The War Before Mine

by Caroline Ross

  But Aunt Dottie’s gloves fitted a treat. A beautiful pair, in green suede, closed at the wrist with a single pearl button. And what scarves! Catching sight of her reflection as she pulled them from a drawer, Rosie felt like a magician releasing a gorgeous flock of bright silks. Chiffon, jacquard, georgette, crêpe de Chine – all the silks she knew from working with Aunt Betty – fluttered and ruffled on the bed. She wanted them all! Was that very greedy? Her uncle had said she could… Selecting a peacock-coloured silk square, she folded it crossways, tucked her hair inside at the back and tied the ends in a bow on top of her head. A look in the mirror. Just like in the magazines.

  In the topmost drawer, divided into layers with tissue paper, Dottie’s underwear was fragrant with lavender. Rosie lifted the tissue to discover her aunt’s intimate secrets with an uncomfortable sense of prying. Among the corsets and neatly rolled stockings was a slim cardboard box labelled Woollands of Knightsbridge, containing a cream satin slip with shoestring straps and coffee-coloured lace around the bust. Rosie untied her apron, and dropped her skirt, blouse and stockings to the floor. Reaching her hands behind her, she undid the hooks and eyes of her corset. There. Slowly, she raised her eyes from the pile of clothes on the ground to the figure reflected in the oval mirror.

  What do you think you’re doing, showing off your chest and your down belows? But this was what he wanted. This body. She pulled her aunt’s satin slip over her head and surveyed the fit. An inch on the sides, another on the straps should do it. She pulled back her shoulders, sucked in her belly, gazed at the strange film star reflection. The brush of satin on her nipples was distracting; it made her want to touch her breasts, to slide a hand down herself. It made her want to press against the mirror and feel its cold kiss on her body. ‘Pins,’ she said aloud, and went in search of her work basket.

  Safely dressed and seated in the honest daylight of the living room, Rosie unpicked seams, tacked in new ones, and after re-trying the clothes, made the changes permanent with a neat backstitch. Using the iron and a damp cloth she pressed in her alterations and then put on the slip, a white blouse of her own, the new jacket and skirt and the beautiful green suede gloves. What was most needed to complete the outfit was a good pair of shoes. She had enough coupons, and could just about afford them, even after sending money home to her father. Then she would be ready, a new elegant Rosie, barathea above and satin below, for Philip. Smart looking enough, anyway, and hopefully the Book of Knowledge would see to the brain part…

  It was nearly three o’ clock in the afternoon by the time Rosie took her transformed self down the two streets to the Red Cross, carrying the first of several bags of clothes. It went against the grain, giving things to charity, and Rosie thought how Aunt Betty would love to get her hands on Dottie’s stuff, but she had to do as her uncle had told her. The woman in the Red Cross office had the face of someone who liked to order you round to the tradesman’s entrance, so the polite ‘May I help you?’ came as a surprise.

  Rosie handed over the bag, and the woman glanced inside, smiled and said, ‘How very kind. Do you have any more things we might pick up?’

  Pick up? More unexpected still. Rosie had imagined carting everything down the road herself.

  ‘Yes. Loads, as a matter of fact.’

  The woman’s expression changed as she registered the northern accent and demoted the young person before her to a lower social slot. But it was too late. Rosie was not going to relinquish the chance of getting the clothes picked up, and, having arranged a time, she walked back home, wondering at how easy it was to become someone different, someone who wasn’t despised. A different location, a change of clothes. Could it really be that easy?

  The pastry had been left so long it had settled into a solid sulk. Rosie dusted the deal surface of the table with flour and got to work with the rolling pin, coaxing the dough to relax, stretch, and allow itself to be draped over an oval pie dish, supported in the middle by an upturned egg cup. She took off her mother’s signet ring and stamped circular impressions around the rim, then poured a little milk into her cupped hand and smeared this over its surface. Finally, she slashed it twice with a knife and pushed it into a hot oven.

