On 27 July their Sergeant lined them all up at 1400 hours and, as the sun beat down on the compound square, the Commandant addressed the camp in Chinese.
‘The bugger,’ breathed Jack, because he knew the Commandant spoke English well. There was a pause.
Then the interpreter said, ‘Both sides in the Korean war have agreed to a cease-fire to take effect from now. You will be returned to your own side.’
There were cameramen with the camp staff and Jack knew that they were there to record the scenes of joy, but none of the prisoners moved. They looked at the Sergeant and waited.
He gave his orders. They obeyed. Attention. About turn, quick march. Back to their huts, denying their captors any emotion. Denying themselves any as they sat on their beds and wondered if this was another trick.
One week later, in pouring rain, trucks came and took them to the railhead. They travelled in cattle wagons until they reached another camp. They lived beneath canvas for another two days eating beans and rice. Jack would not believe that he was going home and neither would many of the others.
Small groups departed each evening. Red Cross observers were there now. Jack watched the yellow moon push up over the mountain crest. Where were they going? Back to the camp? Even with the Red Cross he could not bring himself to believe.
But then it was his turn. He pulled himself up into the truck and wished that Steve was here and Nigel, Tom, Bob. And still he couldn’t believe. He couldn’t feel. A Chinese Captain stood in the rain, urging them to turn from the warmongering capitalists and stay where there was truth.
Jack said, for Steve, for Tom, for Nigel, ‘Why don’t you take a powder.’
They drove into Freedom Village three days later and passed lorry after lorry taking Communist POWs back north.
There’s nothing left for you up there now, Jack thought, the ruined countryside still raw in his mind. It was the people that suffered, always.
They drove into the encampment beneath a ‘Welcome Home’ arch and slipped down from the lorry. Someone directed them towards doctors who examined them, then on to the interrogators, who examined them. Then on to the psychiatrists who gave them ice-cream, and examined them.
‘I just want to get home,’ Jack said, because now he believed it and the joy was racing through him. He had been asked to fill in too many forms, been asked too many questions for it not to be the truth. It was over. He was going home. He was bloody well going home.
A woman in WVS uniform came to him as he sat on his bunk. She gave him a shirt and sat and talked to him. It was too long since he had heard a woman’s voice, too long since someone had done up the buttons on his shirt, and his eyes filled with tears.
‘It’s so long since I’ve seen Rosie,’ he said to the woman and then he cried.
The next day he boarded the troop ship, felt the wind in his hair and stood by the rail, with so many others who were too thin, too old, to be twenty-three.
‘It was exquisite,’ he called out as the ship left, not caring about the looks from those at his side. He was saying goodbye to Nigel and to Tom. ‘It was goddamn exquisite.’ And he was crying again, the tears smeared across his cheeks.
The year had passed slowly for Rosie too. Frank and Nancy had come in the summer of ’52. They had held Lucia, they had held Rosie. They walked in the park, they looked at the ruins, at the rosebay willowherb which covered some still-unfilled craters. They gazed at the re-building which was slow, very slow. They took her to shows, to restaurants where there was still a maximum price. They went back with her to Somerset but not to Herefordshire because she must go there alone one day.
They travelled through the Somerset lanes, visited Montacute, Martock, Crewkerne, Stoke-sub-Hamdon. They climbed the hill and looked across the Levels. They looked down on the orchard where Ed had camped. They stood outside the school where Jack had been taught. They heard the laughter through the peaked windows and Frank put his arm round Rosie, chewing his empty pipe.
‘He’ll come back,’ he said, but none of them really knew whether he would or not.
Frank and Nancy had left for the States again in August and when they took Luke and the group back with them it was as though they had taken the sun. Winter had come and gone and Bob had sent for the Larkhill Band too. They were all playing in New Orleans which Luke said ‘was heaven come early’.
There had been no letters from Jack though she had written. Nancy said that much of the mail did not get through.
In April 1953 Frank telegraphed her: ‘Repatriated POWs arriving RAF Lyneham, Wiltshire. May 1st. Meet them. Ask them. Frank.’
He arranged for her to have admittance but when she arrived and saw the plane land, saw the men being helped to the ground, sick, tired, injured, she turned away. This was a time for the families that surrounded her, families that now held back tears that had been falling all morning.
She wouldn’t intrude. She would wait. She would work.
Promoters started coming to her with propositions in spite of her youth and because of her honesty, her reliability. On 2 June she covered the Coronation for Frank’s paper because it kept her in contact, it kept the paper in the family. She took two-year-old Lucia with her and she sat in the pushchair, waving a flag, turning and laughing at Rosie, with Jack’s mouth, his laugh.
