On the cover of the drawing book she had pasted a square of white paper, with STRENG GEHEIM in red – this was definitely the German for Top Secret. Now she took the book upstairs, into the cold, empty room which had once been her mother’s bedroom and later the place for Stella and wee Francis after the Clydebank blitz. In the corner there was a loose board which Jackie now howked free. She laid the drawing book on top of the four others already filled up with spy notes and sketches, and fitted the board back over them.
By the time she walked softly downstairs, she was not a bat but a cat. She mewed silently as she crossed the hall and sat down at the table in the kitchen, gnawing delicately at the corned beef with her head cattishly tilted to one side. She was no cuddly kitten. But neither, she thought with a flinch, was she that terrible white tom cat on Union Street who slashed dogs open with a scuff of his grimy paw. No, she was a thin black cat who knew how to keep secrets, who saw everything she wasn’t meant to see, whose power might one day undermine the whole world.
She finished her tea and thought about her secrets. Apart from STRENG GEHEIM, the main secret was Dad being alive. At first, and she was only a stupid wee thing then, she had thought that she had killed him when she turned the key and the ship blew up. She knew better now, but she could tell everybody blamed her for it, whatever they all said. And again, the death of the other sailors remained; that had been somehow to do with her turning the key. Not that she had intended the explosion. So who had intended it – God? That was too hard, because it meant trying to imagine God doing real things, not creating whales and clouds but coming quietly up the steps behind her to do something in Greenock.
Soon after the funeral, however, another story began to tell itself. Books turned out to be full of lurking men who were not really dead but in disguise or hiding. Coffins had been dug up empty, or packed with stones or treasure. Jackie had begun to wonder: would all the folk who kept coming to the house and asking questions about Dad, would they be asking after him if they really thought he was dead? He could be alive in a hospital somewhere, maybe not knowing who he was because of getting knocked out. Or escaping in the heather across the hills, sleeping in a cave, catching trout with his hands.
So it hadn’t been difficult to suspect what Granny was about, when the cycle trips to Kilmun began. One day, Jackie waited until Granny had set off up the steep path through the birch wood. Then, leaving the cycles unguarded by the loch shore, she raced up the side of the hill until she could look down on the cottage and who came to the door. It was such a shock to see him again, after so long. Even from far off, she saw how feared of everything he was, keeking this and that way into the trees and the bracken to see who might have followed Granny. But one day he and he alone would tell them that she didn’t know what was going to happen when she turned the key. He would call everyone into the front room and put his arm round her shoulders, and he would tell them.
A harder fankle was the puzzle of who knew what. Jackie had no intention of telling Granny what she had found out. What way should she tell her? Granny had been treating her like an idiot, putting her son ahead of her granddaughter although Dad belonged to Jackie more than to her. Jackie grew scornful of her silence. If Granny had now come and told her the truth about Dad, she would have almost felt disappointed. On the other hand, she needed to know why Granny had long ago stopped going over the water. Was Dad not there any more? She had left herself no way to ask.
Then there was Mother, and what she knew. Last year, about the time that she saw the bite out of the Queen Mary’s bow, Jackie had come home from St Columba’s and heard voices from the kitchen. This dazzling, merry woman with an American accent looked up and said: ‘Hi, baby mine!’ Her blue uniform tunic was unbuttoned, and the table was piled with gaudy packets and cans. There were bananas and sweeties and chocolate, which Mother called ‘candy’, and biscuits which she called ‘cookies’. Granny, with a new silk scarf round her shoulders, gave Jackie a tight smile but said nothing. ‘Now try this,’ said Mother, pouring something green out of a bottle into a glass, ‘but wait till I put some water to it.’ The way she jumped up, leaned over the tap and flicked it open was the same as it always used to be; it was Mother sure enough.
‘Lime juice! Straight from the West Indies, and it keeps you healthy. Like it?’
Jackie sipped. ‘It’s awful sour.’
