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

by Sarah Mitchell

  Fran blinks. It takes her a second to realise Martin really does want to go on a date with her and another to understand this is as close to asking her out as he dares to venture. She considers afresh the lanky frame that looks as if it must either be propped against a wall or ducking to avoid a beam, the fairish, floppy hair and the eyes, nose and mouth which all combine to convey a sort of hopeful kindness.

  While she watches, his expression falters. ‘Forgive me, I got carried away. There’s absolutely no reason at all why a smashing girl like you would be remotely interested in going out with someone like me. Please forget I ever…’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  She tries to gather herself, desperate both to end the conversation and not to crush his feelings. ‘I don’t mind that you… what you… I mean about your heart.’ She takes a breath, her cheeks burning. ‘But I hardly know you. This is the first time we’ve met, properly anyway, so stepping out together seems rather sudden, that’s all.’

  ‘Of course!’ He nods eagerly. ‘Of course. Perhaps once we… if we get to know each other a little better, you might feel—’

  ‘Perhaps.’ She dips her head again. What would she say if Thomas asked her out? If he wasn’t German. Or if the war had never happened. If Robbie was settling into a job, about to marry a lovely girl who laughed at his awful jokes, instead of buried inside a French graveyard. She was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that she wouldn’t tell Thomas she didn’t know him well enough to accept his invitation.

  The double doors open to Daisy’s gay voice. ‘Not interrupting anything, I hope!’

  Fran lifts her gaze in time to see Martin glare at his sister. Smoothing her skirt, she gets to her feet. ‘I must be going. Thank you so much for inviting me.’

  ‘Can I walk you to the bus stop? It’s getting awfully dark out there.’

  She throws him a smile, quick and perfunctory. ‘It’s quite all right, Martin. I’m sure I can manage.’

  ‘Of course.’ She doesn’t have to look at his face to know that he is nodding again. ‘Well, I very much hope we’ll see other again before too long.’

  * * *

  Outside, the snow has stopped falling. Thick white fingers lie the length of the garden fence while the carpet of flakes swallows the creak and groan of Fran’s footsteps. The Travis-Jones’s gardener might be right, the next few months may well be hellish, but for now the world is a cake transformed by sugar icing.

  At the bus stop she buries her hands deeply into her coat pockets and waits. The house was quite extraordinary. She never dreamed Daisy came from such an affluent home. The rugs, the gleaming wood, and the abundance of things seemed almost exotic. For a moment, she imagines telling her parents she is to marry Martin. She pictures their reaction, their astonishment, their delight, she could do so well for herself. And not only for herself; marrying Martin could give the whole of her family a sense of security that has been glaringly absent since their father fell ill.

  Fran stamps her feet. The air is becoming raw. Merely breathing makes her lungs burn, as if the sensations of hot and cold have met at the same point and become indistinguishable. She recalls Martin’s long-limbed frame, his kindness. She had meant to rebuff his invitation, gently of course, but also definitively. Instead she seems to have managed to do quite the opposite. To have left him hoping she will change her mind when, despite his many virtues, there really is no hope at all.

  Chapter Eleven

  For hours Martin has lain awake, staring into the dark until he has begun to imagine pinpricks of stars. The bedsheets are tangled from his tossing and twisting, and he has felt his feet turn to ice then all at once become too hot. He is certain there are voices in the drawing room, though he has no recollection of hearing footsteps on the path or the suddenness of the doorbell. Perhaps Daisy is talking to his mother. He glances at his bedside table and the clock winks back. Nearly one o’clock; unusually late for either his sister or his mother to be up, particularly on a Sunday.

