Winter of Discontent

by Jeanne M. Dams

  “I expect she’ll tell us. Anyway, what’s her name?”

  “Barbara Price.”

  “Miss or Mrs.?”

  “Miss, definitely.”

  “Was she an officer?”

  “All women were officers. The respect factor, y’see.”

  “Oh, come to think of it, all the women in the American military are officers, too, or were back then, anyway. Okay, what’s she like?”

  “Let you see for yourself.”

  And not another word would Jane say, from which I deduced that she didn’t like the lady.

  Jane had evidently telephoned to Miss Price to say we were coming, because she answered the door of her cottage attired, on a Saturday morning in December, in a tight black silk dress, high heels, and lipstick. She had probably been pretty, in a blowsy sort of way, when she was young. Now her once zaftig curves had run to plain fat, and her complexion had faded. Her hair, however, was a defiant red and her earrings large and green.

  “Oh,” she said with a note of disappointment, looking at the two of us. “I thought you said Mr. Nesbitt would be coming.”

  “Held up at the last minute,” Jane said, not meeting my eye.

  “Well, never mind. Come in, Miss Langland, Mrs. Nesbitt.”

  “It’s Mrs. Martin, actually. I kept my name when I married Alan.”

  Miss Price giggled. Actually giggled, as if she were eighteen instead of eighty-something. “How very American of you. Come in, let me take your coats. I’ve just put the kettle on, tea won’t take a minute.”

  Nine in the morning was not a time when I usually wanted tea, but Miss Price looked like the sort of woman who could enjoy a nice cuppa at any time of the day or night. I looked around me, trying to learn more about her. The cottage was immaculately clean, but crowded with ornaments, touristy kitsch from all over Europe. I spotted a brass Eiffel Tower, a china Coliseum, and no fewer than three cuckoo clocks before I even sat down. The room was hot, all three bars of the “electric fire” glowing in a corner of the room.

  Our hostess came back carrying a heavy tray laden with pot, cups and saucers, milk and sugar, and a large plate of biscuits and mince pies, and then looked around for a place to put it. “Oh, dear. Miss Langland, would you mind moving the aspidistra? The floor will do nicely, thank you so much. I so seldom entertain that I quite forgot I had put that plant on the tea table. Now, milk and sugar, Mrs. Nes—Mrs. Martin?”

  “Yes, please, quite a lot of milk and two lumps.” I had an idea that tea in this house would be very black and very strong. For the sake of my stomach, I needed it diluted as much as possible. “No, nothing to eat for now, thank you. The mince pies look lovely, but I’m trying to watch my weight.”

  “Oh, well, if you’re sure, but do help yourself to anything you like.” She sounded a trifle offended. It was a bad start to the conversation, but I really could not eat cookies and rich tarts at that hour, and she’d have been more upset if Id taken them and left them on the plate.

  “It was such a surprise to hear from you, Miss Langland,” said our hostess. “It must have been years since we’ve talked. I did want to say how sorry I was to hear about Flying Officer Fanshawe. I’d heard you’d got close to him again, and it must have been a shock for you. I took quite a fancy to him when he was first posted to Luftwich, you know. Of course he never so much as looked at any of us WAAFs. He carried your picture in his pocket, and I was told there was one hanging on the wall of his room as well. Of course I wouldn’t know about that personally!” She giggled.

  Jane said nothing, and Miss Price looked affronted. “I suppose you wanted to talk about him? You weren’t very clear when you called.”

  “It was more that we wanted to get a picture of what Bill’s war was like,” I said. “He never talked much about it to Jane, or anyone else, it seems. For a start, I wondered just what you did in the RAF. Jane tells me you were in the Operations Room, but I don’t know what that implies.”

  Miss Price relaxed a little, happy, as people almost always are, to talk about herself. “Oh, it was a very responsible job, very. The men weren’t actually keen on letting women do it, at first, but of course the men were needed in the planes, weren’t they? And at command posts, naturally. So we were taught to control the flights.”

  “When you say control …”

  “Air traffic controller, they’d call us today. We tracked the planes on radar—our planes and the enemy—and directed our pilots by radio until they could see the German planes. When we weren’t on the radio—that was rather nerve-wracking, and we couldn’t do it for terribly long stretches—we’d plot the positions on the map table. We knew at all times where everyone was, unless they got out of radar range. I think I may say that we did as much to keep our boys safe and help them destroy the enemy as any support staff. They couldn’t have done without us, really, though of course we were in very junior positions. I do sometimes think the officers at command level took us quite for granted, but the boys knew what we did, and were grateful to us.

  “Oh, I well remember how it used to be when they came home from a mission. Dead tired, of course, and cold. Even in the summer it was cold in the planes, because of the altitude. They’d go first to the mess for hot tea and a meal, but quite a number of them would always come in and thank us for what we’d done. Sweet boys, they were, and so many of them never …”

  She stopped talking and blew her nose. I had been wondering why she’d never married. Perhaps she’d just told me. I thought it was time to change the subject. “How many men were there at—Luftwich, was it? I mean officers and enlisted men, all of them.”

  “Well, it varied, of course. There weren’t as many at the beginning of the war as later on. At the peak height, we had five squadrons, and we were terribly overcrowded. The aerodrome had been built to accommodate two.”

  “And a squadron would be—”

  “Ten to eighteen aircraft,” she replied promptly, “each with a crew of at least four. Two pilots, a wireless operator, and a tail gunner.”

  “So that would be … let’s see, fifty to ninety planes … at least two hundred men, perhaps closer to four hundred.”

  “You’re forgetting the flight lieutenants and the squadron leaders and the wing commanders and the mechanics and cooks and batmen and the rest of the ground staff, and, of course, us WAAFs. Luftwich was a big place.”

  “I can see that. How many of those people did you know?”

  “Well, the flight crews, of course. And the chief controller, our boss. Not the higher-ups. We knew them to speak to, but we weren’t on what you’d call friendly terms. A squadron leader or whoever was someone to salute and respect, not someone to get pally with.”

  “I suppose you knew Wing Commander Merrifield? I gather Bill usually flew in his crew.”

  “Yes, I knew him.” She picked up the pot. “More tea?”

  “No, thank you. What was Merrifield like? He was a career officer, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. A stickler for rules, ambitious, not friendly.”

  “You didn’t like him.”

  She sniffed. “It wasn’t my business to like or dislike any of the men, or the officers. I worked with them, I got them where they needed to go and home again.”

  I switched tacks again. “I suppose there were a lot of secrets to be kept around the base—the airfield, I mean.”

  Miss Price sniffed at the foolish remark. “It was wartime. Everything we did was secret. Of course that didn’t keep the men from talking about it when they shouldn’t. We WAAFs heard a lot we weren’t supposed to, but we were safe, and the men knew it. They had to talk sometimes. It’s human nature.”

  “What sort of things? I can’t imagine they’re still secret. The war’s been over for nearly sixty years.”

  “Some things might be. Anyway, I swore not to tell, and I’m not going to tell. Most of it doesn’t matter anymore, where missions were going and that, but there were other things … no, my lips are sealed. And why do yo
u care, anyway?”

  I shrugged apologetically. “Just idle curiosity, I suppose. Everyone likes to think they know things other people don’t. But what I’m really trying to do is fill out the picture of Bill’s war.”

  “Why?” she demanded. “Are you writing a book or something?”

  I laughed. “No, but Bill was planning to do a special exhibit that highlighted what Sherebury men and women did to help win the war. At the museum, you know. Mr. Merrifield contributed some materials to it, I know. I thought perhaps I could help a bit by writing some narrative about Bill.” St. Peter chalked up another lie to my account, but I’d piled up so many by now that I didn’t think one more mattered much. “So tell me, did the men have much free time? I mean, I suppose they formed close friendships and did things together in their time off.”

  “Of course. It happens in wartime. But the men learned not to get too close to anyone, because you never knew …”

  You never knew when your best friend might not come home. “What about romances? Surely some of the WAAFs and some of the male officers fell for each other.”

  “We were not encouraged to fraternize with the other officers. They were our superiors, you know.”

  “I’ll bet that didn’t stop the women.”

  “Well—no, not entirely. But a lot of hearts got broken, because the women weren’t always able to keep the friendships casual. And when the men didn’t come back … do have a biscuit.”

  That was the second time she’d warned me off. I put two and two together. She didn’t like Merrifield. She had, I was pretty sure, fallen in love with someone who hadn’t come back. Could it have been one of the men killed when Merrifield’s plane was shot down?

  Jane, who had sat silent, now spoke up. “Bill said you’d got engaged. To one of the other pilots.”

  Miss Price looked at her coldly. “And when did he say this, if I might ask?”

  “Letter. Just before he was shot down.”

  “Well, if he had written to you later he might have told you that my fiance was in the plane that day, and was killed. James was a pilot himself, and the best pilot in the squadron, but he was flying tail gunner that day because a lot of the men were out sick with the flu, and the mission was important. So he died. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

  The bitter question was directed to me. “I’m sorry, I never—”

  “James Little was a wonderful man, wonderful! We would have been happy together. We neither of us ever looked at anyone else once we’d seen each other; it was love at first sight. And he had just as much courage as any of them, and more than most, and more patriotism than the lot of them!”

  I tried to calm her vehemence. “I’m sure he did. I didn’t mean—”

  “And as for that exhibition—if you’re not making it up—I hope you’re planning to use the things I contributed, memories of James. I can’t imagine any exhibit will be worth seeing if it’s just some rubbish Merrifield’s dug out of his attic. His concern in that war was looking after himself, and they didn’t give medals for that.”

  After that, the room seemed more stiflingly hot than ever.

  We left as soon as we decently could. I took my coat off before I got into the car. “Freeze to death,” was Jane’s comment.

  “Not me. I’m too ashamed and embarrassed. Why didn’t you warn me about the hornet’s nest I was stirring up?”

  “Wanted you to see for yourself. War’s been over for longer than most people in this town have lived. Still bitterness.” She pulled onto the main road into the traffic, heavy on a Saturday morning close to Christmas.

  I’d said that myself, hadn’t I? Said it to Alan, who’d replied with something about long memories. The notion had been abstract then. It wasn’t any longer.

  “‘The sins of the fathers …’” I quoted.

  “‘ … unto the third and fourth generations,’”Jane finished.

  I brooded for a while. “They don’t any of them seem to like Merrifield, do they?”

  “No. Didn’t realize he was so unpopular. Bill never said much about him.”

  “Of course Bill knew him for only those few months before the plane went down. I wonder if he really was a bad officer, or if it’s just the grudge about him flying the plane when two men were killed. It seems—disproportionate, somehow. How many hundreds of thousands of men were lost, after all? And all this bitterness about two.”

  “Bitterness about most of them. We’ve happened across two, that’s all.”

  “True enough. But still. I must say I liked Merrifield quite a lot, and I can’t help wondering why Miss Price and dear old Stanley hate him so. It wasn’t his fault about the plane, just the fortunes of war.” I shook my head and sighed.

  “Still want to go on with it? Not getting anywhere that I can see. Upsetting people.”

  “Is it upsetting you, Jane? Hashing it all over?”

  “Not much. Bill survived the war, lived a long time. Our little romance—over a long time ago. Thinking of him when he was young’s a bit—refreshing, I suppose. Makes me remember what he was like then. A long time ago.” She cleared her throat. “Haven’t heard anything to his discredit, have we?”

  “No, not that I expected to. In fact, I agree with you, we haven’t learned much of anything. It’s so hard to ask a direct question, is the trouble. Even if I knew what questions to ask, which I don’t. I’m stumbling around in a fog, feeling my way. I hate to give up, but I wish we could get just one fact, just one idea of a direction to go.”

  “Push on, then. You never know. I’d like to learn the truth.”

  That declarative sentence, complete with subject and verb, was for Jane an oration, a trumpet call. I responded like the old warhorse I am. “Very well. I’m in favor of truth myself. Let’s go for it. Who’s next?”

  SEVENTEEN

  “GETTING DOWN TO THE DREGS,” SAID JANE AFTER A LITTLE thought. “Two others, but neither likely to know much. One’s Mr. Tredgold, chaplain at Luftwich for a time. Lives at Canterbury House.”

  Canterbury House was a home for retired clergymen. Having spent their working days in big, drafty old rectories owned by the church, the clergy were often hard put to find housing after their retirement, especially when their meager stipends had been eaten up by the demands of the old houses. So unless their wives had independent means, as few did nowadays, they often ended up in places like Canterbury House, which was better than letting them starve on the streets, but still a poor way to treat men who had served God all their lives. It was, I thought, still harder on their wives, who had to give up the accumulated treasures of a lifetime of housekeeping, the heirloom china, the favorite pictures and chairs and ornaments they had looked after so lovingly, and condense their belongings to what would fit into one or two small rooms. “Store not up for yourselves treasures on earth …” was an injunction, however wise, that most of us preferred to ignore.

  And like clergy wives, most of us might have to get rid of our treasures someday, if we couldn’t afford to keep our houses, or if their upkeep became too much for our strength … a depressing thought. It was true that you couldn’t take it with you, but I wanted to keep it as long as I possibly could. I wrenched my mind back to the chaplain. “Does his wife live with him, or is he widowed?”

  “Never married. Very High Church. Oxford Movement type.”

  Well, the Oxford Movement, an attempt to return the Church of England to Catholic practices, happened in the middle of the nineteenth century, about a hundred years too soon for direct influence on the Reverend Mr. Tredgold. Undoubtedly he had imbibed its principles through a devout mother or grandmother, or a clergyman who touched his imagination. “Hmm. He doesn’t sound very likely.”

  “Said we were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Only other survivor I know of is even less of a starter. Leigh Burton, widow of Bill’s best childhood friend George. He was at Luftwich, too, though not in Bill’s wing.”

  “Oh, well, it had better be Mr. Tredgold, then
. He is—um—compos mentis, I hope?”

  Jane permitted herself a grim smile. “As much as he ever was.”

  Typically, she didn’t expand upon that remark.

  We went back to Sherebury before heading out to Canterbury House, which was several miles out in the country. I took some bicarbonate of soda to offset the effects of the extremely tannic tea and then asked Alan to call the hospital and check on Walter. I knew he’d get more information out of the nurses than I would.

  Alan is one of those irritating people who say little on the phone, so I couldn’t tell from his end of the conversation what was going on. A smile crept across his face, however, so I was panting to hear the news as soon as he hung up.

  “Good news! He’s fully conscious, and they’ve moved him out of intensive care. He isn’t making a great deal of sense when he talks, they say, and he has no idea what’s happened. However, he can move all his limbs, is responding properly to stimuli, and wants something to eat. They think he’s going to make a full recovery.”

  “Hallelujah! But you didn’t ask when we can go and see him.”

  “They volunteered the information, love—said not for a day or two. They want him kept quiet until he’s talking more or less normally. After that, he can have company.”

  “I don’t suppose he’s told them anything about his attacker. Or no, you said he doesn’t even know what’s happened.”

  “And we knew he wasn’t likely to at first, or perhaps ever.”

  “Yes, well, I’m going to run over and give Jane the news. I don’t suppose you’d care to fix us all some sandwiches?”

  Jane, working in the kitchen, was pleased with my report, but declined my offer of lunch. She was pouring a brown batter into square pans. “Gingerbread,” she said briefly. “Never knew a youngster who didn’t like it.”