across France, it had often felt as though Martin was at my side, guiding and directing me. Here, at the convent, where the battalion had rested after the fierce firefight at the Escaut Canal, I met an elderly nun tiptoeing across the frozen cobblestones on a stick. ‘Mais, je ne connais pas cette histoire!’ she said, when I told her why I was there. ‘I don’t know this story.’ Her cataract-veiled eyes peered at me from behind a pair of thick, tortoiseshell spectacles. ‘And I am the convent historian.’

  Her name was Sister Elaine. She took me inside and introduced me to the Mother Superior, an olive-skinned woman in a dark blue habit, who was originally from Sri Lanka. Little had changed since 1940. The dormitories, where some of the men smashed furniture and broke into the nuns’ rooms, were still there, as were the refectory and the cellars where the refugees sheltered. The Mother Superior and I talked over tea and biscuits in the small reception room at the back of the convent where the CO, Major Brian Heyworth, discussed the logistics of the battalion’s stay.

  After about ten minutes, Sister Elaine bustled back in, clasping a faded, French school exercise book. It was one of those bits of serendipity every writer dreams of: a diary record, kept by one of the nuns who was there when Martin arrived with the battalion. In pencil, across the front, were the words Evacuation 1940. Sister Elaine opened the book and read:

  Les soldats anglais arrivaient cet après-midi. The English soldiers arrived this afternoon . . . The soldiers brought a cow to the convent . . . to provide milk for our sick sisters. We have endured many terrible nights. Today, a shell exploded in the orchard. The cellars are full of refugees.

  ‘Mais c’est incroyable!’ cried Sister Elaine. ‘This is living history!’

  Flanders fields were shrouded in fog when I arrived at Hazebrouck. ‘Un infiniment de brumes,’ Jacques Brel, the great Flemish troubadour, called it in his anthem to the flatlands of his birth: an infinity of fogs. Fog drifted like smoke across the fields, swirled through the streets, muffling sounds, obscuring landmarks of the battle, as though nature had conspired to throw a veil over the distant events I had come to uncover.

  The shelled-out ruins of the orphanage have been replaced by a modern glass and concrete structure. But it was easy to imagine how it was that night, in May: the Grande Place, where the German Panzers encamped after taking the town. Today, it is a car park. I visited the railway station and the outlying areas where the battalion fought. I laid a wreath at Martin’s grave in the municipal cemetery. On the Rue de l’Orphelinat I retraced Martin’s footsteps on the night he died. I hoped that I might find out, for my mother’s sake, what she never discovered: the exact circumstances of his death. But I never did. The record ended as he turned that corner.

  A few months later, I got a notice from the post office saying that I had a registered letter. I was on Long Island at the time and expected it to be the new hammock we had just ordered for the garden. The clerk disappeared into the back to retrie
ve the item, which I assumed would be a long cardboard box. Instead, he laid a large, brown envelope on the counter. It was postmarked Geneva. Next to the postmark was a stamp: IRC. It was Martin’s Red Cross dossier.

  I took a knife and slit open the envelope. Would this be the missing link? The final piece of the puzzle to explain exactly how he had died? There were ten photocopied documents. The first was part of the list of members of the Bucks Battalion buried in Hazebrouck, received by the ICRC from the French mayor of the town. The first name was Second Lieutenant M. S. Preston. In black ink after the name were the French words: ‘inhumé a Hazebrouck’. Buried in Hazebrouck. What surprised me was the date: 8 April 1942. Two years after Martin disappeared.

  The next document was a microfiche copy of a handwritten report by Elliott Viney, given in the POW camp, and stamped by the British Red Cross and dated 2 April 1941.

  This officer was sent out on a patrol at 23.30 hrs. on the 27 May in Hazebrouck. He was accompanied by 4 men; at about midnight the men returned and they stated that they had encountered the enemy in the square and that MS Preston had shouted to them to get back to HQ. His task at the time was to reach the Transport Officer of the battalion (Captain BS Mason), who subsequently reached England & we hoped that MS Preston had reached him; as he did not, it can only be assumed that he was either captured or killed . . .

  There were also copies of handwritten testimonials of other Bucks Battalion men in the camp, among them David Stebbings, the IO. The longest is from Trevor Gibbens. It is dated 16 January 1941, and contains a noticeable degree of irritation with the bureaucrats.

  If you refer to my card of Dec. 21 you will see that I have already given you the information requested. Since this is the second time you have written to me for information already in your possession, I feel that you would save yourself & relatives much trouble if you would pay some attention to your correspondence.