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‘Please. Be a love and get the plates out of the oven.’
‘Smells good. Stew, is it?’
‘I suppose so, though it’s more gravy than meat.’
Daisy sent her mother a smile across the table, realizing for the umpteenth time since the day she had filled in that application how much she was going to miss her if – when – her call-up papers came. She had such wonderful parents, such a lovely happy home; why, why had she been so stupid, so impulsive?
Because there’s a war on, answered her conscience, and because you care very much about England and this precious, one-horse dump you live in. And because Drew has already gone to war and the sooner you do your bit, Daisy Dwerryhouse, to help win that war, the sooner Keth will be home.
More selfish, really, than patriotic she admitted with ruthless honesty.
‘I think, Mam,’ she said softly, ‘that I really would like a sapphire engagement ring. But I’ll tell Keth that if he gets one he’s not to risk sending it.’
‘You do that, love.’ Alice was outwardly calm again. ‘Like I said, we wouldn’t want it to be sunk.’
Already the greedy Atlantic had claimed too much, a lot of which could never be replaced. The lives of young seamen, for instance …
‘There’s one from Drew, Mother!’ Julia ripped open the envelope which, instead of a postage stamp, bore the red frank and scribbled initials of the censor. ‘He’s got a ship at last. Listen – I’ll read it to you.
‘Dearest Mother and Gran,
‘When you get this I’ll be en route to my ship. I won’t give you the name for obvious reasons because this is to let you know we’ll be stooging around, sweeping mines.
‘I’ll be based in home waters so I should get leave pretty regularly – at least they aren’t sending me foreign. I’ll let you have my official address when I get there.
‘Just to let you know I’ll soon be doing some seatime, and glad to be out of barracks.
‘In great haste, take care,
‘Drew.
‘Well now, isn’t that good news, dearest?’
‘Yes, but why hasn’t he told us which ship?’
‘Because he couldn’t. He’s let us know he’s been drafted to a minesweeper based in home waters. If he’d given us the ship’s name, too, the censor would have cut it out of his letter.’
‘Censors! Such an invasion of privacy!’ Helen said crossly. ‘I’d be ashamed to be one of them, prying into people’s private letters. How is a man to tell his wife he loves her – yes, and write about other intimate details, too?’
‘Letters must be censored, Mother. If they got into enemy hands, even the most innocent remark could be a danger. One like, “I’ll send you a picture of a camel when I get there” would be a giveaway; that such-and-such a regiment was being shipped to some place there was sand. Where else but North Africa – and before you know it, a troopship has been torpedoed. And it didn’t stop Andrew and me in our war. We wrote the most passionate things to each other.’
‘Julia!’
‘But people in the censors’ offices are human beings, too. They are only on the lookout for breaches of security. Love letters don’t worry them one bit.’
‘Well, I hope their cheeks are red, for all that!’ Helen donned her spectacles, reaching for her grandson’s letter. ‘You haven’t finished your breakfast. Where are you going?’
‘To tell Alice.’ Alice had a right to know.
‘But can’t you ring her up?’
‘Best not. Got to be careful what you say on the phone. Never know who might be listening in.’
‘But Winnie is the soul of discretion and so was her mother before her!’
Winnie Hallam, who manned Holdenby’s tiny switchboard, never listened in!
‘I know she is, Mother, but a German spy could climb a telegraph pole and tap in on any line he wanted. That’s why telephones can be –’
Scrambled, she had been going to say, but her mother would never understand that vital war telephones were fitted with a device called a scrambler for just that very reason.
‘That’s why we have to be very careful what we say over the phone,’ she amended.
‘But I can’t believe there are spies climbing up Holdenby’s telegraph poles,’ Helen frowned, her voice anxious.
‘There aren’t any. Holdenby isn’t all that important. But if there were, Tom would soon spot them,’ Julia comforted.
‘Yes, of course he would.’ Tom Dwerryhouse’s presence was a great comfort to Helen, especially now that Drew was no longer here. Tom would take great pleasure peppering the behind of a telegraph-pole spy with gunshot. ‘Well, off you go, dear, and tell Alice …’
‘Won’t be long.’ Julia kissed her mother’s cheek. ‘And don’t forget to let Nathan know where I am when he gets back from early communion.’
She closed the door of the breakfast room quietly, then leaned against it, eyes shut tightly.
Dear God, I know Mother is old now, and frail, but don’t let her mind get old, too. I love her too much to let that happen.
Helen, Lady Sutton; always gracious and kind. Always her dearest mother. It would be too awful if her mind got old as well.
Please, God? I’d rather she died than went peculiar …
Guiltily, Julia shook such thoughts from her head, because the war was to blame! It was this awful war that caused so much worry, especially to the old. No one should have to live through one war, let alone two.
10 (#ulink_daf7e104-3e49-5abe-817d-76b74a0ef1e7)
‘Time to put the kettle on.’ Gracie Fielding thrust her fork deep into the earth, then mopped her face and neck. They were digging the plot from which the early potato crop had been lifted, making it ready for replanting, and digging was hard work.
Yet already she felt as if she belonged here. It was as if she and Jack Catchpole were shut away from the war by the high, red-brick walls that enclosed the kitchen garden. Even on rainy days there was always something to do, something new to learn.
The tomato house she liked especially. Tomatoes were thirsty plants, Mr Catchpole said; needed more water than most. It had been a thrill to pick the first of the crop ready for the vegetable man who called each morning; tomatoes red-ripe and firm, with the scent of the greenhouse on them and not the sad, soft, ages-old things Mam had to queue half an hour for. Soon Gracie would be given a week of her annual leave and she would take home as many fresh vegetables and apples and pears as she could carry and maybe a rabbit, if she could sweetheart one out of Daisy’s dad. People who lived in the country fared better for food than those who lived in towns and cities. Mam would be tickled pink to get a rabbit.
She filled the little kettle from the standtap outside the potting shed, stirred the fire in the iron grate, added twigs and wood choppings, then set it to boil on the sooty hob.
‘Ready in about ten minutes.’ She took up her fork again. ‘Heard the early news, did you?’ Everyone listened to news broadcasts and read the newspapers from cover to cover; not because they wanted to but because it was their patriotic duty and anyway, people had to know the exact time blackout began each evening and when, in the morning, it ended. Since war came, newspapers were no longer allowed to print weather forecasts, nor were they read out at the end of news bulletins. It wouldn’t do to let the enemy know when conditions would be best suited for their planes to come dropping bombs and incendiaries. Because mark his words, Mr Catchpole had said, there were those living amongst us pretending to be ordinary, normal English folk, who looked just the same as we did and spoke and acted as we did. But they were really spies and loyal to the Fatherland and had nasty, devious ways of getting weather forecasts back to Germany, and hanging would be too good for them when they were caught!
‘News?’ Jack Catchpole paused to lean on his fork. ‘Makes you fair sickened. They’re still bombing our fighter stations down south and we all know what for, don’t we?’
‘But we shot down sixty-seven of theirs.’
‘And lost thirty-three of our own.’ Never mind the Spitfires and Hurricanes. It was really thirty-three pilots we had lost, Catchpole considered angrily.
‘The Air Ministry has confirmed that sixty-seven enemy aircraft were destroyed,’ droned the newsreader, ‘and thirty-three of our fighters failed to return …’
Thirty-three telegrams there’d be this morning. Regretting. And how many more telegrams before Europe came to its senses?
He drove his fork angrily into the earth, breaking down the clods with unnecessary force. Gracie noticed it at once but knew better than to ask what was bothering him.
‘Think the kettle’ll be just about on the boil,’ she said, and headed for the potting shed. He was sitting on his upturned apple crate when she returned with two mugs, determined to cheer him up. ‘Did you hear about Mussolini, Mr C.?’
‘What’s he been up to now?’ Catchpole scowled.
‘We-e-ll, you know he said that all British ports on the Mediterranean would be blockaded by Italian warships …?’
‘You mean the Eyetie Navy might actually put to sea?’
‘Not exactly. They didn’t get the chance. “Blockade us, will you?” said the Royal Navy, and sailed out there and then and sunk an Italian depot ship, a destroyer and one of their submarines!’
‘And serve them right!’ Mussolini was a strutting fool. No one took much notice of him. Talk had it that the Italian people hadn’t wanted to go to war; that Mussolini only landed them in it to get on the right side of Hitler. But Hitler was a different kettle of fish. There was something unwholesome about him; the same wildness in his eyes you saw in the eyes of a mad dog before you had it put down. The evil in that face made Catchpole’s flesh creep. ‘But there’ll be a nasty shock waiting for them Nazis if they try invading Yorkshire.’
‘There will, Mr Catchpole?’
‘Oh my word, yes! Now not a word to a soul about this, mind.’ He tapped his nose with his forefinger and gave her one of his knowing nods. ‘Us have been making ’em all week at the Home Guard. Petrol bombs!’
‘But I thought petrol was on the ration, for cars.’
‘So it is.’ He’d thought much the same thing when two five-gallon cans had been delivered to their headquarters, petrol bombs for the use of. He had even gone so far as to wonder what those ten gallons would bring on the black market, but such thoughts were dismissed from his mind as he had seen himself hurling petrol bombs at a ruthless enemy, giving them a bit of their own back. ‘So it is, lass, but it makes grand bombs, an’ all. You get a bottle and half fill it with petrol. Then you stuffs rag down the bottleneck.’ So simple, he wondered why they had never been used in the last war. ‘Then you wait till you see ’em coming, you light the rag and when it’s burning you throw your bottle – and duck!’
Nor would there be a problem in the delivery of such missiles. Yorkshiremen were born cricketers, could throw anything from a ball to a bottle further than most!
‘And it explodes, Mr C.?’
‘It doesn’t half!’ And not only with a bang but with blazing petrol to add to the confusion. Would stop a tank, some said, but he had his doubts on that score. You would, he had worked out, have to lob one down the tank’s turret to do any real harm and to do that would take a lot of luck. Still, petrol bombs would do very nicely until the long-promised hand grenades arrived.
‘But are you sure they’ll work?’
‘Oh, they work all right! We had a dummy run up on Holdenby Pike.’ They had thrown three, and so startling had been the effect that the entire platoon had wanted to throw one and the Reverend had been forced to point out that three was more than enough or where would they be when the time came with all the bombs used up? ‘But not a word, mind.’
His good humour restored, Mr Catchpole blew hard on his tea then took a slurping swallow. Strange, he thought, that the Reverend was of the opinion there wouldn’t be an invasion, though why he thought it he couldn’t rightly explain. And no one wanted to be overrun like the French had been and especially himself, who would take badly to Germans goose-stepping all over his garden or even – and just to think of it made him shudder – throwing her ladyship out of Rowangarth. There had been a Sutton at Rowangarth for more’n four hundred years and a Catchpole had been head gardener here since Queen Victoria was a lass; four generations of them.
On the other hand, no one could blame him for wanting to throw a petrol bomb. Just one. Slap bang into the turret of a Nazi tank. He set down his mug and returned to his digging. And to his dreams of glory.
Tatiana heard the long, low whistle then ran towards it, arms wide.
‘Tim! You’re all right!’ She always waited now in the shelter of the trees beside the crossroads, hoping he would come because it wasn’t always possible for him to phone her after he had been flying nor dare she, sometimes, pick up the phone when he did.
‘I’m fine,’ he said when they had kissed, and kissed again.
‘Were you on ops. last night? It wasn’t Berlin?’
There was a tacit agreement that open cities were not to be bombed by either side, yet this morning’s newsreader announced that 120 bombers had raided Berlin in retaliation for the bombs dropped two days ago on London.
‘It was.’ He pulled her close and they began to walk, arms tightly linked, thighs touching, towards Holdenby Pike. ‘And for an open city, there was a heck of a lot of searchlights and flack.’
Open cities, Tatiana frowned, were supposed not to be of military importance and left unmolested; beautiful old places like Dresden, or York perhaps.
‘They said it was a mistake – them bombing London, I mean. They’d been trying to bomb a fighter station, and got it wrong.’
‘In broad daylight, henny? The RAF can fly in total darkness and get it right! No, they meant to do it. You can’t mistake London for a fighter station.’
‘It’s getting worse for us, isn’t it, Tim?’
‘Hush your blethering.’ He kissed her fiercely and she clung to him, eyes closed, lips parted, silently begging for more. She had loved Tim Thomson since first they met, but now she was in love with him and naked need flamed from him to her each time they touched.
Grandmother Petrovska had been wrong. It was a woman’s duty to give her husband children, and a man, she said, liked making children. It was his nature. A woman, on the other hand, did her duty in the privacy of the bedroom, reminding herself that it was a small price to pay for a household of her own and the respect society gave to a married woman.
But this dizzy-making feeling could not be a part of duty but a need, and to have children with Tim would be a shivering delight. And why in the sanctimonious privacy of a bedroom? Why not here on the wide hilltop with the sun to bless them and little scuds of cloud to see them, then float by uncaring.
‘Penny for them?’
‘A penny won’t buy them, Tim.’ They had, to her reluctant relief, begun to walk again. ‘I’ll tell you if you want, but you mightn’t like it.’
‘Try me.’
‘Remember I once said I thought I was falling in love with you?’
‘Aye. You said it in Russian.’
‘Well, I don’t think any more.’ She took a deep, steadying breath. ‘I know I’m in love with you.’ She looked down at the grass at her feet, cheeks blazing.
‘Then that makes two of us. What are we going to do about it?’
‘I can’t marry you, Tim. My family wouldn’t let me.’
‘Because I’m a Scottish peasant, a Keir Hardie man, and you are landed gentry?’
‘No, darling, no!’ She wanted him to kiss her again but he walked on, chin high. ‘All right – my mother was a countess, but countesses were two a penny in St Petersburg. And the Petrovskys aren’t rich. The Bolsheviks took almost all they owned. What Mother and I have is because of the Suttons. It’s their charity we live on!’
‘Charity! You live in a big house with servants!’
‘Only Karl, now, and Cook, and Maggie who comes twice a week. And Cook might have to do war work in a factory canteen, she says.’
‘Aye, well, my mother works in a factory and glad of it, and my father works in the shipyards – unemployed for years till the war started – so I suppose that rules out marriage. And let’s face it, your Grandmother Petrovska wouldn’t take kindly to one of her enemies marrying into the family.’
‘You’re a Bolshevik?’ He couldn’t be!
‘They call us Communists, now. And I’m not red. Just nicely pink around the edges. Before the war I wanted to go into politics – Labour, of course – try to help my own kind, because there are only two classes in this life, Tatiana: those who have and those who have not.’
‘Then why do you love me when you despise my kind of people?’ She was angry, now. Any minute she would round on him in Karl’s earthy Russian.
‘I don’t know, God help me. But I do love you, Tatiana Sutton and I want you like I’ve never wanted a woman in my life.’
