Brave Faces

by Mary Arden

  ‘And talking,’ he said looking at me with a smile.

  ‘Yes, that would be nice,’ I replied.

  Henry bent down and began to pick daisies, which he then threaded into a chain while we walked… and talked, and when it was big enough he put it on my head.

  ‘There, my little princess,’ he said, ‘you’re as fresh as this daisy chain, and one day I hope to—.’

  I never did hear what he had hoped to do for me, or give me, because just at that very second, an air-raid siren wailed; and it was deafeningly loud.

  Henry quickly grabbed my hand and we ran towards Green Park tube station to take shelter underground. Weaving amongst the other people hurrying for shelter, Henry found us a safe place against a wall on the lower level, and then stood facing me to protect me with his body, leaning his hands against the wall so that the crowd wouldn’t crush me. As the area filled up with more and more people, Henry was pushed even closer to me, but I didn’t mind, and laid my cheek against the jacket of his uniform.

  A resounding crash made the tube station shake, and I was really scared but then I felt Henry’s reassuring lips on my forehead and I felt quite safe.

  When the All Clear siren sounded there was a mad rush for the stairs, ‘We’ll wait until everyone else leaves before we move,’ Henry said, grinning down at me with a mischievous smile. ‘It’s rather nice standing like this, isn’t it little one?’ and then looking at his watch he exclaimed, ‘Goodness, it’s nearly five; we must have been down here for nearly an hour! I’ve got to get back to my squadron, and you my pretty young lass must get back home, so we will have to make a date for tea at the Ritz another time.’

  Henry guided me up to the entrance and we both stood for a moment taking deep breaths of fresh air. We could hear the sound of a nearby fire engine bell, and then two ambulances with their emergency lights on and sirens blaring, passed us at a speed.

  ‘Thank God it wasn’t us,’ Henry said quietly. Then suddenly seeing a taxi, he put his fingers to his mouth and whistled for it to stop. Looking down at me he chuckled, ‘See how common I can be? But don’t tell my father, he’d have a fit.’

  ‘I can’t tell your father about your bad behaviour,’ I grinned, as he sat down next to me in the taxi ‘because I don’t know where he lives.’

  ‘Really?’ Henry asked, looking surprised. ‘I thought you must have heard that my family lives in a dusty castle.’

  ‘A real castle? Like in a fairy tale?’ I asked naively.

  ‘No a real castle like not in a fairy tale but in real life!’ he laughed.

  ‘Stop teasing me, I don’t believe you,’ I told him, but he assured me that it was true.

  ‘I promise I’ll take you there when I have a longer leave.’

  We took the taxi to Waterloo and when we arrived at the station, Henry escorted me to my platform and then apologised, saying that he was sorry but he must leave me now otherwise he would be late for his briefing. He removed his cap, bent down, and gave me a kiss on my lips.

  ‘Goodbye Goldilocks,’ he whispered in my ear and then he saluted me, turned around, and disappeared into the crowd.

  For the next few days, all I seemed capable of doing was wandering about the house in an absent-minded way with a dreamy look in my eyes.

  ‘You have a soppy look on your face. Are you all right Mary?’ William asked me one day, which made me laugh and make an effort to pull myself together.

  About a week before William was due to go back to school, we were both asked if we would clean out the hen house, as everybody else was busy. It was a disgusting job that we both hated doing, but it had to be done. I changed into what William called my ‘chicken shit’ trousers, which although they had been washed since I had last had to do this nasty job, still looked stained and shabby.

  William and I were halfway through cleaning out the henhouse, scooping all the old straw and sawdust into buckets, when I suddenly heard Henry’s voice calling my name. I almost jumped out of my skin, but when I turned around there was nobody there. I told myself that it must just have been wishful thinking because I so badly wanted him to be there.

  We’d almost completed the job, when once again I heard Henry’s voice calling my name, but this time the voice came from the direction of the rose garden, a few yards away from the chicken run.

  ‘Henry’s here!’ I said excitedly. ‘I’ll just go and fetch him.’

