The English Girl: A heartbreaking and beautiful World War 2 historical novel

by Sarah Mitchell

  Thomas nods. ‘Show me.’

  Fran spins on her heel and starts to run. Thomas lopes easily alongside. Together they race the length of the flint wall. At the corner of the alley Fran slows, scared all at once the passage will be empty, the men gone, that she will have stopped the army truck for nothing. The blood is pounding in her ears, her heart stammering, yet the moment their footsteps cease she hears a groan followed by a voice that is rancid with menace.

  ‘Now don’t you go all soft on me! That was just for starters. I’ve not got going properly yet. A real man should be able to take a punch or two, that’s what I say!’

  At the far end of the alley they see the fair-haired target. He is pressed against the wall, elbow shielding his face. The left arm of the bottle-man pins his quarry to the brickwork, while the right hangs loose, knuckles clenched and free now of the bottle that is rolling about his feet.

  ‘See!’ Fran whispers. She is horrified, and also – unforgivably – a tiny bit relieved not to have intervened in the truck’s passage for nothing. Before she can say any more Thomas sprints away from her. The sink of bone into flesh carries over the cobbles, followed by a second, more anguished moan. As she watches, bottle-man swings back his arm again. This time, however, Thomas is close enough to grab his wrist, hauling the soldier backwards so that he reels away from the wall and staggers to keep his balance.

  ‘I think that is enough. You must stop now.’ Although Thomas has released his grip on bottle-man’s arm, he maintains his ground so that barely the length of a broom handle separates the two men.

  The soldier gapes at Thomas, digesting the black patches and the white letter P on the trousers. ‘You’re a fucking German!’ His face ignites with fury. ‘Fucking Hitler scum! And you dare to tell me what to do! We bloody beat you Krauts. I’ll teach you to put your filthy fucking hands on me!’ He dips towards the ground, hands scrabbling on the cobbles, but Thomas anticipates what is happening, locates the glinting bottle first and kicks the glass away.

  As bottle-man rises, his features contort with rage. The fingers of his right hand curl into a fist. Fran waits helplessly, bracing herself for the impact, when the second soldier steps from the cloak of the shadows.

  ‘Wait, Jack. You could be stirring up trouble. We don’t know what’s going on.’ His eyes flit across the alley, as if checking for guards or a cavalcade of escaped prisoners. Then, roughly, to Thomas, ‘Why aren’t you locked up?’

  ‘A whole truck of German prisoners and British guards is waiting over there.’ Thomas indicates over his right shoulder, towards the solidity of the main road. ‘Any minute they will come. And when they understand what you are doing to this man, they will call the police.’

  ‘He’s fucking lying.’ Bottle-man looks to where Thomas is pointing. ‘There’s no one there.’

  The second soldier shakes his head. ‘Leave it, Jack. Not worth the risk. He can’t be out on his own, can he? They don’t just let the fucking Krauts wander about, do they? Besides’ – he jerks his chin towards the fair-haired man who is cupping his nose, blood seeping between his fingers – ‘you’ve already made your point. Let’s go home.’ He takes a few paces, before retracing his steps to yank his friend’s forearm. ‘I said, let’s go, didn’t I?’

  Bottle-man nods slowly and makes as if to follow his mate. Suddenly he swivels round, heels grinding on the tarmac, and shoves Thomas in the small of his back. The German pitches forwards and sprawls onto the ground. ‘That’ll fucking teach you. Fucking Kraut.’ With horror, Fran sees the soldier lift his boot, draw back his leg, but he must have second thoughts because after an unsteady second he lowers his foot and, swearing under his breath, lurches after his mate. Fran watches until she is certain they have exited the alley and are headed in the opposite direction to the main road.

  When she turns back, Thomas is on his knees gathering a number of items – a notebook, a pencil, a small black wallet – that have fallen from his pocket. A long arc of dirt runs the length of his cheek while the skin underneath smarts sore and red. Instinctively Fran reaches out to help him up, only to retract her arm an instant later. She blushes as she sees him notice her confusion. She puts out her hand again. After a pause, Thomas takes it.

