by Lilian Harry
‘We used to go carol-singing round the village at home,’ Alison said. ‘And there used to be Christmas mummers’ plays as well. What else happens on Christmas Eve?’
‘We start our supper with a specially baked bread, with a holy picture on the top. It’s passed around the family, and as each person breaks a piece off, they forgive any hurts or grievances that have happened over the past year and wish each other happiness. Wigilia is a time for forgiveness and fresh starts.’
‘Christmas is here, as well,’ Alison said. ‘At least, it’s supposed to be. I’m not sure that it always works out that way.’
He laughed. ‘It can be a difficult time, I know. There are some members of the family who will never get on! But most of them try to, at least for this short time, and if there’s a quarrel that hasn’t been healed, it often helps to mend the breach. Well, after we have shared our optalek, and sung some carols, we begin our meal. There are eleven courses—’
‘Eleven?’ Alison repeated in astonishment. ‘How can you possibly eat all that?’
‘Well, we have fasted all day,’ he said. ‘But most of them don’t contain meat. We will have almond soup, and perhaps beetroot soup, and then fish and vegetables – sauerkraut in pastry and fried millet in cabbage leaves – very different from your vegetables. And many sweets, of course – children everywhere love sweets.’ He smiled at Hughie. ‘But again, they’re not much like yours. Poppyseed cakes, perhaps, and ginger cakes and sweet pastries. And fruits – dried fruits and oranges and apples. And plenty of wine and mead to drink.’
‘It sounds lovely,’ Alison said, thinking of pre-war English Christmases, with sherry before the turkey and a good burgundy or claret to drink with it. Then Christmas pudding with brandy butter, crackers to pull and maybe a piece of Stilton and a glass of port for her father afterwards. Pastry filled with sauerkraut didn’t have the same attraction somehow, but if it was what you were used to …
‘But what about the presents?’ Hughie asked impatiently. ‘You said Father Christmas comes and gives you presents.’
‘Ah yes, Father Christmas – the Starman. The children are all taken to another room to meet him. Perhaps their father has dressed up or perhaps it is the parish priest himself, who examines them on their catechism and asks about their behaviour over the past year. Some of the children may feel very uneasy about this!’ He grinned, and Alison surmised that he had had his own moments of discomfort. ‘But once this is over, he takes them back to the dining room and there they find the lanterns lit and the Christmas tree filled with presents and, good or bad, you may be sure that they are all well satisfied.’
‘I wish the Starman would come here,’ Hughie said wistfully.
‘Well, he did, didn’t he?’ Alison told him. ‘He came last night, while you were asleep, and filled your stocking.’
‘I’d like to see him, though. I’d like him to come to supper like he does at Uncle Stefan’s house.’
‘What happens then?’ Alison asked. ‘Do you have a party, with games and songs and stories?’
‘Oh yes. We gather round the fire and sing, and sometimes we visit each other with more presents, and at last we go to midnight mass. That’s the church service,’ he added to Hughie. ‘We go in our sleighs, all wrapped up warmly, and give thanks for all the good things we have.’
There was a moment’s silence. Alison saw his face settle into more sombre lines and knew that he must be thinking of those happy times, and wondering if his family were still able to celebrate Christmas – if they were even still alive to celebrate at all. She reached across and touched his hand, and he gave her a quick glance and a small smile.
‘Sing us some carols now,’ Hughie commanded, oblivious of the moment of sadness.
‘Hughie!’ Alison protested. ‘Uncle Stefan may not want to sing carols.’
Stefan got up and went to the piano. ‘I will play you some, very quietly so as not to wake your father.’ He sat down and began to pick out a tune, very softly, one note at a time.
‘Why, we know that tune!’ Alison exclaimed in surprise and, at the same moment, Hughie said, ‘It’s “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”!’
‘It’s a nursery rhyme,’ Alison explained to the Pole, and Hughie chanted it. ‘It never occurred to me that it might mean the Star over Bethlehem. And you have it too!’ It seemed to bring them even closer together.
‘Play another one,’ Hughie said, and this time the Pole began to sing as well, very softly.
