Meet Me Under the Clock

by Annie Murray

  ‘I’ve got news for you.’

  She could see that he could tell it was good news. Had he guessed? For a moment, once again she saw a flicker of something in his eyes – worry, fear? Then he started to smile. ‘Go on then.’

  A grin spread over her face. ‘You’re going to be a dad.’

  ‘Oh!’ he gave an overjoyed cry and pulled her into his arms. ‘Oh, Sylv – are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ she said, cuddling up happily again. ‘I’ve been feeling really sick – in the mornings mainly. I’d missed my monthly and . . . Anyway, I asked Mom in the end, because I wasn’t sure, and she said I’d better go to the doctor.’ She looked up at him again. ‘I haven’t told your mom and dad yet – or Audrey and the others. I swore Mom to secrecy because I thought you ought to know first.’

  Laurie was laughing with happiness. ‘I can hardly believe it! Are you really sure, Sylv?’

  ‘Sure as I can be – I feel funny. I’ve never felt like this before.’

  ‘What about work?’ he asked, with concern.

  ‘I’m managing, just. But I’ll have to give up before too long.’

  He stroked her hair. ‘I can’t wait to see you as a mother. You’ll be so lovely – the best mom ever.’

  ‘Maybe it’s something I can be good at, for once!’

  ‘Don’t be daft. You’re good at lots of things. And I’m going to be a father,’ he said in wonder. But a moment later she heard him give a deep sigh. He turned his face away for a moment.

  ‘What?’ she said, pushing herself up in the bed again. ‘What’s the matter? Tell me!’

  He turned back to her, his face troubled. ‘This isn’t the moment to say this, but I’m going to have to. I’ve been dreading it.’

  She stared at him. Fear clutched at her. ‘They’re not . . . Tell me they’re not—’

  ‘They are – I’ve got to go back on ops.’

  A chill spread through her. She could see the pain and dread in his eyes. ‘I knew there was something – you seemed . . . As soon as you get back?’

  Laurie nodded. For a moment they gazed at each other in silence.

  ‘Right,’ she said. She drew in a deep breath. More nights of waiting, in terror. She would not cry. Determinedly she resorted again to the only way she could think of surviving. ‘Let’s not talk about it, or think about it, because I don’t think I can stand it.’

  ‘Come here.’ He wrapped his arms tightly around her. ‘We’re here now. That’s all. And that’s all that matters. Here and now. I love you, Sylvia – more than anything.’

  It was a week of celebration. When they broke the news to Mr and Mrs Gould, Marjorie wept with happiness and Stanley suddenly became very jumpy around Sylvia and solicitous, as if she might break.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she laughed, as he took a jug of water from her in case it was too heavy. ‘I am still working as a porter, you know!’

  ‘Well, it’s time you stopped,’ he said. ‘That’s no job for a woman in your condition.’

  ‘I will, as soon as I can,’ she promised. ‘I’m off for the next few days anyway.’

  When she told the family, her father grinned bashfully and said, ‘Well, that’s nice news, wench.’ Jack made gruff noises about a football team, and Audrey was especially happy. ‘I thought you might be!’ she laughed. ‘I heard you heaving in the mornings. Thought I’d better not say anything, though. Dorrie!’ She called her little boy to her. ‘Auntie Sylvia’s going to give you someone to play with.’

  Sylvia basked in the excitement, determinedly blocking out all thoughts beyond that week, as they celebrated and lived and loved as thoroughly and happily as possible.

  A month later Sylvia had got over the sickness and was feeling better. She had told her employers at Snow Hill that she was expecting, and they kept her on duties that were as light as possible. Dealing with pregnant porters was not something they were used to.

  She was so glad still to be at work, to be kept busy and not sit at home thinking unbearable thoughts about what Laurie might be doing. Surely now it would be all right, she prayed. They were winning the war – the Allies were pushing forward on so many fronts. Surely it would be over soon and her lovely Laurie could come home, safe and sound? But the work of Bomber Command was far from over. She knew that, but kept trying to push it to the back of her mind.

