by Lizzie Page
Not long after that, there was the rumbling sound of a train coming in and then Olive was back at the gap, murmuring that they were coming.
The stirring outside turned into a commotion. The new load arrived. Two men on stretchers, one young lad on foot. And another on someone’s back. They’d already been checked over. They were loaded up and then some doctor patted the side of the van like it was a horse, and said, ‘Off you go, ladies.’
Olive sat next to me, but I found myself longing for silence, too shy even to say anything to her. I had never felt like this with Edmund. In Edith’s Tatler magazine, they were always talking about ‘A bolt from the blue’. People kept getting hit by them when they least expected. Edith laughed that they were more destructive than bombs.
When we were back at Lamarck, Olive and I unloaded our three men. The pilot was asleep. I whispered that I would be in to see him tomorrow but although he mumbled my name, I don’t know if he heard.
As we changed for bed, Olive said she had never seen anything so picturesque as the two of us in the back of the ambulance. She had been staring for ages, didn’t I realise she was there?
I said I hadn’t.
‘His name is Sam,’ I told her. I suddenly wanted to talk about him. I could have talked about him endlessly. ‘Sam Isaac.’
She smiled at me triumphantly. ‘I’ve never seen you like this over anyone, Vivi!’
I didn’t ask what she meant.
* * *
The next day, I didn’t wake until near midday. For a moment, I was soaked in a feeling of tranquillity, then I remembered the day before and my emotions churned. Olive was already awake, sat up, sketchbook resting on her knees.
‘You should have woken me!’
‘You were so peaceful there, sleeping beauty,’ she said before returning to her paper. Her legs were bare and her toes were sticking out, just like back at home. Olive never seemed to feel the cold.
I thought of my conversations with the pilot, Sam. Would he remember the things he told me? The things I told him? Perhaps he was delirious all along. Perhaps I had dreamed it all.
‘What are you drawing, O?’
‘New picture,’ she said, but she rolled back the paper deliberately, so I couldn’t see it, then said we should go and get breakfast.
In the canteen, Enid and Agnes had just arrived back from leave and were distributing chocolate. I could hardly believe only two weeks had passed since I’d seen them. So much had happened. When they saw Olive, they called out, ‘Bad luck, O, shame about the ankle,’ and when they saw me, they called out ‘Congratulations!’ and I thought that was unusual: we help people all the time, maybe not out of burning planes, but still. Then Enid passed me a card:
Congratulations on your engagement! Don’t forget to invite us to your wedding!
All the FANYs had signed it.
They were talking about Edmund. Edmund Lowe. My fiancé.
I could feel Olive’s eyes drilling into me.
27
1940 – Now
‘It is you, isn’t it?’ Pearl’s mother sits on Pearl’s bed, holding the framed picture on her knees. I feel like bursting into tears. It must be the stress of the Max incident. What on earth was I thinking, giving copper pennies to a toddler?
‘I… Maybe. I don’t know. What picture?’
‘The one of you. You’re in the back of an ambulance – you’re holding a flame.’
I breathe.
‘How do you know it?’ I need to sit. I place myself on the bed next to her.
‘I saw it once,’ she says, mystified, as though the question is ridiculous.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But what? I mean… how?’
I have so many questions, I don’t know where to begin.
She bites her lip, puts the baby on her other knee. He shakes his scrunchy little fist at me. His arms look as though elastic bands have been applied to the creases.
‘Do you know Sam then?’ I whisper. Is that what she means? She knows Sam. My Sam.
‘Yes.’
I can feel my insides drop. The baby clutches his knuckles to his mouth. He’s got no control over his hands.
‘How?’ I murmur.
Baby on hip, Eleanor Posner goes over to the wall and replaces the picture back on its hook. It’s lopsided, like a ship on high seas with its bow pointing to the ocean floor, but I don’t care about that, not now. I wait, my heart beating out of its cage, thumping a tune. Don’t be his wife, don’t be his wife.
‘Sam’s my big brother.’
