A Woman's War

by S Block

  ‘Just the two of us, if you don’t mind.’

  To Teresa’s ear, Nick spoke as if he was inviting a subordinate into his office for a quiet reprimand, and her heart began to race.

  ‘Have I done something to upset you?’ she asked.

  Have you seen something? Overheard something? Does Annie keep a diary that you’ve caught a glimpse of?

  Nick took a bite of toast and shook his head.

  ‘Of course not. And even if you had – and I can’t for the life of me think what that might be – I’d hardly ask you to go for a walk to discuss it. Whatever made you think I thought you’d done anything wrong?’

  ‘It was just the way you said “will you take a walk with me”. It sounded like something you might say to a trainee pilot who wasn’t going to make the grade.’

  ‘I simply want to talk to you alone.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Without Annie.’

  For the remainder of breakfast, Teresa wondered if Annie had irritated Nick in some way, causing him to want to discuss getting her out of the house. She couldn’t think of one. Annie’s date of departure was not something they had ever discussed in concrete terms. Her invitation to stay for the duration of her recuperation was left open-ended. Annie would leave whenever Annie felt ready.

  Outside, the air was bitingly cold, exacerbated by a stiff wind that had been blowing since Christmas Day. A few crows and a couple of seagulls were managing to cruise the currents of the slate-grey sky, but for the most part wildlife around Great Paxford had decided that sheltering from the weather was the best option.

  ‘I don’t want you to be alarmed,’ Nick said in an opening sentence that achieved nothing but instantly alarming Teresa, ‘but I’ve decided to fly again.’

  Teresa wasn’t sure what Nick meant. Since they’d been married she had become used to RAF words and phrases that were unique to the service, excluding any not privy to their lingo.

  ‘I’m not sure I understand what you mean,’ she said.

  ‘For as long as we’ve known one another I’ve been ground-based, running the station. But I need to get back in the air.’

  ‘Why do you need to?’ she asked. ‘Surely, you’re needed more on the ground, directing operations, looking after your boys. Running the station, as you say.’

  ‘I need to stay sharp.’

  ‘Surely, knowing how to fly isn’t something that fades after a few months out of the cockpit?’ she said.

  He hesitated. ‘I need to stay fighting sharp.’

  They walked in silence as the words sank in.

  ‘Fighting sharp . . .?’ Teresa repeated, as if she had entirely forgotten that Nick wasn’t merely the Wing Commander at Tabley Wood, wasn’t merely a pilot, but was at heart a fighter pilot.

  ‘The skills required to fight up there need refreshing and updating to meet the changing tactics and technology of the Germans. Strategy and tactics are evolving constantly to deal with the ever-changing threat, and as we learn more about the most effective means of combat. For example, and this is strictly entre nous, we learned a great deal from the formations the Luftwaffe flew during the summer. They were devastatingly effective. But once we had adopted something similar we discovered similar advantages. Theatre is always changing. Pilots have to change with it. I’m no different.’

  ‘But you’re the Wing Commander . . .’ Teresa said, trying to keep her voice level and devoid of the rising sense of panic she was now experiencing.

  Nick nodded, as if to give the impression that he was carefully weighing up Teresa’s words in the spirit of discussion, and not landing her with a fait accompli.

  ‘Even if I was entirely ground-based,’ he said, ‘I would still need to maintain my fighting edge. By flying.’ He looked away from her, casting his eyes across the frozen field to their right. ‘On ops.’

  Teresa understood that beneath Nick’s smart uniform and urbane demeanour, her husband was a man trained to kill other men. But because his work was based on the ground this was information she stored in the very back of her mind. Suddenly, she had to pull it forward and process what Nick was telling her.

  ‘Nick, look at me.’

  He turned his face to her, his expression defensive, knowing this was likely to be a hard sell.

  ‘I am expected to keep up my flying hours.’

  ‘But on operations?’