She wrote of the golden coach, the eight grey horses and wished that Lucia was old enough to remember it all. It was wet and it was cold but wasn’t England so often wet and cold? Rosie laughed and so did Mrs Eaves who was with her.
‘Will you go back to America?’ Mrs Eaves asked.
‘It depends if he comes back. And if he does, will he want the stall? It all just depends. Both countries are my home.’
They waved at Queen Salote of Tonga, that huge brown smiling figure whose open carriage, Mrs Eaves said, must have been filled with rainwater.
Each Commonwealth Prime Minister had his own carriage and that led to such a shortage of professional coachmen that, Rosie wrote, businessmen and country squires had dressed up and were now driving some of the coaches. Rosie and Mrs Eaves laughed again and moved to Buckingham Palace where the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh waved from the balcony at midnight by which time Lucia and most of the other children around them were asleep in their pushchairs.
Rosie said to Mrs Eaves as the crowd roared, ‘I missed VE Day. I’m glad I caught this.’
Mr and Mrs Orsini had been watching it on their new television and when Rosie and Mrs Eaves returned they toasted the new Queen in iced champagne which Mario had saved since the beginning of the war. They talked until two, with Lucia asleep in Rosie’s arms. Life was good, she thought.
On 15 June the Chinese launched a new Korean offensive and she cried all night because there seemed to be no end to this waiting, this killing.
Then Frank rang her from America. ‘It’s me. Take no notice. It’s these goddamn Commies trying to gain some sort of propaganda success before the armistice is signed. We’re close, Rosie, very close. Hang in there, goddamn it. See you. Bye.’
The line was crackling, she had hardly been able to hear. But it was enough.
The roses in the yard behind the kitchen were blooming well by July and Lucia pointed to Rosie’s pocket each time they went out, wanting to be shown the matchbox which they always took for the ladybirds.
On 27 July the armistice was declared and a few days later Rosie rang her jazz groups and her contacts and told them she would not be available for at least two months. Mr Orsini would handle everything. She took a cab to Middle Street and dropped a letter in through Ollie’s door. It said:
Dear Jack,
If you come back and want to see me I shall be in Herefordshire until the end of September. I love you.
Rosie
She didn’t go into Grandpa’s yard because Norah was there, the windows were open. She walked to Woolworths and heard Frank Sinatra singing, felt the warmth, basked in the light, fingered the glasses, the jewellery, the same sort of ribbon whi
ch she had bought when she met Sam.
‘I’m going to Herefordshire. I can’t wait here. I shall give myself two months and then that’s the end. I’ve left a letter. I haven’t told him about Lucia. He must come because he wants to,’ she said to Mrs Eaves, speaking in short sentences because it seemed to hurt too much to speak, to breathe.
Jack’s troop ship arrived at dawn on 18 September. He felt better, he had eaten well and there was a little more weight on him now. All he could think of was Rosie and he rushed for the train, sat in the carriage looking out of the window at the greenness of this land. He had forgotten. Somehow he had forgotten how green it was. He leaned out of the window as the train rattled through fields which had been ploughed, through fields in which cows grazed. There was sweetness to the air. He was home.
A woman was knitting opposite. She looked at him as he sat down again. ‘Been posted abroad have you? Must have been nice to get a tan like that. I don’t know, you young people. Away from the shortages. You don’t know you’re born,’ she tutted.
‘I’ve been in Korea.’
‘Oh, that’s the one my Harry said was a waste of time.’ She was looking at her pattern, tracing the line of instructions. It slipped and fell to the floor. Jack picked it up.
‘Yes, you could say it was a waste of time,’ he replied and looked out of the window again. So many years had passed, so many men had died. There had been so much waiting, for them all. But there was Steve, there was Bob, and he had learned to write, learned about himself. He shrugged. ‘Some of my friends will have thought it a waste of time,’ he said. ‘They didn’t come back. They’ll never come back.’
But the woman wasn’t listening, she was counting her stitches. There was no point in talking any more. He just sat and watched the country unfold, the towns cluster, the suburbs of London approach. He ran down the platform, out to the taxi-rank. There was a queue. There was always a bloody queue. He was laughing and the man behind him smiled.
‘Been away then?’
‘Yes.’ Jack didn’t say where to. ‘Going back to see my girl.’
‘That’s what makes it all worth while, ain’t it, mate?’ the man said.
Jack nodded, climbing into the taxi which drew up. ‘Yes, that’s what makes it all worthwhile,’ he called back. ‘Middle Street,’ he said to the cabbie.
