Ronnie tried to explain exactly what had happened. But rather than use words, this time he illustrated that the explosion had been caused by a ‘doodlebug’ or a V-2 rocket. This he did by using both his hands to show a vivid imitation of the clipped wings and burning tailplane flame of the ‘doodlebug’, and then went on to do the same with an animated illustration of a V-2 rocket.
Sunday, her face and duffle coat covered with snow, watched the boy with intense fascination. Suddenly, in a reaction that bewildered Ronnie, she grabbed hold of both his hands, stared hard at them for a moment, and held on to them.
Ronnie thought his new friend had gone mad.
For Sunday, however, it was a moment of enlightenment.
Soon after Sunday arrived back at the barn, Ruthie suddenly collapsed to the floor, suffering from an epileptic fit. Sunday’s first response was fear, for she had never seen such a thing before. But as only Maureen and Sheil were present at the time, she had to think quickly what to do.
‘Sheil!’ she called. ‘Give me a hand – quick!’
Sheil, who until this moment had been curled up on her bed drawing her umpteenth sketch of Algie, shook her head and retreated towards the kitchen door.
‘Get back here, Sheil!’ yelled Sunday angrily, whilst kneeling down beside Ruthie to try to calm her.
But Sheil ignored Sunday’s pleas for help, and rushed out.
Sunday then turned to Maureen, who was by this time also kneeling on the floor at Ruthie’s side. ‘Maureen,’ she said, using her hands to show that Ruthie needed a pillow.
In what to her was a perfectly natural response, Maureen used sign language back at Sunday to show that she understood, then rushed across to Ruthie’s bed, brought back a pillow, and whilst Sunday gently raised Ruthie’s head, Maureen placed the pillow beneath it.
‘It’s all right, Ruthie,’ said Sunday several times. ‘Just try to lie still, and we’ll get some help.’
All this time, Ruthie, unaware of what was happening, lay twitching and jerking on the floor. Soon after Sunday arrived at the farm, Jinx had briefed her that should she ever have to deal with this kind of situation with Ruthie, then the first thing she should do would be to force something between Ruthie’s teeth to prevent her from biting her own tongue. But, quite instinctively, Sunday thought this a risky thing to do, and decided to just keep Ruthie as calm as possible.
Whilst this was going on, little Maureen tried to soothe Ruthie by placing one of her cool hands on Ruthie’s forehead. This greatly impressed Sunday, who, without fully realising what she herself was doing, spoke not only with words to convey what she wanted to say to Maureen, but also her hands, which she used as a rough and simple attempt at sign language. ‘I think she’s going to be all right now,’ was what Sunday seemed to be saying.
Maureen’s face beamed when she recognised the effort Sunday was making to communicate with her. So she nodded eagerly and accompanied her reply with sign language that indicated that she understood perfectly what Sunday was saying to her.
By this time, Ruthie had calmed down completely and was fast asleep.
A few days later Gary Mitchell called on Sunday at the farm, and asked her out to have a meal with him. After the way she had treated him when they last met, Sunday felt a little guilty. But Gary was very persuasive, and early that evening he took her to the British Restaurant in the nearby town of Halstead. It was quite an austere establishment, but as the country was still in the grip of food rationing, there was very little choice. When they got there they found the lower floor dining-room crowded with young evacuees from London, who were encouraged to use it as a common feeding place by the local District Council. However, once Sunday and Gary had climbed the stairs to the second floor, there was a table available by the window overlooking Trinity Street below. The three-course meal they collected from the counter consisted of soup, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and veg, and baked milk macaroni and jam, which cost Gary the princely sum of two shillings and threepence. Once he had handed over a half-crown to the ebullient elderly lady cashier, he collected his threepence change, and followed Sunday back to their table.
‘I’m sorry for the way I behaved at the canteen the other day,’ said Sunday, before she had even started on her tomato soup. Although she had already apologised once to Gary, the guilt was still preying on her mind. ‘I’m amazed you should ever want to see me again.’
‘Just try and stop me,’ replied Gary.
For a brief moment, their eyes met. Sunday noticed his for the first time. They were pale blue, and his eyelashes were just as fair as his short wavy hair.
