by MARY HOCKING
`I hate the war!’ She unleashed the cry with an unchecked animal ferocity that tore her lungs. `I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!’
There was not much satisfaction in baying against the war, which was abstract. She cried:
`I hate God!’ She could picture God, looking incredibly old and gnarled like an Irish saint, and definitely saddened by her blasphemy. `I hate God!’ she repeated. `Hate, hate, hate . . .’ It did not really help. She Said, `Oh Peter, Peter, Peter . . .’ She went on repeating his name until the tears came and she wept softly, holding her arms across her breasts.
When Robin returned, refreshed from her wash, she came across and placed one hand awkwardly on Kerren’s shoulder.
`Kerren, what is it?’
`I want him, Robin. I want him now! This is the time for us, it will never be quite the same again.’
`I’m so sorry, my sweet.’
Robin went across to her chest of drawers and rummaged until she found a bottle of expensive eau-de-cologne which Con had given to her and which she usually guarded jealously.
`Put some on your forehead,’ she said. `Take as much as you want.’
Kerren knew better than to do that, but she was touched by the gesture and she dabbed a few drops on her forehead.
`Why don’t we go down to The Sycamore Tree?’ Robin said. `We’ll get gloriously drunk and shock even Naomi.’
`That is a very splendid idea!’
They went out of the cabin and down the cinder track. There were very few people about, most of the Wrens were on duty or off the camp at this time of the evening. They left their station cards in the regulating office and then went through the gate into the lane that led away from the airfield towards the village.
The trees soon thinned out and there were fields on either side. Kerren loved the fields on summer evenings, the drowsy movement of the grass, the tremulous paths of air parting the barley, the smell of warmth and ripeness without the day’s irritation when the blown seeds peppered one’s nostrils and the dry earth breathed dust. She and Peter had missed this summer, it would be autumn when she saw him again; but next year perhaps the war would be over and they would have the whole summer together. Beside her, Robin was saying:
`I’ve never been really drunk. It’s something I must do before I go back to Civvy Street.’
Chapter Fifteen
Life in Cabin 8 was not quite what it had been. Even Naomi noticed the change. She had evaded an overseas draft by painting a pathetic, if inaccurate, picture of the effect that this would have on her widowed mother. On her return to Cabin 8 she had an unexpected feeling of emptiness as she opened the door and saw the rows of bunks, very neat and tidy because it was the evening after the Captain had done his rounds.
`The atmosphere isn’t the same,’ she said to Cath later in the evening. `I realized when I came back, how much I missed Beatie.’
`We’ve been together too long,’ Cath said. `Why don’t we get drafted?’
`Someone at Lee lost a file,’ Robin suggested.
Kerren maintained that Marney was the trouble, and in some ways she was right. Marney was too dark and devious for them. Also, she did not need them. They might bully Jessie and laugh about the ineffectual Hazel, but both Jessie and Hazel were a part of the corporate personality of Cabin 8. Marney, by her own choice, remained an outsider. She slept there and she stayed in on the night before Captain’s rounds when she did her share of scrubbing and polishing. Apart from this, they had very little to do with her. And yet the cabin was never quite the same after she came; a wholeness had been lost. Occasionally someone who was particularly irritated by one of the trivial incidents which assumed enormous proportions in their enclosed world would confide in Marney. On such occasions Marney would come out with a comment which showed the other girls in a light in which they had never been seen before. `But hadn’t you realized that she’s a Jewess?’ she said of Naomi, as though diagnosing an incurable disease. Of Cath, it was, `Poor little sober-sides! She’s desperate for a man.’ Robin was referred to as `The Snow Queen’.
But it was not just in Cabin 8 that the rot seemed to have set in. The heat, combined with the feeling that they were wasting their time on a training station now that the allied offensive had been launched, made tempers short. Another squadron had come in to refit and rest. The pilots wandered around looking untidy and wearing their oldest caps with nearly all the gold braid scraped off just to show how battle-scarred they were. Their flying was appalling. One of them taxied down the duty runway when a Barracuda was coming in to land. Both pilots were killed. Hunter watched the incident from the met. office window; he seemed to attract calamity, something always happened when he was on duty.