  Uncle Stan and Roger were delighted with the golden-crusted steak and onion pie, the portions generous because she’d used the last of the extra meat rations allocated to soldiers. Rosie served the dish with satin gravy and spinach from the garden. Without pausing to wonder why he noticed this, Stan thought what a beautiful girl his niece had become, moving with grace around the room as she cleared the plates.

  9

  Falmouth, 22 March 1942

  The wonderful March weather continued. ‘Putting on her glad rags for us, isn’t she?’ Tucker said, as they looked across the water to the harbour and countryside beyond.

  ‘She certainly is,’ said Philip, searching in his head for some more poetic expression. Like a woman dressing to meet her lover, England slid her bare arms into green sleeves and filled her hair with flowers…

  Each morning on deck – in the moments spared from memorising the plan of the dock and quizzing each other relentlessly on the details – Philip watched the seabirds develop their mating colours, the gulls putting on chocolate hoods to impress their ladies. Once or twice the commandos were taken ashore for more strenuous exercise than could be done on board and he charted the unfurling of the leaves, the woods turning into a wall of green; he felt his nostrils prickle with the sharp scent of wild garlic.

  Every day before the off became special, to be treasured, and so did companions with whom he shared them. His main friendship was with Tucker, but other people suddenly came into focus, some of them new faces, people he found himself wanting to know. The naval officer in whose launch Philip would travel was a good-looking man called Ross. Debonair – even when he was wearing an oil-covered boiler suit he walked with the air of someone who had just stepped out from a Savile Row tailor – he was the sort of man Philip would usually avoid. Now there was mutual curiosity.

  ‘You’re one of us, aren’t you, Seymour?’ Ross said, as they met one afternoon in a narrow corridor in the bowels of the ship.

  ‘On the launch with you, yes sir.’

  ‘No. I mean class, dear boy. You’re public school. Am I right?’

  ‘I was at Dunborough.’

  Ross produced a packet of cigarettes from his breast pocket and offered one to Philip. Their heads almost touched as they shared a light. ‘What the devil are you doing in the ranks then?’

  ‘I refused a commission.’

  ‘Did you?’ The doubt was there.

  Philip felt irritated. ‘Look. Not everyone wants to live and breathe in the class they were born into. I hated Dunborough to tell you the truth.’

  Ross smiled. ‘Oh well. Each to his own. Did you come across Nick Ormsby at Dunborough? About your age I would have thought.’

  ‘Yes I did.’ Philip pictured Ormsby, a hulking, gorilla-like boy, given to torturing younger pupils.

  ‘He was some kind of distant cousin of mine. We used to be obliged to play together. You know. Summer visitations of relations. Ghastly.’

  ‘Did you say he was?’

  ‘I thought you might have heard. Nick was killed last year. Nothing very glamorous. Crashed his plane into a factory chimney.’

  ‘How terrible. I’m sorry.’

  Ross raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes. A shame. Not such a great loss though, was it? I always found him a bit of a shit myself.’

  ‘Mmmm. So did I.’

  They laughed. Ross’s eyes twinkled. ‘Terrible aren’t we? Never mind. Soon have our come-uppance, I dare say. Done anything like this before, Seymour?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither have I.’

  ‘I’m surprised. You seem so confident. Like an old hand.’

  ‘Just brazening it out as always.’ Ross was moving away now, speaking to Philip over his shoulder. ‘If you can ever tear yourself away from the lower orders, come and have a dr
ink. I’ve got a few bottles stowed away. Number 17 I’m in.’

  It was easy enough to explain everyone’s new inclination to socialise, Philip thought. If an eternity of silence and solitude lay ahead, it was logical to love the voices and presence of men more than ever before. Death preoccupied them all, and with thoughts of death came thoughts of sex.

  The desperate need to have Rosie in the moments before his departure must be attributable to the male’s primitive desire to set his genetic imprint on the world he may be about to violently leave. It was a thought that seemed confirmed by the fact that every Technicolor® imagining of his own death – through drowning in burning oil to being hit in the carotid artery, his life-blood spurting away on some foreign lump of concrete – was accompanied by a hard dick and an urge to roger the next thing that moved. In the night, staring up at the riveted ceiling above his bunk, the sound of the sea slapping against the sides of the boat, Philip endlessly replayed making love with Rosie.