  William looked at me strangely and asked, ‘How do you know he’s here?’

  ‘He just called my name, didn’t you hear him?’

  ‘No,’ William replied, ‘You’re just making it up so you don’t have to carry these disgusting pails of poo to the compost heap.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I insisted. ‘I promise you, I did hear him call me, I’m going to go and look for him.’

  I hurried down towards the air raid shelter bank, but there was no sign of Henry anywhere. I decided I’d better go through the hole in the hedge to see if he had gone back to the Derwent’s house. I expected to see Henry’s MG in the drive, but it wasn’t there.

  As I reached the front door I slowed down and opened it very quietly. I could hear sobs coming from inside the house and as I turned the handle, the sobs grew louder. When I went in, I saw Mrs Derwent in tears.

  ‘Oh Aunt Nora, is it one of the boys?’ I asked now starting to cry too.

  She shook her head, and then in an almost inaudible voice, she whispered, ‘No Mary, it’s Henry. He’s missing, presumed dead.’

  I wanted to scream but all I could manage was, ‘It’s not possible, I just heard him calling me,’ But when Edward and Robert came into the room and I saw the grief-stricken look on their faces I knew that it must be true and my knees gave way and the room began to whirl around me.

  They carried me into the sitting room, laid me on the sofa and wrapped a rug around me. Edward, now openly crying too, put his arms around me and rocked me as if I was a baby. After a few minutes, I became aware that I should try and pull myself together, all the Derwent family, had known Henry since he was eight, and their anguish must have been ten times worse than mine.

  ‘Oh Aunt Nora,’ I cried, ‘I know he loved you all dearly. He told me often that he loved coming here.’

  ‘You’ve got to be brave Mary, just as we have to be,’ Edward insisted. ‘This kind of thing happens in war, especially with the sort of work Henry was doing. I’m very proud of him; he was a very brave man. But what made you come here just now? No one else knows that Henry is missing yet except us.’

  ‘I thought I heard him calling me; in fact I was sure he did, twice. That’s why I came here.’

  Robert then put his hand on my shoulder and said kindly, ‘It must have been your imagination.’

  ‘If he is missing in action, could there be a chance he is still alive?’ I asked desperately.

  ‘We’ll have to wait for two or three days, and hopefully one of the radio operators will be in contact with London and be able to explain what happened, but it sounds as though his plane was destroyed on the ground while he was picking up some of our chaps.’

  Then Edward looked deep into my eyes and told me gently, ‘I know it sounds awful to say this, but if he has been captured, he would be better off dead than a prisoner of the Germans as he’ll be treated as a spy.’ Then he put his head in his hands and wept.

  Robert said, ‘Henry told us that they had all been issued with cyanide, and if forced to, he would have to swallow his pill.’

  ‘You mean commit suicide!’ I gasped.

  Seeing my horror, Robert quickly tried to reassure me, ‘Not to save himself but to stop him from betraying the lives of others under torture. That isn’t suicide, that’s giving up your life for your friends.’

  The next minute, all of us were clinging on to each other, trying desperately to give each other the courage to face the truth.

  My legs felt like lead, as I walked home, forcing one leg to move in front of the other. When I reached our garden I climbed up
the bank to the air-raid shelter, went inside and shut the door, and then sobbed as if my heart would break.

  William, meanwhile, had got fed up thinking I’d just decided not to return to finish the job, because I was enjoying myself with Henry at the Derwent’s. In fact, he’d become so angry that he was on his way to the hole in the hedge to come and get me, but when he’d passed the air raid shelter, he’d heard sobs coming from inside. When he opened the door and saw me lying on one of the bunks with my knees curled up to my chin sobbing uncontrollably, he ran to the house to fetch our mother.

  ‘What is it my little one?’ my mother asked me while stroking my hair, as she had done when I was little and had hurt myself. I told her that Henry was missing in action, presumed dead.

