‘I think I’ll survive without that,’ he grinned at her. ‘But I’m glad to see you’ve recovered your spirits anyway, no pun intended!’
‘None registered,’ she grinned back.
Someone had begun to thump out a tune on the pub’s battered piano, and a group of squaddies had crowded around it and begun belting out the words of “This is the army, Mr Jones”.
Moonie nodded his head slightly towards a noisy group of RAF personnel who were hogging a far corner of the public house. The services tended to stay in their own groups unless a fight broke out between them, which wasn’t unheard of.
‘Friend of yours?’ he asked. ‘He keeps looking your way. The RAF bloke over there, I mean.’
Celia’s heart leapt with excitement. Olly! It had to be Olly… Her pleasure faded when she looked across the smoke-filled room into a ruggedly handsome face she had never seen in her life before. It certainly wasn’t her brother; this man was an officer, hob-nobbing with a couple of fellow officers and some lower ranks.
‘I’ve never seen him before,’ she said, abruptly.
‘Well, he seems to think he knows you,’ Moonie said. ‘He’s coming over.’
Celia was aware of the man weaving his way through the crowded groups, and deliberately turned away. She wasn’t an unaccompanied female, and she wasn’t looking for company apart from the safety of Moonie’s. But she sensed that the officer was standing nearby, and then she heard his voice.
‘Pardon me for intruding, but you are Miss Pengelly, aren’t you? No one else could look so much like Wenna unless she was her sister.’
Hearing Wenna’s name unexpectedly made Celia’s head jerk around so fast she felt her neck crick.
‘You know her?’ she asked stupidly.
‘May I join you?’ the officer said after a brief nod, taking charge so effortlessly it was like poetry in motion, she thought, as he dragged a stool from nowhere and perched on it, his tall frame fitting it awkwardly. Now that Celia looked at him properly, she could see the scar running down his cheek, and registered his accent. He might wear a RAF uniform, and from his wings she could see that he was a pilot, but she knew by his accent that he wasn’t British.
‘Please forgive this intrusion, but won’t you put me out of my misery?’ he went on with a smile that would charm the sparrows from the sky. ‘I spent some time recuperating at a house in Truro, and a young lady called Wenna Pengelly came and sang to we poor wounded mortals. You look so much like her I thought for a moment you must be her, until I remembered hearing that she had a sister.’
‘Wenna sang at Aunt Betsy’s?’ Celia echoed before she could stop herself, beginning to feel like a parrot.
Harry Mack smiled in relief and spoke with a hint of triumph in his voice. ‘Thank God it is you. I began to think I was going crazy and seeing double. Look here, may I get you and your companion something more interesting to drink? I might be able to persuade the landlord to rustle up a bottle of red wine. He owes me a favour or two.’
Celia gaped. Red wine was for Continentals, she thought irrationally, and nobody persuaded this landlord to do anything, as far as she knew, but moments later the officer came back to the table with a bottle and three glasses.
‘I’m impressed,’ she said. ‘But you may have a riot on your hands if you’re so privileged.’
Why should he be, she thought resentfully, just because he wore a Group Captain’s uniform and had what she had now deduced was a slick Canadian accent? She felt her hackles rising, whatever the hell they were, at the thought that he might think her an easy pick-up just because she was here in a pub with a man old enough to be her father.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘They know me here, and Wally’s henchmen will keep us from being lynched. I know this is an imposition, Miss Pengelly, but can you tell me what’s happened to Wenna? I’ve tried desperately to keep in touch but she doesn’t answer any of my letters. Do you have an address for her, by any chance?’
He was slick all right. But slick with a desperation in his eyes that she recognised all too well, because it echoed the way she so longed for news of Stefan. Just to know that he was alive and still thought of her and wanted her.
It stuck out a mile that this man was in love with Wenna, and that was the only reason he had sought her out. When she didn’t answer immediately, he went on rapidly.
‘I’m sorry. I can see that I’ve embarrassed you. But we’re leaving here in a few days. Obviously I can’t say where we’re going, so if you would please just let Wenna know that Harry Mack was asking after her, I’d be very obliged.’
He stood up to go, and she nodded at once.
‘I’ll be sure to do that, Group Captain—’
Her voice was drowned then as the raucous singing in the bar grew louder, and he smiled down at her.
‘Thanks. And please finish the wine with my compliments.’
He saluted them both, then walked swiftly away to rejoin his companions. Celia turned to Moonie with wide eyes.
‘Well, what do you make of all that? It seems my sister made a conquest whether she wanted to or not!’
Chapter Nine
By the middle of May the whole country was in a state of intense excitement as news of the Dambuster raids in Germany became the main topic in every newspaper and every wireless broadcast. Led by the fearless Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the bombers of 617 Squadron had breached the huge defences with their new bouncing bombs that had skimmed the surface of the water and then exploded at the foot of two major German dams.
Walls of water had burst through, flooding the valleys of the Ruhr and Eder rivers, destroying a vital power station, causing massive damage to coalworks, ironworks and railways, crashing through the industrial city of Dortmund, and causing thousands of people to flee their homes.
