Letters to the Lost

by Iona Grey

  Wow – you have email! I really appreciate you taking the trouble to set up an account. It sounds like you’ve been going through a pretty tough time lately.

  I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you trying to help me out like this – a stranger; some old, sick guy on the other side of the world, but I guess I’m kind of resigned to the fact that mine is a lost cause. I’ve spent weeks searching for Stella online, following all the leads I can think of to find a mention of her. Writing one more letter to the house I bought her was my last hope. I don’t have too much time left to waste, but I’m pretty darned sure that there’s a whole bunch of other stuff you should be doing instead of chasing ghosts that are probably best left undisturbed.

  I sure am glad you’re over the pneumonia but you take it easy now. England can feel like the coldest, wettest corner of the planet in wintertime. You need to rest up and eat well. Take care of yourself.

  Dan.

  No! Without pausing to think she clicked ‘reply’ and began to type, hurriedly and clumsily, with two fingers.

  Please don’t give up – not before we’ve really tried every possibility! I want to help. I want to find her.

  The thing is, you don’t feel like a stranger to me. That might sound weird, and I hope you won’t be angry, but while I was at the house in Greenfields Lane I found the letters you wrote to Stella. All of them, I think, from the one you wrote when you found her watch to the one that was sent to her when you didn’t return to your airbase. I know I shouldn’t have read them and I’m really sorry. Well, sort of. I can’t be completely sorry because they were amazing. I never realized until then what love really was.

  If she’s alive, I believe that we can find her. Please, let me keep trying.

  Jess.

  She was sitting rigidly upright as she finished typing, and sagged a little as she pressed ‘send’. This time his reply wasn’t immediate. Scrolling mindlessly through pages of irrelevant results for ‘Job Vacancies Church End’ she had just about convinced herself that he was so angry at the idea of her reading his letters that she’d never hear from him again when a message dropped into her inbox.

  Oh Jess, you sure are persuasive. Here am I, trying to be as rational as I can and convince myself that it’s a no-hoper, and that I should spend the next couple of months writing letters to congressmen, pushing for change, campaigning for justice and all kinds of things that’ll make a difference to the world when I’m gone. And there’s you – the voice of my heart, not my head, telling me not to bother trying to change a place I’ll have no part in and to spend the time I have left finishing my own story.

  So you found the letters. I don’t know whether I’m happy that she kept them or sad that, wherever she is now, she left them behind. The house was hers, you know. I bought it for her when I was on sick leave in August 1943 and her husband had beaten up on her. It was supposed to be a safe place for her to go if I couldn’t be there to protect her and a place where we could be together. Wishful thinking. It didn’t quite turn out like that.

  I sent more letters, afterwards, when I got home. For years I wrote regularly, in case she changed her mind. Did you find those letters too? There must be hundreds of them somewhere. She never replied and I always wondered whether she ever read them. If not, what happened to them?

  You see, there I go – doing what I’ve tried to avoid these past 68 years; asking questions I’m never going to be able to answer. Leastways, not unless I find her.

  So, where do you think we should start looking?

  Jess’s heart was thudding as she finished reading. She thought of Will. He would know. He’d know which records to look up, and how to go about it. But the ridiculous thing was she didn’t even know where to find him now.

  I don’t know, and I don’t know what happened to the other letters. The ones I found were in a shoebox, carefully filed in date order. The last one was the one you wrote to be sent if you didn’t come back. But if you bought the house in Greenfields Lane that must mean you still own it, right? And if you own it and you give me permission, surely I can go back and have a proper look? I didn’t really want to touch anything last time I was there. It didn’t feel right, if that doesn’t sound weird after what I did, breaking in in the first place.

  The thing is, I don’t really understand what happened. I mean, I got as far as guessing that you got shot down or something and that she must have thought that you were dead. But surely you went to see her when you got back? I can’t imagine how that must have been for her – finding out that you were alive. Actually, I can. It must have been AMAZING. Like the answer to all her prayers. So why didn’t the two of you live happily ever after?

  Do you mind me asking all this?

  She watched the screen, barely blinking. Ten minutes stretched to fifteen. To twenty. Her shoulders ached, and as she flexed her neck she became aware that the man at the next computer was looking at her strangely. She realized then that she’d been leaning forward, staring fixedly at a blank screen with her hands balled into fists in front of her face. Hastily she tried to look like a normal person and pulled up the job search results again.

  Head chef. Motorbike delivery driver. Shiatsu therapist. Bench joiner. She assumed not knowing what a job title meant was a pretty good indication that you weren’t qualified for it. There was a vacancy for an assistant in a bookmaker’s shop and she was about to look up the details when she thought of Dodge and his gambling habit and changed her mind. All the rest of the jobs posted were Nanny positions. She was just weighing up whether having no previous experience, an address in a women’s hostel and a recent spell as a nightclub-singer-cum-squatter might make some parents wary of employing her to look after their kids when the message icon flashed.

  She leaped on the mouse like a hungry cat.

  I don’t mind you asking.