  ‘You can do all the training in the world. But there is only one real way to stay sharp in aerial combat, and that’s by taking part. The adrenaline, the sharpness you get from the real thing can’t be replicated in training.’ He took Teresa’s hand in his. ‘Darling—’

  Teresa pulled her hand away and stepped back from him.

  ‘I know the survival statistics, remember?’

  ‘Teresa, this is what I do.’

  ‘No – what you do is be a Wing Commander. On the ground. For how long are you going back?’

  ‘Darling—’

  ‘I know, I know – this is what you do . . . you said . . .’

  ‘The RAF is short of fighter pilots. The freshest are the wettest behind the ears and consequently the easiest to pick off. If it wasn’t for the Polish boys we would never have survived the summer. We need every drop of experience we can throw up there to stem the flow of bombers coming across. Force GÖring into a re-think. It won’t be often, I promise. But if we’re short-handed I cannot remain behind my desk.’

  Teresa didn’t know what to say. His decision had clearly been made. He was simply tying up the formalities.

  ‘If it helps, I don’t think it will be for long. We’re constantly pounding their factories now, eroding their manufacturing base. Eventually, they simply won’t be able to produce aircraft at a sufficient rate.

  They walked back to the house in silence. Teresa felt a whirl of anxiety swirling in her stomach. She brought to mind the lifeless body of the dead pilot in the cockpit of the Spitfire that had crashed into the Campbells’ house. For all his skill and experience as a pilot, in that moment it felt all too easy for Nick to meet the same fate. All it took was a single bullet piercing his engine, or his skin.

  I can’t lose another person to this war. I couldn’t bear it.

  Teresa decided she wanted to spend a little time by herself for a while, and left Nick to make his way back alone.

  ‘Don’t be too long,’ he said. ‘You’ll catch your death if you’re out in this for any length of time.’

  Careful to make sure she wasn’t seen, Teresa made her way to the old wood where she used to walk with Alison and her dog, Boris.

  The wind increased in strength. Teresa pulled her coat more tightly around her shoulders and pulled her hat even harder onto her head, hurrying through the trees, aiming for a specific destination.

  She finally arrived at a small, almost private clearing she used to visit in the months after the death of her lover, Connie, lost at sea when the liner carrying her to a new life in America was torpedoed by a German U-boat.

  Teresa stood in the middle of the clearing, and looked around. Almost nothing had changed. There was the same fallen trunk she used to sit on for hours at a time. She sat down and the memories of Connie’s loss caused her chest to ache and her eyes to flood.

  ‘Why did you go?’ she said quietly. ‘All this now, none of it need have happened if you’d stayed . . . ’

  Teresa sat listening to the wind whip through the overhead branches and across her face.

  ‘I can’t go through that again with Nick. If anything happened to him . . . I believe it would actually kill me.’

  Teresa looked upwards, through a gap in the trees to the turbulent sky above, and immediately pictured a Hurricane spiralling earthwards, trailing a black spume of smoke. The average life expectancy of a Spitfire pilot during the Battle of Britain was just four weeks. Five hundred and forty-four were lost altogether. Teresa understood that Nick’s chance of surviving the war was slim at best.

  ‘Why can’t I have someone?!’ she shou
ted at the heavens. ‘Why can’t I just have one person who loves me?! Why must you always take them away?!’

  She stared at the patch of sky until her vision was too blurred by her own tears to see anything clearly. It started to rain. Teresa wiped her eyes on the back of her coat sleeve and suddenly felt colder than she had ever felt in her life.

  Chapter 31

  My dear reader, I owe you an apology. When I began to submit my Mass Observation reports I fully intended to make a regular commitment, and send reports at frequent intervals. Writing them only made sense if they offered a continuous insight into my life as I see it. If I was to participate then I wanted to do so properly, and not merely submit a few reports and then run out of steam. I wanted to present a portrait of my life, for as long as I was able. To that end, I have been remiss in recent weeks as I haven’t submitted a report since before Christmas. That isn’t to say nothing has happened during that period, because things are happening at a rate of knots.

