by Liz Trenow
They gape at each other, wordless.
‘Whatever are you doing here?’ she says at last. There’s an edge to her tone, not entirely friendly. ‘It’s been thirty years, Vic, for heaven’s sake. You never wrote back to me, even when I pleaded. I thought you’d stayed in America and I’d never see you again.’
It is as though he’s been smacked in the chest. ‘No, you never wrote back to me,’ he gasps, trying to absorb what she’s just said. He’s become so used to accepting that she’d simply found someone else. ‘Oh my goodness . . . you mean . . .? No . . . I can’t believe . . .’
Abruptly she turns away, through the door into the kitchen, and for a long, fearful moment he thinks she has left for good, unable to face him. A deep ache of desolation creeps through his weary bones. All his attempts to find her were in vain, and now this. She never received his letters, and he never received hers. A whole life spent apart, through the vagaries of the wartime postal system. Such a loss of what might have been.
Then she is back, dabbing her face with a handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, sniffing. ‘It’s just so unexpected. Seeing you again.’
He cannot think what to say.
‘But really, what brings you here, after all this time?’ she asks now.
‘It’s a long and ridiculous story.’
‘I’ve got time to listen if you’ve got time to tell it,’ she says. ‘Let me get some more tea and make up the fire. There might even be a couple of slices of cake left.’
When they are seated and she has poured the tea, adding milk and half a teaspoon of sugar without even having to ask, he tells her about the newspaper obituary and his impulsive decision to make the pilgrimage from London to pay tribute to his old mentor, Robert Watson-Watt. And how, by the time he’d finally got here, the ferry had stopped running, and on his way back he’d seen the cafe and decided to come in just in case, and once he’d tasted the carrot cake he’d become convinced it was hers.
‘Ridiculous, of course,’ he says. ‘Forgive me, I’m such an old fool, but I’ve always loved your carrot cake.’ He lifts a slice from the plate and takes a bite, including the icing this time, munching with little murmurs of appreciation. Now at last she smiles, and he feels warmed by it. That little gap between her two front teeth, the one that first melted his heart, is still there.
‘And what about you?’ he asks. ‘You’re still baking wonderful cakes, at least.’
‘That, and being a mother,’ she says.
‘You have a child? How wonderful. Son or a daughter?’
‘A daughter,’ she says. ‘Vicky. She probably served you, earlier.’
‘Ah yes, a lovely young woman,’ he says. ‘Your husband . . .?’
‘It didn’t last.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he says.
‘Did you marry, Vic?’
‘Yes, to Ella. We met after I got back from America. She died last year.’
Even now, their conversation is stilted. Despite the joy of being here with her, the tea warming his throat and the blazing fire beside them, he feels uneasy and he senses that she does, too. Bitterness hangs like a veil between them.
‘I thought you’d forgotten all about me,’ she says at last.
‘How could I ever forget you, Kath? I wrote again and again, honestly. You must believe me. I wrote to Bawdsey and your parents’ address,’ he says. ‘I even went to WAAF HQ in London when I got back from the US, I was that desperate to trace you. They said if I wasn’t a relative they couldn’t divulge any information.’
It had been his final hope, and he could still remember the dreadful despondency weighing over him as he’d walked away that day. ‘I came back here trying to find you, but your house had been bombed and though they reassured me no one had been killed, nobody seemed to know where you’d gone. Or perhaps they just weren’t prepared to tell this odd-looking stranger.’
‘Our house was destroyed by a doodlebug in 1944,’ she says quietly, not looking up. ‘We moved inland, to relatives in Stowmarket. But I went on writing to you, Vic, right up till the end of the war: to all of the American addresses, to HQ, to your lab in London. I even wrote to your father – I couldn’t find a proper address, so I just wrote to “Mr Mackensie senior, Tunbridge Wells”. I couldn’t believe you had just disappeared. And then when the war ended and there was still no news, I assumed you must have met someone over there and didn’t have the courage to tell me.’