‘Wsrod nocnej ciszy, Glos sie rozchodzi,
Wstancie pasterze, Bog sie wam rodzi.
Czym predzej sie wybierajcie,
Do Betlejem pospieszajcie,
Przywitac Pana!’
‘Do you know it in English?’ Alison asked, and he began the tune again.
‘Angels from heaven sang a thrilling psalm,
Waking the shepherds from their drowsy calm.
Rise, ye shepherds, hurry onwards,
Greet the newborn Son of David,
King Emmanuel!’
The song drifted into silence as his fingers caressed the last few notes from the keys, and he sat motionless for a moment. Alison glanced at his face and saw there the pain of all that he had lost and might never find again, and wished she had not asked him to talk about his memories. Then Hughie said, ‘I knew it was about the boy David!’ and they both laughed.
‘All the Christmas stories are about a boy,’ Stefan said, closing the piano lid, and as he turned Alison caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye and saw Andrew standing in the doorway.
‘Oh, darling! Did we wake you?’ She got up and went over to him, needing suddenly to make a link with her husband, to feel the warmth of his skin. ‘We meant to be quiet.’
‘No, I was waking anyway. It was rather nice, hearing the piano.’ He glanced at Stefan. ‘Good to see you. Are you staying for lunch?’
‘Not at all.’ The Polish pilot got up hastily. ‘We met by chance and your wife invited me in for coffee. But I won’t intrude any longer – you want your family to yourself now. And I’m poor company, especially at Christmas. I think too much, so the others tell me.’
‘It’s easy for them to say that,’ Andrew said. ‘Most of them can get home now and then, and even the Canadians can keep in touch with their families. You can’t.’ He came further into the room and dropped into an armchair, reaching out his arms for Hughie to scramble on to his lap. ‘You may as well stay. Some of the others will be coming in later – no point in you going all that way, only to turn round and come back again. And I’m sure Alison is providing us with a feast.’
‘A feast!’ she said with a rueful laugh. ‘Rabbit – that’s what we’re having. Again. But better than lots of people will be having, I’m sure.’
‘Yes,’ Stefan said. ‘Better than many, many people will be having.’
Behind his clouded eyes, Alison seemed to catch a glimpse of hungry people, driven from their homes, living in squalor and desperation, and she shivered.
As Andrew went out to the little garden shed to fetch vegetables from the store Alison kept there, she turned to him and said, ‘Thank you for telling us about your Christmases, Stefan.’ She hesitated for a moment, then went on, ‘At the party we had a couple of months ago, you said you’d like to come and talk to me. To tell me about your home and your family. You never did.’
‘I’ve come to your house many times since then,’ he said.
‘But not to talk. Not like that.’
‘It’s too much. I can’t burden others with my troubles.’
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she said, meeting his grey eyes. ‘I really wouldn’t mind. If it would help.’
There was a short pause. Then he said slowly, ‘It has helped, talking to you this morning. Yes. Perhaps I will do it again, one day.’
The back door opened and slammed again as Andrew and Hughie came in, bringing a gust of cold air with them. Stefan turned away, and Alison went to start the preparations for their Christmas dinn
er. Later, the other pilots would come and the day would grow merry, but she knew that she would not forget this hour of quiet, nor this glimpse she had been given of another kind of Christmas.
Ben was the only member of the squadron who didn’t take up Andrew’s invitation that Christmas Day.
He went to dinner that evening in the mess, sitting at the long tables with the other pilots without really noticing what he was eating – it could have been roast beef, turkey or fish and chips for all he was aware. He drank steadily, listened to some jokes and speeches without taking in anything that was said, and finally got up, pushed back his chair and excused himself.
Outside, the darkness was lightened by the moon which had enabled them to see their way to Germany last night. He stood for a few minutes in the narrow road, letting his eyes get accustomed to the stark black and white, and then turned to walk along beside the perimeter fence. He didn’t want to go inside the airfield – there was too much chance of bumping into someone he knew, even on Christmas night, or having to explain himself to some sentry. Instead, he stayed outside, trudging along the moonlit ribbon of roadway, his thoughts far away from the quiet shadows of the moors.
