A Christmas Gift

by Ruby Jackson

  ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to have her home for Christmas?’ he asked as Elsie stopped for breath. ‘If Grace gets down, maybe it’ll be like before the war with them all running in and out and making a right mess of this living room.’ His voice was full of joyful anticipation.

  Elsie didn’t want him to look forward too much; disappointment would be hurtful. ‘Just remember Grace was allowed home for her sister’s funeral. Can’t expect to get Christmas leave two years in a row, not during a war.’

  ‘You’re right, love, and we don’t really know about Sally, do we? And the ballerina girl, poor girl, widowed so young. We’ve room for her, right, pet, if she comes?’

  ‘We’ll make room, Ernie.’

  ‘It isn’t Jon, it isn’t Jon. Isn’t that fantastic? I mean I’m terribly sorry for the poor dead sailor but he isn’t Jon.’

  After her telephone call with Maudie, Sally had rushed to the stage where the company was waiting for directions. Some were exercising, some vocalising, and others just ‘milling’. Among these was Sebastian. She had pulled him out into the wings.

  ‘Tell all, quickly, Sally. Max will be here bullying us in a minute.’

  ‘I never bully,’ came Max’s voice from just behind Sebastian. ‘Mind you, I could be persuaded to start. Tell him your good news, Sally, and then back on stage for rehearsal.’

  As Max’s head disappeared through the curtain Sally smiled, a heart-breakingly lovely smile, and shouted, ‘It isn’t Jon.’

  ‘That is good news – but who told you?’

  Patiently he waited while Sally told him all about Sybil and her telephone calls and then, at last, the telephone call to Maudie. ‘And Maudie knows because?’

  ‘She was Jon’s nanny when he was small. You probably had a Maudie too.’

  ‘A Clara. She smelled of lavender and sometimes peppermints. Sally, Maudie isn’t a relation, a relative, is she?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then she wouldn’t—’

  She held up her hand. ‘Just listen, Sebastian.’

  He listened.

  ‘His wife was listed as next-of-kin, as was Miss Maude Cooper. Jon wasn’t really sure where she went when she left him; he told me it was either the United States, a place she had always wanted to visit and there had never been an opportunity – since he was away at sea most of the time – or Malta where she was born. Well, it was definitely Malta. The people who send the telegrammes, the War Office is it, then contacted Maudie and they sent her the photograph. The poor chap, she says, is very like Jon but it isn’t him.’

  He put his arms around her. ‘Oh, my darling Sally, she wants it not to be Jon as much as you do. Don’t you think she’s seeing what she wants to see? His book of poetry was in his pocket.’

  ‘He was wearing a gold watch on his right arm.’

  ‘Lots of people do. My father wore his wedding ring on his right hand because he was left-handed and his wedding ring ruined his squash grip.’

  Sally had not the faintest idea what a squash grip was and neither did she care. ‘Jon was…is left-handed, as it happens, and he did wear his watch on his right wrist but he was … is allergic to gold and always wore a leather strap and a metal watch of some kind, but never gold.’

  ‘That does sound rather convincing, Sally, but if this poor fellow isn’t Jon, isn’t it likely that …?’

  ‘Jon drowned or was killed. Yes, that seems likely but Maudie doesn’t believe it and neither do I.’

  ‘Oh, Sally, “this way lies madness”. Maude was his nanny. If she’s the slightest bit like my Clara, she loved him as if he were her own child. She wants, needs him not to be dead.’

  ‘I won’t give up until they find him.’

  ‘Hundreds of men went down with the ship. Their bodies will probably never be found. Ships are being sunk in every ocean or sea in this tortured world, planes are being shot down. A huge army of waiting women is being formed.’ He stopped, unable to think of any word that would help her, but, as a friend he could not patronise her with false hope.

  She looked at him and the look was one of grim determination. ‘I won’t just wait, Sebastian. I’ll look.’

  For an insane moment the most appalling thought crossed his mind. She meant to throw herself into the Mediterranean.

  Sally saw his look of fear and recognised it.