‘No. No. NO,’ he almost shouts. ‘It wasn’t like that. Not like that at all.’ How can he persuade her, get her to understand how much he suffered, that terrible heartache, that interminable agony of loss? He looks up into her shocked face. ‘Oh, Kath. I missed you so much. But when you didn’t reply, I thought . . .’
They gaze at each other, each trying to understand how random acts of fate have broken them apart, leaving each of them thinking so ill of the other. How different their lives could have been. She leans across the table and places her hand on his, and he feels ashamed at the state of his bony fingers, the nails that need a trim – and, now he looks more carefully, aren’t even particularly clean.
Tears are now running unchecked down her cheeks. ‘How did we manage to lose touch like that?’ she says.
‘I loved you, Kath. So very much.’ His voice is thick, shaky.
‘And I loved you. That day we met again in the Round Garden . . .’ She grabs a napkin and wipes her eyes, takes a deep breath and straightens her shoulders. ‘Oh, this is stupid. It’s all so long ago.’
‘And we’re here now. Better late than never,’ he says, with a wry laugh.
In the distance there is the sound of a church bell. He remembers it from his first years here, before they were silenced during the war. It chimes seven.
‘Heavens, is that the time?’ she says, glancing round the empty room. ‘I’d better lock up. Where are you staying tonight, Vic?’
He hesitates, reluctant to admit that his absent-mindedness has left him effectively destitute. ‘Well, I planned to stay at the Manor, but when I found the ferry was closed I went to a bed and breakfast place. And then I discovered I’ve left my wallet at home, back in London. God, I’m such an idiot.’
‘Then that’s quite simple.’ In her smile he sees the girl she was back then: the halo of flaming curls, the freckles on her nose. ‘I have a spare room. We’ll light the fire and open a bottle of wine, have some supper, if you’re not too full of cake?’
‘I can think of nothing I would like more,’ he says.
An hour later he is full of scrambled eggs and they are sitting companionably either side of a roaring coal fire in her small terraced house, well into their second glasses of wine.
He asks after her brother and she tells him how Mark’s plane had been so damaged he’d had to ditch, then was captured and spent the rest of the war in a PoW camp. ‘I wrote to you about all of this,’ she says.
He ignores the jibe. ‘So he wasn’t that straggler, after all? Or anything to do with the IFF?’
‘No, thank heavens. All that guilt disappeared just as soon as we knew he was safe.’
‘What a relief, Kath. Did he come back safely?’
‘He’s an aeronautics engineer in Southampton, happily living with his partner. He’s always said he’d like to meet you and shake your hand some day, because radar saved his life more than once.’
‘I’d be honoured. He and his fellow fliers saved our country.’
They watch the flames for a few moments, remembering those desperate, dangerous days, when everyone’s future hung in the balance.
‘What about you, Vic? I hope you’ve had a good life?’
He tells her about his time in America, his peacetime work for the Met Office on radar for weather forecasting and his most recent job developing microwave technology. ‘I got caught by one of those new radar speed guns last year,’ he laughs. ‘And wished we’d never invented the ruddy thing.’
She asks about Ella, and he tells her they were happy for
twenty years, and how he has found himself so lonely since she died. ‘I’d rather given up on life, I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘But meeting you has been a real tonic. I’m going to pull myself together from now on.’
‘Did you have children?’
‘We hoped for it, but it never happened.’ He shakes his head. ‘By the time we got together we were both a bit over the hill, I suppose.’
She tells him about her marriage ‘on the rebound’ to an old flame, a charmer called Billy Bishop, and their move to Leeds, where he worked as an engineer. ‘It was such a stupid thing to do – he persuaded me that he’d changed, and he was lovely with Vicky. It worked well at first, but I never felt at home in Leeds. It was hard to make friends; they could never make out my accent, and I couldn’t understand theirs.’
They were short of money and she’d tried to go back to work, hoping for a job related to physics, or at least in science, as a laboratory technician or something similar. But all she was ever offered was mind-numbing menial work that barely covered the cost of a childminder. ‘There weren’t even enough jobs for all those men coming back from war,’ she said. ‘Women didn’t really get a look in.’