28
1916 – Then
After all the noise and disruption of the plane crash, there followed a quiet few days. A lull in activity. ‘The Bosch is licking his wounds,’ Daisy said. And I, who usually hated a lull, because it meant doing nothing, was delighted, because this lull meant I could visit the pilot in peace.
I did leave him for one day. I knew he’d have surgery on the arm, but I also felt shy and didn’t know what the right thing was. I could hardly wait to see him. He was in a cramped ward of thirty, maybe forty men – we’d had a big delivery of Australian wounded – but he had the end bed and, by some trickery, no one was in the next one. In this busy place it felt private.
‘You came!’ he said, his eyes alight.
As we talked, I felt the same ease, the same connection to him as I had done in the back of the ambulance. It’s just because you saved him, I told myself. It’s because you are invested in keeping him safe. That’s war. It’s probably what Christopher meant by ‘intensity’. I told myself: Of course, I mustn’t confuse this with the far deeper and far more permanent feelings I have for Edmund.
* * *
When Olive was working on something, she became obsessed. And the next morning, and the morning after that, she was obsessed. I spotted that dangerous glint in her eye. She was devoted, single-minded. Sometimes, she threw her pencil across the room.
‘Gah, the proportions aren’t right!’ Sometimes, I would wake up and she would be wide-eyed, sketchbook on her knees, drawing wildly, chewing her pencil.
‘Don’t interrupt me,’ she would say as soon as she saw I was awake. Sometimes I would wonder if she was coming down with some kind of sickness.
‘I won’t!’ I would reply, disgruntled. I would pull on my uniform while she sketched up to the very last minute.
‘You won’t like this one,’ she said. I laughed. Olive could be so silly sometimes. With my uniform on, I got back down under the covers. We still had twenty more minutes until breakfast.
‘Why won’t I like it?’
‘You just won’t.’
And then she got out her paints, and once she opened them, the room smelled of oil.
* * *
I didn’t visit Sam the next morning. Nor the next afternoon, since Olive and I unexpectedly had to transport some cheery boys to the port. The next day, though, I went. I told myself, I owe him a quick visit, that’s all. What’s the harm? But he wasn’t there and I filled up with this horrible panic that he might have died alone of an infection and no one had told me. But then I found the ward sister and she laughed: he had only gone outside to watch badminton.
Sam was sitting in the sunshine outside one side of the hospital, where we played. As I approached, I watched his kind, worn face. It seemed to me he looked much older than his twenty-six years. When he saw me, he gave me a broad grin and waved with his healthy arm. I walked over, feeling that curious mix of self-consciousness and delight he evoked in me. At the same time, I saw Olive limping out with her deckchair, shading her eyes against the sun.
Sam’s dark eyes were on me. ‘Are you going to play?’
‘No,’ I said but then Agnes called for me to join her three. ‘Please, Vivi!’ they called. ‘We’re short.’
‘Go on,’ said Sam. ‘It looks fun.’
So, I played with Agnes, a doctor and a patient who had just a stump for his left arm, but was full of determination. We exchanged volleys. Neither Olive nor I were interested
in sports, but I wasn’t bad when I put my mind to it. The four of us were evenly matched. The doctor whacked it, and Agnes yelped: ‘Out!’
The shuttlecock had fallen next to Olive. As I went to pick it up, Olive said in a low voice: ‘Your pilot hasn’t taken his eyes off you.’
I gave a small shrug, pretending I was unaware, or I didn’t care – I’m not sure which.
‘I’m engaged to Edmund, O.’
Saying the words aloud made them feel more real.
* * *
Olive picked up her chair and placed it to the side of Sam’s. I knew they were discussing me. I pretended to myself that I didn’t care what they were saying, but I was desperate to hear what it was. Olive clapped when I returned a tricky shot. I blushed beet red but kept on playing.
Daisy and Enid were both looking at me from the side and talking behind their hands. When the game was over – Agnes and I just about won – I went to get water and Daisy smirked at me. She gestured towards Olive and Sam, still deep in conversation.