Helen laughed a lot, and said Jackie was just the same except for growing so big. Then she and Granny talked for a long time about the war, and about her job as a ferry pilot. Jackie was astonished, then proud. Who else had a mother that flew bombers, Flying Fortresses, over the Atlantic? Mother had changed, she thought. Easy-going, chatty like somebody on the wireless, no longer so girny about everything.
‘I have to go now. Want to walk along with me?’
It was autumn, already chilly on the dark street. Helen turned downhill to the Esplanade, and they walked beside the sea, the ships invisible behind a chain of red and green riding-lights.
‘When the war’s over, you know you could come and stay with me in Canada. Stay, live, make your life over there. There’s a home waiting for you. Think you’ll come?’
‘What about Granny?’
‘Ach, she’d maybe come over on visits. There’s people here in Scotland would take care of her when she’s old.’
‘Mother?’
‘What, big beautiful daughter?’
Jackie meant to say something else, but courage failed. ‘Will you take me in your plane one day?’
‘Maybe. Want to be a stowaway in a Flying Fortress?’ They stopped on the deserted pavement, and mother and daughter stared at one another. ‘That’s not what’s on your mind, Jackie. I can still tell. Spit it out, kid.’
‘Like Granny says: tell the truth and shame the Devil?’
They laughed together suddenly. Helen put her arm round Jackie, who leaned into her and said: ‘There’s something you need to know. Dad’s alive yet. He’s hiding somewhere but he’s no dead. You could find him and rescue him.’
Helen sighed, then shivered. She moved forward, and the two walked along arm in arm.
‘I knew that, Jackie. I heard it a while ago. I thought it was you didn’t know.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Well, it was Mike told me. Does it matter?’
‘Uncle Mike? How did he know?’
‘Who cares? Give us a break. Listen, Jackie, Dad will always be your dad, if he ever turns up again. But the time he and I were together, that’s over. Don’t you grieve about it, there’s no hating between us. But I’ve changed. There’s been the war, Canada, the flying, all that... I couldn’t go back to Union Street. But you, I’ll always be there for you.’
‘Always’ means a couple of hours every six months or so, thought Jackie. But she felt calm. Her mother had said: ‘I’ve changed!’ In some ways she had, but in other ways she hadn’t. Jackie smiled to think of it. Mother still suited herself, put herself first, just as she always had.
When she got back, there was a cardboard box waiting on her bed. Inside lay an amazing sort of quilted winter coat in red tartan, with an outsize zip fastener and a hood with royal-blue lining. A note said: ‘This is called a parka. You’ll need it in Canada among the grizzly bears! Luv and xxx, Mother.’ She tried the parka on. It had a funny, different shop smell and the pockets were enormous. Would people not stare after her in these bright colours?
She sat down on the bed, forgot about the coat and thought about her new discovery. Uncle Mike knew. That meant he probably knew a lot more than she did, maybe more than Granny did. Such as: which cave Dad was hiding in now, sleeping on dry bracken and roasting trout from the burn.
Granny was surprised. ‘Uncle Mike? I’ll give you his old army postbox address, if I can find it. But that’s a while back, he’ll maybe have been moved somewhere else. A letter? Why do you not just postcard him?’
Jackie wrote the letter and her granny, sighing with vexation, showed her how to spell Uncle
Mike’s name on the envelope. She licked it shut and put ‘Forces Mail’ on it. In the letter, she said she had seen Mother, who brought her a parka from Canada and American chocolate. Would Uncle Mike be coming through to Greenock soon? There was a very important matter to discuss. Extra private. She hoped he was well.
A long time passed. A winter came and went. The warships of all the Allied nations and the liners and freighters kept gathering at the Tail of the Bank, often so many that you couldn’t see across to the Fronsac to tell the tide. And then one morning the estuary would be empty again, the convoy gone until the next gathering.
