Under a Wartime Sky

by Liz Trenow

  ‘Hardest thing I ever did,’ he told Ruby as they waited for the others to arrive. ‘Leaving the lads there to face the Hun without me. Broke my heart. The army don’t want a cripple like me, no ruddy use at all, excuse my French.’ He grimaced, tapping his knee. ‘So when Cooks advertised for guides I saw my chance. Escorting people like your good self to the battlefields to pay their respects to their loved ones is the best way I can think of to honour my old mates. You have to make sense of it all somehow.

  ‘It’s your husband, isn’t it? Died at Passchendaele? A young man, I assume?’ he added, after a discreet pause.

  ‘Twenty,’ she said, trying to steady her voice. The major was waiting, watching, expecting more. ‘He was only out there nine months,’ she added. ‘We’d just got married. They never found him.’

  ‘God bless you,’ he said simply. ‘It’s a brave thing to do, to visit the battlefields. I admire your courage. But I can reassure you that most people find it brings them some peace.’

  Despite her initial wariness, Ruby warmed to his down-to-earth approach. She had been so busy just trying to put one foot after another, to get through each day, one at a time, that she’d forgotten to look up. The war was over but there was no relief from the misery: men returning were injured, often unable to find work or housing. Newspapers talked of strikes and unrest, food was still rationed. What had it all been for, in the end? But if, as Major Wilson said, this trip would help her make sense of it all, then it would certainly be worth it.

  The group was soon gathered – around ten people, mostly older than herself – and shepherded onto the Dover train in a carriage that reeked of cigarette smoke and orange peel. A great weight of almost visible sorrow seemed to hang in the air. She glanced around at her fellow travellers. Most were couples, so far as she could see, speaking in low voices to each other, or just sitting in silence, drawn and sallow-faced. A man with an eye patch sat with his pale waif of a wife. She caught a brief glimpse of another single woman, tall and rather glamorous with a glossy brown bob, like a movie star, in a flame-red jacket and matching hat with a flamboyant brim. Red? To the cemeteries? How inappropriate. Happily she did not seem to be in the same carriage.

  Being in the group made her feel even more alone and she wished for the umpteenth time that she’d found the courage to refuse Alfred’s request. She found herself sitting opposite a couple eager to talk about their two sons, killed a year apart, in the fields of Flanders.

  ‘They gave their lives for King and Country,’ the man said. ‘That is our consolation.’

  ‘We want to find their graves,’ his wife added, her voice serrated with grief. ‘So we can tell them how much we . . .’ She tailed off, sniffing into her handkerchief.

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself so,’ the husband chided, squeezing her arm. ‘I told you we must be strong.’ It was like being with Albert and Ivy all over again.

  By the end of the journey, Ruby had learned everything about their boys. She didn’t mind, only relieved that the couple seemed so utterly absorbed in their own loss and pride that they never asked her a single question. Or perhaps they were just being polite. She was afraid she might not be able to retain her composure if someone showed sympathy. This is just between me and Bertie, she said to herself.

  Now, as she stood on the deck of the ship in the sunshine, her heart began to lift. The weeks of waiting and the almost paralysing anxiety had almost disappeared. The sky was an unblemished blue, the water only gently ruffled by the slightest of breezes. The bracing tang of seaweed and salt that she’d first inhaled on stepping from the train was now overlaid with reassuring smells of fresh paint and varnish.

  The last time she’d been on the water was at the artificial lake in Christchurch Park, when she’d found the instability of the little rowing boat unnerving. But this ship felt so steady beneath her feet it was hard to believe they were not still on dry land. A huge grey and white seagull landed on the railing just ahead of her, cocking its head to one side, interrogating her with a piercing yellow eye.

  ‘Hello, bird,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got anything to give you, I’m afraid.’

  Men far below on the quayside began to wheel the wooden gangways away from the side of the ship. Great coils of rope, thick as a man’s arm, were slung from either end and hauled in by waiting groups of navvies. Their shouts were drowned by a sudden ear-splitting blast of the ship’s horn that seemed to reverberate through her body. The gull flew off, leaving a white splat on the high polish of the hand rail.

  A single downy feather fluttered to the deck and she picked it up, turning it in her fingers, marvelling at its delicacy. But then she recalled, at the start of the war, reading reports of women handing out feathers like this, shaming men into joining up. She shivered and dropped it quickly. She’d rather Bertie had been called a coward and come home with one of these than with his call-up papers. At least he’d have been alive.