  ‘Dear Sebastian. Don’t worry; I found him before and I’ll find him again.’

  Every sailor picked up from the George Francis by the various battleships had been returned to Britain, except for those rescued by the German ship. Eventually the families of those men heard that their husband, son, brother was in a prisoner-of-war camp somewhere in German-occupied territory, but all the details of the living had been handed over to the Red Cross. Jonathon Galbraith, alive or dead, was not listed among them. Survivors rescued by the American or Allies’ ships were now in British hospitals, at home with their families or – such was the need for manpower – back on duty.

  Sally and Maudie appeared to be becoming firm friends. Once a week, Maude would ring the theatre and either talk to Sally or, if Sally was working, she would leave a message; and, as often as she could manage while travelling from factory to hospital or church hall, Sally would find a telephone box and ring Jon’s former nanny.

  One night, after a late rehearsal, she dialled Maude’s number. It was answered almost at once as if Maude had been waiting for her call.

  ‘Sally, how lovely to hear from you.’

  ‘Sorry to be so late, Maude, but I …’

  ‘No dear, there’s no more news, good or bad, and I don’t mind when you ring. I don’t seem to sleep much these days.’

  ‘You must try harder. If Jon, when Jon comes home, he’ll need you.’

  ‘Good girl. He is not dead, Sally; he may be wounded, dreadfully wounded, but I’ll, we’ll take care of him.’

  ‘Chin up! There’s still hope that Jon’s in a hospital somewhere,’ said Sally, trying to be brave for Maude’s sake as well as her own. ‘If his identification tags have been lost or he’s too severely injured to speak, then no one will know who he is. We have answers from all the ships …’

  ‘Except the fishing boats.’

  ‘Yes, Maude, let’s pin our faith on the fishermen.’

  The beeps sounded and they terminated the call. Next time, there had to be good news.

  Sally had nagged at Maude like a playful puppy hanging on to a child’s toy. She conceded that Maude was right; she must wait patiently. She now completely understood why Millie wanted, needed, to get to France. She knew that her young husband was dead; he would never return to her but she had to see his grave, to lay flowers on the patch of French soil that held all her dreams, to sit on the earth and talk to him, tell him how much she loved him and missed him, and to assure him that she would never forget him.

  Sally’s hopes lay in the limited information that had been given by the captains of the fishing boats that had picked up both bodies and injured sailors and, according to their secretive captains, taken their sad cargoes to their home ports. It seemed that one boat had returned to a port in Corsica and the other to Malta. But how could Sally, an actress living in London, find out anything more? It all seemed impossible, yet surely it was here that her only hope lay.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, the first afternoon in some weeks that the three flatmates had had to themselves. Free to choose to do whatever they felt like doing. And so, of course, they did nothing; they dressed casually, and with their faces clear of the slightest trace of the heavy ‘flexible greasepaint’ they used for performances, they looked remarkably young and fresh. They peeled potatoes and an onion Dmitri had brought them from his victory garden and then they made potato soup. It was a far cry from the meals they often enjoyed on military bases, and was nothing at all like the meals they occasionally shared in hotels, but they enjoyed it tremendously.

  ‘Doesn’t this make you think of Sunday afternoons before the war, Sebastian?’ asked Millie.


  ‘Golly no, a hundred times better. Grandmamma always had the same coven of ancient grandes dames to afternoon tea on Sundays. All widowed, poor old dears, but so excruciatingly boring.’

  ‘Boring? Then they weren’t a coven,’ Millie pointed out seriously.

  Sally thought of Sundays in Dartford. Sometimes, a church service with her parents, but more often reading the papers and peeling the vegetables, then lunch and off to the park or on a cycle ride with her three best friends.

  Did we ever pass Jon’s home or cycle on his land?

  ‘Would fishing boats go out during a raging battle, Sebastian?’

  Sebastian and Millie looked at each other over Sally’s bent dark head. The message in their eyes was the same. Will she ever come to terms with this? They had discussed Sally’s inability to let the matter drop several times.

  ‘As far as I know, she met him only twice, Millie, and for just a few minutes each time,’ Sebastian had explained. ‘I simply can’t understand it.’