‘That’s a shame. You were always such a clever lass,’ he said.
She shrugs. ‘Besides, my marriage was already on the rocks and by the time I’d caught him having affairs with three different women I’d had enough. So I brought my daughter back to Suffolk and got a part-time job in the teashop. When the owners decided to sell, Ma and I went into partnership to buy the place. It’s made us a good living, over the years.’ She laughs, that same laugh that warmed his heart all those years ago.
‘What’s funny?’
‘I was just remembering something you said to me, that first day we met on the Cliff Path.’
‘Heavens. I hope it wasn’t too pompous?’
‘Not at all. I thought it was rather profound. I’d never met anyone who talked like that before.’
‘You’re worrying me now. Whatever did I say?’
‘I was wittering on about you being such a clever scientist developing important secret things and you said, “Yours is by far the most important work. The human race wouldn’t exist without food”.’
‘I was right, of course,’ he says. They laugh together now and it feels as though the years were never lost. They stare into the flames in comfortable silence, immersed in memories.
‘Are you still in touch with him, your husband?’ he asks after a while, not really knowing why. Seeking reassurance, perhaps.
‘Well, my daughter still sees him from time to time.’
‘That’s nice. Well, nice for her father, anyway.’
‘He wasn’t actually her father,’ she says suddenly, her cheeks colouring. ‘It’s complicated.’ She sighs. ‘Anyway, she’s a married woman now, and they’re expecting a baby in March. My first grandchild.’
‘You must be thrilled,’ he says, with more than a twinge of envy: the comfortable house, the daughter, the growing family around her. He recalls Ella’s depression when no children arrived and pictures his empty flat, the cupboards still filled with her clothes that he hasn’t had the heart to throw away, and the empty hours he spends, barely speaking to another soul, sometimes for days on end.
She fills his glass once more, then her own, pokes the fire and sits down. He thanks her and stares into the flames again, so distracted by his own thoughts that at first he doesn’t hear her.
‘Sorry? I’m getting a bit deaf these days,’ he says.
‘I said there’s something else I need to tell you, Vic.’
‘Go on.’
She is struggling for words, he can tell. ‘Oh, never mind,’ she says, getting up to tidy the plates. ‘Water under the bridge.’
He waits until she returns from the kitchen and sits down again. ‘You were going to tell me something,’ he prompts, gently.
She shakes her head. ‘No. It’s all so long ago.’
‘Try me,’ he says.
‘I don’t know how.’ There is another agonising pause before she bursts out: ‘I named her after you, Vikram.’ For a second he’s confused, until she explains. ‘My daughter. Victoria – Vicky for short.’
‘Goodness, how wonderful. I’m very touched.’
‘Don’t you want to know why?’
He nods, his spine tingling with a powerful premonition that what she’s about to tell him will change his life forever.
‘Because she is your daughter, Vic.’
He is so astounded that he doesn’t for a moment understand. ‘My daughter? What? How . . .? When . . .?’ His face is numb, and his lips won’t work properly.
‘After you left for America I began to feel slightly unwell, but I assumed it was because of my grief over Mark, so I just buckled down and got on with it. And after a while the sickness passed. When my skirt wouldn’t do up any more I put myself on a diet, but that didn’t work either. I must have been five months gone when it dawned on me what had happened. I just couldn’t believe it.’
He feels light-headed. He has not taken a breath all the time she has been speaking.
‘Good God. But why didn’t you tell me, Kath? I’d have been here like a shot.’
‘Tell you? Of course I bloody told you. I wrote to you, again and again, but when I didn’t hear anything, I just assumed you didn’t want to know. I felt so ashamed and embarrassed, Vic. I was such an innocent. How could it have happened after . . . you know, just the once? Eventually I confided in Marcia, and she gave me the address of a clinic in London and lent me some money, but they said I was too far gone. If I didn’t want the child, they said, I could have it adopted, and I was all set to do that, but as soon as she arrived I realised it was completely out of the question. So I kept her. Ma and Pa were brilliant. I’d never have got through it without them.’