‘They were the lucky ones,’ Nick said grimly to his wife. ‘The poor devils who thought they were safe in their air raid shelters stood no chance at all. I know they’re our enemies, but most of them were probably ordinary people like us, going about their daily business. That’s the hellish side of war. We’re all puppets in the hands of overlords.’
As she was normally the one to show such compassion, Skye was touched by his words. But she had other things on her mind as she read the later reports in the newspapers.
‘How quickly they gloss over the fact that eight Lancaster bombers were lost in the raid,’ she said. ‘They treat us like children, keeping the grim details from us. The young men in those planes won’t be coming home—’
He broke in. ‘Stop it. I know where your thoughts are going, but we don’t even know if Olly was flying Lancasters.’
‘We don’t know that he wasn’t, either,’ she retorted. ‘We don’t know anything, do we? He never writes, and we might as well be on the moon for all the real information we get.’
‘Would you rather be in London?’
Skye flinched. ‘I would not,’ she said.
The news that Wenna and her friend had gone to London and revisited what had once been the Flamingo Club had touched her at the time. Now, she could only think what danger they might have been in. The German bombardment of the capital might have stopped and moved to other vulnerable cities, but occasionally there were horrific tales of undetonated bombs in burnt-out buildings suddenly exploding and causing untold injuries and deaths to unsuspecting victims.
There was a tale of one such bomb being found beneath a family’s doorstep in Notting Hill, and the whole family being sent away. It had been made safe by a controlled explosion, but they had been left with no home to return to. Better that than losing their lives, everyone had said at the time, but it still made the family evacuees and the rest of them aware that danger still lurked in such a silent and obscene way.
Skye also couldn’t rid herself of the thought that Olly might be flying in one of these powerful Lancaster bombers. The last time he was home he had sounded so grown-up, so brash in an oddly endearing way, and it had been easy t
o see he believed himself invincible. She prayed that he was, and that God would forgive her for asking him to protect her own.
In June came the sad news that one of Britain’s most beloved actors was ‘missing believed killed’.
‘He wasn’t even involved in the war,’ she almost wept when the news about Leslie Howard came through among all the regular reports of war casualties. ‘It says he had been giving lectures in Spain to promote British films there and he was in a civil airliner shot down in the Bay of Biscay. It’s so tragic. What had he ever done to the Germans?’
‘What have any of us done?’ Nick said shortly. ‘We don’t take account of the civilian population when we bomb their cities, either, do we? War’s a cruel game, darling, and in the end, it’s the little people who are hurt the most.’
‘Only a philistine would call a famous actor a little person,’ she retorted angrily.
‘They still eat and sleep the same as the rest of us. And break wind too, I shouldn’t wonder,’ he added, trying to lighten the tension between them.
‘You’re as much of a pig as Seb sometimes, aren’t you?’ she snapped, knowing he would have put it far less delicately.
‘Not at all. Just realistic. And if you’re going to spend your days mourning every person who is killed in this war, you’re going to depress us all. We all have to get on with living, Skye.’
She knew that. She just couldn’t rid herself of the nagging fear that Olly was up there somewhere, flying those abominable machines that looked so fragile and beautiful in flight, but could bring such death and destruction to innocent people, and to the men who flew them.
Whether the words were ‘missing in action’ or ‘missing, believed killed’, they had a terrible finality about them, and were being delivered via yellow telegrams with agonising regularity these days. Sometimes to a family whose sons were fighting the war at sea against the dreaded enemy U-boats; or engaged in the war in the air; or still fighting on the ground in Sicily or Tunisia or the western desert…
Nowhere was safe any more, and the thing most women dreaded was to see a telegram boy leaving his bicycle outside their house and coming towards their front door. When a loved one was declared missing, everyone automatically assumed the worst, and mourned him in their hearts.
* * *
Daphne Hollis went missing after school one sunny June afternoon. By now, she and Butch had mastered the bicycles that had been Christmas gifts from their generous Cornish hosts, and rode to and from their Truro school each day.
Butch didn’t always wait for Daphne. For one thing, it was getting to be beneath his dignity to hang about for a bumptious nine-year-old girl whose school friends always giggled and huddled together when they caught sight of him. For another, he liked being alone. He liked riding through the lanes and catching sight of the sea, and he liked the smell of the wild flowers, and he liked to think of himself as a proper Cornish lad now, and to pretend that he was here to stay.
On that June afternoon, he dawdled on the way home, knowing Daphne would catch up sometime. The lure of his favourite cove beneath the cliffs was too strong to resist. The whiff of the salt air and the glitter of the sunlight on the waves made it a magical place, though Butch was far too inarticulate to ever put such thoughts into words.
When the tide went out and the sun baked the sand dry, it was firm enough to ride on and catch the spray as the waves crashed on the rocks nearby. It was a sport Butch loved, and the tingling touch of the sea water on his face invigorated him. That day he spent longer in the cove than he should, collecting shells and a few fossils. When he finally cycled back to New World, he was aware of the prickly heat on his skin, but decided it had been worth it.
‘Where’s Daphne?’ Skye said, the moment she saw him come into the house, long past tea time.
