The Silent War

by Victor Pemberton

  ‘Hallo, Ronnie,’ she answered, aware that the boy looked uneasy. ‘Where’s your mum?’

  ‘Gone home,’ Ronnie replied. ‘I told her I was going down to the pond.’ He moved a few steps closer to her, so that she could read his lips. ‘When it gets iced over, I make a hole – to let the fish breathe.’

  Sunday didn’t quite know what he meant, but she smiled and nodded as though she did.

  ‘Did you like the service?’ he asked.

  Sunday lowered her eyes. ‘It was very sad.’

  ‘Too sad. People always cry when they’re sad. I don’t see the point.’

  Sunday thought that was a curious thing for him to say. But then it occurred to her that she had rarely ever seen Ronnie himself cry.

  For a moment, Ronnie stared at his feet. Then he looked up again. ‘I’m sorry, Sunday,’ he said, even more awkwardly, ‘for the way I talked to you – on Christmas Eve. I didn’t mean to, honest I didn’t. It was just the way I was feeling that day.’ He lowered his eyes guiltily. ‘I shouldn’t have talked to you like that.’

  Whilst they were standing there, two robin redbreasts swooped in and out of the church porch just behind them, jostling each other for territory and ending up on the headstone of a neglected grave close by.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Sunday, ‘we all say things we don’t mean. But by the time we say them, it’s too late.’

  ‘Is it too late, Sunday?’ the boy said, a pained expression on his face. ‘Does it mean we’re not friends any more?’

  Sunday smiled and held out her hand for him to shake.

  Ronnie took hold of her hand and shook it vigorously.

  Behind them, the two robins, with puffed-up bodies to keep out the cold, were preening themselves in competition on the ridge of snow along the top of the headstone. Sunday and Ronnie moved off together, and wandered slowly through the churchyard.

  ‘How’s your dad getting on?’ Sunday asked. ‘Is he still in pain?’

  ‘He’s all right,’ replied the boy, casually. ‘Mum said he’ll be in hospital for at least three or four weeks.’

  ‘Have you been to see him?’

  Whilst they strolled, Ronnie turned to look at her. ‘Why should I?’ he asked.

  Sunday was shocked. ‘Ronnie! He’s your dad.’

  ‘I know he is,’ replied the boy, digging his hands deeper into his raincoat pocket. ‘But I still couldn’t care less.’

  Sunday came to a halt, and stared at the boy. ‘You mustn’t say things like that, Ronnie,’ she said. ‘Your dad was very nearly killed the other day.’

  ‘I wouldn’t’ve cared if he was.’

  Ronnie’s calm but piercing reply shook Sunday to the core. ‘How can you say such a thing?’ she asked.

  ‘Look, Sunday. What’s the use of lying? I’ve told you before, my dad doesn’t care about me, and I don’t care about him. In fact, I hate him. I hate everything about him. So why should I lie?’

  Behind them, the vicar was just leaving the church, and when he caught sight of Sunday and Ronnie, he waved at them. Sunday and Ronnie waved back, and watched the black-and-white clerical robes he was wearing flutter off along the snow-cleared path towards his vicarage.

  ‘Shall I tell you something, Sunday?’ the boy said suddenly. ‘One of these days, I’m going to get away from him, away from my father, away from home.’

  ‘Don’t be so daft, Ronnie,’ said Sunday, firmly, but clearly anxious.

  ‘It’s true, I tell you. As soon as it gets warm again, I’m going to go to London. I won’t have much money, so I’ll probably have to hitch a ride somehow.’

  As Sunday looked into the boy’s soulful eyes, she felt deeply sad and sorry for him. Ronnie was such a strange, lonesome kind of boy. Never had she seen him knocking around with kids his own age, doing all the things that he should be doing, such as kicking a football around with his mates or something, just like she’d seen the boys do back home in ‘the Buildings’.

  ‘Will you help me, Sunday?’

  Sunday flinched. ‘What d’you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Will you help me get away from the farm? Oh, I don’t mean give me money, but – well, tell me how to do it, where to go, that sort of thing.’