‘Oy vey,’ she said strangely. ‘I didn’t think he would be your sister’s type?’
I stared back challengingly. ‘This is the gentleman who was in the flying accident the other day. He is not Olive’s type, nor mine, we merely feel responsible for him.’
They nodded, and I felt proud of my dignified response. That made sense, I thought.
* * *
Quiet evenings, I played piano in the hospital canteen. ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ was always one of the most requested. Sam sat near me at the piano with Olive.
‘Our friend wrote the lyrics,’ said Olive, as usual.
‘Do you have to tell everyone?’ I asked, laughing.
Olive was deadly serious when she replied, ‘Yes, otherwise it will be forgotten. Women are always being written out of history.’
Diplomatically, Sam said, ‘It’s a beautiful song… I love the idea of having someone waiting back home.’
‘You don’t have anyone waiting for you, then?’ Olive asked. She could be such a busybody.
He didn’t look up. ‘Not really.’
‘Olive won’t admit she is in love with the son of the woman who wrote “Keep the Home Fires Burning”,’ I interrupted. Their conversation was making my stomach flutter.
‘Not a girlfriend or a wife?’ asked Olive, ignoring me.
I grimaced at her. Sam smiled to himself. ‘No wife or girlfriend. I’d like someone special but I’m waiting for the right one.’
* * *
The next few days, there was a big push further along the line and many casualties. Badminton and sing-alongs were abandoned. We worked and we slept, with little time even for eating. While the days were warm, at night the temperatures plummeted unseasonably. One night I drove for over twelve hours straight in the sleet and I had run out of cigarettes after three hours. You couldn’t tell if it was thunder overhead or the roar of the guns. I think it was both. Acrid smell. Dying men. Petrol and blood. When I arrived back, blue-lipped, fingers rendered useless by cold, I was shaking so much I thought I’d never warm up. But of course, this was nothing to what our poor boys out in the battlefields were going through.
* * *
It’s silly, but I thought Sam might be annoyed that I hadn’t visited for a while, but when I next saw him in his ward, he said he’d heard it had been rough and was I still fine?
‘Always fine,’ I said, smiling. It occurred to me that was exactly how I felt when I was with him.
He was in bed writing a letter, leaning over a pocket-sized book.
‘What’s that?’
He blushed. ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Poetry is my escape.’ He grinned at me: ‘It’s not quite “Keep the Home Fires Burning”, but it’s not bad.’
I smiled at his kind eyes. ‘I’d like to read some.’
‘Do.’
‘Carry on with your writing,’ I told him. ‘I’m happy watching.’
He explained that he was writing to his brother but he was nearly done. I leaned over to see rows and rows of equisitely written words. It was so tidy, so lovely, it took my breath away. I followed the consistent swirls on the page, watched the gorgeous progress of his pen. It’s funny – beautiful handwriting was not something I had particularly valued before that moment.
I leaned in. ‘G-d? Why have you written that?’
‘That’s what some Jewish people do. It’s so God is not represented on earth.’
‘Really?’ I hadn’t heard that before. ‘But why have you done it, Sam?’
He screwed up his eyes. ‘Why do you think?’
I was completely clueless. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Because I’m Jewish, Vivi.’
My belly contracted. I thought of what Mrs Lowe used to say about them, what Father said, what I said. I looked at him askance: Sam was a Christ-killer?
‘Really?’ I wondered if this was a joke, some ha-ha concocted between him and Olive maybe, but then I thought of Daisy’s comment, and even the driver’s attitude that first night. It seemed to ring true. Plus, why would he lie?
‘Uh huh.’
‘I’ve never met a Jew, uh, a Jewish person before,’ I admitted. I wondered where his curly sidelocks were. ‘What does it mean… I mean, to you?’