  You never noticed me. What an idiot he’d been! Now, when it was too late, he wanted to know everything about her. Since Tucker was his only source of information, Philip asked himself why he couldn’t just come straight out and confess all, because keeping it a secret made him feel dishonest – well it was dishonest. And being honest, he knew a wish to avoid Tucker’s resentment provided only part of the reason for his silence, the main one being he couldn’t stand the idea of the questions afterwards: ‘What? You’ve had it off with Rosie? When, you bastard? I don’t believe it! Not then! Where? Well? Go on then, what was it like?’ So he carried on the deception, extracting as many snippets of information as he could without Tucker sniffing him out.

  She was eighteen, two years younger than he was. Came from a big family. Worked since she was fourteen, Tucker didn’t know what at, exactly, but clever, oh yes, had her head screwed on all right…and a looker, of course.

  At dusk, the sea thickened, its dark surface rippling like velvet. Philip gazed from the deck of the Josephine Charlotte towards the town. More than a looker. He saw her standing there, the sheets in her arms, vulnerable and defiant at the same time. Beautiful. And so…different from any other girl he’d met. Where are you now? he thought, searching the soft, dim shapes of the town. Think about me.

  About ten days after going on board, Jimmy Burns took them ashore for a long distance run. The route skirted the coast and mounted the narrow high street of Penryn, where squat terraced cottages were painted in colours from a small girl’s paintbox: yellow, pink, cream, mauve. ‘Might have known it’d be up a fucking hill,’ Tucker panted.

  Aware the incline got even steeper ahead of them, Philip did not answer. It was all down to breathing. You could run for miles and miles so long as you breathed right. It was only when your legs started to give out that you knew you’d had it, and even in the heavy boots, his legs felt fine. Burns pointed upwards. ‘Swallows have arrived.’

  Philip looked up at the diving shapes, miniature Spitfires in a tiny Battle of Britain, where the targets were insects rather than each other, and thought of his father; remembered holding his father’s hand and watching the swallows as they gathered on the telegraph wires at the end of summer.

  ‘Like lines of music, aren’t they, Phil?’

  The houses thinned out, sandy banks rose on either side and became wooded, the branches arching over their heads until it seemed they were running in a tunnel, still remorselessly climbing. Jimmy turned off the road, up stone steps, too many of the bastards, and along a narrow path under tall beech and oak trees. They had gone the same way before, two weeks ago, passing swathes of delicate pale yellow daffodils. Now, the bluebell carpet had been laid. Philip shortened his stride to fight the hill, sucked in and spat out air, the blue bulging at him from all sides, a purplish, insane hallucinatory blue, so that all the blues he knew throbbed through his mind in time with his boots striking the ground: cobalt blue, woad blue, saxe blue, smalt blue, Oxford blue.

  At last the path turned downwards and for a few hundred yards he had time to recover, blowing out long breaths and filling his lungs slowly, letting his arms dangle at his sides. No one spoke. The men puffed and snorted like beasts, every face flushed and glistening with perspiration. Then, through a narrow opening, Jimmy led them in single file out of the wood and back on to tarmac. A collective groan erupted as he turned uphill. Jimmy was a bloody sadist. Philip’s legs felt like lead now, but he dug in, keeping his eyes on the ground. Count to a hundred, no looking up, that was the only way to get to the top.

  But high-pitched voices penetrated. Three land girls were coming down the hill with a great feather-footed farm horse. The stumbling gait of the men changed; knees lifted, strides lengthened. One for all tastes, thought Philip: a blonde, a redhead, and a tall dark girl. Tucked into the flanks of the horse, the smiling women waited for the soldiers to pass. The blonde was very pretty – hair curling on to her shoulders and dungarees cinched tightly around the waist with a leather belt. Tucker started to sing.

  ‘Give it a minute,’ Jimmy gasped, but as soon as they rounded a bend and the girls disappeared, they all started.

  ‘I’ve lost me legs

  But I’ll use pegs

  I’ve lost me head

  But I’m not dead

  I’ve got me dick

  so long and thick

  And

  with a little bit of luck

  I can still fuck.’