He looked out. The ruins were still there, but progress had been made. He smelt the air. It was the same old smoke, the same familiar skyline, the same streets which were becoming narrower. It wouldn’t be long now. The taxi was turning into Albany Street, past Woolworths, down into Middle Street. Jack tapped on the glass partition. ‘This’ll do, mate.’ He pushed open the door outside Rosie’s house. He paid, tipped, ducked down through the alley, into Grandpa’s yard, then stopped. Dropped his kitbag. He was home. At last it was all over. They could begin again, if she would have him.
He knocked on the door, pushed it open, calling, ‘Rosie. I’m back.’
There was only Norah there, washing clothes at the sink, her hair permed, her mouth pursed. Grandpa’s books were gone from the walls, his chair too. Norah turned from the sink and said, ‘Thought you’d be here one day. She’s gone. Back to America with that Joe. Gave you up a long time ago. Ollie’s gone too, up north of London. Building the new towns.’
Norah didn’t watch him go, she just heard his feet run out through the yard. She knew he’d try Ollie’s house. She’d left the key there in the usual place but she’d burned the letter he’d got his friend from the camp to post. She’d taken the letter Rosie had pushed through the door. Thought I wouldn’t see, I suppose, she thought, scrubbing harder at the dirt ingrained in Harold’s trousers from kneeling on those church floors. Well, that’ll teach her to tell my husband to go back to his hobby. That’ll teach her to take him away from me. She turned back to the sink.
In Herefordshire, the sun was still warm, though it was nearly five p.m. Rosie paddled with Lucia in the stream, taking the pebbles as her daughter handed them to her. They were wet. She carried them to the bank, adding them to the pile of those which were drying.
Two weeks to go until the end of September and Jack had not come.
She looked up at the slopes above her. The bines were half picked. The pickers were using the last of the light, flip-flipping, not looking. Chatting, laughing.
When she had arrived the barley had still been in the fields all around the cottage she had rented. The combine had worked up until the end of August, shaving off the last tuft before the farmer sent in the plough. Seagulls had clustered over the furrows and Lucia had stood with her mouth open, waving at the birds, calling back when she thought they called to her.
Rosie had gone for a walk with her daughter the evening before the pickers came, and climbed the stile into the kale, hearing the partridges as they whickered in the hedge.
They had passed the blackberry bushes, still ripe with fruit, and looked across the sloping fields, down to the stream they were paddling in now. Seeing the thistles, the cows grazing, she had felt the peace of the place, the echoes.
She had waited, then walked her daughter through the bines which swung in the gentle breeze, telling her that one day they would all come and pick hops and then dance like she and Grandpa had once done. She had taken Lucia to the gate, shown her the carved initials. Her daughter had rubbed her hand over the letters her father had cut and laughed.
And each day they had waited.
Rosie turned back to the stream now, easing her feet through the water, over the stones, as Lucia, her dress tucked into her knickers, laughed and held up more pebbles, drips running down her plump arm.
Rosie turned and threw them towards the pile. Yes, they had waited but not for much longer. If he didn’t come she knew now what she would do. She would spend half her year in England, half her year in Lower Falls and she would survive and prosper. But … But …
They waded towards the bank, ate sandwiches which were warm from the sun. Rosie remembered the lake, then Lee at Wembley, and touched the letter in her pocket which he had written, now that he was ‘a big boy’. She lay back on the grass, pulling Lucia on top of her, hugging her, rocking gently, hearing the buzz of nearby bees.
There were moths at night, beating against the window, trying to reach the light. Didn’t they know it was hopeless? She kissed Lucia fiercely.
‘Water, Mummy, water,’ Lucia said and laughed, pointing to the stream.
The water was cool against their legs as they waded in again and they scooped pebbles and threw, again and again, and the pile grew bigger as Rosie told Lucia how Daddy had lain on the bank and told her of Somerset and how Grandpa had picked hops that year as though he was a young man again.
Her hand was cold now but the pyramid wasn’t high enough and so she threw again.
Another, larger pebble came through the air, hitting the pile before hers did. ‘I hit the marker every time now,’ Jack said.
Rosie saw his smile, his thin face, his thin hands that he held out to her and to his daughter. Then she was running with Lucia clutched to her, through the water, over the pebbles which bruised her feet, but which she didn’t feel. Running as he came down the bank and into the water too, and at last his arms were round them both, his lips were on hers, the same soft gentle lips, the same skin, the same words.
‘Mrs Eaves told me you were here. I love you, little Rosie.’ And then, into her neck, ‘Forgive me.’
‘God damn you, my darling love,’ was all she said, because the waiting was over.
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Copyright © Margaret Graham 1991
Margaret Graham has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This novel is a work of fiction. Apart from references to actual figures and places, all other names and characters are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
First published in Great Britain in 1991 by
William Heinemann Ltd as The Future is Ours
Arrow Books
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At the Break of Day Page 36