  She told me to come with her and once we were back in our house, she called the family doctor and asked him if he could come and give me something to make me sleep. When the doctor arrived, he sat with me until the drug he’d administered had done its job. I slept right through until the morning, and woke to the sight of Agnes pulling my curtains. When she turned around to look at me, I could see tears running down her cheeks. ‘You loved him, didn’t you?’ she whispered. ‘I saw it on your face when you came home last week. He’ll take that with him, dear, and be blessed.’

  Later that morning I went to find somewhere quiet, where I could be on my own and think for a while. Just as I was about to sit on the bench in the rose garden, I heard a fluttering sound, and looking up, I saw a flock of white doves. It made me think of Henry’s squadron flying over the Hall. I watched them disappear over the Derwent’s house and then turn around and fly back over our house. It was almost as though they were flying in the shape of an arrow. I had heard of doves flying in flocks before but never in formation. I wondered why they were doing it today of all days. I so wanted this to be a sign from Henry that he wasn’t suffering, but deep down I knew that this was just wishful thinking.

  A single dove then landed on the edge of the birdbath and it had something white in its beak. I crept very slowly towards it, hoping that I wouldn’t frighten it away, but when the dove saw me, it flew off, dropping whatever it had been holding into the birdbath. I peered into the bowl to see what it had dropped, and to my amazement, there was a solitary daisy floating on the water.

  I stared at the daisy in disbelief and then lifted it out, holding it in my opened palm. I was convinced that Henry was trying to send me a message to say goodbye and I burst into tears. I knew then that Henry must be dead and that I would never see him again. I took the daisy carefully back to the house and then placed it in my diary between the blotting paper next to the daisy chain that Henry had given me in Green Park, and whispered, ‘I will never forget you Henry’.

  CHAPTER 4

  1941-42

  It took me a long time, to get over Henry’s death, and to stop thinking about him all the time. To help my grieving process, I made sure that I filled each day and worked even harder at the Cottage hospital than ever before, looking after wounded soldiers and scrubbing hospital floors during the week, and then travelling to London at the weekends to buy new clothes for the ‘coming out’ season, which now held little interest for me. Seeing my reflection in a shop mirror one day, all dressed up in a very expensive evening gown, I suddenly felt very ashamed, especially after seeing all the damage that had been caused by the bombing, and the idea of attending cocktail parties and dances now felt totally repugnant to me.

  After supper that evening, I told my father what was on my mind, and that I didn’t want to go back to do my last term at Finishing School or be presented at court. He said nothing for a moment, and then got up from his chair and kissed me on the top of my head, saying that he knew exactly how I felt, and that he was proud of me for feeling the way I did. But then he explained to me that there was a practical side that I had to consider too, as if I didn’t go back next term, he would still have to pay the expensive school fees, as there was a term’s notice in the agreement, so it would mean him losing a lot of money. He then said that another thing I had to consider was how terribly disappointed it would make my mother. In the end, I felt that I really had no choice but to return to my Finishing School for one more term, which was very frustrating, as I had now set my heart on doing some proper war work.

  I was still in this frame of mind when I received a call from Miss Bowden, one of the YMCA helpers, who I had assisted at the station during the Dunkirk evacuation. She told me that she had been asked to take her refreshments’ van to a few isolated outposts, where some of the Ack-Ack gun emplacements were situated, near Guildford, and that she really needed some help and as I had been so useful before, could I help her out again for a few days.

  ‘It’ll only be serving tea and buns to about ten men,’ she explained, ‘so it won’t be hard work, and I was wondering if you would consider singing a few songs before we leave, dear, to cheer them up, and perhaps the boys might join in too? I could easily put my gramophone and a few records in the back of the van.’

  I then mentioned our recent school fete and how some of my school friends and I had danced in the open-air with balloons, and how well our performance had been received.

  ‘That sounds marvellous! Would you be willing to do the same thing for the troops here? Miss Bowden asked, ‘Poor boys, it must be terribly boring for them in these isolated outposts, and it would cheer them up no end, I’m sure, dear. I have a large selection of records. What type of music would be appropriate for your dance?’

  ‘Do you have any of Debussy’s music?’

