In my mind I heard my father say – when he taught me, aged five and starting school, how to fight – ‘Chin up, my girl, back to the wall and bring those fists up,’ and now I imagined I was about to face an invading German. I looked up at the sky, already a brilliant blue, picturing German soldiers parachuting down disguised as nuns (or so the newspapers warned), and what I would do, armed with perhaps more than my fists, maybe a carving knife, to one if he dared to land in the field before me. I would disable him and snatch his gun and cry, ‘Hände hoch oder ich schieße!’, this last courtesy of the Teach Yourself German I acquired from Brixton Library during the half term week. Hands up or I’ll shoot.
I’ll definitely do German in the sixth form, I decided, so I can spy on them if their invasion succeeds.
The absurdity of these thoughts brought a wry smile to my face and I stood, ready to retrace my steps back to my billet and thinking about the day ahead. Asking around my year if anyone fancied going on a picnic on my birthday, I had been pleasantly surprised when several girls eagerly assented.
Becky was awake when I returned, already half-dressed and planning to look for me.
‘Did you guess where I might be?’ I asked.
‘Well, as those trees are where you always seem to head when you want to get away from it all, I don’t think it would have taken me long to find you,’ Becky replied with a warm smile. ‘What is it, that you’re sixteen at last but you wish you could stay fifteen forever, or you’re feeling sad to be away from home, or,’ and she leaned forward conspiratorially, raising an eyebrow, ‘you have a beau with whom you were keeping a secret assignation? You’re old enough to get married now.’
‘Only with my parents’ consent,’ I laughed. An image of James’ smiling, chiselled face rose before me.
Becky chuckled. ‘A secret beau called James, perhaps, the one you told me about at half term? Aha, you’re positively beetroot! Or your friend Bill? Or,’ she added hastily, seeing my sudden frown, ‘perhaps you’ll have a chance at the dance with a St Birstan’s boy. Hey, I like that, it rhymes. Chance at the dance,’ she repeated to herself.
‘No chance at the dance,’ I retorted, although I was looking forward to the opportunity the forthcoming end of exams dance would give me to use my ballroom dancing skills acquired over many terms’ dancing lessons partnered by various fellow St Martin’s girls. Only problem was that, being tall, I tended to have to dance the man’s role so I would have to think twice as hard to translate the steps into the lady’s moves.
‘Well, anyway,’ said Becky, ‘I was coming to look for you to wish you a happy birthday, and,’ she continued, diving into her suitcase beneath her bed, ‘to give this to you.’
I took the small package from her. It was wrapped in decorated brown paper and tied with a thin pink ribbon.
‘What pretty paper,’ I said. ‘Did you decorate it yourself?’ The paper sported little butterfly motifs randomly drawn and coloured in. ‘How sweet of you.’ I opened the package and found a small book entitled The Impressionist Series: Monet.
‘Oh,’ I squealed, ‘what a lovely book, how kind of you. Where did you get it?’
‘Charing Cross Road. I got it last week during half term break. It’s second hand,’ she added a little abashed, ‘I’m sorry, that’s all I could afford.’
‘It’s perfect,’ I breathed, flicking through the pages and stopping to admire the black and white reproductions of some of Monet’s most famous works, the ‘Water Lily Pond’ and ‘The Woman in the Green Dress’.
‘And here’s your card,’ added Becky, handing over an envelope which I opened and found a home made card with a butterfly theme too.
‘You’ve really made my birthday special,’ I told her, giving her a quick thank you hug.
Halfway through our toast a rat-tat-tat sounded on the front door knocker. ‘The milkman?’ speculated Mrs Grice with a frown as it was still rather early for someone to come visiting, and she made her way to the hall, closing the living room door behind her.
Straining our ears to the low murmurings at the front door, we jumped a little as Mrs Grice burst into the living room with a flustered,
‘Oh, Becky dear, I am so sorry, your father’s been taken very ill and your mother’s asking for you to go to her straight away.’
Mr Parker hovered in the hall behind her. Becky and I looked at each other in alarm. For Becky’s mother to have rung the one contact number she had other than St Birstan’s School, and so early in the morning, the situation must be very serious indeed.
