by Annie Groves
A large building loomed out of the mist in front of them.
‘Ops is over there,’ Kieran told Lou, nodding in the direction of one of the doors.
‘Thanks.’ Lou turned away from him, refusing to give in to the temptation to turn round to see if he was still there. It was only when she got to the main door into the admin block that she allowed herself to turn and look back, only to find that Kieran had gone, swallowed up in the mist as he no doubt returned to his men and his plane.
Half an hour later, after Ops had spoken to the Maintenance Unit and Thame, Lou was told that she had done extremely well to put the plane down safely and that the girl who had taken off after her had not been so fortunate, miscalculating the situation and losing both her life and the plane.
That sobering news had Lou shivering inside her flight suit.
The weather she had run into had not been forecast, she was told, and had been caused not just by a new weather front rolling in but because the dew point had been unusually high for the area, meaning that with a very slight variation of temperature, the sky over the whole of the middle of England had suddenly condensed into cloud.
‘Let’s just hope it clears for tonight,’ the ops officer told Lou, which she interpreted to mean that the base must have bombers going out on a night-time bombing mission.
Even if the sky should clear, though, Lou would not be flying anywhere until the morning.
A bed would be found for her in the Waafery, and in the morning she could resume her journey, provided the weather was suitable.
By now it was almost dusk, and Lou welcomed the thought of a hot meal and, even better a hot shower, as she accompanied the Waaf corporal summoned to escort her over to the Waafery.
‘There’s a letter for you, Katie,’ Peggy Groves informed Katie.
Katie thanked her as she put down her bag and sank down into one of the kitchen chairs. She’d hung up her coat in the hall when she’d come in, but the kitchen was so cold she wished she’d kept it on. The kitchen faced north, a rectangular-shaped room with a stone sink under its single small window, the porcelain chipped here and there. The walls were painted an unpleasant shade of pea green, but thankfully the gas cooker was relatively modern and the geyser by the sink worked efficiently to heat the water for washing up. When the house had been requisitioned Lord Cadogan must have instructed his staff to remove everything that was of value. The table and chairs looked cheap and had obviously seen better days, although the table was a decent size. The cupboards that ran the length of one of the long walls might once have held expensive china but now all that was in them was a collection of thick pottery. Dark brown linoleum covered the floor, adding to the room’s drabness.
They were very busy at work. With so many men overseas, the numbers of letters they were having to check was growing by the day. Some of them were so poignant and others so heartbreaking that it was impossible to prevent their contents shadowing her own thoughts, Katie admitted. The letters that affected her most were those from fighting men saying how much the letters they were receiving from those they loved meant to them, how they cheered them on and supported them, and how even the most mundane details of everyday life were things they cherished in the midst of battle, reminding them as they did of all that they were fighting for.
Katie’s supervisor had said much the same thing when she had thanked them all for working longer than normal hours, telling them, ‘We all know from the correspondence we see how vitally important letters are to our boys in uniform; and how very grateful those unfortunate men who have no one of their own are to receive letters from volunteers who write to them.’
‘I’m just making some tea, do you want a cup?’ Peggy asked.
‘I’d love one,’ Katie responded gratefully, going over to the dresser on which the girls put all the mail neatly sorted for each girl.
Her letter was from her parents, the envelope written in her father’s heavily slanted style. Katie frowned slightly. It was unusual for her parents to write to her – they had access to a telephone and so did she – and the letter felt fat and heavy.
Opening it, she discovered that there was another envelope inside and the shock of recognising Luke’s handwriting sent Katie’s heart into a flurry of accelerated beats. Once the sight of a letter from Luke would have filled her with delight and joy; now though, she was almost reluctant to pick this one up, never mind open it.
There was no reason for Luke to write to her, so why had he?
‘Are you all right?’
Peggy’s concerned question had Katie forcing herself to smile.
‘It’s a letter from my ex-fiancé,’ she felt bound to explain. ‘Seeing his handwriting was a bit of a shock. I can’t think why he should write to me.’
‘Maybe it’s a letter that he wrote to you whilst you were still engaged, that’s been held up somewhere?’ Peggy suggested.
Peggy’s suggestion made Katie even more reluctant to open the letter.
‘The others will be coming in soon. Why don’t you take your tea up to your room so that you can read your letter in peace?’ Peggy suggested.
‘In private’ was what Peggy meant, and Katie was grateful to her for her tact.
‘Yes, I’ll do that.’ Katie picked up the cup of tea Peggy had poured for her.
Never had the short walk up the stairs to her room seemed so filled with apprehension. Her heart was thudding as though she had climbed a mountain.
Once she was inside her room Katie removed her hat, carefully putting her hatpin back in it. Things like hatpins were virtually irreplaceable because they were metal and every scrap of metal in the country was needed for munitions. Having done that, Katie sat down on the edge of her bed, her cup of tea on the bedside table.
