A Woman's War

by S Block

  ‘Steph?’

  Steph turned and found herself facing both Sarah and Frances, wrapped up in winter overcoats, gloves, and hats. They smiled a little too brightly as Steph turned, as if to signal extreme good intent.

  ‘How are you, Steph?’ asked Frances.

  Generally, Steph would have taken Frances’s query as an inconsequential opening to a perfectly ordinary exchange. But she could tell from their faces that the two sisters had not come for an amiable chat over a cup of tea. Frances really wanted to know how Steph was. Steph recalled Sarah had been in Brindsley’s when the applause had started.

  ‘Been better,’ Steph said, smiling bravely.

  Frances could see from the dark circles beneath Steph’s eyes that her friend clearly hadn’t been sleeping well.

  ‘We’ve come to talk to you about what happened,’ Sarah said. ‘I think people have read the article in the Echo, and heard the interview on the BBC, and assume everything is hunky-dory. But I didn’t believe that was the case when I saw you dash out of Brindsley’s.’

  Steph had neither prepared for nor wanted this conversation, and to some extent felt ambushed into it.

  ‘I didn’t ask to be interviewed either time,’ she said. ‘They came and persuaded me it would be for the best. I didn’t imagine people reading the newspaper, or listening to the wireless. I was just glad to get it over with and thought that might be the end of it. When Stan came home we even tried to get the article stopped. Stan telephoned the Echo, but they said it was too late.’

  Frances nodded. ‘Of course. From their perspective, they had the most marvellous story. They weren’t going to let that go. I expect they sold a lot more copies that day, because of you.’

  ‘No idea. Stan thought so.’

  ‘It is a remarkable story, Steph’ said Frances. ‘Truly remarkable. I know you won’t thank me for saying this, but everyone in the village is extraordinarily proud of you.’

  ‘Well, they shouldn’t be,’ said Steph dolefully.

  ‘You forget how terrified everyone was in the days leading up to it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Steph, unwilling to soften her harsh view of her actions. ‘But it would have been better if it had ended almost any way other than how it did.’

  ‘The only way it could have ended worse,’ said Sarah, ‘is if Stanley or yourself had been killed instead of the pilot.’

  ‘May we come in?’ Frances asked. ‘We have a proposition we would like to put to you.’

  Steph ushered the two women inside the farmhouse and put the kettle on the stove.

  The proposition Sarah and Frances had come to put to Steph concerned her new status in the village. Frances presented it matter-of-factly.

  ‘While the village considers you a hero for your action against the German pilot, saving your son from a potentially lethal attack, and possibly saving future casualties too, you don’t see yourself the same way, and want nothing more than for normal life to resume as quickly as possible. Is that about right?’

  Steph nodded agreement.

  ‘The two positions are fundamentally incompatible,’ Frances continued. ‘The village has a strong desire to express its appreciation, Steph, irrespective of whether you want it to. They are responding to an incredible story which you just happen to be a part of – so they are responding to you in the same way. Merely telling everyone you want to forget all about what happened won’t make them be able to leave you to get on with life and put it behind you.’

  Steph knew that Frances understood better than she did how large groups of people behaved. Sarah took up the baton from her sister.

  ‘If the desire to celebrate you goes unexpressed it will continue to bubble under the surface. People will watch you from a distance, and talk about you behind your back. Not unpleasant things from their perspective but if you shy away from it they won’t feel able to be as open with you as they were before it happened. And it will simply continue because they won’t have been able to express their feelings about it all.’

  ‘Like a blister that’s bubbling up,’ Steph offered. ‘Needs pricking.’

  Frances looked at Sarah for agreement, and Sarah nodded.

  ‘Let them express their goodwill towards you, Steph, and this will settle down much, much quicker than if you don’t. I promise you.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We propose that you allow the WI to make a special presentation to you at our next meeting, allowing the women to express their admiration and gratitude for what you did.’

  ‘You might think about offering a small question and answer session at the end of it,’ added Frances. ‘To allow their curiosity to become completely sated.’

  Steph looked at the two women for a few moments. She felt the same sadness rise that she’d felt almost every waking hour since the moment she pulled the trigger of the farm’s shotgun and ended the pilot’s life.

  ‘But I don’t want their admiration,’ she said. ‘Or gratitude.’

  Sarah nodded. ‘But you saying that won’t make it go away. Let them get it out of their system in one evening. Talk about what happened a little – as much as you want. Then tell everyone that you just want to get on with life on the farm. After all that, the ladies will be very protective towards your desire for everything to return to normal.’

  ‘More or less,’ added Frances a little unhelpfully.

  ‘What do you mean, “more or less”?’ asked Steph.

  ‘You can’t turn back the clock completely. You will always be known as the woman who killed a Nazi pilot who was about to kill her son. But that’s as far as it will go.’

  ‘I’m not sure he was,’ Steph said.

  ‘You’re not sure who was what, Steph?’

  ‘About to kill Stanley.’

  ‘He had a gun, didn’t he? I’m sure I read that he had a revolver of some kind.’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  ‘Before I ran out of the farmhouse he had ample chance to shoot Stanley. Didn’t fire once.’