  As I say, the reason for the delay between this submission and my previous one some weeks back is not because my life has been inconsequential during this period. Quite the opposite. In fact, I had two significant pieces of news I wish to tell you about.

  We are to leave our lodgings and move into a new home. This had to happen eventually, but because we had a very efficient financial arrangement with our current landlady (supported for the most part, by her charitable feelings towards us after we lost our house) I fully expected my husband to exploit the situation for as long as he could. Even as it increasingly irritated him to remain living under the auspices of a woman who annoyed him no end. But that has changed, and I believe it’s part of the overall change in him that I’ve witnessed over the last weeks. I can’t deny that the desire to move back into a home of our own has been fanned by the receipt of some insurance money from the destruction of our previous house, in conjunction with some healthy royalties my husband has recently received. This income hasn’t left us wealthy by any stretch of imagination, but it has put us in the position to make some significant choices.

  If I am completely honest, I didn’t expect his desire to move out to last beyond finding out how much he would have to pay for a new property. I was wrong. The new house is wonderful. It has a large kitchen, and a dedicated study on the first floor in which my husband can work without drowning the rest of the house in the sound of hammering typewriter keys. It also has a small garden which I will turn into an allotment in which to grow fruit and vegetables. There is a utility room with a double sink, which will make clothes and linen washing so much easier and more efficient. My husband is very pleased with it. He says it is befitting for a man of his status. I know that sounds very self-aggrandising. However, I don’t object because he was always at his worst towards me when he felt least secure in himself. When he feels as if he has status in the world, and is respected, I am the direct beneficiary. If he now sees himself as a man of some standing I hope he won’t want to return to the man he was. As much as I’ve hated him for the way he treated me, I’ve always known that deep down he despised himself for behaving that way. Let him be a man of status if it makes him happy and therefore bearable to live with. The only drawback to the house is that it’s located several miles from the village where I have all my friends and work. But I can cycle to and fro, I suppose.

  You are probably wondering how I feel about moving to a new house. In a word, ‘nervous’. It does feel like the start of a new chapter in our lives. We shall have to wait and see about that. It affords us space to keep out of each other’s way, which was always a problem in the old place, leaving me feeling we were prisoners in the same cell.

  Which brings me to my second piece of news, and additionally explains why I haven’t submitted a report for a while.

  I have received a letter from my lover!

  It came via my secret channel – the friend I asked to receive his letters and pass them on to me without my husband finding them. The letter was wonderful. He could offer me no details about where he was being posted, or for how long. Only that he was departing the following day. His words were full of love, and plans for our future together. What I loved most was his refusal to question or qualify that we would have a life together. He writes as if it is a certainty. As if there is no question he will survive this war and come for me. I have no reason to doubt it. After all, this is a man who survived the invasion of Czechoslovakia, fought his way across Europe, and held off the German army with his comrades until they could be rescued. As he told me once, ‘I appear to be quite difficult to kill.’ I can live off the elation I get when I receive one of his letters for weeks afterwards. I re-read his words over and over until I no longer need to read them at all, because I’ve learned them by heart.

  There you have it. My current position. Making the best of a bad lot for the moment, as we all must do.

  That’s all for now. He’s calling for more tea. Thank you, as always, for reading.

  Chapter 32

  THERE IS A reason why harmless gossip is the lifeblood of village life. A small population of people living in close proximity cannot avoid one another’s business because it’s all but impossible to keep out of it. Conversations are overheard. Assignations witnessed. Changes in fortune – up or down – are noted. Secrets are hard to keep. Information leaks out and immediately converted into conversational currency. Members of the community relentlessly measure themselves against the status quo to ensure their position remains secure.