The meal wasn’t exactly what the Sergeant had in mind for his first date with Sunday, but at least it gave him a chance to take a few admiring glances at her, and to get to know her better than the last time they had met.
‘You haven’t told me yet where you come from,’ said Sunday, struggling to cope with her tiny ration of tough roast beef.
‘Ah!’ replied Gary. ‘Good point.’ He put down his fork, and leaned back in his chair. ‘Ever heard of Montana?’ he asked.
Sunday shook her head.
Gary then leaned forward and rearranged the table so that he could illustrate with his own style of map. ‘U.S. of A,’ he said, making an outline on the tablecloth with one of the prongs of his fork. ‘Idaho State on – this side,’ he said, placing his knife on the outline. ‘North and South Dakota – on that side.’ He did the same with his fork. ‘And right here in the middle,’ he plonked down his glass tumbler, ‘Whitefish, Montana.’
‘Whitefish!’ exclaimed Sunday incredulously. ‘What’s that!’
Gary stiffened. ‘A little respect for my home town, if you please, ma’am!’ His strict reprimand was soon accompanied by a broad grin. ‘We may not have the Crown Jewels and Yorkshire pudding, but we have mountains – beautiful, snow-capped mountains. And not too far away we have our “Big Muddy” – the good old Missouri river.’
Sunday thought for a moment, then asked, naïvely, ‘Is it anything like the River Thames?’
Gary, shaking his head, was amused. ‘No, ma’am. Our river is big, wide, and deep. When I was a kid, my dad used to take me fishing there.’
‘Is that where you caught your whitefish?’
Gary went along with Sunday’s teasing. ‘White, blue, yellow, brown. You name it, I caught it.’
They both laughed, and whilst they carried on eating, Gary told Sunday everything about his life back home in Montana, about his father, who worked as a track-layer on the Great North-Western Railroad, about his kid sister, Jane, who was so bright at college that she was clearly heading for a career in Law, and about his mother, who took part in nearly every social activity in the town that you could think of, despite the fact that she had been deaf since birth. Sunday read Gary’s lips with rapt attention. Everything he was telling her was totally alien to anything she had ever experienced in her own life, and he made it all sound so much more appealing than life in ‘the Buildings’. She also told him about herself, about her mum and the Salvation Army, and Aunt Louie, and Pearl, and her time at Briggs Bagwash. Most of all she told him how she had always missed not having a father, someone who could have helped her to balance out her life between a well-meaning mum and a domineering aunt.
When they had both finished their meal, Gary offered Sunday a cigarette. Her first reaction was to shake her head. But quite suddenly, she had second thoughts and took one. As they were lighting up, two of the evacuee kids from the downstairs dining-room came chasing each other up the stairs, and when they saw Gary, they immediately shouted out to him, ‘Got any gum, chum!’ The cashier lady was furious, and chased them down the stairs again. ‘Sorry about that, sir,’ she called to her GI customer. ‘Those Cockney kids are such cheeky little . . .!’
Gary laughed. He wasn’t at all offended. ‘Is that true?’ he asked, turning to talk directly to Sunday again. ‘Are you Cockneys all as cheeky as that?’
Sunday looked puzzled. The fi
rst cigarette she had smoked since before the explosion tasted awful, so she quickly stubbed it out in the ash-tray. ‘What makes you think I’m a Cockney?’ she replied.
‘You come from Lond’n, don’t you?’
‘You don’t have to be a Cockney to come from London.’
Gary pulled on his cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs for a moment, then exhaled what was left, making quite sure he didn’t let it drift into Sunday’s face. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ he said, staring straight at her with a look of genuine care. ‘Why do you shout when you talk?’
Sunday was at first taken aback by his question. But she quickly answered it. ‘Do I?’ she said.
Gary nodded. ‘Yuh. It’s not easy, I know, but there are other ways of making conversation with people.’
To his surprise, Sunday answered, ‘Then why not tell me about them?’
Gary’s face changed immediately. For a split second he stared right at her. ‘The last time I offered—’
‘The last time you offered,’ interrupted Sunday, ‘I should have accepted.’
Again, Gary just stared in silence at her. Then he broke into a warm smile, and after resting his cigarette on the edge of the ash-tray, he held up both hands in front of her, as though he was a magician who was about to show her a trick.