The American soldiers, the Yanks, came off the ships to the landing stages at Gourock. Their troop trains moved very slowly through the first station at Fort Matilda, so slowly that you could walk alongside and talk to the soldiers as they leaned out of the windows yelling and cheering: ‘Hey, kid, you really English?’ When they first started coming, Jackie thought they must be hungry after that long journey across the sea, and took her sweetie ration along to throw up to them. But there was a roar of laughter from the Yanks, and then it began to rain all sorts of things on the platform around her: chewing gum, Hershey bars, packs of Lucky Strike and Camel, a doughnut with a hole through it, even a fountain pen. Soon mobs of children were racing to the station to wave and beg as the troop trains moved through. Jackie did not go back there.
No answer came from Uncle Mike. Six months later the letter found its way back to Union Street, with ‘This Officer Across Posted’ written on it in spiky foreign handwriting. ‘He’ll be away on invasion training,’ said Granny.
That summer, Granny and her friends organised a treat for Jackie and a few other girls from St Columba’s. They all went down by train to Wemyss Bay, and took a steamer to Tarbert in Kintyre. There was an old castle and heather and a herring fleet at the pier, a scent of old seaweed and peat fires, and the girls were allowed to eat fish suppers and pokes of chips in the street. Even though they had just been given a full tea at the boarding house run by Mrs MacQuarrie, a cousin of Granny’s, where they stayed for three nights at special rates.
Françoise le Gallois complained about the midges, and didn’t like the dressing on her haddock. Jackie finished it for her. She was watching Granny carefully, in case the cave was near here and she was planning to slip out at night with a bag of food. But Granny shared a bedroom with one of her friends, the granny of one of the other St Columba girls, and each night Jackie heard them both snoring so comfortably that she soon fell asleep herself.
On the journey back, Jackie stood on deck and hung over the rail so long that the sun scorched her nose and forehead. Presently the ship began to roll and heave, beam-on to the open sea as she rounded Ardlamont Point. Françoise was sick into the wind and had to be taken below and cleaned up. Jackie stayed staring at the sharp-toothed waves and things like little black sails between the waves.
‘See that, it’s the fins of the basking sharks, each one the size of a fish lorry!’ said a sailor. He added: ‘No worry, wee girl, they’ll no eat ye.’ But Jackie was not worried. She was trembling, but with excitement: the greatness of the indifferent sea, the mystery of the places far below her where wrecks lay in the dark, the monsters poking their heads out of rusting funnels.
One of the St Columba gang was English; her father was an important naval officer who could get petrol for his car. A few weeks later, he drove the girls up to Arrochar on Loch Long, a fjord used for the test-firing of torpedoes. They were allowed to sit on one of the distance-rafts, set every half-mile along the range, and fish for whiting. Alongside the rafts were jaunty little steam pinnaces with brass funnels, which hurried out to retrieve the practice torpedoes as they bobbed to the surface at the end of their run. There was one rule, said the large, grim seaman in charge of the raft. When the red flag went up, you took your line in – fast.
Jackie wore her new parka. It was already cold out on the sunless loch, and its waters were so deep that the fishing lines ran out for many minutes before they slackened as the weight touched bottom. But the fish down there were awake. The pinnace crew helped Jackie to unhook a thrashing, dripping whiting and drop it into a basket, just as the distant red flag went up over the firing sheds. Frantically, the other lines were wound in. A whistle blast echoed over the loch. Then a long silence fell.
She felt the tremor before she could hear it, a deep humming which grew until her bones whirred. Then a gleaming red and silver monster that seemed as big as a subway train flashed under her, deep in the transparent green water; it was gone long before its wake of bubbles tore up to the surface and made the raft sway. Jackie felt rapture once more, as if she were riding the missile into the darkness down there, far down there, where one day she must go.
15
A year is declared to be a long time in a young man’s life. Some of my junior comrades at the radio school and on the parachute courses certainly thought so. They were loudly indignant about the loss of each month, counting it out like misers snarling at a tax collector.
