by Mike Hollow
“Oh, yes. I thought I saw something in her that I’d not seen in any other woman, and that stayed with me. I sometimes think in a way I’ve been looking for her ever since, but always with the fear that she might not have been all I imagined her to be. After all, she was a nurse and I was her patient. Perhaps I’ve just wasted the last twenty years. You probably think I’m a fool.”
“No, I don’t. How could I? You loved my sister.”
“Please just tell me, then, what happened to Eleanor after she left France.”
“OK, but eat your dessert. You haven’t touched it.”
Jago had forgotten the dessert, and now had little appetite for it. He took half a spoonful.
“It’s quite a simple story,” said Dorothy. “She came back to Boston and nursed at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She was there for about fifteen years.”
“Did she marry?”
“Not during that time, no. But in 1937 she went out to Spain as a volunteer nurse.”
“She was there the same time as you?”
“We did overlap for a short while, but we were in different parts of the country. I only met up with her once before I got transferred to cover the German takeover in Austria, and then Czechoslovakia. It was just after I left that she wrote to me to say she’d met someone.”
“I see,” said Jago. “So how does the story end?”
“He was a writer, an American. They married and moved back to the States.”
“And she’s happy?”
“Oh yes, she’s very happy. But I guess that’s maybe not what you wanted to hear.”
“No, I’m truly pleased for her. She deserves all the happiness in the world. I’m glad she found someone who could give her that.”
“How does that leave you feeling after all this time?”
Jago poked at the remainder of his dessert with his spoon while he reflected on what he had heard.
“I think,” he said slowly, “it makes me feel released from something I’ve been carrying for a very long time and that’s become heavier year by year. It’s regret, I suppose, and regret isn’t good for you. I think now perhaps it can become just a good memory. A door has been closed, and I can no longer keep nudging it open in my mind. I suppose what it means is I feel free.”
“Free to find your own happiness, perhaps?”
“Yes, perhaps.”
Dorothy said something about having to go powder her nose and left him alone with his thoughts for a few minutes. He finished his dessert more out of duty than of pleasure. It had not been the easiest of conversations, but knowing what had become of Eleanor had finally laid something to rest in him. It also made him feel closer to Dorothy.
She returned to their table and took her seat.
“Would you like a coffee?” said Jago.
“Yes, I would,” she replied. “But then I think I’ll have to call it a day: I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow and I can’t afford to be sleepy.” She looked into his eyes. “But it’s not that I want to run away. Thank you for this evening.”
“It’s me who should be thanking you.”
“No, really, I mean it. You can’t know how much I’ve enjoyed this time.”
“So have I,” said Jago. “I’m sorry I’ve been a bit serious, but it’s meant a lot to me to get the answer to my question at last.”
“I’m glad I could help. Any more questions before we go?”
Jago’s face relaxed and his frown disappeared. His voice was lighter when he spoke.
“Well, actually, yes, there is. I’ve just remembered: it’s only a little thing. When we were here on Tuesday you saw that actor Leslie Howard having dinner and you were about to say something, but then you said you didn’t want to bore me. What did you mean?”
Dorothy lifted her glass and tilted it a little towards her, then gazed into the pale gold of the wine and blushed. She looked up at him and smiled.
“I was just going to say that you remind me of him, and I think he’s rather sweet.”
Jago made no reply. In the brief silence between them, they heard the ominous wail of the siren drifting eerily across the rooftops.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In 2012 I went to the London Olympics. The games took place in Stratford, once part of the Essex County Borough of West Ham, where this book is set. Sitting with my wife in the stadium waiting for the women’s heptathlon to start, I worked out that we were only a few dozen yards from my father’s old workplace, in Carpenters Road, now buried under the Olympic Park. Later we walked past Stratford Town Hall. In the Blitz of 1940 he was on its roof, doing fire-watching duty as a sixteen-year-old Home Guard volunteer, responsible for spotting and extinguishing any incendiary bombs that might land on it. As we emerged from the Olympic stadium into the twenty-first-century shops and traffic it was difficult to believe those days had really happened.
In writing this book I’ve been depicting a world that is still vividly present in our cultural memory and yet irretrievably lost to the past. Some would say the transformation of the East End of London in the post-war years is a tragedy; others would say it’s a triumph – the truth is no doubt a mix of the two.
For those like me, born in the decade after 1945, the war was part of the background to our lives, but as remote as anything that happens in the world before we enter it. When I was a schoolboy, all our dads had been “in the war” in one way or another, so there was nothing unusual about it. Most, like mine, who went on to serve in a reconnaissance regiment in the Italy campaign, didn’t talk about it much: I think they wanted something better for their children.
The little they did say, however, was eye-opening. My mother’s description of seeing the sky red over London from the fires on the first night of the Blitz is as vivid in my imagination now as it was when I was nine years old.
Sadly, the people I would most like to thank for their contribution to this book – my parents – are no longer here, but I can at least record my thanks and admiration for the part they played in those dramatic days, and for leaving a little of it in me.
This book is fiction, but the time and the location where it takes place are real. I would like to thank Richard Durack and Jenni Munro-Collins of the Heritage and Archives Team at Stratford Library for their help in exploring the rich resources held by the library’s excellent local history centre, and also John and Muriel Moore for their stories of the old days.
I am grateful to the Friends of the Metropolitan Police Historical Collection and to the Metropolitan Police Heritage Centre in West Brompton, London, for their assistance on factual aspects of policing in West Ham in 1940. I am also indebted to Retired Superintendent Roy Ingleton, Retired Chief Superintendent Robert Bartlett, and Retired Detective Chief Inspector Mike Gurton for kindly allowing me to draw on their experience and knowledge in creatively portraying the life of a detective in those days. Any inaccuracies are due to my ignorance or to the artistic licence necessary in fiction.
I am grateful to Richard White for introducing me to his Riley Lynx, and to my friends Rudy and Sara Mitchell in Boston, Massachusetts, for their help with the American dimensions of the story.
I would like to say a big thank-you to Tony Collins of Lion Hudson for his help along the way, to Rachel Ashley-Pain for her vigilant editing, and to my dear friends and family for your constant encouragement. Lastly, my love and thanks to my wife Margaret, who has been as always my most patient and perceptive support through all the long hours and days it has taken to make this book a reality.
To find out more about the Blitz Detective and to contact the author, go to
www.blitzdetective.com
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