  But Millie, who had first become aware of Patrick when, in rehearsal, she watched his taut, muscular body leap effortlessly through the air to land at her feet, the naughtiest smile in his dark eyes, was well aware that sometimes a moment was all it took to change one’s life for ever.

  Eventually, it was Sebastian who answered Sally’s question. ‘Highly unlikely, I would say, Sal. Possible, of course, that they had already been in those waters; I mean, “geography needs care”, as my old form master was rather too fond of saying, but I don’t think Corsica is a tremendous distance from Gibraltar. The Corsican boat could have gone out a few days before and … gosh, I don’t know, got caught in bad weather and so didn’t make it back to port before the battle started. Malta, though, is a heck of a long way from Gib. Could the fishermen have heard the guns and thought, “We’re part of the British Empire and should try to help out”?’

  ‘No idea,’ Millie contributed to the conversation. ‘Maybe they were smugglers – after all, if those poor islanders are unable to replenish supplies because of the U-boats, then no doubt black marketeers are doing a roaring, if exceedingly dangerous business. Could they have been gun runners? Possibly even spies? For what it’s worth, I think they were up to no good, got caught up in a battle, had some decency and, instead of disappearing, tried to help. Corsica’s French, isn’t it, and that would make them allies; Malta is British.’

  ‘I think Millie’s right,’ Sebastian said. ‘Corsica and Malta should be on the side of the Allies and so anyone picked up by fishermen from those islands would most probably be safe.’ He managed to stifle the word ‘initially’, which is what his tongue seemed to have formed itself to say and, of course, if Millie was right and they were not fishermen at all … he did not want to contemplate that scenario.

  Sally jumped to her feet with excitement, her face suffused with healthy colour for the first time since Sebastian had told her of the sinking. ‘Jon’s there, I feel it. He’s on one of those islands. May I use the telephone, Sebastian? I’d like to ring Maudie. She’ll be thrilled to hear there really is hope Jon’s still alive after all.’

  While Sally went to the telephone, Sebastian and Millie moved to the kitchen where they could speak quietly and have a slight chance of not being overheard by Sally.

  ‘What are we going to do, Seb? She’s going to want to try to get to one of those places. Allied soldiers aren’t stationed there, are they? We couldn’t possibly take an ENSA programme, could we?’

  ‘I don’t know the answers to any of your questions. I do know that Malta is being blitzed into nothingness. Some of the nobility have huge tunnels under their homes, constructed during the time when Turkish armies were invading Malta, and the people are taking shelter there, but if by some sheer madness, a fishing boat from Malta took survivors from a British ship there, what on earth would they do with them?’

  Sally overheard the last comment as she replaced the telephone receiver. ‘They would take care of them and they’d contact London and find out how to get them home.’

  Neither of her flatmates wanted to remind her that the people of Malta were struggling – often without success – to feed themselves.

  ‘How was Maude?’

  ‘She brightened up, I think. I know you two are sure that I’m wrong but isn’t it worth clinging to even the tiniest bit of hope?’ As she spoke she looked at Millie.

  ‘I have no hope, Sally.’

  ‘Yes, you do, Millie. Not that Patrick will miraculously walk in that door but that we’ll get over to France. I know we will. Somehow, whatever we have to do to reach Arras, we’ll do it, and you’ll see … you’ll see.’ She turned to look directly at Sebastian, who was obviously finding the conversation difficult. ‘We will help, won’t we, Sebastian, in whatever way we can?’

  ‘Sally, of course if we are sent to France we will do our utmost, but it’s a huge country; even if we do get there we might well be stationed nowhere near Arras.’

  ‘Quite right, Sebastian, but the one thing we can do is never give up hope so that we’re ready should the chance arise. I’m going to work really hard to improve my abilities so that when the Government finally decides that our company should go to the front, I’ll be good enough and Max will select me. You two are brilliant and don’t even have to worry about being good enough.’

  But as Max was fond of reminding the company whenever the subject was raised, there was no money immediately available to send them overseas just yet.