Becky rose quickly from the table and moved to the door.
‘Mr Parker,’ she said, ‘did my mother say what’s wrong?’
‘No, Miss,’ Mr Parker replied, clearly uncomfortable at being the bearer of bad news. He was slightly breathless, as if he had run here. ‘Just that your father has been rushed to St Thomas’ Hospital and your mother wants you to meet her there as soon as possible.’
‘Goodness, it must be serious,’ said Becky.
‘How terrible for you, especially after the happy news of your brother’s baby,’ I sympathised.
Becky turned to me. ‘Oh, Pat, what if I have to miss the revision tests next week.’
We looked at each other in horror.
‘If it’s really serious you’d not be able to concentrate anyway,’ I said, a proper Job’s comforter I realised as I said the words, and hastened to make amends. ‘I’ll walk with you to the station.’
‘Oh, you don’t have to do that,’ Becky protested but I thought how I would feel if summoned by my mother under such circumstances and insisted.
Becky hastily crammed a few belongings into the little case unpacked only six days earlier and we hastened to the station. We took the short cut along the millpond footpath and made it in little over thirty-five minutes.
‘I’m so sorry to miss your birthday picnic,’ said Becky as we waited for the train.
‘Don’t worry about it, you’ve enough on your plate,’ I replied. ‘We can have a picnic any day. Your father’s more important now.’
I waved her goodbye, remonstrating silently with myself for selfishly resenting the intrusion of her father’s illness into my birthday plans. Becky had a naturally happy and bubbly personality and made a good companion. I was going to miss my best friend on my birthday.
The sun beat hard on my back as I returned. I stood awhile beside the millpond, marvelling at the stillness of the air and the quietness of my surroundings broken only by the humming of the bees in the wildflower-strewn hedgerows and the cawing of the crows on their treetop perches. Swans and geese swam towards me like a mini flotilla with ducks their pilot boats and I apologised to them for the absence of bread. A couple of geese mounted the bank ahead of me honking loudly and I thrust through them and hurried on.
Janet also missed my birthday picnic, away at a family wedding. The remaining nine of us gathered with our bikes outside the Evacuation Distribution Centre at the pre-arranged time of one o’clock. A ragged chorus of ‘Happy Birthday, Pat,’ accompanied the girls’ arrivals and by one fifteen we were all ready. We sped off northwards towards Oxshott Heath, a long straggly ribbon of pumping legs and billowing skirts, our bicycle baskets laden with bread and tinned spam and a few luxuries such as cake, boiled eggs and early tomatoes contributed by the farmer’s wife with whom Gwen was billeted.
Swinging off the road near the War Memorial at Oxshott Heath we pushed our bikes up the slope and stopped a while at the Memorial to admire the view south west across the Surrey hills. I originally intended us to picnic there, but the sun was beating down, the air still and heavy with the sweet scents of summer and the stickiness of another very hot day, so I brought out a sketch I had made for this very contingency from Mr Grice’s old ordnance survey map of the locality. A lake lay perhaps a mile or so to the northwest. ‘I think I’ve found somewhere to cool off,’ I said. ‘We’ll eat our picnic there. Follow me, girls.’
A short way along the track northwards,
before it plummeted downhill again, I remembered the smart second hand Box Brownie, an early birthday present from my parents the week before, resting under the food in my bicycle basket. Drawing to a halt, I ushered the girls together. As the sun beat down, Gwen, Kitty, Daisy, Nora, Vera and Joyce lined up in a clearing, some with arms around others’ waists, to form a standing back row, while Muriel and Fiona knelt in the grasses in front of them. A solemn moment and made only the more poignant by Becky’s unexpected absence, Muriel and Fiona instinctively sitting to the centre and one side, leaving a space in the cameo where Becky should have been.
‘Now a photo of the birthday girl,’ said Fiona, taking the camera and I obligingly stood still, squinting a little under the sun’s brilliance.