  ‘But Stanley said he thought he was going to shoot him.’

  ‘But he didn’t though, did he? He could’ve, but he didn’t. What does that make me, eh?’

  The two sisters regarded Steph in silence, and glanced at one another, hoping her sibling would be able to answer her question.

  Eventually, Frances said, ‘In the heat of a potentially terrible moment you acted out of maternal instinct. Every single member of the WI will understand that, Steph. Every single one will think, There but for the grace of God go I.’

  *

  Stan thought Steph was unwise to agree to Sarah and Frances’s proposal. He couldn’t see how talking publicly about something Steph never wanted to speak of again would do anything but make it more likely the whole business would roll on. Steph wasn’t sure he was right.

  ‘If I satisfy their interest there’s nothing left for people to be interested about. We can all just get on with it.’

  *

  On the night of the WI meeting, Steph got ready as usual, applying a little less make-up than was her custom, so as not to appear as if she was going to enjoy being the centre of attention. Frances had offered to send the car to collect her and take Steph to the village hall, but Steph declined.

  ‘What’s she thinking?’ she said to Stan. ‘I want to show I’m no different to how I was. How can I do that if I arrive in a fancy car driven by a bloody chauffeur?!’

  Stan laughed, and agreed. ‘I’ll walk you, if you want.’

  ‘When’ve I needed you to walk me to WI meetings? I’ve got legs, Stan. I’ll make my own way. Give me time to think about what I’m going to say.’

  Frances had suggested Steph arrive at the hall twenty minutes after the monthly meeting started, to give her time to set the scene. Steph turned down this suggestion too, on the grounds that she didn’t want anything to be different to any other meeting. She didn’t want to set herself apart from the other women in any way.

  ‘T
he sooner they see I’m no different the sooner everything goes back to how it was.’

  As Steph entered Great Paxford proper, she saw other women up ahead, walking towards the village hall. She didn’t speed up to join them, but kept pace behind, happy to be unseen. It didn’t last long.

  ‘Steph!’

  Steph turned and saw Erica walking towards her with Alison. Even with these two women, who she knew well and considered friends, Steph felt a surge of anxiety about how they would treat her.

  ‘We heard you on the wireless,’ said Erica. ‘You were wonderful. Very calm. Very thoughtful answers. At no point did you give the impression that you felt anything but sadness for what happened. Is that how you really felt?’

  Steph nodded. ‘Still do.’

  ‘Has it changed you in any way?’ Alison asked.

  Steph turned to look at Alison. It was the first time anyone had asked her that.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think it has.’

  ‘I couldn’t imagine it not,’ said Alison. ‘Not only because you went through a true life and death experience. But what happened with the pilot . . . I mean . . . well . . . things happen in life that you can’t reverse, don’t they? There’s no returning to the moment before. I felt it when my George was killed in 1918. It was as if a door had been closed between us and no matter how hard I tried to turn the handle I couldn’t go back and find him. It was the first time in my life that had happened to me. Horrible.’

  ‘That’s exactly how I feel at the moment. Will must still be reachable because he always has been. But I have no way of reaching him, and have to come to terms with the fact that I never will.’

  Alison smiled with empathy and gently touched Erica’s forearm in support.

  ‘Fortunately for you, Steph, with Stan and Stanley you don’t have to go forward alone. You can deal with it together.’

  Steph felt Erica thread her arm through hers, Alison on the other side did the same, and the three women walked towards the hall.

  ‘Can I sit with you?’ Steph asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said Alison.

  ‘I mean, between you?’

  ‘Of course. Make yourself comfortable. Everyone’s so looking forward to seeing you,’ Erica said. ‘They all heard what happened in Brindsley’s, and they want to show that you have nothing to fear from them. There’s some curiosity about what happened, but for the most part I think everyone simply wants to welcome you back, and help you get through what we all understand must be a difficult time.’

  The evening went better than Steph could ever have expected. When she entered the hall, the women stood up to give her a round of applause – Steph later discovered that Erica and Alison had been tasked by Frances to gently ambush her on the way to the meeting, and slow her down long enough for the members to get into the hall and prepare for her arrival. Steph had expected some form of greeting, and took the applause with good grace, before sitting between Erica and Alison on the front row. She stood to sing ‘Jerusalem’ with the rest of the members, and caught several pairs of eyes looking at her, the women smiling with kindness when their eyes met hers. She then sat and listened to the evening’s agenda, and when Sarah came to ‘any other business’ Steph was invited to the front to answer questions about her recent ordeal.

  She had never spoken in front of so many people before, and though the women were all friendly, she wasn’t quite sure what they expected or wanted from her that evening. She decided to take the bull by the horns as she stood before the members.

  ‘I would like to make one thing clear,’ Steph said at the beginning of what she considered would be an ordeal, trying not to be intimidated by rows and rows of faces looking directly at her. ‘I don’t want to talk about the event itself. About what happened. The death, I mean. It’s been written about in the Echo and elsewhere, and I talked about it a bit in the interview I did with the BBC. I don’t want to talk about it again. I find it too difficult.’

