Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

  But in fact the affair continued for several weeks more, and didn’t end properly until Tory became pregnant, in the late summer of 1941.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Private Donald Midlothian Pace of the 11th Royal Hussars, captured east of Tobruk while defending the Bi’r al-Ashhab airfield from encroaching Italian forces, during which he was wounded by a bullet to the knee, had, by the time his camp was liberated on 15 April 1945, been a prisoner of war for four years and twentynine days. About the same as what you’d get, he sometimes joked, for knocking off a jeweller’s.

  Having been transported across the Mare Nostrum in the light cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi, he had begun his captivity at a camp beside the Appian Way, before being transported again, north by cattle truck through France to Germany. Here he was moved between camps five times, each time being forced to march up to twenty miles a day, a venture that did little to heal his wounded leg and, in fact, made it a lot worse. By the end of the war he was, effectively, crippled, being unable to bend his right knee, or place much weight upon it. He had never mentioned any of these facts in his letters to his wife.

  Donald derived little pleasure from the letters Tory was eventually able to write him, and his requests had been made purely for expedient reasons. In the camp in which he was first detained, there had grown up, in certain quarters, and among certain men, a culture of letter exchange. Captain Harry Wilde, Private Roy Smedley and Sergeant Horace Maxwell, among others, were the first to start bragging about the letters from their wives and sweethearts. They had begun swapping them among themselves, and would teasingly exaggerate the effect of reading them, giving loud moans and sighs of ecstasy that filled the huts as they read, which had the desired consequence of arousing burning curiosity among those in the hut (the majority) without such letters.

  ‘Roy, I have to say your old girl certainly knows how to get a fellow hot under the old collar …’

  ‘It’s a good job the Obscene Publications Act doesn’t apply to letters, Harry, old man, otherwise your good lady would be doing a stretch in Holloway.’ The others in the hut, Donald included, could do nothing but imagine what the letters contained.

  This led to some unpleasant moments. The merciless teasing by the men with letters led to several confrontations when the honour and morality of the writers were openly challenged. It never came to blows – there was never the energy in the huts for actual violence. Instead there were month-long sulks and endless cold-shouldering. Eventually the men started loaning their letters in return for favours or goods. A few squares of chocolate, a pinch of tobacco, a night off from cooking duties. Donald, having nothing material to offer, agreed to clean Captain Harry Wilde’s boots for a week in return for an evening’s loan of one of his letters. It turned out to be deeply disappointing, being little more than an innocently flirtatious description of French kissing. If only his own wife could write something stronger, he thought. Imagine what he could get people to do for that. Not only could he have almost anything he wanted, he would become part of the hut’s elite. Private Donald Pace could take his place along-side Wilde, Smedley and Maxwell as a force to be reckoned with.

  Other men had tried the same thing and failed, receiving cold rebukes from their wives, much as Donald had experienced when he eventually received replies from Tory. It was what he had expected. But he had the persistence that the others in the camp lacked. And it was a persistence that eventually paid off, but to an extent that Donald found quite overwhelming.

  After weeks of protestations, and half-hearted attempts at compliance, there came from Tory a torrent of erotic missives that unfolded, over a few weeks, into an epic of the nuptial arts. Letters arrived daily, sometimes in batches of three or four. When Donald opened the first of these he couldn’t help but shout the word ‘Bingo!’ at the top of his voice. Everyone in the hut could guess what this meant, that Donald Pace had finally managed to nag his old woman into writing him a dirty letter. They were crowding round his bunk within seconds, begging for a glimpse, just a line or two. Items were thrust in his direction. Archie Warhol would lend him his domino set for three days, Ricey had a tin of Ovaltine, and was willing to give him four tablespoons in a twist of paper. Corporal Howard would lend him a picture of his sister Jenny. But Donald could see that Tory had excelled herself, that she hadn’t just done one of the feeble bum-pinching and thigh-stroking letters that were the best his comrades could produce. No, Tory had gone into details. Minute details. Jesus Christ, Donald could hardly contain his shock. Had she really paid such close attention to those parts of his body that she could now describe with such verve? Not even Donald could describe his own nether regions in such detail. He’d have to check when he got a moment – did it really look like that? And her own body – how had she ever been able to view those portions of herself so clearly? Not even Donald, with his detached perspective, could recall the folds and creases that shone so brightly in Tory’s letter.

  ‘Oh, but she knows how to turn a shapely phrase,’ said Second Lieutenant Orson, who’d glimpsed a few lines over Donald’s shoulder before Donald had time to shield the words against his shirt.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘If any of you blighters want a look at these lines, you’re going to have to come up with more than a few spoonfuls of Ovaltine, I can tell you.’