  Sunday began to feel panic. How could she help Ronnie to do such a thing? She wasn’t old enough to advise, she wasn’t grown-up enough herself to show this boy the way out of his own childhood. ‘You can’t do it, Ronnie,’ she said, quite calmly. ‘If you go to London, what will you do? Where will you go? Without money, or people to go to, you could end up sleeping out rough on the pavements or something.’

  ‘I’d sooner do that than go on living under the same roof as my father. I’d sooner be dead than let him go on resenting me for the rest of my life.’

  Reacting to the casual determination in the boy’s face, Sunday felt quite numb. ‘Your mum, Ronnie,’ she asked softly. ‘What about your mum? Can’t you talk to her?’

  Ronnie’s lips curled up in a wry grin. ‘She’s not much better than him,’ he said. ‘You should hear them sometimes. At night I listen to them from upstairs in my room. Always drunk on black-market booze, always fighting like cat and dog. Then they talk about me. And they laugh. I hate it most when they laugh about me. They make me feel dirty. But I’m not. They’re the ones who are dirty – not me.’ He suddenly realised that he was upsetting Sunday, so his face quickly brightened up as he asked, ‘Will you come and see the pheasants with me some time?’

  Once again, Sunday was taken aback by Ronnie’s ability to change the mood so quickly. ‘Pheasants?’ she asked. ‘Where?’

  ‘In the woods, on the other side of the ’drome. There are hundreds there. They hide from the farmers’ guns. Mind you, they shot a lot of them just before Christmas, so there might not be so many now. But I like to see them. I like to let them know that not everyone wants to kill them. Will you come with me some time, Sunday? Will you?’

  Sunday found herself nodding.

  ‘Aw – thanks, Sunday! Thanks! Maybe next Saturday?’ he asked eagerly. ‘Is Saturday afternoon OK for you?’

  Again Sunday nodded.

  Before she could say another word, Ronnie was rushing off out of the churchyard. But he suddenly stopped, turned, then came back to her. ‘By the way, Sunday,’ he said, returning to a brief expression of guilt. ‘I’m sorry about – about that bloke. You know, that friend of yours – the Yank? I didn’t mean what I said about him – honest I didn’t.’

  With that, he was gone.

  As Sunday stood for a moment, watching young Ronnie stride off through the churchyard, the first signs of a freezing fog began to drift across the village green on the other side of the road. It was an eerie feeling to be left alone in such a place, with an icy blanket gradually wrapping itself around the thatched roofs and smoking chimney pots. But at least Sunday could still make out the USAF jeeps and trucks parked outside the King’s Head pub just down the road, which made her feel far less isolated knowing that her friends from the farm were having a lunchtime drink there.

  The churchyard itself was now blending in with the stark grey fog, and the scattering of white headstones were protruding out of the ground like hands and arms reaching up for life. But the churchyard had its own special atmosphere to offer, and Sunday felt nothing but peace and confidence there. She started to move amongst the stones, but many of them were so old that the inscriptions were too difficult to read. It was now getting colder than ever, and she had to pull up the hood of her duffle coat to protect her ears from the frost.

  Realising that the weather was now closing in on her, Sunday paused for only enough time to savour that special link which always exists between the living and the dead. Although she could hear no sound, in her mind she could hear all those voices that had always meant so much to her. And not only human voices, but cats and dogs and birds, and band music, and just about every sound of everyday life in her entire experience. Strangely enough, she felt no sadness, only joy. A smile even cam
e to her face, and she found herself looking around as though all those voices from her past were lining up to encourage her. But then, something inside told her to stand still without moving.

  The freezing fog was gradually engulfing the entire churchyard, and slight flurries of snow began to drift down on to the hood of Sunday’s duffle coat.

  At that precise moment, she felt the urge to turn around. Before her was now a blanket of sinister grey fog which threatened to swallow her up and cast her off into the wilderness. But then, she saw a figure emerging from the mist. At first it was nothing more than a distant shadow, closing in on her, as if in slow motion in a cinema picture. She became mesmerised by the image, all the time agonising whether she should back away and escape while she still had time. But as the figure drew closer, blood surged through her entire body, and she felt like shouting out as loud as she knew how. The figure was now no longer walking, but rushing straight at her. At that moment, Sunday realised that she knew that walk, she knew it better than any other in the whole wide world. Unaware of what she was doing, she found herself rushing forward, arms outstretched in greeting. A moment or so later she had been lifted off her feet, and was being whirled around in the miserably grey ice-cold fog. When her feet finally touched the ground again, two bodies were clasped against each other, and Sunday could feel the warmth of a man’s lips pressed firmly against her own. She couldn’t hear what was being said to her, and the visibility was too poor to enable her to read those lips. But she knew what was being said. Yes, in some extraordinary moment of intuition, she just knew.

