Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  It was a time of high excitement: for those who flew the P-47s from the bases at Ibsley and Truxton, or the P-38s from Stony Cross in the New Forest. They were either relaxing and bored at the base, or caught up in the heady game of sweeping over northern France, often face to face with death, as they pounded the enemy in preparation for Operation Overlord.

  Was it really possible that during this existence, when life was being lived at the edge, Patricia Shockley was also going to happen?

  She would know what it must mean. A few, snatched moments – passion caught and taken when you can, in the knowledge that each time may be the last.

  All day he had wondered about her, and asked himself: was she, also, thinking of him? He had made arrangements in the hope that she was.

  It was when she opened the door, and gave him a shy smile, that he knew in a flash that she had been.

  “I brought you a present,” he said.

  It was two pairs of nylon stockings.

  “Oh, you lovely man.”

  They did not dine in the city, but just outside, across the meadows in the place used by the cognoscenti of the area: the Old Mill at Harnham.

  “It really is a mill,” he said delightedly, as they mounted the rickety oak staircase with its wide treads to the upper room. It had window seats, dormer windows, and a grand piano.

  “It was a flour mill – and probably a fulling mill before that,” she told him. And she explained the significance of the term. “You’d never think this sleepy old place had once been one of the foremost cloth towns in England, would you?”

  “What else?” he grinned.

  “Constable painted some of his best known pictures, of the cathedral, from here.”

  “It’ll do then.” He smiled. “Every damn thing around here has some piece of history attached to it.”

  “It does,” she agreed.

  It was an excellent dinner – the best that could be had in Sarum. He ordered a very passable bottle of red wine. And then, when it was over and they were both bathed in a warm glow, they walked together across the moonlit water meadows with the silent grey shape of the cathedral rising in front of them. At the little wooden bridge over the river, she let him kiss her.

  After some time she asked:

  “What are your plans now?”

  He smiled.

  “Funny you should ask. I’m staying over until the morning at the White Hart.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I booked the best room they had, just in case my wife turned up.”

  “I see. Her name, of course, would be Shockley.”

  “I guess it would.”

  She put her arm through his.

  “Lead me there, Shockley.”

  Half an hour later, looking up at the lovely figure who had suddenly rolled over and was now triumphantly astride him, Adam remarked in some surprise:

  “You seem to be taking control of this situation here, Shockley.”

  “Not at all,” she murmured happily. “I’m just a little hungry.”

  It was nine o’clock when John Mason called at the house on Milford Hill to see her.

  The girl who had answered the door went in to look for her. He heard voices inside, then one calling from her room:

  “She went out with an American airman. Nearly two hours ago.”

  He felt a sensation in the pit of his stomach.

  “She seems to be out,” the girl said tactfully.

  He turned and walked away. The night was warm. He wondered if she would be out late. Perhaps if she came back soon, he could speak to her.

  John Mason paused at the bottom of the hill and waited.

  At ten o’clock he decided to go: except that since she was bound to return soon, it seemed foolish not to wait a few minutes more. At ten thirty, a drunken G.I, came by. He wondered whether to do anything about him; the drunken man was waiting near the A.T.S. house. After a few minutes Mason walked back up the hill and told him to leave.

  “Why?”

  “I’m a lawyer and if you don’t I’ll call the Snowballs.”

  The man cursed him, but the white-hatted military police that the locals now called Snowballs could be rough, and the English lawyer was bigger than him. He went away. John Mason felt better.

  At midnight, he knew in his heart that he was wasting his time.

  A little after one in the morning, he walked sadly home.

  The affair of Adam Shockley and Patricia Shockley was conducted in a series of meetings, usually in the afternoon, in the month of May.

  They were never easy to arrange. Once they met at Fordingbridge; another time at Downton; for both lay between his base and Salisbury. But one beautiful afternoon, he rode into Salisbury on the bus and she took him in the car up to Old Sarum and the high ground.

  “I’m going to show you the rest of Sarum,” she told him.

  “But what if we want to . . . ?”

  “Don’t worry,” she cut in. “We’ll find somewhere.” And after they had viewed the ruins of Old Sarum and gazed out over the plain, with its huge cargo of camouflaged vehicles, she drove him up the little Avon valley and parked at Avonsford. “Come on,” she cried, “we’re going to have a picnic.” While he carried the small basket she had provided and she brought a rug, she led him up a track to the top of the ridge. “There,” she said in triumph as the wonderful view opened up before them. “I discovered this place last autumn; isn’t it divine?”

  There was a cluster of trees at the top of a little mound nearby.

  “What’s that?” he asked. And since she did not know, they made their way across a fallow field towards it, only to be surprised as a huge host of blue butterflies rose like a cloud all around them.

  At the top they found a circle of trees, mostly yews, with a glade of grass in the centre.

  “It’s a strange place,” he remarked.

  “It’s also completely deserted,” she said. The grass was warm and dry, and bathed in the afternoon sunlight.

