Izzy's War

by Isla Dewar

  ‘Nobody,’ said Lorna.

  ‘You’ve got nothing I haven’t got. Come on.’

  The river was clear, tinged peaty brown. Looking down, Elspeth could see her legs treading water, small sparks and bubbles rising round them, green moss-covered rocks. She swam to the far side and beckoned Lorna to take the plunge. ‘Scaredy cat. I dare you.’

  Lorna never could resist a challenge. Besides, Elspeth looked serene and really rather beautiful swimming back and forth. What fun, Lorna thought. She took off her clothes slowly, folding each thing, leaving them in a polite pile. She kept her knickers on. She was a good girl, after all. She minced to the bank, tiny steps, arms crossed over her breasts. She was shy.

  At the water’s edge, she paused, wondering how best to get into the water. The gentle slide in from the bank, or the abandoned leap into centre stream? The leap won. She launched herself, screaming, from the bank, sending a deluge of water into the air as she landed. The screaming resumed once she surfaced. ‘It’s freezing.’

  Elspeth swam round her. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  Lorna gasped, sucked in air, flailed about and asked if there would be any fish about.

  ‘Not since you arrived,’ said Elspeth. ‘They’ll have scarpered, thinking a whale’s come to get them.’

  They moved in circles round one another, from time to time one would skim the surface with her arm sending a shower sparkling over the other. They lay on their backs, kicking up a cascade with their feet. Elspeth dived, sped along the bottom of the river, watching waving plants. She pushed her way back up, burst through the surface, heaving air into her lungs and shoved her hair out of her eyes. She looked round at the thickly treed slopes and saw a movement among the branches about halfway up.

  ‘Sometimes, when I come here, I get the feeling someone’s watching,’ she said.

  Lorna looked round. ‘There’s nobody.’ Then, she called out, ‘Hello, hello, is there anybody there? Are you spying on us?’ Her yell went ringing up through the trees. ‘Nope, nobody there.’

  Elspeth thought it time to go. ‘Best get back before it gets dark.’

  They headed for the bank.

  ‘You know what we haven’t got?’ asked Elspeth.

  ‘No.’

  ‘A towel.’

  They dried themselves roughly with their dungarees. Dressed, wriggling damp bodies into damp clothes, and headed back to the hut.

  Elspeth took her toilet bag across to the ablutions hut. She brushed her teeth, noting that her tin of Gibb’s toothpaste was running out, washed her face, then carefully rubbed Pond’s cream onto her cheeks. She changed into her pyjamas – men’s striped pyjamas, they were warm – and walked back over the duckboards.

  She hung a tilley lamp beside her bed and turned the letter Duncan had given her over in her hands. It seemed to be from Avril, but the writing on the envelope wasn’t hers. She opened it.

  My dear Elspeth,

  I hope you don’t mind my calling you by your first name when we haven’t met. But Avril spoke of you so often, I feel I know you.

  I’m afraid I have very bad news. Avril, my lovely daughter, died last week. We buried her yesterday. As you probably know, she had TB and was very ill by the time we lost her. There was hardly anything of her when she finally went. She was so pale and thin, it broke my heart to see her.

  We visited her most days at the sanatorium, but, of course, we were not allowed near her. She was on one side of a glass screen, my husband and myself on the other. It is a cruel life, I sometimes think. I would so have loved to hold Avril in my arms before she died. How dreadful it is not to be able to comfort the sick. Especially when the one who is sick is someone you love.

  Anyway, I won’t detain you any longer, dear Elspeth. I just wanted to let you know about Avril. And to tell you how much she liked you and enjoyed your company up there in the wilds. I don’t know why, but she claimed that her days in the forest were the happiest of her life. I often think of you girls working in the forest, doing your bit for the war. I hope that from time to time you will spare a kindly thought for our dear Avril.

  Yours sincerely,

  Morag Osborne

  Elspeth put down the letter. ‘Avril’s dead.’

  Cries of, ‘No,’ and ‘She can’t be.’

  ‘When did she die?’ asked Lorna.

  Elspeth told her last week. ‘Her mother wrote this letter the day after the funeral.’