  For years I didn’t talk about it, mostly because there was nobody I could talk about it to. My brother Alek died in the liberation of Normandy in ’44, and when my Pop – who was the only other person who knew about Stella – got Alzheimer’s disease he got pretty mixed up about everything. He forgot people who he’d known for years, so there was no chance he was going to remember a girl I’d talked about in my letters home. A girl he’d never met.

  You’re right. I got shot down. It was a mission to Zwickau in Germany. We made the target but ran into a bunch of BF 109s on the way home. Our plane was badly hit, there were two engines gone and a fire in the tail section. Two of the crew were wounded and the tail gunner was killed. There was no option but to bail. The men who weren’t wounded helped the others out, but I stayed at the controls too long to use my parachute so I got separated from them and had to attempt to land.

  It could have been a hell of a lot worse. I came down in a field – got out with just a cut on my head where it hit the rudder. We’d been briefed about what to do in the event of a crash landing and I knew I had to set fire to the fort so it didn’t fall into enemy hands. That was a low moment; Ruby Shoes had looked after me through a whole lot of scrapes and she felt like a friend.

  After that I walked and kept on walking. The whole place was crawling with Gestapo so I avoided the roads and kept to the fields. I walked all of the first night, and through the next day, heading north. I figured that every step was taking me closer to Stella. I found a farm – a run-down sort of a place – and waited for it to get dark before I slipped into a haybarn to sleep. But later, when the old guy came out his dog must have picked up my scent. It started going crazy, barking its head off. I thought I was done for.

  But I was lucky. As soon as this guy found out I was an American airman he took me inside and gave me soup and cider, and a place to sleep in his attic. Man, that cider was knockout stuff – I must have slept for twelve hours straight. When I woke up there was a woman there. She turned out to be a teacher at the local school, and an active member of the Resistance.

  I don’t know how much you know about the Resistance movement in occu
pied France? I hope if you’ve heard or read or been taught anything it’s that they were incredible people. Ordinary, but braver than most of us can imagine. A lot of people helped me in the weeks and months after that, and every one of them risked torture and death for me, even though they didn’t know me from Adam. I was moved every week or so, from Rheims to Amiens to Paris and a hell of a lot of other places with names I couldn’t pronounce at the time and can’t remember now. I wanted to get word to Stella, to tell her I was alive, but to do so would have been to put all of those people in danger. I just had to wait, and trust that one day I would get back to her.

  I guess it never crossed my mind it would be too late.

  32

  1944

  After a promising spell of sunshine at the end of May, for the first time in living memory the day of St Crispin’s church fete was marred by bad weather. While across the Channel, British and American troops bravely battled rough seas and squally, soaking rain to land on the beaches of Normandy, in King’s Oak the ladies of St Crispin’s fought against sharp gusts of wind that tore down the bunting and whipped the cloth off the tombola table, carrying it high in the air and throwing it down in a pile of manure left by the milkman’s horse on Church Road.

  Buckling under the weight of her other responsibilities, Stella had had no input in the fete this year, though as the date approached and Charles’s afternoons were taken up with committee meetings it was impossible not to let her mind be pulled back twelve months. The time seemed distorted, like a fairground mirror, in some ways hugely stretched so that it felt like a century ago that she had battled with Marjorie over ginger cake and scones, in other ways truncated. She closed her eyes and remembered Dan kissing her in the green gloom of the scullery. She could recall every detail, from the prickle of stubble on his jaw to the taste of mint and cigarettes and the silk of his hair through her fingers, as if it had happened yesterday.

  How could it be that the man who lived so vividly in her mind was no longer alive?

  The fete was already well underway by the time she managed to get herself and Daisy ready to go out. She’d hoped to have a bath and wash her lank hair, but Daisy had cried whenever she was put down in her cot, and the sound grated on Stella’s raw nerves too much to endure it. The few clothes she had that fitted her newly expanded bust were all dirty. Taking out the least obviously stained blouse from the wardrobe she deliberately averted her eyes from the apple green dress hanging beside it; the dress she’d worn to meet Dan the day he’d taken her to the concert, and to St Paul’s. She was about to shut the wardrobe door when she was seized by another impulse. Reaching inside she pulled it from its hanger and bundled it up to give to Ada for the WVS collection. This was her life now; Daisy and Charles and their attempt to be a family. There was no point in hanging on to relics of past happiness.

  Outside it was cold – more like February than June – but at least that meant she could cover up the dirty blouse with a coat. Daisy was quieter in the pram (a stately Silver Cross obtained by Lillian from one of her bridge friends), soothed by the rocking motion and the flicker of acid-green leaves above her as they moved in the sharp wind. Her eyes had started to cross slightly, Stella noticed with a stab of anguish. On his last visit Dr Walsh had muttered darkly about ‘abnormalities’ and Charles had laughed heartily and called him an old woman, worrying about nothing. Secretly, Stella wondered if Dr Walsh might be right.

  On the field the scout tent had been hastily erected and the stalls were huddled beneath its snapping canvas. Without the draw of tinned peaches on the tombola table or as prizes for the hoopla there was precious little to attract customers this year. Only children, impervious to the cold and oblivious to the purple clouds that were massing above the roofs of the surrounding houses, were crowded around the coconut shy (cabbages this year, Stella noticed dully) and the stocks, where Mr Potter, the grumpy ARP warden, was getting a soaking. She went into the hall, which was noisy and crowded. The tea urn had created a steamy fug which had turned Ada’s cheeks pink and made the curl drop from her hair. Marjorie, handing out her scones, looked very full of herself.