  ‘If anything happens,’ she begged Pauline, ‘come into work and tell me – like you did before. Don’t wait, please.’

  ‘I don’t think I could stand waiting anyway,’ her mother said.

  Every day that went by without bad news was another victory, another day closer to peace, when they could all sleep properly, knowing that Laurie was safe, for the time being.

  They got through one day, then another and another. One March afternoon, the air heavy with cold, Sylvia walked wearily back from the bus stop after work. As she reached the house, she saw the net curtain at the front drop, as if someone had been standing looking out. She only registered this with half her mind. But as she pushed the front door open, something already felt different. Almost immediately her mother and Marjorie appeared from the parlour, Mom in front, their faces very solemn. This again . . . No . . . no . . . ! Sylvia’s legs buckled. She was too busy screaming to notice the pain as her knees hit the hall floor.

  ‘No!’ Her arms flailed at them. ‘No – go away! Don’t look like that. Stop it, go away. Don’t!’ She was shrieking, completely distraught now. ‘Don’t speak to me!’

  ‘It’s all right, bab.’ Her mother rushed to her, as well as Marjorie, both putting their arms round her and pulling her to her feet. ‘It’s all right,’ Mom kept saying, frantic with distress. ‘There’s been an accident, but it’s all right . . .’

  They were helping her, limp as an empty sack, into the front room.

  ‘He’s alive,’ Marjorie said. Sudden, pent-up tears rushed from her eyes.

  Sylvia sat looking up at them groggily. These were, for now, the only words she needed to hear.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she whispered. ‘He’s alive? Tell me he’s alive.’

  Through her tears, Marjorie said, ‘He’s alive. But they haven’t said much else. They say he’s to be invalided out.’

  It was only quite some time later that they got the full picture. Laurie’s squadron had been performing training flights that day, over the North Sea. As they were on their way back, the plane Laurie was navigating developed engine trouble; they reached the Norfolk coast, but the pilot mishandled the landing and crashed the plane. The crew were all injured – though none killed – and Laurie less seriously than the others. He suffered only cuts and bad bruising, but (and this was something he could never make sense of, to his own satisfaction) that day something broke in him. The rescue party found him some distance from the smashed fuselage, sitting in a field of frostbitten parsnips, rocking back and forth, sobbing.

  ‘One of the lads, a Canadian who was on the base by then, just came up to me and put his arms round me,’ Laurie told Sylvia later. ‘I think he could see that I’d had it.’

  The months that followed were full of anxiety. As their child grew inside Sylvia, Laurie was invalided out to recover. Though he was no longer in physical danger, Sylvia almost found it worse now than when he was on operations. At least then he had been himself. But after his breakdown it was as if he disappeared into a deep, black place, where she could not reach him and did not know how to give help or comfort. Even after he was allowed home from hospital, Laurie was in a very fragile state. No one had flung at him the accusation of LMF – lack of moral fibre, or cowardice in not being able to fly – but he certainly flung it at himself.

  Even though he eventually recovered enough to go back – not to an air crew, but at least to the RAF, as an instructor again – she knew that Laurie suffered terrible remorse. The chance of any airman surviving another tour of duty of thirty sorties was horrifyingly low. But now he was safe, and out of it, unlike the rest of them. However much s
he told him that all this was understandable, he could not shake off the feelings of guilt and failure. Every one of his original air crew was dead. He was the only one, so far as they knew, who had come out of Belgium alive. Some blokes had done so much more, had paid the ultimate price, while all he had done was go to pieces. That was how he saw it, and Sylvia knew it was something he would never fully get over.

  1953

  Sixty-Five

  May 1953

  Sylvia sat staring at her cooling mug of coffee. The custard creams she had thought she was so hungry for, as she dashed inside for a break, lay forgotten on the plate, lit up by a slanting sunbeam, on the tablecloth’s embroidered hollyhocks.