  Lorna took the letter, read it and handed it to Tricia, who, in turn, handed it to Dorothy. Slowly it was passed round till everyone had seen it.

  The atmosphere turned black. Minutes before, the girls had been quietly pottering, preparing for bed. Now, they stared at one another in gloomy disbelief.

  ‘Only weeks ago she was running with the logs,’ said someone.

  ‘She was only nineteen, maybe twenty,’ said Lorna. ‘That’s too young to die. I hate death. Why do people have to die?’

  Elspeth didn’t know the answer to that.

  Tricia said they should have a memorial service. ‘Tomorrow morning, before we go to work. Someone should say a few words about Avril and we’ll sing a song.’

  ‘Duncan Bowman wouldn’t like that,’ said Lorna.

  ‘To hell with him,’ said Elspeth.

  ‘He might dock our pay.’ Lorna worried about this.

  ‘If he does,’ said Elspeth, ‘we’ll go on strike.’

  ‘Yes.’ A ripple of rebellion shifted round the room. ‘Strike.’

  ‘We have a right to mourn one of our fellow lumberjills.’

  In the end, though, their dreams of rebellion came to nothing.

  After breakfast, the girls had ignored the call to climb on the trailer that would take them into the forest. They gathered in a circle and listened as Elspeth spoke of Avril. ‘A good and true friend. An honour to have known her . . .’

  They nudged one another, watching in quiet amazement as Duncan joined them. They sneaked shy peaks at him as he took off his cap. How odd he looked without it, they thought.

  ‘Let’s have a minute’s silence,’ Elspeth said. ‘We’ll have a quiet word with God, as we remember her.’ She wasn’t sure about God. She wasn’t sure about praying. But she thought the other girls might want a moment’s communion, and a chance to convey good thoughts about their old friend to whomever might be up there would be comforting. They sang a thin wavering rendition of ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’. Only Elspeth knew all the words. After that she bowed her head and said, ‘Thank you for bringing Avril into our lives. She was a wonderful lead girl, may her whistle never be silent. May she forever be at peace. Amen.’

  The girls gathered their axes and trudged down the track to the trailer, Elspeth behind them. Duncan caught her arm. The cap was back in place.

  ‘That was a grand thing to do,’ he said. ‘A bit of a service for the dead, helps us all.’ He smiled.

  It was the same stiff upwards movement of the lips he’d given her when he’d turned up to stop the party – a begrudging shifting of rarely used muscles. Elspeth’s stomach turned over. She had a niggling notion that this man’s approval was not something she wanted.

  But she smiled back, picked up her axe and joined Lorna on the back of the trailer.

  ‘I’m a terrible person,’ said Lorna. ‘I didn’t think about Avril at all when we had that silence. I didn’t pray or anything. All I thought was how funny Duncan Bowman looked without his cap. Sort of naked and vulnerable. I wondered if he kept it on in bed.’

  ‘Me, too,’ said Elspeth.

  She vowed that the state of Duncan’s head at night, cap on or cap off, was something she would never discover.

  Chapter Twenty

  You Owe Me

  IT WAS A time of rumours. Hamish knew that. There were spies everywhere. In the village, strangers were treated with suspicion. Gracie Fields was a traitor. She’d been accused of taking her money out of the country and fleeing to Canada when her husband, an Italian, should have been intern
ed. Hamish loved Gracie Fields and doubted this was true. There was a rumour that the Germans had built a decoy airfield entirely out of wood and the Allies had sent a plane over to drop a wooden bomb on it. Hamish was convinced this couldn’t be true. Why bother? Why let them know that we know their airfield is a decoy? He shoved his hands into his pockets and sighed. Rumours and sex during wartime – he supposed it took people’s minds off their worries.

  He knew, for sure, that the rumours about him weren’t true. He was not, as the village gossips said, a German sympathiser. He had simply said that German mothers would be weeping as British mothers were also weeping. But there had been an intake of breath across the congregation when his words came out. Perhaps he’d said it too passionately. All he’d meant was that war was ruinous. The innocent suffered. He was sure that there must be Germans who disagreed with Hitler.