  ‘Oh God, Sunday! I’ll never leave you again. Never!’

  The arms, the lips, the voice, the warmth. They all belonged to Sergeant Gary Mitchell.

  Chapter 17

  Sunday had always wanted to go to Thorpe Bay. She had no idea why the place appealed to her, except that she had once read about the beaches there in an old Picture Post magazine. It was an odd ambition, she knew that. After all, most girls of her age yearned to go either to the East-ender’s favourite day-trip paradise at Southend, or to the swankier Essex resorts of Leigh or Westcliff-on-Sea. Perhaps it had something to do with the sound of the name – Thorpe Bay. It sounded so exotic, like Hawaii or Scarborough, although Sunday hadn’t the faintest idea where either of those two resorts were. No, Thorpe Bay was at the top of her dream list, and it was ironic that it took a young American airman to make that dream come true.

  In reality, exotic Thorpe Bay turned out to be quite ordinary – delightful and charming, but ordinary. Situated right on the tip of the Thames Estuary, it was flanked on one side by the hectic amusement arcades of Southend, and on the other side by Shoeburyness, which was mainly a restricted area as there was a top-secret army camp there. Since the beginning of the war, there hadn’t really been many holiday visitors, and even though a lot of the barbed wire had now been removed from the beaches, a cold, frosty weekend along the seafront in the middle of January was not to everyone’s taste.

  ‘It’s hard to believe there’s a different country on the other side of that sea,’ said Sunday, her face tinged with a bright rosy glow from the biting-cold breeze that was curling across the bay to create a shimmer of small white patches of foam on the surface of the water.

  ‘Not just one country, Sunday,’ replied Gary, his arm tucked firmly around her shoulders to keep her warm. ‘Just a few miles from where we’re standing, there’s a whole continent, with all kinds of people with different ideas, and different ways of life. When this hell of a war’s over they’re going to have to learn how to live together, without tearing each other to pieces.’

  As if to emphasise Gary’s point, high above the sea wall from where they were staring out to sea, the clear blue sky was streaked with several white vapour trails, all heading over the Essex coastline towards their final destination in London. And behind them, the pounding of anti-aircraft guns was shaking the foundations of the old seafront houses and small hotels, as the Army did their best to bring down the seemingly endless stream of V-1 ‘doodlebugs’ and V-2 rockets before they could reach any populated areas.

  Even after Gary had finished speaking, Sunday continued to stare up at his face. She loved to watch his lips moving. Not only were they easy to read, but they were so firm and sensuous. As she leaned her head on his shoulder, her arm around his waist, she gazed out to sea, telling herself over and over again how lucky she was to know that he was alive and holding her in his arms at that very moment. The story of Gary’s survival had sent a chill down her spine as he told her how his plane had been shot down over enemy-occupied territory, and how, despite the fact that the entire crew had managed to bale out, he had been the only one to find his way back to the Allied lines in Belgium.

  ‘Do you really have to fly again?’

  Gary paused a moment before answering Sunday’s question. When he finally did speak, he pulled her gently round to face him. ‘Look, honey,’ he said, talking with lips and sign language, ‘I’ve got two weeks’ furlough. Let’s make the most of it, huh?’

  Sunday’s eyes were anxiously taking in every part of Gary’s face. ‘But how can they send you back when—’

  Gary stopped her saying anything more until he had made her take off her gloves, so that she could use her hands for sign language.

  Sunday’s hands struggled to continue what she wanted to say. ‘But how can they send you back? You were very nearly killed.’

  ‘I have to go back, Sunday. That’s what I’m here for. It’s my duty.’