‘I am only going to be twenty-two once, and I have to waste it polishing boots and belt, standing about in the rain in this fucking Scotland where nothing happens, not even a German to shoot at. In Kraków, I would be finishing my law degree by now. I would be painting the apartment for Kasia and me when we get married. Where the fuck is she now? Am I supposed to do what some of the others do, and visit that frightful ten-bob hag out there in the bushes? This is my youth I am losing here. Youth? I might as well be forty, what’s the difference?’
‘Easy, Jacek, easy! Soon enough you’ll be on the end of a parachute, wondering who’s waiting for you down there. Then you’ll be wishing you were back at Polmont, queuing up for a nice piece of spam with baked beans and chips.’
‘Soon enough? Make it bloody sooner still!’
I couldn’t stand this avarice of the young about their youth. It seemed to me obscene. Weren’t we supposed to be careless, generous with our lives and time? ‘We’? I realised that I had forgotten what being young felt like. Thirty-six is already old age in wartime.
The training was hard, often harsh. I was still fit: I could run five miles in full battle order, keeping up with the squad, but it hurt. I couldn’t be like young Jacek and the others, who flung themselves gasping and cursing on the grass, lit a cigarette, and five minutes later were ready to sling their rifles and run on.
All the same, that was a good year in which to lack time to think. There was just enough space for anger at what was happening, but not enough for proper grief and mourning. The last Poles to be released by Stalin had emerged through Persia and a few of them, women as well as men, were sent on to us in Scotland. While they were telling their stories, the Germans opened the mass grave at Katyń.
As I remember, we were not really surprised. The three-year silence from our officer prisoners – those thousands captured by the Red Army whose letters had stopped so abruptly in April 1940 – had already been filled by terrible rumours. What did surprise us was the silence of the British. They knew as well as we did who was guilty, but they pretended that there was some doubt. So when General Sikorski was killed a few months later, in an air crash at Gibraltar which the British called an ‘accident’, it was our turn to doubt.
I recalled, not for the first time, what Commandant le Gallois had said about the ruthlessness of les Anglais when their national interest was at stake. No, I don’t believe they directly murdered the Supreme Commander. But perhaps it was like this: if Soviet agents crept towards the plane on the airstrip at Gibraltar and cut its control cables, someone had orders to look the other way. For a day or so after the disaster we all argued among ourselves, at times shouting, occasionally with tears.
That was the only occasion when bad news brought training to a halt. And it frightened us. Not just the shock and anger over Sikorski’s death, but the discovery of how vulnerable we were. We looked tough, we talked tough, but underneath we were all living on our nerves. What kept us goin
g was a continuous act of will, the daily effort to concentrate on the job of war against the Germans and not to think about what would happen when the job was done. But of course the effort often broke down. Sometimes it was news on the wireless which made us sit on our bunks at night and talk in low voices. Sometimes it was the stories we heard from fresh arrivals; men and women who now began to reach us from the Soviet immensity, refugees from the future.
*
My best friend at Polmont was a tall, gloomy-looking captain called Tadeusz Ostrowski – ‘Tadek’. He was the man who, for two bottles of whisky, had provided me with a British identity card in the name of Alexander Ketling. Now he was an instructor on the radio course and I was his pupil. We were much of an age, and he came from the same part of Poland as I did, but Tadek looked more Scandinavian: a bony, beaky nose, fair hair already receding. A lot of Swedish soldiers had been around his district three centuries before. Maybe Tadek was the echo of some thigh-booted scuffle in the hay. He certainly liked to think so.
One day, he said to me: ‘Tomorrow, there is a canteen revolution. No more army cooks. But instead real women – Scottish ones, even Polish ones!’
‘Polish women?’
‘Yes, fresh from Siberia. Well, from Egypt or Palestine; after Siberia, that’s where they landed up.’
Next day, we spent a silly morning laying out green-painted wireless aerials supposed to be invisible in the grass. They showed up brilliantly on the Scottish turf, leading the Abwehr or the Gestapo straight to the concealed transmitter. The class began to snigger. Tadek said: ‘If you laugh, you will have to paint the grass darker green after lunch. Fall out!’
The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel Page 14