  With a chuckling laugh, she spread the rug and lay down upon it, loosening her jacket as she did so.

  “Picnic?” she asked.

  Adam Shockley had never known greater happiness than in these brief interludes with Patricia. It was not long before his fellow pilots realised his good fortune and began to tease him about the curious messages that would sometimes be left for him by the telephone – cryptic but full of suggestion, like the one which read simply: “Downton, 2.30.”

  “Who is she?” they asked, and when he would not tell them she became Downton 2.30 to the whole station.

  Patricia, too, went about in a glow of good health, though for her it was interspersed with periods of anxiety whenever he was away on a raid and she had not heard from him. Often she found herself sleepless at nights and lying with tears on her pillow at dawn.

  Forest-Wilson asked her in a kindly, languid way to dinner one evening; but she refused. He said nothing but she suspected from the half-amused, half-compassionate look he gave her that he had guessed the reason. He did not bring up the subject again.

  A few days later, Forest-Wilson noticed she was wearing nylon stockings. “He’s an American then,” he deduced.

  They were both careful never to mention one subject – their own lives after D-Day. That was taboo. The moment for them was now, in these few brief weeks, to be enjoyed while it lasted. Once, when he began to speak of the possibility of their meeting later in the year, she cut him off quickly.

  “Don’t let’s think about it. It’s bad luck.”

  But to himself he thought, several times, that when this war was over, he would not mind at all if Patricia Shockley made a trip to Philadelphia – a permanent one.

  Yet there were times when she puzzled him.

  They talked a lot, in their brief times together. It was one of the things he liked about their relationship most. But she had such strong and unusual opinions on many subjects that at first the things she said baffled and even disturbed him.


  The first time he had noticed something strange was in a shop in Fordingbridge, where the elderly woman had addressed her as miss with a deference that he suspected had nothing to do with her uniform.

  “Was that the English class system at work?” he asked laughingly. But instead of making light of it, she looked angry.

  “I’m afraid so. After the war it will all stop though.” He noticed she was prepared to speak about after the war in a general sense.

  “Does it matter so much?”

  She pointed to the four initials in brass on the shoulder of her uniform. “You see those initials: F.A.N.Y.? They call us the fannies. We’re the part of the A.T.S. that act as drivers for the officers.”

  “So?”

  “How do you suppose we’re chosen?”

  “By driving skill, I guess.”

  “Wrong. By accent – the way we speak. And . . . if someone knows us. Class, in other words. It’s nicer for the officers.”

  He shrugged. It was the kind of thing he had always heard.

  She grinned. “Actually, I suppose most girls from lower-class backgrounds can’t drive, so I’m exaggerating. But even so, it’s got to change.” She was vehement. “I’m a rebel of course,” she added.

  He didn’t mind her being a rebel. But he wondered what form her rebellion meant to take.

  On the next occasion they met she said something even stranger. They had seen a G.I. buying an armload of goods in the market place and she had shaken her head disapprovingly.

  “It’s terrible, their having so much money,” she remarked, as though it were a statement of fact.

  “You mean, it makes the English people jealous.”

  She stared at him in complete astonishment.

  “Of course I don’t. I mean it’s bad for them, the G.I.s. Nothing to be jealous about.”

  This he had not been able to make much sense of; but he had not felt like pursuing the subject at the time.

  In fact it was only after that perfect time on the hill above Avonsford, when they had made love, eaten their picnic and made love once again, and then sat on the outer edge of the little circle of trees, gazing out over the ridges that he had decided to find out a little more about her opinions. It would be hard, he thought, to find a more perfect girl to settle down with. But, he grinned to himself, it would be wise to find out a bit more about the strange processes that went on in her mind.

  “You say everything’s going to change after the war. What do you mean by that?”

  She leaned back against a tree, staring towards the horizon.

  “You really want to know that? Now?”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed.

  “Oh well, if you must.” She pulled up a long blade of grass and began to wind it around her finger. “No one agrees with me, you know. I mean, if you ask any of the other girl drivers, or the people living around Sarum – what will it be like after this is over? – they will all, every one of them, tell you: ‘We’ll just go back to normal.’ You know what normal is?”

  “Just working I suppose.”

  “No. Leisure. Domestic servants. Cheap labour. And exploitation. It’s how it’s always been.”

  “But you think that will change?”

  “Yes. With the whole class system. The war’s changing that. The ordinary people feel they’ve been ordered around too much in the services, but they’ve got used to being something other than servants in people’s houses. They’ll demand a change.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Neither. But the old class society will collapse, and I think that’s a good thing too.”

  “Welcome to America,” he said with a smile.

  “Oh, I don’t think we want anything like that,” she said.

  He was puzzled. “Why not?”

  “Too capitalist. All greed.”

  He remembered the scene in the market place, and her anger at the G.I.s’ wealth.