I felt silly but he reassured me. ‘Good question,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘This brother’ – he waved his paper at me – ‘is religious. I’m not. For me, being Jewish is more of a cultural thing, I suppose. Shared history, community, values, food even.’ He laughed to himself, but then looked pained. ‘Things are very difficult for the Jewish people. When times are hard, those who are different are often blamed or scapegoated. We seem always to be at hand for that.’
We sat in silence for a minute or so.
‘What about your family, Vivi?’ he said. ‘You’re an Englishwoman through and through?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Then, remembering, I said, ‘Actually, my father used to say we Mudie-Cookes may have Spanish blood a long way back… that would account for my darker skin.’
Sam bites his lip. ‘You do have extraordinary skin.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And that’s your surname, is it? Mudie-Cooke? I like it.’
I snorted. ‘I used to secretly think Olive was muddy, I was the cook.’
‘You’re good at cooking as well as rescuing pilots in peril? Is there no end to your talents?’
I laughed. ‘Only compared to O. She would make King Alfred look like an expert pie-maker!’
‘Come here,’ he said suddenly, and even though we were close already, I leaned further towards him and he pulled himself up and kissed me. It took me by surprise but at the same time it seemed a perfectly natural and unshocking progression.
‘Sam?’ I hesitated, but then I kissed him back. My questions faded away. My answers were all here. I felt the ground beneath me shift.
* * *
Some weekends, touring drama groups came from England to cheer up the patients. I expected to see Walter, Johnny or David – sorry, Ivor Novello – turn up one evening with a pile of ukuleles or wigs. (That was unlikely: Walter was in Cheshire, Johnny was in Gallipoli, Ivor was in America, Frank and Clive were in Belgium and no one knew where Uilleam Chisholm had got to.)
The Friday night of ‘the kiss’, a group came to perform a comedy, Chu Chin Chow, which had been a hit show at His Majesty’s Theatre in London. I asked Sam if he wanted to go. He said, hmm, he had several other invitations to consider… He was joking: He would be delighted to come.
* * *
At seven that evening, I went to the canteen to look for him. The nurses had rearranged beds and there were wheelchairs, and some of the walking wounded at the front. Sam was on his own towards the back.
Olive had been in our hut before I left, so unfortunately, I wasn’t able to dwell before the mirror as long as I would have liked to. It’s silly, but I could tell from Sam’s eyes that he approved. I thought of our kiss earlier. I was yearning for the chan
ce to repeat it. After the show, I decided, we could go outside under the pretext of a cigarette.
I was desperately not thinking about Edmund, but had an intuition that all would be well there. The bridges that lay between us were endless after all and it seemed to me evident that Edmund and I had grown apart. I hadn’t had a letter from him since I returned, and I figured that anyone who wanted to wait until the war had ended to marry was not entirely keen.
I read Sam the story of the play.
In Baghdad, the bandit chief disguises himself as a Chinese merchant, Chu Chin Chow, to gain access to the palace. But his identity is revealed by his slave, who pours boiling oil on him and then finishes the job by stabbing him to death.
‘That sounds cheery,’ Sam commented. Giggling, I read on.
The show in London was a lavish spectacle, scantily-clad slave girls and a chance to forget the Great War’s trenches.
‘Well, I’m certainly looking forward to it now,’ Sam said.
‘I can’t imagine there are scantily clad slave girls here.’
‘Maybe they will improvise,’ he snorted.
* * *
There was a scantily clad slave girl, but she was at least six feet tall and complete with luxurious beard and moustache. Sam laughed loudly. And when he laughed, I wanted to as well, and when only two, three minutes in, he took my hand, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. I flushed from my cheeks to my toes, and my heart was racing. What if anyone saw? What would they think? But I couldn’t take my hand away. I couldn’t. I wanted us to be joined. His fingers were locked in the spaces between mine, and mine found the spaces between his. Is there a word for that space, a biological word for the dip between one finger and another? I should know about hands, I’ve analysed them for long enough with Olive. I knew about the ring, the middle, the little finger; I knew about the little one who went wee wee wee all the way home…