Keep the Home Fires Burning

by S Block

  Frances was not above a dash of sentimental rhetoric when she wanted to appeal to hearts over minds. The majority of hats in the crowded hall nodded in agreement. But there was a small minority for whom driving the trekkers anywhere else seemed a perfectly reasonable solution. If it meant the trekkers got pushed around the region so be it. Predictably, Mrs Talbot put it the most tartly.

  ‘Keeping them moving sorts out the situation in three ways,’ she said. ‘Firstly, no single village has to put up with them for very long. Secondly, they still won’t have to stay overnight in Liverpool. Thirdly,’ she proposed, with a sarcastic curl of her upper lip, ‘they get to make a twilight tour of Cheshire they’ll talk about for years after the war.’

  Miriam narrowed her eyes at Mrs Talbot, as if to better hone in on her bitter essence. She turned to Steph Farrow on her left.

  ‘Is Gwen Talbot really that unpleasant,’ she whispered, ‘or really that stupid? Or both? Both.’

  ‘Definitely both,’ Steph whispered back. Miriam nodded.

  ‘Even my little girl would recognise that as a stupid idea, and she can scarcely focus on my hand in front of her face.’

  Steph stifled a laugh and raised her hand. Frances gave her the nod to speak.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Farrow?’

  ‘I’ll admit, I was scared of them when they first appeared. First day I saw them I put the shotgun under the bed. Still there, just in case. You know.’

  There was a small laugh of recognition from the women in the hall. Frances smiled.

  Everyone listens when Steph speaks. She’s a natural.

  ‘Look,’ Steph continued, ‘we can argue the pros and cons of this all night.’ She looked nervously at the listening faces around her, convinced they thought she was talking rubbish. ‘But by my reckoning, whatever we decide has to be something that allows us to live with ourselves. Whether we drive them off or help them . . . I want a clean conscience.’

  There were murmurs of approval that clearly alarmed the Talbot faction. Mrs Talbot sprang to her feet to beat back Steph’s deceptively subtle appeal to decency.

  ‘I’m perfectly happy to look myself in the mirror knowing a Liverpudlian face isn’t going to suddenly appear behind it, having just broken into my house.’

  The Talbot faction murmured ‘hear, hear’ and ‘well said’ and ‘Great Paxford is for Great Paxfordians, not strangers’.

  Teresa turned in her seat to look Mrs Talbot in the face and shouted, ‘Utterly disgraceful! Take that back!’ in her thickest Scouse accent.

  But Mrs Talbot simply folded her arms and refused. Steph remained on her feet.

  ‘In my book, this war’s a test,’ she said, raising her voice above the clamour until it quietened. ‘Of all of us. Doesn’t matter if you’re English, German, French, Czech, Polish – we’re all being tested. What sort of people are we? Well, I’ll tell you what sort of person I want to tell my grandchildren I was – a woman who helped when she could, as I’d want to be helped if the shoe was on the other foot. What about you, Mrs Talbot? What would you want all of us to do if you were one of those coming out of Liverpool every night, dragging your terrified kids away from bombs and settling them in the middle of a wood in the cold and dark, and then getting them back in time for school and work next morning, fed and washed? Then doing it next day. And the next. And the next. ’Cause what’s important isn’t their blisters, or lack of sleep, but keeping them alive.’

  Steph looked at Mrs Talbot, and then around at all the silent faces looking back at her. Every single one was gazing at her, riveted.

  ‘What would you want us to do if you were one of those women? Push you off? Move you on?’

  Sarah watched her with quiet awe.

  Some people have an ability to strip away noise and nonsense and reduce things to what they actually are. Steph is one of them, and we are so, so lucky to have her in the branch.

  Mrs Talbot looked at Steph with a triumphant sneer.

  ‘I would never cut and run in the first place,’ she said, spitting out the words.

  ‘Easy for you to say, Mrs Talbot,’ replied Steph. ‘You’re not getting bombed every night.’

  Mrs Talbot looked hard at Steph, but couldn’t match the farmer’s intensity. Steph slowly sat down as Frances stood back up.

  ‘These people are refugees, ladies. Nightly refugees in the true meaning of the word – fellow countrymen – coming into our part of the world to seek refuge. What are we afraid of? To paraphrase Steph Farrow just now – what kind of WI branch do we want Great Paxford to be?’

  Isobel raised her hand.

  ‘Yes, Miss Reilly,’ Frances said, giving her the floor. Isobel stood.

  ‘As some of you may know, I was sent here by my brother. When war broke out, he thought London was going to get bombed, and wanted me somewhere safe. It didn’t happen immediately, but now’s a different story, of course. As it is in Liverpool and Crewe, and all the other cities trying to keep the country going. I came to Great Paxford as an evacuee, or a refugee, or however you want to call it, and I was terrified at how I might be treated. All my life my blindness turned me into a burden in other people’s eyes. I sat on the bus from Crewe dreading what I might find. And I found some of the most helpful, caring people I’ve ever met. This branch of the Women’s Institute made the most difficult period of my life not just bearable, but astonishing. If you can do but a fraction of that for these trekkers for as long as they keep coming, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to do?’

  Frances looked at Isobel and could have kissed her. By the end of the night the branch had conclusively decided to offer the incomers a variety of initiatives to make their time away from home more comfortable. Some offered to put up families with small children so they didn’t have to sleep outside. Steph and the other farmers’ wives offered to make unused barn space habitable for people to sleep in, in dry and relative warmth. Others offered to donate bedding.