  But it had been taken the wrong way. On their way out of church that Sunday, one or two people had refused to shake his hand. In the days that followed, whispers had spread. He was not just a German sympathiser, he was a conscientious objector. He was not a man to be trusted.

  Now, when he walked through the village, there were some who turned away from him. They refused to say hello. Some people stared at him in astonishment. It broke his heart. He’d been told the Kirk Session was meeting soon to discuss his position. He feared they might ask him to resign. He could hardly believe it.

  After all this time, all his work, this had happened. Twenty-six years he’d been here, building up his parish, helping people with their troubles, welcoming them into his home, offering tea and advice. At first, Joan had hated it. The manse was cold. It was the biggest house she’d lived in. She was a city girl, missed streets, traffic and shops.

  They’d both come from poor backgrounds. He’d been the first in his family to go to university. He’d studied theology at Edinburgh. Lived in one room, read his books at night wearing a coat and gloves, it had been so cold. He’d met Joan at the church he’d attended where she was a Sunday school teacher. At the time she’d been living with her parents and three sisters in a two-roomed flat. When they’d moved here, thinking that if they had children, the country air would be good for them, Joan had wandered the manse saying they didn’t need so much space, so many rooms. They should take in orphans or homeless people, she’d said. But they hadn’t.

  At first locals had been wary. They didn’t immediately warm to strangers from the city. But as time passed, Hamish’s sermons moved from being quiet lectures on loving your neighbour to passionate rants about paying for your sins. This, he learned, was what was wanted. Parishioners liked to have an hour or so of feeling awful about themselves once a week before they went back to their normal comings and goings.

  Then Izzy had come along and Hamish’s life got sunny. God, he loved the girl. Watched her grow into a tomboy. He played with her, danced with her, read her stories. Now she was gone from him. She lived her own life, did what she wanted. Sometimes, he wondered if she thought about him at all.

  He wondered what she would think of all this. She might be shocked. She might sympathise with him. Whatever, she’d make up her own mind. That was how she was.

  He’d decided he hardly knew his daughter. She’d been so shy, so unsure of herself. But she was changing. He’d noticed a new confidence in her when she last visited. She’d gained a certain poise.

  She was a stranger in the village where she now lived. He had an uneasy feeling that she hadn’t been telling the truth about what she did. Izzy is flying these planes, he thought. Awkward in company though she is, she’s wilful, stubborn. She wouldn’t want to tell pilots where to fly. She’d want to be up there doing it herself. Oh my, he thought, the little minx, she’s just like me. She goes her own way, does exactly what she wants to do, no matter what anyone says. What did the people in Skimpton make of these young women who flew Spitfires and of his Izzy in her blue uniform?

  In Skimpton, Izzy was a star. People doffed their hats, smiled, said ‘Good morning’, ‘Hello’ and ‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’ She had broken a social barrier and was no longer one of them lady pilots, an outsider. These days, everyone called her Izzy and seemed delighted to find her walking down the same street as they were. She was a heroine. The lady pilot who’d saved the life of Eddie Hicks.

  This shamed her. She’d done nothing except punch a man she’d thought was dying in the stomach. She didn’t deserve her glory.

  ‘You just left me there,’ she said to Jacob. ‘I was kneeling in the road and I turned round and you were gone.’

  Jacob shrugged. ‘What was I meant to do?’

  ‘Stay around,’ said Izzy.

  Late afternoon, they were in the car pool. Izzy had finished her day’s work and was about to go home. Jacob was polishing the Humber, but he didn’t stop to look at her. He just kept slowly, deliberately buffing the bonnet. Sleeves rolled up, sweat patches at his armpits; it was hot.

  ‘You want me to get the sack, then?’ he asked. He kept his back to her, still working up a sheen on the car.

  ‘No,’ said Izzy. ‘Of course I don’t.’

  ‘I was driving too fast, took my eyes off the road and knocked a man down. It’s my fault. I didn’t want to get the sack, so I drove away.’

  ‘You should get the sack for driving away.’

  He admitted that. ‘But you’re not going to tell, are you?’ He turned, leaned on the car, hands in his pockets and smiled at her.

  No, she wasn’t going to tell.

  ‘I parked round the corner and walked back to check everything was all right.’