  Almost imperceptibly at first, and then more quickly, the ship moved away from the dockside. Beside her, fellow travellers waved to their friends gathered below, calling farewells. They gathered speed swiftly, passing through the mouth of the docks and into the open sea. As the breeze picked up most of the passengers retired below, but Ruby was determined to watch the land as it receded. This would have been Bertie’s last view of England, and she owed it to him to look until it disappeared. What would have been in his mind, that day? Was he worried or frightened? Did he wonder when he would get to see those white cliffs again?

  Or perhaps his mood was buoyed by the excitement of the journey, of the new sights and sounds. He’d have been with his mates, after all; they would have been jollying each other along and cracking jokes, of course. At school they’d called him the class clown. It cheered her to imagine how the other men would have come to love his impertinence, his generosity – always sharing his fags – and how he’d have made them laugh.

  It was late afternoon and the intense whiteness of the chalky cliffs, illuminated by the sun, formed a wide luminous band, almost unearthly, along the edge of the land separating grey sea and blue sky. She stood, transfixed, as the ship pulled steadily away.

  ‘Quite a sight, ain’ it?’

  The voice, with its unmistakeable American twang, made Ruby jump. She’d thought herself alone on the deck. She looked up into the eyes of the tall movie-star woman she’d observed getting onto the train. Bright scarlet lips smiled widely to reveal the largest, whitest teeth Ruby had ever seen.

  ‘Alice Palmer. Pleased to meet you.’

  Praise for Liz Trenow

  ‘Liz Trenow sews together the strands of past and present as delicately as the exquisite stitching on the quilt which forms the centrepiece of the story’

  LUCINDA RILEY

  ‘Extraordinary, fascinating . . . deeply rooted in history’

  Midweek, BBC Radio 4

  ‘What a delicious read The Silk Weaver is. I was enchanted by this novel set in eighteenth-century Spitalfields; meticulously researched, richly detailed, the brilliantly structured story shimmered as the threads of silk wound through its pages. I devoured it in two days and was gripped from start to finish. The characters shine too and Anna is an absolute triumph. A fabulous book’

  DINAH JEFFERIES

  ‘Liz Trenow draws us in so that we inhabit her world, and it was a wrench to put the book down after the last beautifully written page’

  GILL PAUL

  ‘Totally fascinating . . . a book to savour’

  KATE FURNIVALL

  ‘Push back the gorgeous brocade curtains of The Silk Weaver’s period detail and romance and you find a window on eighteenth-century London that, with its prejudice and divisions, is surprisingly pertinent today’

  KATE RIORDAN

  ‘I absolutely loved The Silk Weaver. Liz writes beautifully, and I adored the characters of Anna and Henri – their love was so delicately and believably evoked. The background motifs of the silks and the floral designs, and the political/social
context which made their relationship so difficult, are also brilliantly done. I really couldn’t wait to get back to it each evening’

  TRACY REES

  ‘An assured debut with a page-turning conclusion’

  Daily Express

  ‘A novel about the human spirit – Liz Trenow paints with able prose a picture of the prejudices that bind us and the love that sets us free . . . Splendid’

  PAM JENOFF

  ‘An intriguing patchwork of past and present, upstairs and downstairs, hope and despair’

  DAISY GOODWIN

  ‘The aftermath of war can be ferocious. This gentle and thoughtful story concentrates on the positives, without ignoring the destruction and pain of an epic conflict’

  Daily Mail

  UNDER A WARTIME SKY

  Liz Trenow is a former journalist who spent fifteen years working for regional and national newspapers, and BBC radio and television news, before turning her hand to fiction. Under a Wartime Sky is her seventh novel. She lives in East Anglia with her artist husband, and they have two grown-up daughters and three beautiful grandchildren.

  Find out more at www.liztrenow.com,

  or join her on Facebook.com/LizTrenow

  or Twitter @LizTrenow.

  By Liz Trenow

  The Last Telegram

  The Forgotten Seamstress

  The Poppy Factory

  The Silk Weaver

  In Love and War

  The Dressmaker of Draper’s Lane

  Under a Wartime Sky

  First published 2020 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition first published 2020 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  The Smithson, 6 Briset Street, London EC1M 5NR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5098-7985-4

  Copyright © Liz Trenow 2020

  Cover Images: Figure © Rekha Arcangel/Arcangel Images, Background © Clynt Garnham/Alamy, Foreground © WWPhotography/Alamy, Planes © Guy Bell/Alamy

  Epigraph here copyright © Louis Brown 1999

  The right of Liz Trenow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Illustrations by Hemesh Alles

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