‘A,’ he said, at the same time touching the thumb of one of his hands with the forefinger of his other hand.
Sunday pulled down a small handkerchief from the sleeve of her pullover, and wiped her hands on it. Then she held up both her hands, and did exactly the same as Gary was showing her.
‘This is called the two-handed alphabet,’ he said. ‘Just watch and copy everything I do.’
And for the next half an hour or so, Sunday did exactly that. At the start, it was an exhausting process, for her eyes were fixed on his eyes, his lips, and his hands. Time and time again both her hands formed a close union with each other, as she twisted them into strange shapes to make a different letter of the alphabet. As she did so, Gary’s lips would curl into, ‘That’s it, Sunday! That’s it!’ and just occasionally, ‘No, Sunday. Bend that finger more – no, more.’
After a while, the lady cashier started to turn off lights around the dining-room. ‘Sorry, dears,’ she said. ‘It’s ’alf past eight. We’re just about ter lock up.’
The young couple were so engrossed in their sign-language lesson, it hadn’t occurred to them that, apart from themselves, the dining-room was now deserted.
A few minutes later, Sunday and Gary were strolling down Trinity Street. Even though it was still only mid-evening, there weren’t many people around, for there was a hard frost and it was biting-cold. Unlike some parts of the county, where there was now a relaxation of the blackout, the streets of Halstead were still plunged into winter darkness, and the only light they saw came from a chink in the foyer curtain at the Savoy Theatre. But as they made their way up the High Street hill, a bright icy moon floated in and out of the heavy night clouds, and sent a dazzling shaft of light all along the rows of ancient beamed houses and shops.
At the top of the hill, they had to wait quite a while for the bus that would take them back to Ridgewell, and even when it arrived, they had an uncomfortable journey ahead of them, for there was no interior lighting or heating.
Apart from the driver, there were only three other people on the bus, a farm labourer who had spent the last couple of hours with his mates in the Royal Oak pub at the corner of Pickering Street, and two women who had been visiting a seriously ill relative in Halstead Hospital just round the corner in Hedingham Road. Gary and Sunday found their way to the back seat, and snuggled up together to keep warm. As the bus chugged along the lonely country roads, the young couple made no communication with each other. But there was plenty going through their minds, for the evening had made an impact on them both, for quite different reasons. Although Sunday couldn’t see Gary’s face in the dark, she could feel the gentle beating of his heart as she rested her head against his shoulder. There was something about this man that was quite unexpected. He wasn’t at all like any of his ‘buddies’ back at the base, or at least, not like the ones she had met so far. In many ways he was quite shy, and when two girls back in the restaurant had smiled at him, he quickly turned away in embarrassment.
Gary was thinking an awful lot about Sunday too. He liked her independence, the way she refused to take anything at face value. But he was also attracted to the sheer vulnerability of the girl, the way she kept trying to conceal her true feelings. In the dark country fields and woods that were flitting past outside the bus window, every so often strange dark shapes were suddenly illuminated, caught in the act by the glaring white moon, which revealed just how ordinary and natural they really were. For Gary, however, the ice-cold atmosphere inside the bus didn’t even exist, nor the endless chatter of the two female passengers sitting in the front seat. No. All that mattered to him was the warmth of the body at his side, and the breath that was escaping through those lips and drifting up towards his face. If he had had the nerve, he would have kissed those lips right there and then.
After they had got off the bus at Ridgewell Village Green, Gary decided to walk Sunday back home to the farm. They took the long way, past the base perimeter, where in the distance they could see the giant B17 Flying Fortresses already lining up on the runway for the night’s bombing. Although Gary had pointedly not discussed any of the missions he was regularly involved in, Jinx had often told her of the great dangers all the air-crews faced each day and night, some of them never to return.
When they finally reached the barn, Sunday took out her torch and directed the beam on to her own face. ‘It’s been a lovely evening, Gary,’ she said. ‘Thanks a lot.’
Gary took hold of her hand, and directed the torch beam on to his own face. ‘We’ve got a lot of work to do, Sunday,’ he said, squinting in the torchlight. Then, holding out his hands in front of the bright beam, he used his fingers to form a word that he had earlier taught Sunday to recognise: ‘persevere’.
Sunday acknowledged the young airman’s challenge.