‘All that time, and I never knew,’ he gasps.
‘And all that time you never replied to my letters, Vic,’ she retorts, sharply. ‘Can you imagine how that felt, for me?’
He is almost in tears. As he puts down his glass he notices that his hand is shaking.
‘Oh Kath, I’m so sorry you had to go through all that alone. For what I put you through. For what I’ve missed.’ He stands and goes to her, reaches to pull her up into his arms. She doesn’t resist. It feels just as it once did, thirty years ago. She even smells the same. They hold each other for long minutes.
Her words are muffled into his chest. ‘What a sorry mess we got ourselves into.’
He pulls away, hands on her shoulders, and looks into her face. ‘If only I could turn back the clock to make amends, believe me, I would. But after what you’ve told me, how can I be unhappy? I’ve spent my life longing to have a child.’
A shadow crosses her face and he realises, too late, that in the joy of this extraordinary discovery, he’s assumed too much. ‘Will you tell her?’
‘I’m not sure, Vic.’ She sits down again, and he’s left standing. ‘Do you want me to?’
‘My goodness, of course. There is nothing I would like more.’
‘I’ll ask her if she wants to know,’ she says.
That night he sleeps in what was once his daughter’s bedroom and his dreams are filled with what might have been: Vicky as a baby in his arms, as a small child being pushed on a swing, as a teenager who looks just like Kath when they first met. He wakes several times and listens to the silence of the house, this house in which this girl, his daughter, has grown up surrounded by her family, her mother and her grandparents, and he grieves for a life he has lived without them.
Finally he sleeps soundly and then, waking late, he goes downstairs. Breakfast is laid and there is a note: Help yourself. Back in a few minutes. He is about to tuck in when he hears voices, the front door opens and Kath enters with her daughter – their daughter – following behind.
They are both smiling.
A note on the history that inspired Under A Wartime Sky
Although Under a
Wartime Sky is entirely fictional, it was inspired by real-life events, people and places, especially Bawdsey Manor itself.
My father was a keen dinghy sailor and as children we spent many anxious hours watching him from the shingle at Felixstowe Ferry. Across the river, we could see fairy-tale towers peeping enticingly above the pines, and when the tides were right we would pack buckets and spades and take the ferry over to the small sandy beach at Bawdsey Quay. But the Manor itself, at that time still in the hands of the Ministry of Defence, remained firmly out of bounds, with soldiers at the gatehouse and Keep Out signs posted all around the fences.
Several decades later, our friend Niels Toettcher was sailing on the River Deben when he spied a For Sale sign. The Ministry of Defence was selling Bawdsey Manor and all its grounds and cottages. He landed, visited the place and fell in love with it, and for the next twenty-five years he and his wife Ann lived and ran a successful English language school there. Of course we visited often and fell in love with it, too. How could you not? The mansion is remarkable in itself, but with the addition of its extraordinary military role, its masts (since taken down) and curious outbuildings, it is irresistible.
The history of Bawdsey Manor is well documented: William Cuthbert Quilter, a local landowner and MP, bought the land in 1873 to build a Victorian gothic ‘seaside home’. Over the next twenty years he added towers and facades in Flemish, Tudor/Jacobean, French chateau and Oriental styles to accommodate his growing family and lavish house parties. His wife, Lady Quilter, set about creating extensive formal gardens, a vast walled kitchen garden and most notably the Cliff Path, using an artificial rock called Pulhamite.
In 1936 Bawdsey Manor was bought by the Air Ministry. Sir Robert Watson-Watt and his small team of brilliant scientists moved from nearby Orford Ness, working in utmost secrecy and under great pressure to develop new radio direction finding technology before the feared outbreak of war. Stables and outbuildings were converted into workshops and the first receiver and transmitter towers were built.