  ‘Thank you.’ As he gets to his feet, his eyes are smiling, blades of blue light slicing through the dusk. Fran looks down, uncertain if he is laughing at her. The grip of his fingers feels warm. She is aware of the cat’s tongue texture of his skin and the curve of his thumb circling her wrist before she realises there is no longer any need to be holding his hand at all. Pulling away, she walks towards the fair-haired man who is leaning against the wall and pinching his nose with a red-stained handkerchief.

  ‘Are you all right?’ It is a relief to switch her attention away from Thomas.

  ‘Absolutely.’ The man nods emphatically through his handkerchief. ‘Give me a moment and I’ll be fine. I only need to clean up a bit.’ As if to illustrate as much, he takes the cotton from his nose and spits onto the least soiled corner.

  Fran watches as he starts to rub his face. Behind them, she can hear Thomas moving closer.

  ‘They were such thugs,’ she says, determined not to look around. ‘Why would they set on you like that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Oddly, the fair-haired man appears too preoccupied with the bloodstains on his face to want to give the matter much thought. ‘I suppose they had their reasons. Anyway’ – he makes a point of consulting a smart-looking, leather-strapped wristwatch – ‘I really ought to be going. My family will be wondering where on earth I’ve got to.’

  Briefly, Fran wonders if he means a wife and child, and immediately doubts that he does. Not because of his age – he appears to be only a few years older than her – but on account of a solitary sort of gaucheness. Somehow it’s hard to imagine him going home to a partner, or a small, sick baby keeping him up all night with croup.

  ‘Will you be all right,’ he adds, ‘getting home yourself?’

  Fran nods, touched. After all that has happened, the question ought to be asked the other way around. The air seems to charge with static and without turning her head she knows that Thomas has come to stand beside her. The attention of the fair-haired man switches to Thomas too and a range of emotions pass over his features, far too quickly for her to track. ‘Thank you,’ he says, finally. Then, dangling the bloody handkerchief, ‘If you hadn’t come along when you did, I fear the damage would have been a lot worse.’

  ‘I helped very little. You should really thank…’ Thomas looks pointedly at Fran.

  Her mouth dries to ash. ‘Frances. Fran.’

  The fair-haired man alternates his gaze from one to the other, then clears his throat as if there’s an awkwardness to the situation he can’t quite identify. ‘Thank you, both. I really am very grateful.’ He pauses, ‘Well, I’ll wish you a very good evening.’ There is a further beat or two of silence before he stuffs the handkerchief deep into the pocket of his trousers and with a final nod walks purposefully away.

  Neither Fran nor Thomas speaks until the rap of departing footsteps has melted into the gloom. ‘I must go back to the lorry,’ Thomas says eventually, but he doesn’t move. They are both standing exactly on the spot where the fair-haired man left them.

  ‘You’re not tempted to escape?’ Fran says, and is immediately mortified she might have thought such a thing, let alone said it out loud.

  His eyes flash with surprise. Or amusement. ‘I would need a safe house and some English pounds. Prisoners are only paid in tokens. See…’ Delving into his pocket, he opens his wallet to show a mauve slip of paper stamped Bardhill Camp: 2s. 6d. ‘Without someone to help me, I have no chance to go anywhere.’

  Fran has seen the tokens before, of course. She and Daisy spent several hours counting and allocating them at the end of the previous week, but naturally Thomas is not aware of that. He has no reason to know she works at the camp. She’s wondering if – how – to tell him when a different, more t
roubling thought suddenly occurs. ‘You’re not suggesting I help you escape, are you?’

  Thomas stops smiling. His expression becomes earnest. ‘I would never ask you to do such a thing.’ He puts the wallet away without looking at her.

  For a while they both stand quietly. Somehow the silence softens, becomes more intimate. The hush feels like a blanket insulating her both from the cold and the rest of the world. Extraordinarily, she realises she wants to touch him. Her wrist is pulsing for the sandpaper touch of his thumb, while the mud on his face has acquired the pull of a magnet; she is itching to lift her hand to his cheek, to rub away the dirt. She can visualise standing on tiptoes to reach him, tucked against his chest, her fingers light on his skin. The image is so real that for a second she thinks it might even be happening.