  The comments about Steph Farrow that surfaced in the New Year were the opposite of ‘harmless gossip’. No one knew where they originated, though Gwen Talbot was among the first to pass them on to whoever she encountered, with the faux-innocence so beloved of those who beseech everyone else not to shoot the messenger. When pressed to say who told her, Mrs Talbot was at pains to forget.

  ‘I can’t entirely remember. But they had it on very good authority.’

  The gossip concerned Steph’s role in the death of the German pilot, and questioned the Farrows’ account in the newspaper and on radio. It seemed to cast doubt on the fact that Steph was the Farrow who fired the fatal shot, with one version claiming that it was actually Stanley – with Steph claiming responsibility to avoid her son getting into any trouble from the fact that he had shot the pilot at point blank range when he had his hands in the air. This then swiftly mushroomed as Great Paxford’s own version of Chinese whispers took a firm grip. Various versions of precisely how Stanley had shot the German at point blank range spewed forth.

  In one, young Stanley was out shooting rabbits and came upon the mortally injured pilot in undergrowth, and shot him point blank in panic.

  In another, Stanley came upon the German pilot as he was hanging from a tree by his parachute straps on the Farrows’ farm, and Stanley shot him in cold blood where he hung. Why, asked some, could Stanley not have fled the scene without firing, and fetched the authorities to deal with the German? No one knew. In another version, Stanley bludgeoned the German pilot to death with the butt of his shotgun for reasons unknown, and then shot the corpse to make it look as if he’d been attacked.

  This gossip ran like effluent through Great Paxford’s gutter. If its producers hoped to bring trouble from the authorities to Stanley’s feet they were clearly ignorant of the fact that the boy could have shot any number of defenceless German pilots in the face and he would have been released a hero.

  It was more likely the rumours were generated to throw a shadow across Stanley’s courage.

  All versions justified Steph taking the blame for killing the pilot to save her son from the disgrace of being labelled a cowardly murderer. Indeed, many of those repeating the gossip did it in praise of Steph’s maternal self-sacrifice, and categorically stated they would have done the same.

  Once it seemed the gossip that originally maligned Steph had transmuted into yet more admiration for her, another titbit of gossip slipped out – by complete coincidence, via Gwen Talbot. It was al
so passed on to Mrs Talbot via a well-informed source, purporting to reveal that the Farrow family had somehow benefited economically from the incident. The source couldn’t pinpoint by how much, or from who, but nevertheless again had it on ‘good authority’ that the money had been paid as a form of reward for having shot and killed the German pilot.

  Sarah Collingborne had, by chance, been among the first to learn of this via Claire, who had heard it via Miriam at Brindsley’s, who had been told it by . . . Gwen Talbot.

  Unlike everyone else who simply absorbed the information without questioning any of it, Sarah decided to take issue. She cycled over to the Farrow farm to speak to Steph. When she arrived, she found Steph repairing old coops in the chicken house with Isobel. Sarah asked if either of them were aware of what was being circulated around the village in connection with the death of the German pilot. Neither Steph nor Isobel had the foggiest idea what Sarah was talking about.

  ‘All I noticed is people stopped looking at me after I spoke at the WI. But after New Year, quite a few started looking at me again.’

  ‘You’ve not heard the gossip, or rumours?’

  ‘Rumours?’ said Steph.

  Isobel looked up. ‘Is this about who shot the pilot? Because I’ve heard some of those.’

  Steph looked from Isobel to Sarah, wondering what they were talking about. Sarah proceeded to tell Steph what she’d heard. The more she spoke, the more Steph shook her head.

  ‘Everything you’ve just told me is wrong. Stanley didn’t shoot the pilot. I did. I wish to God I hadn’t but there’s nothing I can do about that now. All the stories about Stanley – I don’t understand the point of them. We told the truth. Why would people choose to believe a lie?’

  ‘There could be any number of reasons,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, to begin with, there’s always a small number of people who’ve decided – for whatever reason – never to believe anything they’re told, and prefer to believe an alternative version.’