On the back of the envelope Luke had written his military BFPO address, which Katie, familiar with such addresses, swiftly recognised that it must mean he was in Italy. Also, that he must be in action. But where? The newspapers were full of reports of the Allied forces’ struggle against the Germans as the Allies pushed towards Rome. She opened the envelope carefully – because she wanted to preserve the address? Of course not.
Inside were two thin sheets of paper.
Dear Katie,
I hope you won’t mind me calling you that, because my memories of you are very dear to me, Katie. Don’t worry, though, I’m not writing to you to ask you to take me back. You’ll have moved on now and, for all I know, there may be another man in your life who has far more right than I do to call you his dearest.
I don’t have your address so I have sent this letter to your parents asking them to kindly forward it to you for me.
The reason I’m writing to you, Katie, is to tell you how much I regret the way I treated you, how ashamed I am of my own behaviour, and how much I hope that you can find it in your heart to accept my apologies and forgive me.
The letter I wrote to you ending our engagement was written in the heat of the moment and in a mood of bitter jealousy, but that does not excuse or justify the fact that I made accusations against you, not only without giving you the chance to put your side of the story, but which I knew in my heart of hearts could not be true.
War teaches a person many things, Katie. When I was lying in hospital after I was wounded I had a lot of time on my hands to think about things. I’d already had an ear-bashing from one of the nurses, who said that she wouldn’t put up with a fiancé who didn’t trust her, and who was questioning her all the time.
I wouldn’t let myself trust you because I was so afraid of losing you and so I drove you away. I loved you, Katie, but I didn’t understand that loving a person means trusting them, not trying to control them because you’re afraid of losing them. I was too much of a coward to let you see how afraid of losing you I was. I deserved to lose you, Katie. I know that now. But you didn’t deserve to be treated the way I treated you. If I hurt you I’m sorry. That wasn’t my intention. I was too selfish to think of your feelings. All I cou
ld think of was my own and how much I was hurting. I look back on the person I was then with both shame and guilt. No amount of regret, though, can change the past, nor should it.
I’m writing to you now, Katie, because I want to admit my faults to you; to accept all the blame for what happened between us and because I want to apologise to you whilst I can. If it should be that I don’t come through this war I don’t want to die with it on my conscience that I let the opportunity to do so go.
You’re a wonderful girl, Katie, one of the best, and I wish you all the happiness in the world because you deserve it.
Luke
PS. There’s no need to feel obliged to write back to me, but if you are generous enough to write telling me that you accept my apology, should you feel inclined to do so, I would welcome hearing from you.
Katie had no idea what she had expected to read, but it certainly hadn’t been any of this. The writing might be Luke’s but the sentiments, the openness, the sense she got from what he had written of how much he had changed, of how much he had grown, left her feeling almost as though the letter had come from a stranger.
Katie got up from the bed and paced the room. Her thoughts were confused. To have heard from Luke at all had been a shock, but to read his apology, to know that he had recognised and accepted not just that he had misjudged her but that he understood why he had done so, was even more of one.
Luke’s letter had set her free from the emotions that had tied her to their shared past, Katie recognised. No longer would she find herself troubled by that sense of something not finished, which had haunted her and prevented her from getting on with her life, because of the way in which Luke had ended their engagement without giving her the opportunity to defend herself. That was now gone; that troubled place within her soothed. Katie could feel gratitude and relief welling up inside her. She was grateful to Luke for having the courage to write to her, and if he had been here she would have wanted to tell him so, she knew.
Since he had ended their engagement it was almost as though she had been treading water, unable to go back and unwilling to move forward, because of all the questions she had not been able to ask him. Now those questions were answered; now she could truly put the past behind her and start to live again, free from the torment of not knowing, which had held her back. Katie could feel her spirits lifting, the burden of unhappiness she had been carrying slipping from her shoulders like a physical weight. The wound Luke had inflicted on her was finally, and almost miraculously it seemed to Katie, healed.
She stopped pacing and hurried over to the chest of drawers next to the wardrobe, removing from it her writing case.
Then, before she could have second thoughts, she sat down and began to write.
Dear Luke,
I am so glad that you wrote to me as you did. I won’t say any more on that subject other than to thank you for your generosity.
I am still working with the same organisation, although I am in London now, so I can guess where you yourself are, and I can understand why you wrote as you did with regard to surviving the war. I very much hope that you will do so, Luke, for your own sake, for the sake of your family, and for the sake of the girl who will one day become your wife. I know that you will find that girl, Luke, and that you will make her very happy.
Do take care of yourself.
As she wrote those words Katie thought of all that she had read about the fighting in Italy, as the Allied forces pushed back the Germans and advanced towards Naples. The Allied losses had been heavy, especially at Salerno. Katie’s heart turned over. If Luke was one of those lost he would never see her letter, never know that she understood and accepted his apology.
Her hand trembled as she signed her name at the bottom.
‘You’re in a hurry,’ Peggy commented, standing in the hallway to let Katie go past her as she ran down the stairs.
‘I’ve got a letter I want to get in the post,’ Katie told her, grabbing her coat from the hall.