  The explicitness of Tory’s letters did at first give Donald reason to hesitate before he began loaning them, not out of any sense of loyalty but because he felt uncomfortable about having himself become common property in this way. It was as though he had not just been rendered naked before his peers but transparent as well. But it was Captain Harry Wilde who was able to secure the first loan of Tory’s letter, offering a whole bar of chocolate in exchange, a transaction that shifted the power structure of the whole camp. Having read the letter Harry Wilde declared that the material was so hot he could have the whole camp on its knees at his door begging for a loan (by this time three more letters had arrived). You could make yourself a rich man, Donald Pace, a rich man in the economy of the stalag – you could have all the tobacco, alcohol and sweeties you had ever dreamt of. Not just that. You could take a fortune in IOUs for things that will be paid for when the war is over – cars, clothes, houses. Tory’s letters could bring him any of these …

  It was rather typical of Harry Wilde to get carried away like this and, in fact, no one ever offered a future automobile in exchange for one of Tory’s letters, but Donald was able to secure a constant and endless supply of all the comforts and luxuries a prison camp was able to offer. Harry Wilde acted as a sort of agent, negotiating with the chaps in other huts, being good at that sort of thing. He seemed to know everyone in the camp. He was an educated man, and liked to call himself an ‘ever so minor man of letters’.

  Tory’s letters became valuable currency, or, as Captain Wilde put it, not currency exactly, more like a kind of bond. A jolly good investment for the future. Even the camp guards had expressed interest. That was the really lucrative market. Harry Wilde was able to negotiate all sorts of benefits. Soon Donald was sleeping on a proper mattress, was lathering his face with Sunlicht soap and brushing his teeth with Rosodont toothpowder, shaving with new razor blades, wearing cotton pyjamas. He was given tins of pineapple and peaches. Even, once, a quarter-bottle of whisky. Harry Wilde allowed one of the Germans to produce a translation. ‘I have to say, old boy, when rendered in the language of Schiller, your wife’s missives begin to lose some of their fragrance.’

  Tory Pace became a well-known name in the camps where Donald was a prisoner. She was, so Harry Wilde said, a little starlet. Many times Donald had begged for a photo (he didn’t even have a decent one of her about him), but she never complied. Now the men in the camps were begging to see pictures of Tory Pace, whimpering, even. It added to his sense of power to have to deny them her image: only he would ever know what she looked like. Apart from that, he was worried that they would be disappointed with what they saw.
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  One hundred and seventy-two letters arrived over a period of three months. And then, quite without warning, they stopped. No one could keep it up like that for ever, Harry Wilde said. She’d have to stop some time. No one had it in them to keep writing like that every day. Donald supposed he was right, but wouldn’t they have trailed off, if it had simply been a matter of her running out of stamina? Why this abrupt ending in mid-flow?

  But then came another camp move, a long march in rainy weather, across peaty plains and through dripping forests, for three days. Mail was never regular from then on. The tide of the war had turned against Germany, letters for prisoners became rarer. Donald ended his days as a prisoner of war at a camp east of the Elbe, and he had not heard from his wife for nearly three years.

  *

  Donald kept his stash of erotic letters, though by the end of the war their currency had devalued. The men in the camps could only reread them so many times before their power began to wane. For Donald, their erotic charge had more or less disappeared. They had become dead pieces of paper, no more thrilling than shopping lists or laundry bills. But he kept them. New arrivals at the camp would sometimes approach him nervously, asking about the Tory Papers (as they had come to be known). Otherwise, Tory Pace, by 1945, was forgotten.

  It was quite easy for long-serving prisoners like Donald to ascertain the general direction of the war. Every new arrival at the camp was, of course, a source of encouraging information, but they had become rarer. Otherwise one only had to observe the behaviour of the guards and commandant. It was widely agreed that things had not being going well for Germany since late 1942. Each battle lost, it seemed, would equate to some petty new regulation being enforced or privilege denied. By 1944 the look of impending defeat could be seen in the guards’ faces, as they watched the fresh, crenellated formations of Allied planes heading east to pound the major cities. The same bombers would return with hardly any reduction in their number. Donald could almost feel sorry for the guards to see their doom written so plainly in the sky. By then they had almost ceased their bullying, and had begun instead to try to curry favour. Aware that their captives were now on the side of the eventual victors, they wondered if they would put in a good word for them. They hadn’t been treated so badly, had they? Fed and clothed and housed for five years when they could just as easily have been worked to death in the coal mines?

  So it was little surprise to hear the guns for the first time. Distant thumpings of heavy artillery, gradually drawing nearer. Then, one morning, the men woke up to find themselves alone. The watchtowers were empty, the guardhouses abandoned. The keys to the camp were lying on the roadway just next to the main gate. It seemed that the last guard out had thrown them back over the fence. No one knew what to do. Should they stay where they were or should they leave? After many years of longing for an opportunity to escape, and with the keys to the camp in their hands, it seemed absurd, but the general feeling was that they should stay put. There was some food in the stores. The Allies would be here in a matter of hours. Then the shells started landing, shaking the forest around them. Trees exploded. The whole camp was thrown into turmoil, men running in all directions, some trying to crowd into the defensive bunkers, five hundred attempting to squeeze into a space meant for thirty, others running into the woods to shelter in ditches and gullies. It seemed that two enormous opposing armies had come to face each other directly over Stalag III-F.

  It didn’t quite end with the arrival of the Russians. Donald and his fellow inmates were taken back eastwards on empty supply trucks, then laagered by a railway line with shells dropping all around them. They were as nervous and shy as deer. The only bit of fighting Donald had witnessed in more than four years, and it looked set to kill him. He felt like a child ignored during a tempestuous parental argument. Was it for this he had endured all those years of confinement, to be snuffed out in the crossfire of armies indifferent to his existence?