  ‘I have Clair de Lune,’ Miss Bowden said happily. ‘Would that be suitable for a balloon dance?’

  The following day, Miss Bowden picked me up in her van and we drove to one of the outposts, not far from Guildford, and while the dozen or so men drank their tea and ate their buns, she handed out free pens, paper and razors to them from a box that she had brought with her. While she did that, I examined the grass around the Ack-Ack posts. I noticed that there were quite a lot of thistles and stones, so decided that I would have to wear my dancing slippers rather than dance barefoot as I preferred. When it was time for my dance, I asked Miss Bowden where I could change into my costume and she told me to do it in the back of the van. As I got dressed, I imagined that she had a vision of me skipping about with a balloon in a pretty cotton dress, so she would be in for a shock when she saw my Greek-style dress and matching slip!

  When I came out of the van she took one look at me and said, ‘Oh, that does look pretty, but won’t you get terribly cold?’

  As soon as the music started, I began to dance and the young soldiers sat on the ground watching my every move. Every now and then, I felt a breeze waft around my legs, which blew the light material of my dress well above my knees. It felt lovely and cool, so I continued dancing not realising the effect I was having on my male audience. When the music ended there was a chorus of wolf-whistles and loud applause and shouts of ‘encore!’ and ‘do it again luv!’

  Miss Bowden quickly suggested that we should have a singsong, which we did for the next half hour and I must admit that the men all had very hearty voices and appeared much happier than when we had first arrived. As I looked at the men’s smiling faces, I remembered that it was the duty of the YMCA to bring comfort to the troops and thought that we had certainly done that today. In fact comfort, and joy!

  The next day we went to the Purbright practice gun range, and when we arrived there were far more men there than Miss Bowden had anticipated, including a couple of subalterns, who she told me had no right to be there.

  ‘Word must have got out!’ she said, appearing rather put out, ‘I just hope we’ve got enough milk and buns for this lot,’ she muttered as I helped her make the tea. But she need not have worried, as whatever the van lacked in supplies, the small kitchen in one of the army huts seemed ready and happy to provide.

  Before we set off the following day, Miss Bowden told me that she’d better put two extra bottles of
milk in the van, so that if there were more men than expected at the next outpost, we would be able to cope. It was just as well that she had, as when we arrived, there were over thirty men waiting for us, ‘This is most strange,’ she said. ‘I was assured that there’d only be about ten men at each outpost.’

  We dutifully served the tea and buns and Miss Bowden distributed the free goods, and then it was time for me to dance, which went just as well as before and received the same wolf whistles and applause at the end.

  It was Lady Albright who eventually put a stop to the impromptu entertainment; Colonel Travers, who was in charge of all the troops at the outposts, had got wind of our ‘tea run’ and telephoned her to thank her very much for so thoughtfully sending Miss Bowden’s refreshments’ van, but then asked her if she was aware that a half-naked nymph was flittering across the fields entertaining his troops and emptying nearly all of the more isolated gun posts? And furthermore, did she realise that this was leaving the field telephones unmanned, and that should a call come through warning of an air raid heaven only knows what would happen, as no one was available to man the stations.

  Lady Albright, unsurprisingly, was very concerned. That very evening she made a point of telephoning Miss Bowden to ask her why her young helper was dancing in the fields at all. Singsongs were fine she said, but whose idea had it been to skip about scantily clad with a balloon? Did she realise how inappropriate this was? Miss Bowden said that I had offered to do it, and added quickly that the men had really enjoyed it, ‘You should have seen their smiles, Lady Albright, I’ve never seen so many happy faces; they must have enjoyed it, Mary was asked to do three encores!’

  It was soon time to go back to Finishing School, and although I was still annoyed at having to go back, at least, Jane would be with me now. I had already talked to her about what we did each day and told her the names of all the girls, so when she did finally arrive she didn’t feel like a new girl for long, and soon made friends with the other girls. Although we shared a bedroom and chatted most nights until we went to sleep, we didn’t live in each other’s pockets. Jane was in different classes to me, so we mainly met up at meal times.