The evenings were still light but the air was beginning to smell of autumn now, the leaves on the tree showing their tiredness – rather like the people of London and the rest of the country, Katie thought as she walked quickly to the nearest post office.
It was no secret that the Allies were now planning a second front against the German occupation of France. If that were to go ahead, if it were successful, then the end of the war would be in sight. So many ifs – too many, it sometimes seemed, for a war-weary nation, its people exhausted by the demands that the war had made on it.
A man in RAF uniform, seeing Katie walking towards him as she made her way back to her lodgings, gave her an admiring look.
Katie, seeing it, found that instead of shutting herself away from the young officer’s admiration and ignoring it, right now she felt more inclined to smile. Every minute, every second of life was precious and should be enjoyed, relished, savoured for the wonderful gift that it was. Why deny the young officer her smile as a reward for his admiration when it cost her nothing to give it and committed her to nothing other than a brief exchange between strangers that left both of them lifted by that exchange?
She was free now, Katie recognised, free to be herself without worrying that others would misjudge her as Luke had; free to make her own judgements about what felt right for her and what didn’t.
Once Lou had let the other occupants of the WAAF hut, to which she had been assigned a bed for the night, know that she had been in the WAAF herself, their slight wariness of her immediately melted, and before too long the whole hut, apart from its corporal, who had tactfully disappeared, were clustered together on the two beds in the middle of the hut closest to the stove, sipping cocoa generously laced with Forces-issue whisky (as one Waaf explained to Lou, her army boyfriend had told her that it was possible to swap his permitted purchase of a bottle of gin for two bottles of whisky, such was the demand for the former, so he had passed one bottle of whisky on to her).
Things had certainly changed since she had been a Waaf, Lou reflected, feeling very much like an old hand.
‘There’s a run on tonight,’ one of the girls told Lou. ‘The planes will be taking off soon, heading for Germany.’
There was a small silence whilst Lou suspected they all dwelled on the pounding Bomber Command was giving Germany’s cities – and its people – destruction of property and life being a necessary evil of war. But Lou, who had lived through the Liverpool blitz, couldn’t help shivering and feeling sorry for the innocents whose homes and lives would be destroyed.
Within minutes of their conversation the hut was filled with the sound of plane engines starting up. Lou could well imagine the sight of the heavy bombers queuing to take off one by one, following the lead aircraft as they headed for the South Coast and the ever-present dangers of their mission.
Automatically, without having to think about it, Lou counted the planes taking off.
‘Fifteen,’ the girl who had produced the whisky announced, as the sound of the last one started to fade. ‘We always count them out,’ she informed Lou.
‘We’ve lost six planes and their crews already this month,’ one of the other girls added quietly. ‘The Luftwaffe lie in wait for them coming across the Channel if the Spits based on the South Coast aren’t quick enough to force them back.’
When she was offered another splash of whisky to go in what was left of her now almost cold cocoa, Lou didn’t refuse it. Now that she had flown herself, she could well imagine the vulnerability of the bomber crews in their heavily laden planes.
‘Cath, didn’t you say that Kieran Mallory is having to pilot Joe Stringer’s plane tonight when he was supposed to be off duty?’
‘Yes, poor devil. The word is that since Joe was taken off flying duties, after they were shot up so badly last week that they almost didn’t make it back, his whole crew has got the jitters, and you know what they say about flying with anyone like that. Some of the pilots claim that they can tell when a member of their crew can’t
handle it any more. They say it’s like flying with someone with a death wish and that it affects the whole crew. And tonight Kieran Mallory’s got a whole crew like that.’
‘Well, if anyone can pull them round it’s him. He’s one of the best.’
‘And one of the best-looking as well,’ another girl chipped in, raising a laugh from everyone else.
Kieran Mallory had obviously changed a great deal since he had left Liverpool, Lou decided, listening with some surprise to the other girls’ praise of him. And concern? Certainly not. There was no need for her to feel concern on his behalf. Not when there was a hut full of girls here more than ready to do that.
The dance at the Grafton was in full swing, the dance floor packed with couples. Sasha loved dancing. It was the one thing that lifted from her shoulders the fear and misery that weighed her down. When she was dancing she got forget those fears and that misery. She’d be here at the Grafton every night if she could, and Bobby, bless him, was good-natured enough to say that whatever Sasha wanted, he wanted too, except of course when it came to her wanting him to leave the Bomb Disposal unit. But she wasn’t going to think about that right now, Sasha decided, not with the band in full swing. The young American GIs from Burtonwood base near Warrington were showing off their dance moves, their presence and their expertise adding excitement and energy to the evening. A lot of girls were now saying openly that they preferred to ‘date’ the handsome young Americans in their smart uniforms than their much less well-paid and turned-out British counterparts, but whilst she admired the GIs’ dancing, Sasha had no desire to swap her Bobby for one of them.
Smiling up at him, Sasha snuggled up in his arms when the lights dimmed and the tempo of the music slowed to a smoochier number. In fact, tonight she felt happier than she had done in ages.