  Forcing her gaze downwards, she breathes a lungful of the bitter, sober air and makes herself take one, then two, steps further away. A little way beyond her right foot an object – small, shiny – is catching what remains of the light. It takes a moment to gather both her attention and focus and see that the item is a photograph. Crouching low, she picks up the glossed paper. The picture is of a child, a girl in a summer-ripe garden, aged about six years old. A blond, candyfloss cloud of hair surrounds a face that is rapt with happiness as she stares with adoration at whoever is holding the camera.

  Fran holds out the image to Thomas. She can’t quite manage to meet his eyes. ‘Is this yours? Perhaps it fell out of your pocket when you fell.’ He nods, takes the photograph from her and slides it inside his jacket without a word. A hundred questions buzz around Fran’s head. Although she can’t bring herself to ask him any of them, they hang in the air like a swarm of bees, shifting the atmosphere in a way that makes her suddenly able to say quite coolly, ‘We really should be going. I’m expected at home and you will get into trouble for being late.’ Without waiting for him to reply, she starts to head down the alley.

  Late afternoon has solidified to evening. The plum-coloured curtain of the sky is broken only by a slice of moon and the thin black limbs of the tallest treetops. Fran trails a hand along the flint wall, fingertips bouncing over the egg-shaped stones, using the landmark to retrace her steps. Thomas follows, keeping, it seems, a deliberate half pace behind. Once or twice Fran senses the space between them crack open, as if he’s going to speak, but before he says anything, they reach the junction of the main road where a torch beam is sweeping back and forth through the dusk.

  ‘Thomas, is that you?’ The driver’s voice is tight with anxiety. ‘Ten minutes, I said. You’ve been a bloody sight longer than that! I was beginning to think you’d bloody scarpered.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ Fran says quickly. ‘A man was being set upon. Thom—’ she stops herself, sensing the familiarity would sound misplaced. ‘This prisoner saved him.’

  ‘Is that so?’ The driver peers at her. His torch has dropped, pooling the ground and the underside of their faces with white-gold light. ‘What about the police then? An incident like that should be reported.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  The driver considers Thomas. Even in the dark his surprise is evident.

  ‘The man who was attacked,’ Thomas says. ‘I don’t think he would want that.’

  As soon as he has spoken, Fran understands that he is right. The fair-haired man actually seemed to want to make as light of the matter as possible. And he certainly hadn’t mentioned calling the police. She wondered if it was bravery or some other reason that had caused him to play down the assault with such nonchalance. At the time she hadn’t given his reaction a second thought.

  For a moment the driver seems undecided. Then, ‘Right. Climb in, and let’s get back to the camp.’ There’s relief in his voice, and sudden exhaustion too.

  As Thomas moves away, Fran feels – thinks she feels – a slight brush against her arm. When she raises her eyes, he is looking at her, the blue of his eyes impaling her own. The same urge to lean forwards, to touch him, is so overwhelming she has to clasp her right hand with her left. She imagines her feelings must be as obvious as a scarlet cloak about her shoulders or a dog yapping at her heels, yet the driver seems oblivious, clambering into his seat and coughing the engine to life.

  Thomas swallows. Fran watches the ripple in his throat, the tightening of his lips, as he turns away from her and vanishes behind the back of the truck. In less than thirty seconds she is standing on her own again. Slowly, she retrieves her bicycle from the wall and begins her ride home. The notion that jumped into her head the instant she saw the photograph – that Thomas must have a daughter, that he probably has a wife too, waiting for him somewhere in Germany – has at some point during the last few minutes taken root as a fully formed fact. Pedalling steadily into the night, she is shaken by the stone of unhappiness that accompanies this truth, the weight of sadness in her belly.

  As she unlatches the gate, the lamps from the sitting room glow warm through the curtains. Opening the front door, her mother calls out, ‘Why are you so late? Is everything all right?’ Fran shouts back a reply and wheels the bicycle into the shed. For a while she lingers with the spiders, composing both herself and a plausible story about work at the camp. Providing the real explanation is unthinkable. The events of the evening are so infused with emotion that she doesn’t trust herself to extract one from the other. To explain how a German prisoner helped her rescue an Englishman without revealing a lot more besides.