He had still not come to terms with his brother’s death, partly because his mother was unable to accept it. He had managed one more quick visit home a week ago, hitch-hiking part of the way, and found her moving through the days with a blank face. She had greeted him with a kiss, but her smile had been pallid and forced, as if it were no more than a crack in the face of a marble statue, and when he talked to her he wasn’t sure that she heard his voice. She seemed abstracted, as if listening for something – or someone – else, and when she replied it was with a cool, remote tone in her voice, as if she weren’t really interested in what she was saying.
She made Ben a cup of coffee and offered him a biscuit, talking all the time as if he were a stranger. He sat at the kitchen table with her, watching her pale face and noting the pink rims of her eyes, and felt as if a fist were clutching his heart.
‘Mum,’ he said at last, breaking into a flat-voiced monologue about the Sunday School Christmas party. ‘Mum, tell me how you are.’
‘I’m very well, thank you, Ben,’ she said after a moment during which he wondered if she’d heard him. ‘And how are you? Are they feeding you properly? You look thinner.’
They were all the things she always said to him, yet they sounded different now, as if they were lines in a play that she’d learned and was now repeating to his cue. She didn’t sound as if she wanted to know the answers.
He hadn’t known what to say to her. He had the feeling that she was made of thin glass and the slightest clumsy movement might break her. He mumbled something and she went back to what she had been saying. Little Sylvie, the evacuee at the Suttons’ farm, had won the prize for best attendance, but she wouldn’t be at the Christmas Eve carol service because she was going home to Portsmouth for the holiday … All the Bagshaw children had turned up for Sunday School on the last two Sundays before the party, to make sure they were invited, even though everyone knew they wouldn’t be seen in the church again until next November … Freddy Phillips had got into a fight with Micky Morrison and almost knocked over the Christmas tree … It had been even more difficult than usual, finding presents to give the children … Old Mr Merryweather had decided his arthritis was too bad to allow him to play Santa Claus this year, so Bert Mullins had done it instead …
It was all the sort of news she would have told him at any other time, but the flat voice in which it was delivered made it seem again like lines from a play – a play she wasn’t interested in and just wanted to have over and done with, so that she could go back to that deep place somewhere inside her, where she could hear and talk to that other person – the one she really wanted to hear.
‘Mum,’ he said again, reaching across the table for her hand. She looked down as if she had never seen hands before and he felt the fist squeeze a little more tightly around his heart. ‘Mum, please. Look at me. Talk to me.’
She met his eyes and he wished he hadn’t asked. It was like looking into two pools of emptiness, with nothing but desolation at their heart, and he felt suddenly as he had felt once as a little boy, when the night-light had blown out and he’d been left in the dark. ‘Mum, please!’ he repeated shakily. ‘I know we’ve lost Peter, but you’ve still got the rest of us – Ian and Alexie, and me. Doesn’t that help at all?’
The hollow grey eyes seemed to look right through him and then she said in that flat voice he was beginning to hate, ‘I know I’ve got the rest of you, Ben. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t. But I haven’t got Peter, have I? I haven’t got Peter, and I’m never going to see him again.’
Her pain tore at his heart. He shook his head helplessly, and said, ‘Oh, Mum, isn’t there anything at all I can do to make you feel better?’
The back door opened, quelling any words that she might have spoken, and his father came in. John Hazel-wood’s face lit up at the sight of his son and then the smile faded as he saw the look on his wife’s face. He shucked off his Wellington boots and came quickly across the cold brown quarry tiles in his socks and put his arms around her slender shoulders.
‘Olivia. I’m here, my dear.’ He looked at Ben. ‘It’s good to see you. How long can you stay?’
For once, Ben didn’t make the usual response, that what his father was really asking was ‘How soon are you going back?’ He said, ‘I’ve only got the day. I’ll have to catch the train this evening.’ He felt his eyes slide towards his mother again and saw that she was still sitting upright, making no acknowledgement of her husband’s hands on her shoulders. ‘Can we have a – a bit of a talk sometime, Dad?’