He blinked, having been ready to show her his shells and fossils, and share her own pleasure in such simple things, and was momentarily thrown off balance by the anxious look on her face.
‘I dunno. She’s here, I s’pose,’ he stammered. ‘I ain’t seen her.’
‘Hasn’t she been with you, Butch? Didn’t you wait for her after school?’
The reddened colour on his normally freckled face deepened still more as he heard the accusation in her voice.
‘She don’t want me to,’ he said, his adolescent voice cracking more than usual. ‘She’s always off wiv her mates, and she says I’m spoilin’ their fun if I’m hanging around.’
‘What kind of fun?’ Skye said sharply.
‘I ain’t saying,’ he said sullenly.
‘Oh yes, you are!’ Skye said, suddenly alarmed. Daphne might think herself worldly-wise and a cut above her country cousins, but she was still only nine years old – almost ten, Skye reminded herself – and a large girl for her age at that. And Skye was still responsible for her. She resisted the urge to shake Butch and spoke more calmly.
‘I think you had better tell me all you know about the fun Daphne and her friends get up to, Butch.’
In his own slow way, he was troubled by Daphne’s wildness, but he didn’t want to betray her. But in the end he knew he had to do it.
‘They go down to the river where the soldiers sit outside the pubs in the sun, ’cos they give ’em sweets and fings. And once,’ he gulped, ‘I caught her smoking a Woodbine—’
‘What? And you said nothing about it?’
‘I told ’er she’d better stop it before she got in trouble,’ he howled. ‘But you know what she’s like. She finks she knows better’n everybody else. It weren’t my fault!’
‘I know it wasn’t, Butch,’ Skye said, trying to keep her fury under control. ‘But you say these little girls hang around the pubs where the soldiers sit in the sun. How long has this been going on?’
The town was more overcrowded than ever before, what with the dozens of evacuees and the servicemen who were billeted in every corner of the country now. Skye felt a new fear crawling inside her. A fear that only adults could know, but of circumstances in which children were the victims. Dear Lord, had she been so involved in her own affairs that she had become lax in taking care of Daphne, and allowed this to happen?
‘Stay right here, Butch. I’m going to make some telephone calls and then you and I are going back to Truro.’
The first call was to the school, to be told by the caretaker that everybody had gone home long ago and there were no bicycles left in the stands.
Next she called the newspaper office, and asked for David Kingsley’s personal number. She quickly related what Butch had told her, and he responded at once, saying he’d go down to the riverside pubs and take a look around.
None of them would be open at this time of day, of course, but the old wooden benches outside had become a mecca for the servicemen stationed down here, as many of the older local girls had soon discovered. But Daphne wasn’t old enough to take care of herself in the way those girls were, and while Skye despised herself for thinking the worst of them, she knew there could always be a bad apple in the best of crops.
‘The girl will probably saunter in at any minute as large as life,’ David assured her. ‘Try not to worry, Skye, and report back to the office the minute you know she’s safe.’
But she couldn’t wait for that, and as soon as she had hung up, she called Nick’s chambers in Bodmin to tell him what was happening. Then she and Butch set out for Truro again. He constantly apologised, until she snapped at him to shut up and just concentrate on cycling there as fast as they could.
She hoped against hope that they would see Daphne coming towards them, her head in the clouds as usual, but there was no sign of her, and the sun was getting lower in the sky now, sending a sheen of red and gold across the calm sea.
‘What d’you fink’s happened to her, Mrs Pen?’ Butch finally said cautiously.
‘I dare say she’s playing with her friends and they just forgot the time,’ she said, mentally crossing her fingers.
She didn’t dare to think
what the evacuee billeting officers would say if Daphne was missing for any length of time, or had been harmed in any way. Those stiff-necked townswomen had frightened the life out of the children when they first arrived, and the thought of them interrogating Daphne was something Skye didn’t care to imagine.
It would depend on Daphne’s mood, of course. Daphne, scared and snivelling, would be easier to handle, even though she’d be a sitting target for a billeting officer’s wrath. But Daphne, defiant and belligerent, and peppering every sentence with inventive cuss words, would be something else – and a bad reflection on the household she had been living in for the last three years.
Skye caught her roving thoughts up short, realising that this was no time to be thinking of her own part in all this. What did any of that matter, compared with the safety of a child?
When they reached the town they rode straight to the riverside pubs. David met them there.
‘Nobody’s seen her, though a group of soldiers offered to start a search party for her if we needed one. I told them it wasn’t necessary. No need to alarm people yet. I called home to see if she’d gone there, as she likes playing with our boys, but Lily hasn’t seen her either.’
‘What about her friends, Butch? Do you know who they are and where they live?’ he asked the boy.
Butch, always nervous of David’s direct manner, looked hunted. He couldn’t think and couldn’t help.
After a fruitless hour of searching, and asking anyone in the area if they had seen Daphne, Nick arrived from Bodmin and said shortly that if she didn’t turn up soon, they must inform the police. He anticipated Skye’s protest and spoke sharply.
‘They’re the professionals, Skye, and it’s been more than four hours now since she left the school – and she’s our responsibility,’ he added, echoing her own feelings.
A Brighter Tomorrow Page 16