  The letter, folded into three by the sender, was lying half-open so that she could just see the handwriting, a rounded, childish hand in blue ink. Abruptly Sylvia slammed her hand down on it, pressing it closed so that she couldn’t see the writing any more. She rested her elbows on the table and her head in her hands, threading her fingers through her dark, springy hair. Sylvia was in her early thirties now and a mother; in the emotions that raged in her this morning, though – the tight, terrible surge that almost stifled her breath – she was twenty again. Twenty and full of rage and anguish. She eased herself a little more upright on the old kitchen chair, took a deep breath and, shakily, let it out again.

  ‘You all right, love?’

  She hadn’t even heard Laurie come in for his own break. Her coffee had a puckered skin on the top now.

  ‘Feeling a bit weary?’ He went to the stove. ‘Not to worry – I’ll get my coffee.’

  ‘There are biscuits here,’ she told him, indicating the plate as she quickly gathered up the letter with its envelope and pushed it into her skirt pocket.

  ‘Who was that letter from?’ he said, his back to her, as he relit the gas under the pan of milky coffee.

  ‘Oh.’ Sylvia hated not being truthful with him, but she wasn’t ready to talk, not yet. ‘It was a girl I was at school with years ago. I can barely remember her. Heaven knows why she wanted to write; she’d got nothing much to say.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Laurie showed no further interest. Sylvia stared at his back for a moment, tall and slender in his stationmaster’s uniform, looking so tender and true. With all her heart she wanted to protect him, and all that they had. For a moment she saw all her life with fresh eyes and loved it all fiercely – and him. Why did she suddenly feel so threatened and unsettled?

  ‘I’ll go out and water the baskets, while it’s quiet,’ she said.

  ‘Right-o.’ He was settling at the table in the cosy kitchen, eyeing the newspaper and looking forward to his break.

  Sylvia stepped out into the warm May morning and paused on the path, breathing in the scents. The garden of Station Cottage was full of blossom, lilac and laburnum, roses in bud and clematis trailing up the black drainpipe at the front of the house and spreading out its tendrils across the warm bricks. The marigolds, petunias and white alyssum in her flowerbeds had all opened their faces to the sun, and there was a low murmur from bees busily knocking against the flower heads.

  Normally it was her quiet, serene time of day. The children were at school and no train was due in for another half-hour. She loved titivating the little station: two platforms only, and the sidings that ran off to the Maltings and for the Co-op milk trains. She kept it looking pretty with flowerbeds and hanging baskets. At this time of year it was at its brightest and best, and it was the time she loved it the most.

  She went to the tap at the end of the house to fill a watering can and carried it round through the wicket gate into the station, hoping for a few quiet minutes while the other station staff were having a break between trains. She put the can of water down and sank onto the bench on platform one. The opposite platform was in deep shade, but this side was bathed in sunlight and she felt the warmth sink into her. The rails reached away into the countryside. She liked the way, even in this backwoods part of the railway, it made her feel connected to everywhere else. And she was proud of their home, their work. She had kept a clipping of an article that the local paper had published about them, when she was taken on again by the railway: ‘The stationmaster and lady-porter’s marriage!’ It was all she could have asked for, in this lovely little station, right at the end of a GWR branch line. ‘Wallingbury,’ the sign said in big white letters on black, the paint flaking in the heat.

  A plane rumbled overhead, high and distant. As on so many occasions, she gave thanks for her life. But today the warm contentment that often rose within her on such a lovely morning was ruined by the cold turmoil inside. She pulled the letter from her pocket, looking round to check that she was truly alone.

  The now-crumpled envelope was addressed to ‘Sylvia W.’ Couldn’t she even remember my name? Sylvia thought bitterly. The first attempt at an address, in the blue handwriting, simply said, ‘C/o British Rail (Great Western Region)’. Above that, it said, ‘Please forward’. There had obviously been some official passing-round of the letter, which had been rubber-stamped by various railway offices, until at last someone had addressed it to ‘Railway Cottage, Wallingbury, Berkshire’. Perhaps she was the only Sylvia left working in the entire western network? If only they hadn’t found her, she thought. How much further can you go than the end of the line, for a quiet life?