  Stella spotted Charles sitting at a table in front of the stage. It was hopeless trying to take the pram in, and since Daisy looked like she was about to fall asleep she left it in the vestibule and went over.

  ‘There you are, darling!’ Charles said in his hearty, vicar’s voice, getting up to kiss her cheek. ‘I was hoping you’d come soon. Where’s Daisy? I thought she could have her first portrait taken – what do you say?’

  In a controversial break with tradition the fancy dress parade had been abandoned this year and the stage had been set up like a photographer’s studio, using a roll of painted scenery from a long-ago production of Anything Goes. Sitters posed in front of a backdrop of sea and ship’s railings, while Fred Collins snapped their portraits with his Box Brownie for sixpence.

  ‘Lovely,’ Stella said dully, ‘but she’s almost asleep.’

  ‘Go and get her now, darling, before she drops off.’

  Gritting her teeth Stella made her way back through the crush and gathered up her daughter. Charles was already on the stage when she went back in, standing expectantly beside Fred Collins.

  ‘You sit there, Mrs T.’ Fred Collins gestured to the single chair. ‘And if you can bring the baby down onto your arm so we can see ’er little face . . .’

  Stella allowed herself to be arranged and manipulated into a pleasing little family group. She wondered if she could remember how to smile.

  ‘Perhaps I should stand on the other side . . .’ Charles said. ‘My arm, you see.’

  ‘That’s perfect, that is,’ Fred Collins boomed, bending to scowl into the viewfinder. ‘No, just as you were Mrs T. , looking up at the Reverend like that . . .’

  Obediently she turned her head again, and that was when she saw the figure standing in the doorway of the hall. Tall. Uniformed. Broad shoulders almost filling the doorframe. Narrow hips and long legs, a bit like . . .

  No.

  She got to her feet.

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Darling . . . I say, darling, you were fine just as you were . . .’

  His skin was tanned deep brown, but his cheeks were hollow, his cheekbones too sharp. There were black shadows around his eyes. He was looking at her, gazing with a mixture of despair and longing and anguish that banished all doubt. Even as her head was whispering it can’t be, every cell in her body sang with recognition.

  ‘Dan.’

  Beneath her, on the floor of the hall, people had started to notice. Heads were turning, following the direction of her gaze to the man in the badly fitting American uniform standing in the doorway, but she was oblivious to everyone else but him. The blood swelled in her head. She couldn’t take her eyes from him; was afraid that if she blinked he’d disappear.

  ‘Darling . . . ?’ Charles’s voice had turned icy. He moved to stand in front of her, blocking her view of Dan. Suddenly she was aware that the clamour of conversation in the hall had died away to uneasy murmurs. Charles’s face was crimson, his lips white. ‘Do you know that man?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered, stepping backwards. ‘Yes, I do.’ And with that she clattered down the stairs, cradling Daisy against her shoulder. The people on the floor below fell back to let her pass, their astonished stares following her all the way to the door.

  Beside the tea urn, Ada’s jaw dropped. ‘Tinned peaches,’ she muttered incredulously to Marjorie. ‘That’s that American what brought them last year. I knew I’d seen ’im somewhere before.’ Her face hardened and she shook her head. ‘Well, who’d have blooming thought it? The poor Reverend. I thought Mrs T. was better than that. Selling herself to a Yank for a bit of tinned fruit.’

  A baby.

  Jesus Christ Almighty. A baby. He felt like he’d swallowed the sun; that it was so big in his throat it was choking him. He was shaking. Adrenaline sluiced through his veins, making him unable to speak.

  I
t had been days since he’d slept for more than a few snatched moments, and reality had broken up into jagged fragments that didn’t quite fit together. He’d got back to England yesterday and the last twenty-four hours had been spent debriefing with British and American intelligence. He’d had a shower and accepted a new uniform, but turned down the offer of a bed. The thought of sleep was enticing, but the need to see Stella swamped everything else.

  As she came towards him he was distantly aware of the other people in the hall behind her and the hush that had fallen, but he didn’t care. This was the moment he’d longed for. Lived for. His fingers itched with the need to pull her into his arms and kiss the living daylights out of her, but instead he took her hand and held it tightly as their gazes locked and the rest of the world dissolved.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  They moved quickly, their hands clasped so tightly that it hurt. A good pain. As they left the hall the heavens opened and he felt a jolt of primitive alarm and an overwhelming urge to protect the tiny creature cradled against Stella’s shoulder, its feet, in pink knitted boots, drawn up. Pink – that meant it was a girl, right? His heart crashed. He didn’t care if it was a girl or a boy or a baby goddamned elephant—

  Impatiently he dashed the rain from his face and ripped open his tunic, shrugging it off so that he could hold it over Stella and the baby. Her closeness made his head reel. Half-running they crossed the road to the Vicarage, and she went ahead of him up the path, pushing open the unlocked front door.