  He had been standing in the darkness, collar up, observing as Izzy leaned over the body lying on the road. He’d been anxious at first, shoulders tense, as he’d peered into the gloom. All he could see were shapes. He thought he’d killed a man. To his horror, he’d seen Izzy punch the corpse. God, he’d thought, what is she doing? That’s not what you do with a dying man. He’d wanted to scream at her to stop.

  To his amazement, the dead man had sat up, gasped for air and complained loudly about the blow to his stomach. Jacob had laughed. Hand over mouth, stifling giggles. He’d seen Edith, the ops officer, come along and stand at the kerbside, demanding to know what exactly Izzy was up to, ‘punching an injured man’.

  Izzy had said she thought that was what you did to people who’d passed out. Edith shrilly said, ‘I don’t think that’s at all right, my dear. But it seems to have done the trick.’ They’d helped the poor breathless man to his feet and, propping him up between them, helped him home.

  Jacob had slipped back to the car, examined it carefully by torchlight, and found nothing – not a scratch. He realised that whoever he’d hit couldn’t have been badly hurt. His victim must have slid to the ground and lain in a drunken coma between the wheels as the car cruised over him.

  ‘You should thank me,’ he said to Izzy. ‘You’ve been declared a heroine.’ He spread his palms, unable to believe the absurdity of it. ‘There was a glowing report about your quick-thinking actions on the noticeboard. “A shining example”, it said.’

  Izzy blushed. Edith had posted a report about ‘one of our brave pilot’s quick-thinking action’ on the notice-board just below the official report on Dick Wills’ death and the order that boots were not to be worn while conducting personal business. Izzy cringed every time she saw it. She’d scurry past it, eyes down.

  ‘People in the village look up to you,’ Jacob said. ‘They’re saying you saved a man’s life.’

  Izzy said, ‘You know I did no such thing.’

  ‘Mrs Brent made you a batch of scones and gave you half a dozen of her best brown eggs.’

  Izzy couldn’t argue with that. It was true.

  ‘I bet all sorts of good things are coming your way,’ said Jacob.

  Izzy shrugged, she didn’t want him to know the benefits her new reputation as a heroine had brought.

  Eddie Hicks, the man whose life she was supposed to have saved, was a popu
lar man. He’d been called up at the start of the war, but had been sent home when the army doctor had discovered his heart murmur. His wife, Susie, worked for her father at the local general store – a low-ceilinged shop that sold everything from paraffin to cabbages. Now, whenever Izzy went in to buy her weekly two-ounce allowance of oatmeal for her porridge, she was greeted with a smile, a wink and an extra scoopful. Her money was always accepted, but sometimes her ration book was waved away. ‘We’ll not be needing that.’

  For a while this had puzzled Izzy, till Mrs Brent had told her there were ways to get round rationing. ‘But, there are always ways to get round things that don’t suit you.’ It seemed that Susie spent one evening a week cutting up newspapers into ration-shaped squares. These she slipped in among the regular coupons that she sent to the Ministry of Food. She reckoned it would be impossible to check the millions and millions of coupons that must be sent in every week, and so it was unlikely anybody would look at hers. All her favourite people in the village got the smile-and-wink treatment.

  ‘You owe me,’ said Jacob. ‘You should be grateful to me.’

  Izzy said she owed him nothing.

  ‘Of course you owe me,’ said Jacob. ‘You are reaping the rewards of the accident. I was driving the car. It was really my accident. You should share your good fortune. You owe me. One day I will come to you and expect you to return the favour.’

  Izzy was shocked, unsure of herself, swamped with self-doubt. Could he be right? Surely, she owed him nothing. ‘Cheek,’ she said. ‘You ran away.’

  ‘I ran away and let you take all the glory. Now, you owe me. If you don’t see the logic in that, it’s only because you are a woman. Men know the rules. You return favours.’

  ‘You have done me no favours,’ said Izzy.

  Jacob shouted, ‘Yes I have. You know I have!’ A plane roared overhead, the garage trembled. The thunder of engines drowned Jacob’s voice. He made himself understood nonetheless. He pointed at her. ‘You owe –’ he pointed at himself ‘– me.’

  Chapter Twenty-one