  Two days later, the concert party had a lucky escape when they were strafed while on their way back to London from an airfield in Suffolk they had never before visited, and where they had given three back-to-back performances. They had come under fire before but this attack was so intense they could almost believe that it was personal. Luckily there had been a few minutes’ warning. The road before them had been completely clear and then, almost out of nowhere, had come a motorcycle dispatch rider.

  ‘Get off the road, get off the road,’ he shouted – and he was already hoarse – ‘split up, split up, incoming aircraft. Get away from the railway line; probably bombs.’ He was past them in a screaming blur.

  His last few words were whipped away by the wind but the driver had understood. It was well-known that the Luftwaffe targeted railway lines, bridges, roads, any means of communication or transportation they could. Up until then it was unlikely that anyone in the lorries had been particularly concerned that their route was parallel to a major railway line. All over the country railways and roads followed the same routes, usually the shortest possible distance between two points. Most of the company had been attempting to sleep but the shouts woke some, and the rest were woken very roughly when the transport vehicles began to turn and swerve all over the road as the drivers followed their prearranged orders for evasive action. Baskets of props, costumes and musical instruments rained down on unlucky cast members who had been thrown to the floor. Sally and Millie, already on the floor, were saved from injury when a huge hamper that seemed destined to hit them burst open, burying them under a load of painstakingly washed and ironed costumes.

  They began to struggle and then lay still, holding their breath as what sounded like hundreds of small stones rattled against both the ground and the lorry sides. The lorry stopped suddenly with rather a loud crash, but fortunately stayed upright.

  There were screams, some of fear, some of pain, and then a loud explosion.

  ‘What was that, what was that?’ Sally felt bruised and battered, but she knew that she was otherwise unhurt and that somewhere with her, in the intense dark, was Millie, but where?

  I won’t panic; I know she’s here. I was touching her just a moment or two ago. But that must have been a bomb. What did it hit?

  She began to crawl blindly, feeling around under the blanket of materials. ‘Millie, Millie, please be all right, please …’

  Then she heard Sebastian’s voice. ‘And what about poor old me? Come on, Sal, there’s a good girl. Millie crawl
ed over here and she’s dazed but all right. They tried to blow us up, the swine. How on earth they missed any part of the convoy, I cannot imagine. Blew a ruddy great hole in some poor farmer’s field. Perhaps Jerry isn’t as rigid about eye tests as our air force. Let me help you down.’

  ‘I’ll catch her, Seb,’ came Max’s voice from beside Sebastian and she emerged from under the costumes to see him reach up to help her out to join the others.

  Even in her distressed state, she was conscious of Sebastian’s calm – and Max’s for that matter. Could anything rattle their quiet determination in any situation?

  ‘They’re off to miss more sitting targets, thank God, and we’ve been stopped by banging into an overturned transporter. Just as well it was here or we would have ploughed straight through that wall and into the river. Nice night for a swim.’

  ‘Who’s in the lorry?’ Sally asked, her heart was beating rapidly. Although several company members were walking around looking rather dazed, there was no sound at all from the crashed vehicle.

  ‘Hold my hand, Sally?’ The trembling voice was Millie’s. ‘Casualties? We must have sustained casualties.’

  ‘The piano’s a gonner, and the double base.’

  Millie’s gasp was audible.

  ‘Instruments, Millie, not people.’ Max, sporting evidence of a bloody nose and with what was already turning into the king of all black eyes, had finished checking each lorry. ‘Thank heavens you two girls are all right. It will be some time before our Sebastian will attempt an arabesque, Millie; his right ankle’s swelling up like a balloon.’ He turned to where the tall slender shape that was Sebastian was now leaning against the overturned lorry. ‘We’ve been damned lucky, Seb; no serious injuries. Bruises, cuts, a few sprains, I think, and one or two obviously trying to deal with shock. The lorries and our equipment bore the brunt. Damned capable drivers, but had the blighters dropped more bombs … Can you climb into the cab, old chap?’

  Sebastian winced. ‘Rather heave myself up onto the tailgate.’