Retrieving our bicycles, we bumped steeply downhill and cycled along a wide track to Sandy Lane. Mistaking a driveway entrance for the staggered trackway continuation shown on the map, I took us along the drive and past a silent, apparently unoccupied property. We pushed through a gap in the rear shrubbery to undulating forest slopes, aiming to rejoin the trackway proper from an oblique angle. Silver birches and oaks gave way to pine trees which stretched high above us creating a cool canopy, the unadorned trunks standing like paraded soldiers as we headed on northwestwards, pushing our bicycles around the trees. Worrying that we had missed the lake altogether, I was relieved to encounter the narrow but defined trackway that continued northwest and we sped on our bicycles over undulating ground, brushing ferns with our ankles as we skirted further deciduous foliage with sprouting bushes cloaking oaks, elms and more silver birches. Pressing on through ranks of pines again, I gave a cry of triumph as I spotted tall reeds growing in the distance. Reaching the Black Pond’s embanked western shore we discarded our bicyles and sank onto fallen tree trunks and hastily thrown picnic blankets, a pair of old curtains lent to Gwen by the farmer’s wife. Old, gnarled oak trees shaded us while the sunlight sparkled and danced on the waters, the lake’s surface broken into V shapes in the wake of ducks advancing on us like miniature battleship convoys.
‘Sorry, duckies, we’re too hungry to spare you much,’ apologised Nora, as we dived into our baskets and retrieved our packages. I also laid out a tablecloth, brought from home the previous weekend, on the bare black soil that I presumed gave the lake its name. We set out our shared contributions to the picnic on the tablecloth and settled down, at first feasting silently apart from murmurings of ‘Mmm, I love this real egg,’ and ‘This cake’s delicious, who made it?’ Hunger and thirst assuaged, cards and little birthday gifts were presented to me, a couple of small bars of soap, handkerchiefs, a lipstick, a costume jewellery broach and other trinkets. We swapped stories of our Whitsun break adventures, or, in some cases, the lack of them.
‘It was really boring at home,’ moaned Muriel, running her hands through her curly auburn hair, a self-deprecating grimace on her freckled face. ‘My mother wouldn’t let me go out much in case Jerry decided to pop over the Channel, as if he was interested in anything except bombing the hell out of our boys over there.’
‘You poor thing,’ sympathised Kitty. ‘I had to do the rounds of relatives. Frankly, I’d rather sit at home watching paint dry.’
‘Oh, that’s just what I did,’ laughed Nora, tossing her dark plait over her shoulder. ‘My mother decided to have our downstairs redecorated. I ask you, just when I got home for the hols! A good job the weather improved as the week went on, as the smell of the paint was overwhelming. We had so many windows open at night with no lights on we might as well as bivouacked down in the garden!’
We all chuckled and Gwen, who had spread herself out flat on the ground like a star, drew her legs and arms back to her slender body and sat up, hugging her knees, asking me, ‘So, Pat, what did you get up to last week?’
‘Ah ha,’ pounced Vera, ‘she’s blushing! Go on, Pat, who is he?’
The girls crowded in, chins in hands, and I thought, I’ve already hidden enough family secrets to last a lifetime, I’m going to have to be better at keeping my own cards close to my chest.
‘Really,’ I protested, ‘it’s nothing. An airman was just being friendly, that’s all.’
‘Friendly!’ Vera pounced again. ‘How friendly? Who is he? How did you meet him?’
I hesitated, not knowing whether my mother would be happy for me to tell anyone about her latest employment. Throughout my childhood and youth I was sworn to secrecy that my mother worked as a cleaner, sometimes doing two jobs in the same day, one early morning and the other late into the evening after she’d given my father his breakfast and Nan and I our tea, and seen my father off to his night work. Nan, working at a laundry during the day until she retired, kept me company in the evenings. It simply was not the done thing for a housewife to work because she had to, not if you wanted to rise in society and claim a place at a middle class table. None of my contemporaries whose fathers were bankers or doctors or solicitors or accountants had mothers who worked. In some professions a woman even lost her job when she got married; there were no married women teachers in schools. But with the 1929 Wall Street crash, my father had been forced to take a one third cut in wages just to keep his job and my mother had been forced into menial work. Our family fortunes, little as they had been, never recovered.