  Chapter Seven

  5 November 1946

  Martin turns up his collar against the rain falling slantways from a weighty sky and keeps walking. In many respects he finds wet weather preferable to dry. He has a hat, which offers some protection against the elements. And he’s far less likely to encounter trouble – at the first sign of drizzle, troublemakers, so he has discovered, tend to keep their drinking indoors. Nevertheless, the events of a few nights earlier have made him warier than ever. He starts like a fawn at the slightest noise, peers deep into side streets, and if his path is bordered by a hedgerow or other potential hiding place, hugs the middle of the road unless the appearance of a motor car compels him back to the pavement. He knows he had a lucky escape. If the young woman on the bicycle had been less insistent, less resourceful, the matter might have turned out very badly indeed.

  An image of her comes to mind, as it has done repeatedly since their encounter. A slight yet strong-looking figure, hair the jumbled bronze of autumn leaves, and green-brown eyes that exposed every thought passing through her head as plainly as a clean glass window. As he’s wondering if their paths might cross again, he leaps at the distant clatter of a fallen dustbin lid and immediately rebukes himself.

  If he can’t get a grip, stop behaving with less backbone than a teenager, perhaps he should cease these evening walks altogether? After the attack, pressing ice to his face in the half-lit kitchen, dreading the barrage of questions from his mother and sister, the notion of giving them up was very tempting indeed. Yet if he doesn’t walk, how will he exercise? When every morning he drives to town and spends his working day in an office. When he can’t play a game of football or cricket and is denied the breathy exhilaration of running, of holding his nerve in front of a goal or a determined bowler. And if he doesn’t exercise, what will happen to his heart? A heart so appallingly, shamefully, weak, the British army found him to be incapable of so much as staggering onto a French beach and dying alongside the rest of his friends. No, he has to keep on walking. And perhaps even allow himself a small sense of achievement at writing in his daily diary normal route to Salthouse and back, three minutes faster! Or, hard work today as strong headwind, but no obvious ill-effects.

  Slipping his palm between the folds of his raincoat and jacket, Martin feels the thud of his pulse. Beneath the layer of ribs and flesh the muscles are contracting and expanding, chugging dutifully away – for the time being at least. He has lain in bed like this for hours, trying in vain to detect the fatal anomaly. One day, he supposes, the
flaw will make itself known. His heart will simply stop, not in the way a heart shuts down when anyone dies, a sign on a door flipping gently from open to closed, but more akin to a sudden break on the front wheel of a bicycle, a seizure that will send him spinning over the handlebars and crashing lifeless to the ground.

  Returning his fist to his coat pocket, he moves forwards again and doesn’t pause until he reaches the old cricket ground. At the memorial, he lingers to read the list of fallen men. The names are so familiar that he could almost recite them all without looking. Instead he makes himself read each one out loud while the usual fog of guilt, the same impossible question, descends. Why is he here, standing under the sting of the rain, when they are not? Feeling the ocean air raw inside his lungs, a chill in his toes and the stirrings of his empty stomach. Why did a random affliction spare him from the slaughter, but not them?

  Eventually he sets off again. The final part of his ritual takes him up the hill that leads southwards out of the village and onto the heath. His destination is a wooden bench with vistas, on a fine day, over yellow-tipped gorse towards the shifting presence of the sea. The demands of the incline his best guess at an appropriate balance between effort and risk.

  There is nobody else about, of course, no one else so foolish as to choose to soak themselves to the skin at the end of a working day in November, which is why it takes him a moment to register the figure hunkered low on the wooden bench. He or she is facing the shore, although by now it is surely too dark to appreciate the view, to see anything but a dismal slate-grey canvas falling away to the coastline with the lights of the village beckoning below.

  As he approaches, Martin clears his throat, aware his sudden presence might cause alarm. ‘Terrible weather,’ he says, though in fact the rain seems to be easing. The silver threads still dripping from his hat appear to be from the earlier deluge.