  The rapt faces facing her nodded and turned to one another and softly murmured agreement with Steph’s discretion.

  ‘But I will answer any questions about what happened before and after. If there are no questions about that, that will be fine too.’

  The moment Steph stopped speaking about thirty hands shot up, and for the next hour she fielded questions about how they had come upon the German pilot, what caused him to attack Stanley, what did the pilot look and sound like, how did she feel once she realised the pilot was dead?

  Steph answered as best she could. Some questions about her feelings were more difficult to answer than others. But she tried, and found that as she talked she started to feel everyone’s warmth towards her as an almost physical effect. It melted the icy dread she had endured as she walked to the hall earlier that evening. She was among friends, and they wanted only the best for her.

  Chapter 29

  NO ONE IN the village could have imagined a year earlier that they would be facing the prospect of spending Christmas in an air-raid shelter. Though an unofficial postponement of bombing had been agreed by both sides from Christmas Eve to the twenty-seventh, after Chamberlain’s humiliation at Munich there was no great faith the Germans would stick to the agreement. Many hung decorations inside their shelters and squeezed in small Christmas trees to take the rough edge off where they expected to spend some time over the festive period.

  Frances had worked hard alongside her household to decorate the shelter in the cellar to a high specification, so that those taking refuge might feasibly forget they were cowering for their lives for the hours they were below stairs. Some thought it more than likely Hitler would take Christmas Day as the perfect opportunity to strike England with its guard down. It was a measure of how quickly the war had degraded any sense the German High Command had any lingering decency or compassion. Frances was determined that even if the Germans bombed Great Paxford all through Christmas Day there would still be somewhere they could all spend Christmas together.

  For her, the annual event was a cornerstone of British life, and to turn away from what it represented meant to lose something of themselves. She was loath to do that when the country was being pounded nightly, and when thousands had been consigned to early graves and hundreds of thousands had been left homeless. Everything had changed and yet Frances wanted to hold onto the idea that the very best of British life was battered and bloody, but essentially the same.

  ‘They’d do it,’ he told Frances and Claire, the housemaid, over supper one night. ‘They’ll win by any means. You only have to look at what they’ve done already. What difference does it make to them? Catch us napping on Christmas night after lunch – perfect opportunity. That’s why I’m spending Christmas Day in my uniform – ready to be called out.’

  On Christmas Day, no church bells rang out, leaving the congregation to gather at St Mark’s in an eerie silence. Reverend James delivered a humdrum service about the need for unity and steadfastness, finished with a hope that the world would come to its senses and end the war sooner rather than later.

  ‘Adam would have come up with something far more interesting to say than this stream of cliché,’ Frances whispered to Sarah, by way of commentary. Sarah smiled nodded, and imagined the interesting, moving and stirring sermon Adam would almost certainly be giving to his fellow prisoners of war at that very moment, somewhere in Germany.

  Following the service, the villagers chatted happily outside the church. With the siren blessedly silent, they wished one another ‘Happy Christmas’ and then walked slowly home through freezing winds to warm up, exchange gifts with their family, and get ready for lunch. Petrol rationing prevented people from travelling far to lunch with relatives, so most hunkered in their own homes, and hoped that cards conveying seasonal wishes would make do in their absence.

  Due to the increasing shortage of consumer goods, a national campaign by the government had discouraged spending money on presents, and the population was instead asked to buy war bonds. But the
impulse to give gifts was not so easily subdued, and people made presents of practical items. The women of Great Paxford’s WI produced an impressive array of scarves and gloves made from wool of colours no soldier or seaman would be permitted to wear. Fathers carved toys out of wood for their children, while less fortunate children received gifts donated from around the Commonwealth, and charities.

  Christmas lunch was a feast, where culinary ingenuity would be at the heart of the menu. Meat was expensive, and the ration allocation for a family of four was unlikely to cover the cost of even a small chicken. This was less of an issue in a rural community like Great Paxford than in Manchester, or Liverpool, Birmingham, or London.

  While basic rations were saved to make the Christmas table as full as possible, some villagers slaughtered hand-reared chickens for their Christmas lunch; while others ventured into fields around the village in the run-up to Christmas day to pot rabbits and – if landowners and game-keepers failed to stop them – grouse and pheasant.

  Tea and sugar rations were increased during the week before Christmas, but very little fruit was imported, and nuts were expensive. Alcohol was less available, so people resorted to distilling their own concoctions of variable quality in sheds and cellars on the QT. In the preceding month, the WI put on demonstrations to help their members make provisions stretch, and taught how they could improvise cakes and puddings without dried fruit and marzipan.

  While the war had imposed all these food privations, it had also ignited a spirit of coming together in the village to support one another, and make sure no one struggled to provide for their family over Christmas. Some members of the village even sought to share what they had with any trekkers who wandered into Great Paxford over the holiday period, and a lucky few were given a rabbit or a brace of woodpigeon to take home for a Christmas lunch for their families.

  *