He was more on edge than ever these days. Adam maintained that he was being kept at Guillemot to shore up Hunter. Adam had had a disastrous period during which all his forecasts turned out badly and he dropped the met. office clock. The new Wren, Sue, took the clock into Shaftesbury to get it repaired and subsequently dropped it on the concrete path leading to the control tower. Little incidents assumed the proportions of major crises during these trying days and the episode of the clock overshadowed the met. office for a week. Adam sulked, while Hunter could be heard muttering under his breath as he stalked about the office, `It’ll be the theodolite next.’ When Kerren and Corder sent up a balloon he stood in the doorway watching them, sweating with anxiety. `He’s afraid we’re going to blow up the hydrogen store,’ Kerren said.
The days dragged on. There were a few mild diversions. One of the wardroom stewards was invalided out, pregnant. A sailor walked nude through a Wrens’ cabin at A camp. `Some people,’ Naomi said, `get all the excitement.’ But life became more exciting for her shortly afterwards. The allies took Paris and Naomi met a Frenchman in Yeovil with whom she celebrated extravagantly. She began to talk less about her friend and adopted a very continental attitude to everything, even complaining of the lack of garlic in the mess cooking. Kerren, who was much moved by the newsreels of the entry into Paris and the hysterical welcome given to allied troops in Belgium, wrote to Peter, `How wonderful the news is! We’ll have our honeymoon in Budapest at the end of the year at this rate!’ She was so overjoyed at this thought that she offered to go to the Mill Farm with Jessie whom she had neglected lately. Jessie had been much quieter since Beatie’s death and she responded without enthusiasm.
`If you want to, Kerren.’
`I thought you liked having someone to go with.’
`Frank comes with me. He wants to be a farmer, so he likes going there.’
`I expect he likes to be with you, Jess.’
`No. He was Beatie’s boy-friend.’
`It doesn’t mean he won’t be anyone else’s boy-friend.’
But Jessie shook her head and looked wise. She had given up trying to compete with the others and in their opinion had become rather dowdy. `Frank will get bored with her,’ Hazel said. `She looks positively matronly.’ Her behaviour was much more sober, too; they could never persuade her to sing songs after lights out now.
Kerren went hitch-hiking with Robin instead. It was a good time for hitch-hiking. There was a lot of traffic on the roads and the country looked lovely, the heather out on the heaths, great banks of trees flaming red and gold against a blue sky that was faintly misted. The air was sharper. Salisbury, in contrast, seemed dingy, full of aimless G.I.s and shoddy civilians.
Civilian life rarely impinged on them and on the occasions when it did the effect was unpleasant. The routine of civilian life seemed dreary, the tempo unbelievably slow. Even people such as Cath, who were very attached to their parents, found it difficult to communicate.
`All Mother thinks about is groceries,’ she complained the evening she returned from leave. `Her main enemy isn’t Hitler, it’s Baxter, the grocer. She’s patronized him for twenty years and now he buys on the black market and sells his ill-gotten gains to favoured customers, of which she isn’t one. He was one of the fixed things in our life,
respectable, hard-working, the salt of the earth and a lay preacher into the bargain. The first year of the war he delivered groceries at Christmas just the same and Mother said it would take more than Hitler to change Baxter. I can understand her being disappointed; but she isn’t just disappointed, she talks about him as though he had robbed her of her virtue!’
`Does he go on preaching?’
`Yes. According to our ex-char. He talks endlessly about joy and goodness and how we must all keep our eyes fixed on those lovely things which shine dimly at the end of the dark tunnel of our despair.’
`Your mother ought to go to the Co-op.,’ Jessie said. `They’re ever so nice there.’