  Martin keeps still and listens properly. The drawing room is beneath his bedroom and the conversation is seeping through the floorboards in little gusts and eddies. The words are indistinct, but the timbre is intense and – he is certain – the speakers male and female. Deflated, he rolls onto his side. The answer to the mystery is obvious. Herbert. His mother’s new friend. In fact, Martin is almost sure, his mother’s lover. He wonders at the strangeness of the phrase, examines his reaction and finds he is adjusting to the idea, even if he cannot yet match the wholescale enthusiasm of his sister. At any rate, Herbert, with his silver-grey moustache, his solid grey suits, and his own substantial grey house, does not appear to be a risky prospect. No need for Martin – so his mother keeps telling him – to be quite so concerned. Hunching the blankets over his shoulder he watches as snowflakes begin to meander past the window, seemingly with only the haziest notion of gravity. It’s a good thing the weather stayed dry long enough for Fran’s journey home.

  He recognised her the instant that he stepped into the drawing room. The girl from the alley. The feisty, determined angel who saved, if not his life, at least the symmetry of his features. He cannot remember ever having seen a face that holds his attention so completely, so raptly, as if his eyes have found an interlocking piece of puzzle that makes looking anywhere but at her impossible.

  Fran.

  Again.

  How quickly his thoughts revert to her. To the same agitations that have occupied all of these last sleepless hours. He groans out loud. Why on earth did he ask her out to the pictures so soon? Make such a fool of himself and ruin whatever tiny chance he might have had?

  An upsurge of voices penetrates the oak boards. At the sound of his own name, he sits up. ‘Martin,’ he hears his mother say, he thinks he hears his mother say, ‘Martin must not know!’ Which is odd, because he does know about Herbert; his mother has made no secret of her happiness, or indeed the evenings that turn into mornings with only the shared night in her bedroom to separate them.

  The rumble of reply is unintelligible.

  ‘… his heart,’ Martin picks out, and rises a little straighter in the bed. Then, ‘that blasted report!’ Something indecipherable, followed by ‘Serious.’ Finally, louder and more highly pitched, ‘Very serious indeed!’

  There is sudden quiet, as if the occupants of the drawing room have realised their error. Gripping the blanket with one hand, Martin slips the other between the buttons of his pyjama top so that his palm rests on the skin shielding his left ribcage.

  Very serious indeed.

  Perhaps instead of revealing the extent of his disability to him, she has unburdened herself to Herbert? Beneath his fingertips, tucked under their bony roof, his coronary muscles are contracting and relaxing, his pulse is chugging gamely onwards. But for how much longer. Years? Months? Not weeks, surely? He would know if he was so ill that his heart was on the verge of expiring altogether. Wouldn’t he?

  ‘Don’t touch me!’

  Martin’s eyes shoot wide open.

  ‘I said, no!’

  A gasped scream is alarmingly audible. In one continuous movement he is swinging out of bed, grabbing his dressing gown and diving towards the bedroom door. He is still too late. By the time he strides to the top of the staircase there is no sign of Herbert, or of anyone else. Only the sound of the front door slamming and bouncing in the woodwork.

  Tightening the sash cord around his waist, he descends the staircase slowly. For all its flaws and frailties, his heart is certainly thundering now.

  ‘Mother?’

  The drawing room is dark, save for a single side lamp pooling yellow on the Chinese rug. His mother sits on the edge of the big armchair, the heels of her hands pressed into her eyes. From the doorway, Martin can see her shoulders are shaking. He is about to switch on the overhead light, then thinks better of it.

  ‘Mother’ – he clears his throat – ‘was that Herbert who left just now?’

  She lifts her head. For a split seco
nd she fixes him with a gaze that appears to be one of sorrow, almost pity.

  Martin swallows. ‘You’re crying. Has Herbert upset you?’

  ‘Herbert? Good heavens, no. I’m a little over-tired, that’s all.’

  ‘Someone was here. I heard them.’

  Her focus sharpens. ‘What did you hear?’

  I heard you talking about me, Martin wants to tell her. About my heart. I heard you say how serious it is. And then I heard an argument. You said, ‘Don’t touch me!’ The huge frame of the chair and the dim luminescence of the lamp make his mother seem both old and young, the always loved familiar figure and at the same time a stranger with a life woven from threads of a tapestry that have nothing to do with him at all. As he watches, she passes her right fingers slowly across her temple as if to erase whatever she might be thinking.