‘Of course. Come over to the church with me. I only slipped back for some papers.’ John Hazelwood glanced down at his wife. ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you, my dear? It’s a pity Jeanie’s not here to keep you company.’
With a small shock, Ben realised that he hadn’t given Jeanie a thought; he’d been so alarmed by the sight of his mother, so pale and remote, that he’d forgotten all about her and Hope. He looked around now, as if expecting her to step out from behind the dresser. ‘Where is she?’
‘She’s gone to Portsmouth for a day or two,’ Olivia said in the cold, dry voice that seemed so different from her usual soft, silvery tones. ‘Her mother and father wanted her to spend some time with them.’ She put her palm to her forehead and began to get up. ‘I think I’ll go and lie down. I’ve got such a headache …’
‘I’ll bring you a cup of tea,’ John suggested, but she shook her head.
‘I don’t want anything. I just want to sleep.’ She drifted out of the room and they heard her feet climbing slowly up the stairs.
Ben and John looked at each other. At last, Ben said, ‘Is she ill, Dad?’
John sighed and spread his hands on the table. ‘Not ill, no. Not in the usual sense. Just grieving. But I’m afraid—’ He stopped, as if he didn’t want to voice his fear, but Ben couldn’t let him leave it.
‘Afraid of what? Tell me, Dad. Please.’
‘I’m afraid she doesn’t know how to grieve properly. To let it out – to use it, even, to stop it going bad inside her. She’s holding it inside.’
‘She seems like a spring,’ Ben said. ‘Tightly wound up. I was almost afraid to say anything in case she snapped.’ He looked at his father’s kind, worried face. ‘What would happen, Dad, if she did snap?’
‘I don’t know. I’m afraid to think about it.’
For a few moments, both were silent. John looked at the table and Ben noticed that he hadn’t finished his coffee. He drank it, even though it was cold and unpleasant, and then asked, ‘What about church, Dad? Doesn’t that help?’
The silence this time was longer. Then John shook his head.
‘No, it doesn’t. It can’t.’ He looked up and met Ben’s eyes. ‘She doesn’t give it a chance to help. She won’t go inside the door. She’s lost he
r faith, Ben – lost it at the very moment when she needs it the most.’
Chapter Thirteen
Ben thought of this visit as he walked alone through the moonlit lanes of Harrowbeer on Christmas night. He had gone over to the church with his father and they’d discussed the situation without coming to any answer. ‘If we were in a Victorian novel,’ John had said, ‘I’d have said your mother was going into a “decline”, and there doesn’t seem to be a thing I can do about it. But I’m sure it will do her good to have you home for a few hours. We both appreciate your coming, Ben.’
Whether it had really done his mother any good, Ben didn’t know. She had drifted around the house like a ghost, lost in her own world. His father had assured him that his visit had helped, that she was better for it, but all Ben could do was wonder just how bad she had been before. Towards the end of the day, she had seemed to make an effort, smiling at him, joining in their conversation, and hugging him when he left. But as he walked away down the lane towards the railway station, he had felt again like a little frightened boy, crying because his mother had left him alone in the dark.
He’d written to Alexandra, asking what she thought about their mother, but there seemed to be nothing else he could do. Nothing, other than put all his energies, all his grief, into his flying. Nothing, but avenge his brother and all those friends he had lost, in the only way he knew.
All this while, he had been walking fast along the perimeter fence, with no real purpose or direction. He came to one of the gateways and hesitated, debating whether to go inside and call it a day. The moon shone brightly down from the cold, clear sky and he could see the outlines of the huts and hangars, the shapes of some of the planes and, away in the distance, the dark silhouettes of the hills with their rocky outcrops – Sheepstor, Cox Tor, Vixen Tor. There were no lights showing, but he knew that in some of the huts men would be playing cards, perhaps singing a few songs, celebrating their own Christmas. In his own mess, there would be someone to drink with, to share a joke with. He thought about it a moment longer, aware that the sentry must be watching him, and then, feeling suddenly weary of it all, sick of war and of everything that would remind him of it, he turned abruptly and walked away, the airfield at his back, still half inclined to call in at Andrew’s cottage after all.