  “So let me get this straight. You want the people to be free, but they mustn’t get rich, is that it?”

  She laughed. “You’re trying to make me look stupid, but in a way, yes.”

  “My God, are you a socialist?”

  She considered carefully. “No. I mean, not like the Russians – or the fascists for that matter, who began saying they were socialists. But capitalism . . .” she looked for words “ . . . it’s unfair. And it encourages greed.”

  “Money’s bad?”

  She tapped him on the arm with her blade of grass.

  “What a question to ask when you’re almost in sight of Salisbury cathedral. Of course it is. Money is the root of all evil.”

  “It’s what you do with it,” he suggested, but she shook her head. “Well,” he went on, confident on his ground, “your Labour Party here may agree with you, but I don’t think the Conservatives will, nor most of the country folk around here. They’re capitalists.”

  But to his surprise she disagreed.

  “No they’re not. The real Conservative has a sort of feudal outlook: he wants everything to stay the same but he looks after his people: he feels responsible for them. And he doesn’t think they should be tempted into running about after money.”

  “Which he has, but he can handle – is that it?”

  “Something like that. I suppose you could say many people feel God arranged the classes the way they are.”

  “And the socialists – your Labour Party – want the state to organise everyone: but they don’t want the poor to get ahead too much either. So they’ll just break up the wealth of the rich and then keep everyone from succeeding.”

  “There are other kinds of success than money.”

  “Sure.” A thought had just struck him. “So in fact, the right wing and the left wing in this country – the old guard Conservatives and the Labour people – have exactly the same outlook – a kind of religious paternalism. And the capitalists are just the bad guys in between.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it. Yes. I suppose that’s quite true.”

  “Nor had I, until I talked to you,” he confessed. “Frankly, I didn’t come over here to fight for either the feudal aristocracy or the socialists,” he added irritably. “I thought this was the home of democracy and individual liberty.”

  “It is. And common law. And we abolished slavery first,” she added with a laugh. “But you can’t just put the individual first. It isn’t fair.”

  “Life isn’t fair, lady.”

  “Not yet.”

  “But why can’t you just give everyone a chance to make as much money as they like?”

  She stared at him in surprise.

  “Because if one man makes money, he must be taking it away from someone else.”

  It was a fundamental attitude of European life that Adam Shockley had not encountered before.

  “But, you just create more,” he said.

  “You may,” she conceded. “But,” she waved her arm over the landscape, “in the last few thousand years, this place has been pretty well picked over.”

  “That’s pessimistic,” he countered. “Optimism wins.”

  She grimaced. It had not occurred to him that she would find this idea repugnant.

  “If life’s a game. But perhaps God put us here to suffer.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I think so.”

  For several minutes neither of them spoke. He found what she had said disturbed him profoundly. He thought about the implications.

  “One thing underlies all of what you say,” he suggested finally. “It seems to me that all you believe concerns the past. Either people want to preserve it, or destroy it.”

  “Yes. There’s such a legacy of unfairness and exploitation. It’s got to be changed.”

  “Fine. But what then. What’s the future?”

  “The future? Well, not as cruel as the past I suppose. Pensions, free hospitals, free schools.”

  “Socialism? Labour Party?”

  “Not nece
ssarily. No. Just reform, wherever it’s from.”

  “I don’t think you’re all that interested in the future.”

  She paused, and thought.

  “I think that may be a fair criticism,” she said at last. “With so much history around a place like this, I suppose it’s difficult not to put the past first.”

  Perhaps after all this was the real secret, Adam considered, of Sarum. He wondered if perhaps Patricia would not be happier there than in the U.S.A. But then, there was no need to think about that now. They had agreed to enjoy the moment.

  Although she never told him so, Patricia Shockley owed Brigadier Forest-Wilson a debt of gratitude.

  It was in the last week of May that he happened to offer the high-ranking U.S. Air Force officer a lift from Southern Command H.Q. into Salisbury.

  It was, so the theory went, one of the benefits of the way that F.A.N.Y. drivers were chosen that they were all, by definition, discreet and reliable. Security at Sarum was tight. As Overlord approached, if a man in a sensitive job went sick, he was liable to be whisked into isolation. But Patricia had noticed on several occasions that things were sometimes said in the back of the car which she could hear and which, she assumed, might have been secret.

  Their destination was Odstock – a bleak spot, over a low ridge just south-west of the city where a collection of low buildings and Nissen huts constituted a small British hospital with an American one beside it.

  As they bowled along, she only caught snippets of the conversation. But what she heard electrified her.

  “Of course, if your men could take out . . .” It was Forest-Wilson speaking. “Certainly a great help . . . effective . . . trouble is, too fortified.”

  “Could be done.” The American.

  There was more murmuring she did not catch. Then Forest-Wilson.

  “Seems too much of a sacrifice. I just don’t think anyone’d come out alive.”

  “If we did, though . . . day after tomorrow?”

  “Perfect. Who would you use?”