`I don’t think anything is nice in Civvy Street. It’s so meagre and grey and anxious. It’s made Mother that way, too, scrabbling about after food like a worn old chicken. And Father practically lives at the office because he can’t get any staff. There was a depression over the house the whole time I was there because his conveyancing clerk – who’s grade G3 and blind as a bat – has been called up. All the sparkle seems to have gone out of them, but they can’t see it. They think it’s me that’s changed; they don’t say anything, but I can tell they think I’m restless and discontented. Mother said, “You used to enjoy yourself just lying on the bed with a book”.’
Naomi said, `That reminds me. Did you know that two of the cook stewards were found . . .’
Cath got up and went out. She left the camp and took a path that ran along the edge of the woods. It was a beautiful evening, crisp with a faint gauze of mist drawn across the sky; but as she walked over the soft moss she was still thinking about her leave. It was true that once there had been nothing she liked more than lying in her room reading as the dusk gathered in the street and the lamps came on. She lived in Holland Park and although the area was going down, it still had some sort of grace which the evening light enhanced magically. But now it had changed and the change was more disturbing than the change in her parents. London was all right, full of people in uniform, loud with the knife-edged gaiety of servicemen on leave; but on the fringes of the city gaiety was snuffed out with the coming of night. She hated the tube station where the people still slept, slumped bundles of old rag surmounted by white faces vacuous as turnips in the dim light. There was no need for it any more, the raids were few, but people had become addicted to chaos. Outside, shadows scurried in the dark streets, furtive, evasive. Her mother worried if she was out late.
The street where she lived had been bombed. The house opposite was open to the road like a stage set, the stairs, landing and one wall of the living-room exposed. The old woman who had lived there was in hospital; while they were digging her out thieves had looted her valuables. The house to the left had caught the blast, a great crack like an inane grin spread across the white stucco front. The foundations were said to be undermined. No one lived there now. Nothing thrived but the willow herb. Yet the impression was not of something dead and finished. Perhaps this was because the wind blew all the time she was on leave, endlessly breathing amid the dust and rubble. As she hurried up the steps to her own house she had the feeling that something had been begotten in the ruined house and that the wind was scattering its seeds over the whole of the city. Always, after that week, she associated the willow herb with violence.
As she padded beneath the trees, a square, sturdy figure planting her feet surely between the brambles and broken branches, she looked as though nothing would ever shake her. The round face, with its candid brown eyes, flat, obstinate cheek-bones and stubborn jaw was relentlessly opposed to expressions of panic or despair. Nevertheless, she was very disturbed and the peace of the woods only seemed to aggravate her distress. To her left was a long view of fields, serene in the golden light, but this did not help, either. She did not really like solitude and she was glad when she heard someone running along the path behind her.
Kerren had decided to follow Cath. She was growing up fast now and she often found the conversation in the cabin boring. Cath, whom she had once thought rather too sober, now seemed a more interesting companion than some of the others. They saw quite a lot of each other when they were off duty.
`Don’t worry about your folk, Cath,’ she said as she caught up with her.
`It’s all right for me,’ Cath answered. `I don’t mind roughing it. But I hate to see my parents doing it; they’re too old to get any fun out of it.’
`The war will be over soon. We’ll be in Berlin in no time, and you’ll be able to go home.’
They walked in silence for a while and Kerren thought how lovely the grass smelt cooling in the evening and how odd it was that this kind of loveliness hurt. Cath said quietly:
`I don’t know that I want to go back. Everything’s changing . . .’
`Change doesn’t worry me,’ Kerren answered. `As long as I have Peter, the world can change as much as it likes.’ She kicked at a branch lying across the path. Elation and despair alternated more quickly than ever these days. Now she said wretchedly, `I haven’t heard from him for three weeks. He doesn’t love me any more.’
`Kerren!’ Cath looked as severe as was possible to someone with a currant bun of a face. `He’s probably in action . . .’
`Not continuously for three weeks. There isn’t any excuse.’ She had spent long nights thinking up excuses and demolishing them. `Hazel hears from that tedious brother of hers more often than I hear from Peter.’