  ‘Only raised voices,’ Martin lies. ‘The front door shutting.’

  ‘He was an old friend,’ his mother says. ‘An unexpected visit.’ She gets up and pokes the fire, the same diversion, Martin remembers, he employed earlier that afternoon with Fran, except that now the logs are grey and cold and prodding them only produces a cloud of dead embers and dust. ‘It’s very late. Time for bed.’ As she turns, Martin sees she is wearing her long woollen housecoat over her nightdress.

  ‘Mother, the report the doctor wrote about my heart…’

  ‘What of it?’ The tartness returns.

  ‘Do we still have it?’

  ‘Somewhere in my papers. I doubt we’ll need it again, but I can find it if we ever do.’ She snaps the switch on the lamp flex. ‘Bedtime now.’

  She waits for him to move into the hallway before shutting the drawing-room door and following him up the stairs. By the top step she dabs a kiss on his cheek – a brief, papery sensation that smells of rosewater. ‘Goodnight, darling.’

  * * *

  Moonlight spills onto the counterpane while Martin lies rigid with sleeplessness. He wonders if self-preservation is in fact the cause of his insomnia, a fear deep in his subconscious that he might not wake up. Perhaps now that he has even more reason to suspect the true extent of his infirmity he will never sleep normally again. Eventually, he extracts his hand from under his pyjama top, pushes back the covers, and reaches for his dressing gown.

  The house is heavy with the night. He creeps down the staircase, pausing on every creak, and when he finally reaches the hallway heads towards an alcove next to the kitchen. Not large enough to constitute an actual room, the space contains an old cane chair and mahogany desk on which a line of box-files is propped like books against the far wall. For as long as he can remember, this has been his mother’s office, her engine room, her place where she must not be disturbed, although recently she no longer buries herself quite so often with her boxes of lists and papers.

  There is a desk lamp with a green glass shade. Martin angles the light towards the files where it shines on peeling labels marked Finance, House Maintenance, Garden Maintenance and Children written in his mother’s slanting print. The children’s file is the largest, bulging with so much paper an elastic band has been employed to keep the sides closed. Inside he finds smallpox vaccination records for himself and Daisy, their school certificates and a jumbled stack of school reports: Martin is thorough and careful in his work. His writing and arithmetic are neatly presented, and he always tries his best… He flicks through the remaining pile. At the bottom he discovers a Mothering Sunday card from Daisy bearing pink tissue roses, one of which has been reattached with Sellotape. And beneath everything else an unmarked manila folder.

  The medical documentation is merely one page. Confidential, the typeface warns. Findings of the Medical Board held at City of London. Martin Travis-Jones was medically examined on 10 August 1941 and found to be… Two options are given: (A) Fit for military service, or (B) Unfit. Dr Sands has ticked the box Unfit with a decisive blue stroke and given as the reason dilated cardiomyopathy.

  Martin turns the page over. The reverse is blank. No details are provided. Maybe the gravity of his condition doesn’t require further elaboration. Perhaps if he were to research the meaning of dilated cardiomyopathy, it would be all too obvious why his mother has chosen to use instead the vague terminology of weak heart. Maybe she specifically asked the doctor not to record the extent of the illness on the form.

  Martin continues to stare at the paper. More confusing than his actual diagnosis is the reference to the City of London Medical Board. He doesn’t remember travelling to London; indeed, he is certain the appointment was local. And the doctor is not familiar either. He has a vague recollection that he found the doctor’s name amusing in some way, and it is hard to see what he might possibly have considered entertaining about Dr Sands.

  Carefully Martin refolds the medical certificate. As he is returning the document to the file, he notices the manila folder was not the final item after all. A piece of paper is lying print side down, the blank white face giving the illusion of the bottom of the box. Martin picks up the page. Then he inhales sharply. Although he lifts the document closer to the green glass of the lampshade, there is no doubt about what he has found.

  He is holding a death certificate.

  The death certificate of his brother.

  Frederick Travis-Jones died on 11 January 1925 from complications arising from measles when Martin was eighteen months, Daisy only just born, and little Frederick himself barely four years old.

  Martin sits very still. The house seems to be holding its breath. He can hear the thick tick of the grandfather clock nudging the seconds forwards, but the sound feels artificial, as if time might instead have stopped altogether. Tributaries of the new reality soak into his brain like ink carrying a stain through blotting paper. For the very first part of his life it appears he had an older brother. Yet his earliest memories only feature Daisy: sand, squabbles, ball games and baths, with never any mention there could have been a third to lead the pack.

  Martin shuts his eyes. Somewhere inaccessible is the vaguest sensation of closed doors, of blacked-out rooms, the sound of crying. A drifting, faraway notion that is as nebulous as a sea-fret and may be no more than the power of suggestion from the page in his hand. From the hall the clock strikes the half hour, but he has no sense of which particular hour that might be. The night has become its own landscape, alien and disorientating, in which he feels utterly lost.

  Eventually, Martin extinguishes the green lamp and retraces his steps upstairs. Stilling his mind is now out of the question. He pads the length of the landing, eases Daisy’s bedroom door just enough to spy the sleeping form of his sister, the soft slump and rise of the blankets. Already she thinks his health consumes him. He knows she worries about the length of time he spends on his own, his fixation with his daily walks, his seeming inability to find a girlfriend. What will she say if he wakes her now to discuss the oddities of his medical report, their mother’s late-night visitor, and the death of another child before she was even born? That he has become obsessed, no doubt. That during the war it cannot have been unusual for forms printed for the City of London to have been used by other medical boards. That their mother is a grown woman who is entitled to receive as many late-night visitors as she wishes. That the loss of little Frederick is tragic but hardly urgent news.

  That it is the middle of the night and they should both be sound asleep.

  Martin returns to his bed and perches, shivering, on the edge of his mattress. A snowy chill is stealing through the cracks in the window frames and walls, but his trembling is more about the slivers of uncertainty residing in his gut than the temperature of the room. What would it have been like to have a brother? And how would they have all coped if Frederick had been sent to war, if Frederick had been killed, while Dr Sands declared his younger brother unfit to even raise a musket?

  After a moment Martin pulls a shoebox from under the bed. Stacked inside are his diaries from when he first started keeping one at the age of fourteen. It takes no more than
a minute to locate the volume for 1941 and less to find the entry for 10 August:

  Unfit for medical service! Turns out I have a weak heart. Mother is delighted because she thinks it’s a better option than me getting shot to bits by the Hun. Doesn’t seem all that good news to me. Can’t say I fancied going to the front, but a chap has got to play his part. King and country and all that. Not sure how I can serve the King with a dicky heart or even quite how crocked I am as doctor rather vague about it all. Time will tell I suppose. PS Doctor Dandy – like the comic, though not exactly a barrel of laughs today.

  Martin climbs into bed still clutching the diary. If any of his questions have simple answers, at present they elude him; and for reasons he can’t articulate, the prospect of asking his mother about them fills him with a strange and uncomfortable sense of foreboding.

  Chapter Twelve

  14 December 1946

  Two weeks later and the inch of snow has multiplied to twelve. The salt marsh stretches clean and white into a colourless sky, while in the distance the sea is a cold grey line. Cycling is too dangerous, so Fran walks to work, the murky December dawn feeling like the dead of night. Often, she is passed by trucks from the camp, their headlights flooding the dark with a temporary burst of yellow. The prisoners bear shovels and pickaxes to throw sand on the road and dig out the snowdrifts before they start their real day’s labour. All the forecasts are grim. Daisy’s gardener is not the only one who seems to fear the weather predictions more than he ever feared the war, and amongst unease about fuel supplies and shortages Fran also worries about the seals, whose pups arriving on the spit are about to encounter the bleakest winter anyone can remember.