  There came a moment, however, when the tide of conflict moved onwards towards Berlin, and attention could be paid to Donald and his fellow refugees. But the roads and railways were destroyed. It was more than a month before transport could be arranged. He had to march fifty miles to a landing strip west of Berlin, from where he was flown back to Britain in a battered Dakota, landing at an aerodrome in Oxfordshire. From there he was taken to a reception centre, washed, deinfested, given a roast beef dinner, recorded – he was told he was the thirty thousandth prisoner (or near enough) to return home – and issued with a brand new uniform. (What’s the point? he thought.) A general somebody-or-other patted him warmly on the shoulder and told him he’d put on a ‘damned good show’. Then he was issued with a railway warrant and told to make his way home. He was still, officially, a soldier in the British Army, and was merely going home on six weeks’ leave, with double rations.

  His leg had been given proper medical attention for the first time since his injury. A doctor examined it in a dismissive way and told him it would never get any better, and might get worse. If the Labour Government has its way, he said, with distaste, they’ll probably give you a free wheelchair. He was given a walking-stick. In the train from Charing Cross he had a compartment to himself. Either side of the mirrors above the seats were watercolours of Scottish Highland scenery, which almost brought tears of nostalgia to his eyes, though in fact he had never been to the Highlands, apart from a single weekend, when he was six years old, fishing on the shores of Loch Lomond.

  The spectacle out of the window was rather more moving; London in tatters with, to his astonishment, plumes of smoke still rising from the rubble (though he later realized they were from celebratory bonfires that were still burning). From the embankments he looked down on terraced streets with missing sections, like an old codger’s mouth. Whole areas to the east of Tower Bridge had simply gone, though the destruction became less intense the further out he travelled. The thought had not occurred to him before – supposing the house in Peter Street had been hit? Supposing his wife and mother-in-law had been wiped out? Supposing all he would have to remember her by was that sheaf of letters, which now filled a good part of his kitbag. He imagined the scene when he went to pick up the children from wherever they were. Sorry, kids, but your mama copped it in an air raid. A doodlebug landed square on her noggin. Never mind, here are some of her letters for you to remember her by …

  What had she been up to that she could suddenly, out of the blue, after all those measly protestations, write letters like that? He wasn’t a fool. There was something going on. Must have been. Either that or she had suddenly come by the dirtiest mind he had ever encountered. There were pubs in Millwall and Cubitt Town where such language had never been heard. He had half a mind to make her bring some of her dirtiest letters to life. You thought of it, old girl, now you can do it.

  Well, he would do, if he ever felt the slightest stirring in his loins. He had not seen a woman in over four years, but looking at the gaunt grey dames on the streets of London, he felt he hadn’t been much deprived. He couldn’t even really remember what Tory looked like.

  As the train trundled towards Kent, he took one of Tory’s letters from his bag and reread it. The dirty letters had never resumed after their abrupt conclusion, and for years no word had come from home, dirty or otherwise. He blamed it, in part, on the moves between camps and the deterioration of Germany’s war, but eventually a letter had come from Tory. It was rather different from the others.

  My dearest Donald,

  I hope you will be as happy about this as I am, but I have gone and done an extraordinary thing. I have adopted a little baby boy. He was found in the ruins of a house after an air raid in Leicester, where I was staying with some friends. No one could be found to claim him as their own, and his existence seemed a surprise to everyone, including the surviving neighbours in the street. He was not known to be part of any of the families that were killed in the raid. So I took it upon myself to look after him. No one else was willing (I think the neighbours sus
pected some backstairs work), and the police were only going to take him to a hospital and from there, I suppose, to a horrid orphanage of some kind. You have heard what terrible places they are, I should think. Well, he is a beautiful little thing, and I’m sure you will be happy to have him living with us. I have left my details with the people concerned in Leicester, should the actual mother ever come forward to claim him. I have decided to call him Branson.

  I don’t know if you will ever get this letter, but I hope you are well, dearest Donald.

  Your ever affectionate

  Tory

  Well, Donald thought, as he stepped off the train in a relatively undamaged part of London, I suppose I would prefer it, all in all, if she was alive.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  For Tory Pace the prospect of victory approached with the slow, unstoppable certainty of death – with every dawn, a whole day nearer. She followed the progress of the war in the newspapers and on the wireless, her heart sinking further as each new piece of territory was won. Then she would check herself for having such treacherous thoughts. Immense sacrifices had been made, countless lives lost. But again, when the second front was opened and the beaches of northern France received an invasion force of staggering proportions, she found herself drawing comfort from thoughts of the long road to Berlin, and of how the Germans would surely not just give up, not now. Again she checked herself. I am in danger of no longer being capable of telling good from bad. All around her wives were losing their husbands on distant battlefields, mothers were losing their dear sons, but it seemed to Tory that all of this agony and bloodshed was taking place for one reason and one reason only: so that Private Donald Pace should be reunited with his wicked, wretched, wastrel wife.