They walked on until they came to the edge of the wood and then paused, leaning on a gate that led into a field of wheat. It was sunset, the whole of the sky to the west was inflamed.
`I can’t bear his not being here at times like this,’ Kerren said.
Cath examined the sunset as though looking for a flaw in a masterpiece. After a while, she said:
`You talk as though Peter existed just for you. As though he was an experience, like the sunset.’
`That’s how it is when you’re in love.’
`But he’s a man, Kerren! And he’s probably wet and seasick just now.’
`Do you think I don’t realize that? I imagine him . . .’
`Yes, you imagine! You imagine until you feel wet and seasick, too. It all adds to your experience.’
Kerren turned away from the sunset and regarded Cath’s hot, earnest face.
`What are you trying to say?’
`I think you’re rather selfish about Peter. You want excitement all the time; he probably needs a rest from drama and high tension.’
Cath turned back to the sunset. She looked placid and sure of herself, as though she had put it in its place.
`Have you ever been in love?’ Kerren asked later as they walked back to the camp.
`Once.’
`What happened?’
`He found someone else.’
Kerren, who would never have admitted such a thing, was impressed by the simplicity of the answer. She was also gratified because she felt that it explained Cath’s unromantic attitude to love.
When they reached the camp, Kerren went to the recreation room to see whether there was a letter from Peter. The only letter was for Hazel. Hazel read it aloud in the cabin. Kerren wondered why no one had ever pointed out to Hazel that Michael’s letters made uninspiring reading. Fortunately she said nothing and the next day history took a hand in the affairs of Michael Peake. When Kerren came back from duty, Robin said to her:
`I knew it would happen. Michael Peake would end up winning the war.’
`What’s happened?’
`We’ve dropped paratroopers over some place in Holland, Yanks and Poles and, of course, Captain Peake’s little lot. It will all be over soon now.’
It was Hazel’s hour of glory. The claims which she made on Michael’s behalf were more than borne out by the war correspondents. They talked of a master stroke which would shorten the war, of the most spectacular air landing ever made, of devil-may-care young men, splendid in attack, gay, audacious, invincible. Those who had met Michael Peake began to forget the pal
lid supercilious face with the anxious eyes and visualized in its place a modern Galahad crowned with a red beret. Several girls discovered boy-friends in the paratroopers that no one had ever heard about before. But Hazel’s claim to fame was undisputed. As the days went by the Wrens in Cabin 8 got into the habit of going into the recreation room to listen to the news broadcasts. They crouched over the radio, as intent and proud as Hazel herself. The subsequent reports were something of an anticlimax. There had been a change of weather and the orchestration seemed to have lost some of its earlier vigour; the brass grew more subdued and the violins crept in. The operation was referred to as hazardous, and there was talk of gallantry and quiet courage, of endurance and fortitude. This, as Hazel said, was very nice, but it began to get a bit depressing.
`It makes them all sound older, somehow.’
`You know how things are, Hazel,’ Naomi reassured her. `The news johnnies always start off with a big noise; then they have to play things down a little so that there’ll be something left in reserve to make a really big bang at the finish. They’ll have the brass bands out again tomorrow.’
But tomorrow the story was of a valiant fight against desperate odds, of rapidly dwindling forces and finally, at the end of the week while the tattered remnants of the 1st Airborne Division withdrew, they spoke of men who would be remembered in the long annals of history.
Kerren came back to the cabin early in the evening, wheeling her bike slowly up the cinder track which was now lightly strewn with autumn leaves that had fallen early. She rested it against the wall and paused for a moment, hesitating to go into the cabin because it was so quiet – inside as well as outside. She looked beyond the thinning foliage of the trees and felt sadness drifting in from the dust-smoked fields. She turned away and opened the door of the cabin. Inside the girls were moving about quietly. Cath, who was near the door, looked at her and made a movement of her head in Hazel’s direction. Other eyes turned to her, transmitting the same message. Naomi was standing by Hazel’s chest of drawers and there was an open suitcase on a near by chair. Naomi was saying:
