[Woman of WWII 02] - Poppy Redfern and the Fatal Flyers

by Tessa Arlen

  “But my father just wasn’t a joiner; he liked his own company, and—”

  “Bit like you, then.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, Poppy, you. You have come out of your shell a bit in the last year, but British reserve didn’t begin to describe you . . .” I must have looked stunned because he sprang to reassure me.

  “Nothing wrong with being a loner, you know. You are thoughtful. You keep your own counsel. So much more attractive than always braying for attention, or at least I think so.”

  He thought I was attractive! Steady on, darling, Ilona put her oar in. No need to lose your head.

  Griff wrote down Sir Basil’s name. “Perhaps you just don’t like him. Why is that do you think?”

  “Apart from him being a liar, you mean? He might have wanted Edwina out of the way because things got out of control and Edwina was making things difficult for him.”

  “Six suspects,” Griff said as he ran his pen down the list. “Do you have a favorite? Apart from Sir Basil?” He sighed and looked at his watch. “I’m starving. Apparently, there is a reasonably good restaurant on the way to Southampton. Want to give it a try? Lots of local-caught fish, and of course the usual mutton stew. I think going for a drive would help us think, and no one will be able to overhear what we have to say.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  WE DROVE DOWN LANES LIT BY A FULL MOON AS IT ROSE IN A clear night sky to the village of Butterworth, ten miles south of Didcote, and to a black-timbered low building on the side of the road. As we drove we chewed over our list of suspects but were none the wiser by the time we reached Butterworth.

  “Not to worry, food and drink will restore our brain cells.” Griff jumped out of the Alvis and Bess and I followed. My stomach was roaring.

  “Why a red lion I wonder?” Griff mused as he looked the painted sign above us as it swung in the wind over the inn’s door. Standing on its hind legs, a superb scarlet beast clawed the air and opened its mouth in a full roar. We never pay much attention to our pub signs: we are so used to them swinging above our local inns and public houses, century after century. I looked up at a fantasy creature from the world of Plantagenet kings, knights-errant, and jousting.

  “It’s heraldic. Most pub names take the coat of arms, the badges of royalty or of the local nobility. The White Hart, the Blue Boar, the Swan, are all popular heraldic names for pubs. They date back through the centuries of our ancient, noble, and not-so-noble families.”

  “Do all pubs bear the badge of the leading family?”

  “Country pubs sometimes have hunting names: the Dog and Duck, the Horse and Hound.”

  I could tell by the way he had stopped and was still staring at the painted sign over our heads that here was a bit of our history he wanted to know more about. “What about the Lamb and Flag? That’s certainly not part of the hunting theme.”

  “It’s a very old and common pub name. The lamb is the symbol of Christ as the Lamb of God, carrying a banner with a cross, and often gashed in the side. It probably goes back to the time of the Crusades. You know, like the Saracen’s Head and the Turk’s Head. Have you come across those names?”

  “Yeah, now you come to mention it. There’s a Turk’s Head just south of London, in Greenwich. I bet that’s where they set sail for the Crusades.”

  Griff was still thinking up unusual pub names and demanding to know their origins as we were seated in a low-ceilinged, black-beamed dining room. It was crowded with men and women in uniform and there was a celebratory air about the place, as if something exciting was about to happen.

  “I had a drink this afternoon in a place called the Cat and Fiddle,” Griff said. “What’s that about?”

  “Easy.” I laughed. “It’s part of a nursery rhyme: ‘Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon.’”

  “What?”

  “I know.” I giggled. “It’s probably nonsense.”

  “It’s very useful nonsense,” a voice from a table on our left hailed us. An RAF pilot with a large and extraordinarily ornate handlebar mustache turned toward us. His girlfriend, a pretty woman in WAAF uniform, rolled her eyes and said, “Don’t be a pest, Roger; this isn’t a cocktail party!”

  “Not being a pest at all,” said Roger. “Have you heard the one about the pilot returning from a mission who couldn’t locate his aircraft carrier in the fleet below, and in addition failed to establish secure communication? No? Thought not! All right, so I’ll tell you: the pilot circled around the formation and radioed: ‘Rub-a-dub-dub, where is my tub?’ And received: ‘Hey, diddle, diddle, right here in the middle!’ You see, nursery rhymes do have a useful meaning.”

  Handlebar mustache twisted his chair around to join us and gave us a smart little salute. “Squadron Leader Roger Brabazon, RAF, and this is my wife, Pamela. Don’t pay any attention to her, she’s always telling me off for interrupting. Hope you don’t mind!”

  “Not at all. Captain Griff O’Neal, American Army Air Force, and this is Miss Redfern.”

  “Stationed near here?”

  “No, further north. I’m down here visiting Miss Redfern, who is making a film at ATA Didcote.”

  Brabazon’s head whipped over to me. “Not the Didcote that has been having all those accidents? We heard about Edwina, what a nightmare.”

  Pamela dug her husband in the ribs with her elbow. “Roger, stop!” she hissed and shook her head in apology to me. “He is a shocking gossip! Can’t help himself.” She bent down to pat Bess on the head. “Sweet little dog,” she said as Bess tried to avoid the caress and crawled underneath my chair.

  “Yes, it was a tragedy. Did Edwina ferry planes to your airfield?” I asked.

  “RAF Middle Wallop.” Brabazon laughed at the scandalized expression on Griff’s face as he reached for the most obvious meaning to the name. “I should think she did—Edwina Partridge dated half of my squadron! What a girl—she certainly had a zest for life. War won’t be the same without her.”

  He raised his glass as a salute to good times, and his wife waved a shushing hand at him. “Pipe down, darling. Half of those men are here tonight.” She glanced around the restaurant and then at me. “Trouble with Hampshire,” she explained, “is that you simply can’t get away from the RAF.”

  I wanted to know more about another facet of Edwina’s life. “We were filming her when she crashed her Spitfire,” I explained. I knew I was breaking a taboo by mentioning an air crash.

  Roger’s face became serious. “It was inevitable, in a way,” he said. “She lost her nerve after that Luftwaffe business. I mean, can you imagine playing hide-and-seek with two Messerschmitts, with no means of defending yourself? She delivered a Spit to us about a couple of days afterward. It was evident that her nerves were shot. Her CO should have grounded her.”

  Pamela shrugged off Edwina’s nerves with a toss of her head. “Did she have any friends left at Didcote?” And to me: “She was such a trophy hunter!”

  I shook my head. I knew what she meant, but I wanted her to tell me. “Trophy hunter?”

  “Always poaching on other girls’ territory, you know, stealing their boyfriends.” She paused, offered me a cigarette, and waited as Roger lit hers, before he returned to discussing fighter planes with Griff. She blew a long, thin plume of smoke across the remains of her apple tart and lifted her hands up on either side of her face in mock horror. “Wanted in three counties by half the WAAF for theft.” She giggled and I remembered being told of Vera’s agony when Edwina let her fascinating charms loose on Sir Basil. Who else had she hurt in her desire to collect hearts? I wondered.

  “Oh, I see,” I said, playing the part of the curious but unenlightened. “I had no idea she was like that!”

  And Pamela Brabazon was off. “What was the name of that woman whose husband she pilfered? Sorry, I’m so terribly bad
at names—she wasn’t English.” She nudged her husband’s shoulder. “Roger what was the name of Edwina’s friend, the foreign one . . . the one whose husband she stole? I know she was an ATA pilot at Didcote.”

  He frowned, “Do you mean the Pole, Countess somebody or other?”

  I took a long breath, but Pamela shook her head. “I don’t think she was that foreign. Anyway, I shouldn’t gossip.” She turned back to me. “That’s the trouble with pilots; they break hearts wherever they go.” She ruffled the hair at the back of her husband’s neck; it was a possessive gesture. “Not my old man, though, ay, Roger? Come on, ducky, time to go home.”

  Roger Brabazon got to his feet as the waitress brought his wife’s coat. He helped her into a prewar fox fur, which looked incongruous with her WAAF uniform hat.

  “All right, old girl, are you fit to go?” He straddled his legs as he stuck out his hand to Griff. “Home time, got to be up early tomorrow.” If he smiled, which I am sure he did, it was through a mustache as thick as the collar on his wife’s fur coat. “Middle Wallop is only about twenty minutes’ drive from Didcote; pop over and have a G and T one evening!” He took his wife’s arm and tucked it in his.

  “I remember now!” Pamela turned back to me. “The pilot Edwina snitched was married, happily married, until Edwina came along. Caused quite a stir, and then the poor chap went west; tragic, really.”

  “That all happened at Middle Wallop Airfield?” I asked with what I hoped was a disingenuous expression.

  “Lord no, one of the big ones. Eastchurch? No, no, it was the other one . . .” She circled her hand as if trying to kick-start her memory.

  “Christchurch?” I supplied, astonished at mine.

  “That’s the one. I know we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but Edwina really was the giddy limit.” She pulled a silk scarf out of her pocket and tied it around her neck. “Lovely to meet you both. Ta-ta!” She gave a jaunty wave and they were gone.

  “Phew,” said Griff. “Thought they were never going to leave. I’m famished. What’s it to be, fish or rabbit?”

  But I had lost my appetite.

  “Fish looks good. Sole à la meunière. Do you think they use real butter?”

  I started to laugh. “Real butter? Griff, when will you accept that no one in England ever sees more than two ounces of butter a month—if they are lucky!”

  “Well, what the heck are they cooking it with, then?”

  “Margarine.”

  Griff ordered the rabbit, and I noticed that he didn’t ask how it was prepared.

  * * *

  * * *

  “YOU’RE VERY QUIET.” We were driving back to Didcote. “No need to worry about blackout tonight; it’s as bright as day.” Griff turned into the road that led to Didcote.

  “A bomber’s moon,” I said as I remembered my days in London training to be an air-raid warden. How we dreaded a full moon.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded, and then in the intimate closeness of the motorcar, I told him what Pamela Brabazon had said about Edwina stealing someone’s husband. “He was a pilot who flew out of Christchurch Airfield. His wife found out, and then he was killed.”

  “In the Battle of Britain? Didn’t Zofia’s husband die during the Battle of Britain?” He sighed. “It sounds from everything we have learned that Edwina liked to collect men.”

  “She was such a trophy hunter.” I heard Pamela’s voice. The name given to girls whose need to possess all men was so acute that they made enemies of friends and were referred to in disparaging terms. I had felt that flare of jealous anger myself when Edwina had made a beeline for Griff. The way she had flaunted his interest in her to me had been calculated and cruel. It was not just about the competitive need to collect other girls’ men, I realized. It was about hurting other women, taking what was theirs, destroying trust and confidence. It was an act of destruction. Edwina had dropped a bomb on her friend.

  “Edwina’s sweetheart died in an air raid on August nineteenth of this year. The Battle of Britain was when? Nineteen forty. It went on through the summer, didn’t it? But that was before Zofia came to Didcote, before she joined the ATA. And Pamela and Roger thought it wasn’t the Polish countess. Pamela said the woman was foreign, but not foreign enough to be Polish.”

  Griff’s head turned, and he stared at me in the moonlight. “Australian?” he said.

  I shrugged. “But June is single.”

  “Are you sure? Evesham could be her married name.”

  “She never said she was married. No one said she was married.”

  “But if Edwina stole her husband, and then he was killed, why would anyone mention it? I mean, it would be tactless, wouldn’t it? Can you remember where June was when Edwina was eating lunch? Did she give her anything? Could she have put the drug into her coffee?”

  Coffee. A large thermos of coffee had been brought out with the sandwiches, and the tea urn had been replenished. But all the Attagirls had had their own flasks with them. They had them filled each morning when they left for work.

  I made myself go back over that morning. It was impossible to recall Edwina drinking anything. She had wandered back and forth between a solitary spot on the edge of the group and taking sandwiches from the tray on the picnic table. I had only been conscious that she had eaten at all because she had taken so many of them. But coffee? Had I seen her drinking coffee?

  “I can’t remember!” I said in panic. “Really, I can’t. There was so much going on.”

  His hand reached out in the dark and closed, warm and firm, around mine.

  “It’s okay, Poppy. Don’t try so hard. You are tired and anxious. Just let it all go, let go of all this business. Relax.”

  I felt the tension begin to ebb and my jaw unclench. The blackout headlamps of the car lit up the road immediately in front of us, a comforting half circle of light in the dark as the moon slipped behind a thick bank of cloud. I watched the even gray surface surge toward us like a hypnotized hedgerow creature. I felt my eyes close. I wanted to drive like this forever, but his hand slipped away from mine to change gear, and I opened my eyes to watch the road.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MY FEET WERE ICE-COLD WHEN I WENT UPSTAIRS TO MY MUSTY little room at the inn. I folded the blanket in half to double; then I scrambled into my nightie and dressing gown and pulled on a thick pair of socks before I got into bed. I was conscious only of the wind soughing in the trees as I pulled Bess close to me and sank into sleep.

  * * *

  * * *

  I NEVER SLEEP well when there is a full moon. Were we still driving down the quiet country lanes of Hampshire? Surely the sound I had heard was the Alvis’s engine? I was wide awake in an instant. Kneeling on my bed, I pulled the curtain aside and looked out into the night.

  I could see nothing in the lane or the drive below me. I strained my eyes to try to make out the outline of Griff’s Alvis where he had parked it by the laurel hedge. There was no other car in the drive but his when we had walked into the inn at eleven o’clock.

  I groped on my dressing table until my hands closed around my blackout torch. Scrambling back onto the bed, I switched it on and trained its feeble beam down onto the drive and to the right. The light wavered along the hedge from the corner of the inn back toward the lane. Griff’s car wasn’t there. It was the Alvis’s engine I had heard.

  I pulled the blackout curtain closed and shone the torch on my wristwatch. It was almost three o’clock.

  I lay down and pulled the covers up under my chin. Griff was off on a quest of his own. I had no doubt it was something hush-hush to do with petrol. I smiled as I drifted back into sleep.

  * * *

  * * *

  I HALF OPENED heavy eyelids as dawn broke and lay, still and warm, in the drowsing state between sleep and wakefulness when the mind is reluctant to leave dreams and still too la
zy to try to make sense of them.

  I saw aircraft swooping through a tunnel of trees or turning lazily in a sky lit by a bomber’s moon. “Your coffee is cold.” I turned on my side and drifted back into sleep.

  “Your coffee is cold.” Someone was inviting me to share her coffee. It was delicious, she told me: prewar. Freshly ground from perfectly roasted beans. The water hot but not scalding. There is nothing as unpleasant as burned coffee.

  I spooned a luxurious spoonful of crystal white sugar into my cup and stirred as I inhaled its aroma, the scent of perfectly brewed coffee. I turned on my side and took a long, deep breath: warm dog smelling slightly of ditchwater; damp air filtering through the warped window frame; and an undernote of mildew that was the inn. I sat up in bed, sniffing the air like a questing hound for coffee. All a dream, Ilona informed me. You were having a prewar dream, sweetie.

  There would be no crisply fried bacon either. Nor would there be delicate triangles of ham sandwiches and buttery shortbread for tea. All were gone!

  I sat up, swung my legs out of bed, and scuffed my feet into slippers. The linoleum floor was ice-cold. With my coat around my shoulders over my dressing gown, I shuffled to the bathroom and hoped that at least the water would be hot enough to bathe in.

  * * *

  * * *

  GRIFF WAS HALFWAY through his breakfast when I arrived in the dining room, and so were Huntley and Keith. They half rose in their chairs to say good morning.

  “You look like you slept well.” Griff resumed his seat.

  “I wish I could say the same for you!” I teased, to let him know that I knew he had been up and about at three in the morning.

  Huntley turned to Keith and rapidly started to outline how we could manage to shoot the film we wanted and get back to London. And Griff cleared his throat and grinned at me across the table.