  A dozen or so verses of this got them to where Jimmy at last turned them for the homeward journey. Faster down the hill they ran, wanting to catch the girls before the wood. There. In sight again, the white flicking tail of the horse, and the girls, glancing backwards.

  ‘Now will you shut up?’ hissed Jimmy.

  But the need to shout out the words was overpowering. The girls covered their ears with mock horror and screamed with laughter. The redhead ran alongside Strang for a moment and slipped a piece of paper into his hand.

  Jimmy led his choir back into the wood and pulled them up about two hundred yards in. They flung themselves and their packs to the ground and for a moment did nothing but gasp for breath.

  ‘Go on, Rick, what’s it say?’ said Tucker.

  Strang, beaming with delight, unfolded the piece of paper. ‘The King’s Head, Penryn. Ask for Shirley.’

  ‘Shame it wasn’t the blonde,’ said Tucker, lying back on his pack. ‘I reckon she had her eye on me.’

  ‘Did you see her tits?’ said Anderson.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Redhead. Bouncy bouncy.’

  ‘Reckon it was genuine?’ Tucker enquired. ‘The red hair?’

  ‘Only one way to find out.’

  ‘I went with a redhead once,’ said Anderson. ‘Freckles all over. Big blotchy ones. Silly cow liked it rough…’

  The terrible unrequitable itch had them all, exhausted as they were. But Philip did not want to listen to another of Anderson’s tales of willing rape victims, and got up to join Jimmy Burns, who was standing apart at the edge of the clearing, filling his pipe. Philip watched as his CO tamped down the tobacco and applied a match, sucking until the bowl glowed. Jimmy spoke out of the side of his mouth. ‘Unsettling, women, aren’t they?’ he said.

  ‘I thought you were immune.’

  Grey smoke from the pipe curled upwards through the leaves. ‘You thought wrong.’ The two men stood together in companionable silence, broken after a minute or so by a bird singing in the tree above them.

  ‘You hear that, Seymour?’ Jimmy took the pipe out of his mouth. ‘There’s a thrush up there. Listen… It sings the same thing twice.’ They listened. The thrush obliged, its notes piercing the air. ‘Do you know the Browning? “He sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture…”’ Philip finished the lines: ‘“The first fine careless rapture.”’

  They looked at each other. ‘Rapture,’ Burns said. ‘Now there’s a word.’ They turned and walked back towards the others. The group was subdued now, thoughtful
. Tucker tried to recall their earlier high spirits: ‘You’ve got to let us have a night at “The King’s Head”, Jimmy. There’s plenty of those land girls to go round.’

  Burns did not answer for a minute. Philip knew he wouldn’t be able to grant the request. The response was a complete surprise.

  ‘I was thinking of giving you a few hours to yourselves today, actually. It’s 15.00 hours now. What say we rendezvous 18.00 hours at the quay?’

  Philip dug a pair of trousers out of his pack, pulled them on and ran.

  10

  Falmouth, 22 March 1942

  Roger had taken to coming back to the house during his lunch hour. He sat in the armchair in the bay window, holding forth in his wheezy voice about his hopes for a new job, while Rosie washed Aunt Dottie’s ornaments in a bowl on the dining table.

  ‘Be able to keep you in dusters then, all right,’ he said, as she dunked Our Lord in soapy water. ‘Polishes, brushes – you name it, whatever your cleaning problem, Kleeneze has the cure.’

  The rap on the door startled them both. Roger lifted the net curtain and peered out of the side window. ‘One of the soldier boys,’ he said. ‘Thought they’d cleared out.’

  She dropped the Sacred Heart and was in the hall before she could hear it crack on the enamel, seeing the shape of Philip’s head and shoulders through the glass, feeling sick, yanking off her rubber gloves and apron, thinking, ‘Why does he have to see me like this?’ Her wet hands slipped a little on the latch as she pulled the door open. In the second before he grabbed her, she managed to blurt out, ‘You’re back!’ before he kissed her still open mouth and their teeth met with a little chink.