But to her, the word meant a great deal more.
Chapter 13
With Christmas now only a week or so away, Sunday began to think a lot about home. In her mind’s eye she could see all the flats in ‘the Buildings’ with their Christmas trees, home-made paper chains, and cotton wool stuck around the inside of every window pane, and the smell of her mum’s mouthwatering mince pies cooking in the oven. Christmas in ‘the Buildings’ was always special, because everyone talked together and went into each other’s place to have a Christmas Eve drink and a singsong. Yes, whatever ‘the Buildings’ was like at any other time of the year, Christmas was special all right. The only trouble was, this year people were just as nervous and ill at ease as they were during the darkest moments of the great 1940 Blitz. V-1s and V-2s were still coming over in their droves, and from one day to the next no one ever knew whether one of the murderous things had their name on it. Only a few weeks before, Sunday had heard about the V-2 rocket which had come down on a terrace of houses near the Archway, and despite the fact that the Allies were getting closer to the flying-bomb and rocket launch pads in France and Holland, the deadly machines still kept coming. More than ever before, Sunday feared for her mum’s safety.
The war also continued in North Essex, where the wide, open skies were constantly being savaged by ‘doodlebugs’ and V-2 rockets. Rumours in Ridgewell and the surrounding villages told of V-2s exploding on farmland and residential property right across the district, and one evening whilst they were passing through nearby Sible Hedingham, Sunday and Jinx narrowly missed a flying bomb, which came down close to the centre of the village, causing severe damage to the local school, the Gas Office, and several houses and shops. And as each day and night passed, stories of courage and tragedy filtered out from the US Airbase, where severe losses amongst air-crew on combat duty over enemy territory, and accidents on take-off and landing,
were becoming only too frequent.
But even in the midst of all this anguish, there were lighter moments, and good things to look forward to. For a start, despite opposition from his commanding officer, Bombardier Erin Louis Wendell was reluctantly given permission to marry his Welsh girlfriend, Jinx Daphne Lloyd, who was now twenty-one and who luckily didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. The ceremony took place on the penultimate Saturday before Christmas, and just prior to the Base Mission Dance, and as Erin was Jewish and Jinx a non-practising Welsh Chapel, for obvious reasons the service had to be a low-key inter-denominational ceremony, conducted by the Air Force Chaplain on the base itself. To her surprise, Sunday was asked to be maid of honour, but she only accepted when she was assured that she wouldn’t have to say anything. Gary was Erin’s best man, and the chapel was full of his Air Force ‘buddies’ and even a couple of the WAAC admin girls. Apart from her Land Girl mates from the farm, on Jinx’s side there was only her dad up from Wales and her elder brother, Eddie, who was in the Navy and came down on a few days’ compassionate leave from Scotland. As expected, the one person missing from the proceedings was Jinx’s ‘mam’, who had been so disgusted with the news of her daughter’s pregnancy that she wanted no part of what she considered to be Jinx’s mad rush to the altar.
The ceremony itself was short and to the point, and Erin positively glowed with pride as he kissed his bride, who in his words looked ‘a knockout’ in a pink, knee-length wedding dress, which had been loaned from the base in a generous American gesture of Christmas goodwill to any brides who were serving in the women’s forces, Civil Defence, or Women’s Land Army. When the ceremony was over, everyone made their way back to the Sergeants’ Mess, where a slap-up meal was provided, with a fair amount of bottled ale which had been smuggled in from a local off-licence. As best man, Gary made a very moving speech about how ‘Limeys’ and ‘Yanks’ were made for each other, how Erin was a ‘lucky sonoverbitch’, and, turning to Sunday to illustrate what he was saying in sign language, he expressed the hope that when the war was over, everyone would find what they were looking for in their life. Jinx cried all the way through the speech. In fact, she had not stopped crying since the start of the wedding service, which meant that every so often she had to keep rushing off to the girls’ room to fix her make-up. And when it was all over, everyone had a wow of a time swapping stories about their own lives back home, from Selly Oak to Kansas City, Swansea to Jersey City, and from Bagshot, Surrey, to Pea Green, Iowa! The celebrations ended with a British knees-up which somehow perfectly matched a selection of bawdy American baseball songs.
The Silent War Page 17