But there’s a war on, and lots of women are now working, and some are even doing men’s jobs.
‘We-ell,’ I began slowly, choosing my words carefully, ‘my mother’s decided to do something to help the war effort, and helps out,’ I hesitated to say works, ‘at the Beaver Club just off Trafalgar Square. It’s for Canadian servicemen when they’re in London on leave.’
‘You mean Canadian soldiers?’ queried Fiona.
I nodded. ‘And airmen. And presumably sailors too.’
Fiona continued, ‘We have Canadian soldiers staying near Leatherhead. I know there are Polish and Czech airmen over here but that’s because Hitler invaded their countries.’
‘Canadians have recently been joining the RAF and some have formed their own RAF squadron apparently, and one Royal Canadian Air Force squadron’s here already and now a second will be coming over too,’ I explained. ‘I wouldn’t have known that if my mother wasn’t,’ I hesitated again and jettisoned working for ‘attending the Beaver Club. James says he’s meeting Canadian airmen already over here and preparing for more to come.’
Vera pounced a third time, ‘So, James, is it? You’re on first name terms?’
‘Well, not really, only it seemed polite.’
‘So tell us,’ persisted Vera, ‘how did you get talking to him. Did he give you the eye? Or did you throw yourself at him?’
‘Of course not,’ I protested vigorously, to an echo of my father’s admonitions the previous Christmas holidays about not leading young men on. ‘I went to the Club to meet my mother and I bumped into him. Well, he bumped into me. Well, we bumped into each other.’
‘Bumped into each other?’ shrieked Vera, her stubby arms flailing, while Nora chortled, ‘So you did throw yourself at him.’
Vera persisted, ‘How do you just happen to bump into each other?’
I flushed. ‘We-ell, he was looking one way and going another and I was looking back and he came round the corner of the steps just as I got there and we collided and I fell down and he helped me up…’
‘Helped you up?!!’
I thought, good job Vera’s not near any glass.
‘Then I said I was going to the Nash Gal to check on the concert timetable for the summer, and he said he had just arrived in London on his way to Croydon that evening and had just a few hours spare for sightseeing and if I was going to the Nash Gal would I allow him to accompany me and, well, one thing led to another…’
Daisy leapt in with, ‘One thing led to what?’
‘Oh,’ I recovered, ‘I don’t mean that sort of thing. I mean, I took him to the Nash Gal, and he wanted to see the Palace, and after that Westminster, and we went back to the Square and stopped off at the Lyons
opposite Charing Cross station for afternoon tea. Then he had to go…’
‘So,’ breathed Daisy, ‘when will you see him again?’
‘Goodness, I’ve no idea, probably never,’ I shrugged, looking across the lake and not meeting anyone’s eye and certainly not mentioning the promise he had extracted from me to correspond with him via the Club.
I turned to Daisy. ‘I was just being polite to an overseas visitor.’
‘Polite?’ shrieked Vera, bouncing on the spot. ‘Polite is saying, “Good bye, sir, nice to have met you”, not walking the streets with him.’
‘It wasn’t that sort of walking the streets,’ I snorted indignantly. ‘Besides, my mother knew he was accompanying me to the Nash Gal. It’s not as if we were anywhere other than in public at all times.’
‘How old is he?’ This was Vera again.
‘Oh, ancient,’ I replied. ‘Must be, I don’t know, maybe somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, I’d guess.’
‘But what was he like?’ persisted Vera.
‘Well, he was very polite and personable, I suppose.’
‘No,’ Vera’s voice squeaked off the end of the scale, ‘I mean, what did he look like. Is he handsome? A Clark Gable, or an Errol Flynn, or a Tyrone Power?’
I hesitated, picturing the straight nose, the square jaw with its central dimple, the deep blue eyes and the almost blond, with a hint of auburn, short back and sides looking down from a near six-foot height. And the quirky tilt to his lips when he smiled and the laughter creases at the side of his eyes.
‘More Wayne Morris,’ I decided. ‘We-ell, somewhere between Wayne Morris and a sandy-haired Cary Grant.’
‘Now there’s a combination,’ said Nora dreamily.
The Keeping of Secrets Page 9