  Forcing herself, she opened the letter again: one sheet of white paper. At the top there was an address in Kent, mercifully far away. The date was more than a fortnight before. ‘Dear Sylv’ (Sylv!), it said:

  I thought I’d send this to the good old GWR and see if anyone can track you down, after all this time. It would be so jolly to see you again and talk over all the old days. I’ve missed you. I can hardly believe how it was during the war now – it all seems like a dream, and such an age ago.

  I hope you’re happily settled. I have a son of nine and am trying to become a sober matron at this time in my life! Not much in the way of family, though. I’ve had quite an eventful time of it. I do wonder how you’re getting along. We didn’t part on the best of terms, but I hope we can let bygones be bygones. I’d so love to come and look you up. I do hope your family are all well, especially the lovely Jack, who must be a big grown man by now.

  Do write back, don’t be a stranger!

  From your old pal,

  Kitty

  Sylvia folded the letter again, sickened by its contents. She did not even reread the address. She had never been to Kent and certainly had no intention of replying. Why on earth should Kitty suddenly be thinking of looking her up?

  But she knew. Kitty’s loneliness echoed through the letter. Kitty was always alone in the world – always would be. What ‘family’ did she have? The parents of the dead father of her child? Was that how it was? And, in her loneliness, had she thought back to someone who had been a friend to her? God knew, but the very thought of Kitty filled her with horror.

  She remembered the grainy photograph in the newspaper, Kitty’s smiling face beside the man of whose death she would shortly be the cause. And here was this letter – so jolly, as if nothing had ever happened. Had she no shame, no idea, even now, of what she caused, the effect she had on people? The American airman who had shot Kitty’s rival had been hanged by the American authorities at Shepton Mallet prison. How could Kitty imagine ever again facing anyone who had known her?

  What if she turned up here? Sylvia was filled with an icy, primitive fear. No – Kitty would have to go to a great deal of trouble to find out where they were. It was probably just one of her impulses, Sylvia told herself, a passing mood to write, but not meaning it.

  But she walked back into the house feeling very shaken. After tucking the letter into the bottom of one of the kitchen drawers, she pulled the kitchen window shut, despite the warmth, as if to keep something out. And she felt a powerful urge to cleanse the house, as if Kitty Barratt had bodily invaded it; to scrub and clean until there was nothing left of her, anywhere.

  Even after long years of p
eace Sylvia had not lost the habit of looking at her husband, the lovely and at the time same fragile man she had married, and seeing it as a miracle that they were here. Now she knew more about the massive losses there had been among Bomber Command crews, it seemed even more of a miracle.

  ‘I don’t know why I came through and so many didn’t,’ Laurie would say sometimes. The guilt that he had survived, when so many had not, played on his mind. However much she tried to reassure him that he’d done his share, that he was only human, Sylvia knew it would always haunt him.

  Their son Jonny was born in September 1945 in a nursing home in Kings Heath. Sylvia had never been happier, seeing Laurie’s delight at his first sighting of his son, hoping and praying that this little child would give her husband new light in his place of despair. Even his joy at the birth was tempered by the shades of all the dead air crew who would never see the faces of a growing family.

  Gradually he recovered, though. While Laurie was still away, Sylvia lived at home with her family. Little Dorian and Jonny grew up as brothers. The man who came home – though loving and still devotedly her husband – was a more fragile, angry man than the fresh-faced innocent who had left in 1940. He was even more resistant now to his father’s views about ‘making something of yourself’ and advancement in a good job. It was as if the well-trodden paths of professional careers that Stanley envisaged meant even less to Laurie. And he resisted being under certain sorts of authority – or ‘knuckling down’, as his father put it. They fell out about it often at that time, and Laurie would grow explosively angry. The two men were better kept apart. Stanley saw the end of the war as time for a fresh start – which of course it was – but for Laurie it meant something quite different. His father had not been through his experiences; he could not seem to grasp how Laurie felt. Marjorie, as ever, was quite different.