  Sunday knew she was breaking her promise to him not to be anxious. But she couldn’t help herself. ‘You’ve done your duty, Gary,’ she said, trying desperately to find the right fingers for the letters and words he had been teaching her. ‘It’s other people’s turn now.’

  This irritated Gary. With a scolding expression, and after wagging a finger at her, he answered, ‘It’s up to all of us to end this war, Sunday. And that includes me.’

  For a brief moment Sunday looked hurt. So she turned to gaze out towards the sea again. In the distance, a flock of seagulls was swooping down into shallow water just off the beach. She couldn’t hear the screeching and squealing sounds the gulls were making, but she guessed that a shoal of fish had strayed into their view.

  Gary, concerned that he had upset Sunday, turned her round to face him again. ‘You know what,’ he said, a warm smile on his face. ‘One of these days I’m going to take you across to the other side of that water. Have you ever been there?’

  Sunday smiled, and shook her head. ‘My Aunt Louie went there once. Before the war. She said they eat snails and frogs’ legs.’

  This made both of them laugh.

  ‘I prefer fish and chips,’ said Sunday, impressing Gary with the accuracy of her sign language.

  ‘I prefer you,’ replied Gary. He pulled her to him, and kissed her full on the lips.

  A special constable nearly fell off his bike as he passed them by. ‘Bloody Yanks,’ he said to himself. ‘Overpaid, oversexed, and over here!’

  Mrs Baggley bought her house on the seafront long before the war. In those days Thorpe Bay was very popular with holiday-makers, and there was hardly a day during the summer months when every room in her Hotel de la Mer wasn’t taken. Since the war started, however, it had been a different story, for, with the constant threat of enemy invasion, most seaside resorts had been more or less declared restricted areas. But she did get the occasional guests, usually soldiers and their girlfriends down for a dirty weekend. However, Gary was the first American visitor she’d had, and when he had checked in earlier in the day with his ‘companion’, she had gone to the most enormous trouble to assure him that he had booked into a ‘truly international establishment’.

  ‘I’m sorry you can only stay for the weekend,’ said Mrs Baggley, as she poured tea for her only two guests in her downstairs parlour. ‘Thorpe Bay has such a lot to offer the holidaymaker. In my humble opinion, our beaches are some of the finest in the whole of East A
nglia. And you can get a really wonderful suntan.’

  Gary exchanged a look with Sunday, but resisted taking a glance out through the window, where it was now snowing quite heavily.

  ‘And we’ve had our share of Jerry’s bombs, yer know.’ The hospitable hostess was determined to get as much out of her tea party as she possibly could. ‘Oh yes. It was terrible during the early part of the war, planes going over day and night. My dear hubby nearly copped it when a parachute bomb come down on a pub just along the road. Blew him right off his feet into my neighbour’s vegetable garden.’

  Gary enjoyed talking to Sunday in sign language in front of Mrs Baggley, mainly because the old lady was so fascinated to watch him doing it. ‘Mrs Baggley says Thorpe Bay was bombed at the beginning of the war.’

  Sunday nodded her head, indicating that she understood.

  ‘Oh yes indeed!’ Mrs Baggley was determined to make a meal out of her wartime experiences. ‘We’ve had everything here – including these terrible “doodlebug” things, and now the V-2s.’ She leaned across to Sunday, to make sure she could read her lips. ‘And have you heard about the butterflies?’

  Sunday looked puzzled, and shook her head.

  ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about the butterfly bombs? These terrible things ’Itler’s dropping to kill poor little kids?’

  Sunday swung a questioning glance at Gary.

  ‘They’re a small explosive device, usually dropped in rural areas. They’re really booby-traps, designed to kill civilians, especially kids.’

  Sunday was horrified. ‘But that’s wicked!’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes, dear,’ said Mrs Baggley, patting her head of tightly permed ginger curls. ‘It’s wicked all right. If anyone ever tries to tell me that it’s wicked to bomb Germans in their own homes, I always remind them that it wasn’t us who started this war, thank you very much. And when you think of what they do to us! Those poor people in Halstead today.’

  Sunday swung a startled look at Gary.

  ‘Pardon me, Mrs Baggley,’ said Gary. ‘Did you say – Halstead?’