  Frances was tasked with finding out if the village hall could be made over as a makeshift air-raid shelter after a certain hour each night, and offered to establish a basic soup kitchen at her house for any refugees who lacked for a warm, basic meal. She continued to use the term refugee throughout the evening, hoping it might begin to stick.

  Pat immediately offered to help wherever she could, eager to seize upon another reason to spend less time with Bob under Joyce’s roof. Having Joyce around curtailed some of Bob’s worse behaviour, but Pat still lived in fear of further retribution over Marek.

  A working party was set up to monitor the implementation of the agreed proposals, and another was established to go into the surrounding area to inform the refugees of what was being offered. Frances cautioned the branch not to overstretch itself.

  ‘Ladies, as we know, and as is often said during war, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. We do what we can do for these refugees, but no more. We can help people, but we cannot sort out, or interfere in, their lives. Do not offer more than you can give in both time and resources.’

  As initiatives and offers came thick and fast in a flurry of proposals and shows of hands, Frances found herself looking more and more at the door. She willed Claire to burst in and blurt out the news of Noah’s discovery, safe and well. But by the end of the meeting Claire still had not arrived. Having inspired the branch to help the refugees, a subdued Frances brought the meeting to a close. She thanked the ladies for their great, good hearts, and bade them goodnight.

  Walking home alone, Frances glimpsed the scattered glow of several small campfires hidden among trees, away from the road. She imagined mothers and fathers and children huddled together around the warmth, keeping one another’s spirits up, thankful that they were here, and not slowly coming into view under the Luftwaffe’s nightly bombsights.

  From these thoughts Frances made a swift connection to Noah, camped out somewhere, but with no fire or blankets to keep him warm, and no food, and almost certainly no sense of where he was.

  What was
he wearing when he fled the school? What had he eaten? What was the weather like? Has he gone back to Liverpool? Was he there now, beneath a bombing raid, screaming in terror?

  It was too much to bear. To even begin to consider what Noah was experiencing at this moment created a tight knot in her stomach. He had escaped from the school, but to where?

  Frances felt crushed. She could provide no answers to any of her questions. It left her feeling wretched that she could inspire and mobilise a packed hall of grown women to help possibly hundreds of strangers, yet could do not one thing for a single little boy, alone and miserable, whereabouts unknown.

  Suddenly, a twig cracked to her right, causing Frances to turn sharply in its direction.

  ‘Hello?’ she said. And then before she could stop herself, ‘Noah?’

  It wasn’t fear that gave her voice a cautious inflection, but the frantic hope he might step out of the shadows and reveal himself, having made his way back to Great Paxford for the express purpose of falling exhausted into Frances’s grateful arms. Noah didn’t appear. The vixen that had been the source of the sound darted out of the undergrowth, sprinted across the road and disappeared into the hedgerow. Frances could feel her heart pounding so hard in her chest it was almost painful.

  How do mothers do this, day after day after day? How does any woman assume complete responsibility for the well-being of another human being year after year? Fathers too, of course, but not like this. Or perhaps it can be like this for some men. Not mine and Sarah’s father, but for others. It’s overwhelming. Almost unbearable.

  After a few moments Frances took a deep breath and continued her journey home.

  Please, Noah. Stay alive until you’re found. Just do that and I promise I will never send you back.

  Frances walked the remainder of the way in the dark, repeating those three sentences over and over to herself. It was all she could offer Noah at that moment. If he was discovered safe and sound she would offer him a great deal more, she was certain of that. More than she should, she expected. But she didn’t care. You can have whatever you want. Just come back to me.

  Before she went to sleep that night, Frances knelt beside her bed and prayed for Noah’s safe-keeping to a God in whose existence she had always struggled to believe. She felt a twinge of disappointment in herself for succumbing to prayer in the moment, but it nevertheless gave her a small throb of comfort. Frances then climbed into bed, turned off the light, and slept for precisely forty-two minutes, before waking up with a gnawing sense of dread that kept her awake until sunrise.

  Chapter 37

  For almost the entire ride home, Will gazed out of the ambulance window at every sunlit field, tree, hedgerow, shrub, ditch, smallholding and house, knowing it would almost certainly be the final time he would see them. Erica watched him in silence. It was possible Will might have to go back to the hospital in the event of an unforeseen medical emergency, but they had left on the understanding that Will was leaving to spend his final days at home. Some of those would be better than others. For a spell, when his breathing eased and his speech became more fluent, it was like having the old Will back. Eventually, those days would become fewer, until every day was the same as the one before, only worse, and Will’s body and faculties would begin their terminal decline.

  Erica understood that this would likely be Will’s final drive home from hospital. The realisation that everything Will now did might be for the final time was slow to dawn. There were times when she thought she understood and believed it. But then it slipped away. She forcibly spelled it out to herself.

  His final meal. His final kiss. His final pipe. His final shave. His final haircut. His final sunset. His final sunrise. His final sleep. All now close on the horizon. And he knows it. I can tell.

  A kestrel caught Will’s eye, fluttering over a field as they drove past, flickering its wings to hold back gravity, and lock into position over unwitting prey beneath. Erica watched her husband slowly smile at the way the bird held its balance in the air, keeping high enough to cast no shadow of alarm, but not so high it would be unable to identify inviting movement among the field’s furrows. Erica knew that, unlike many who feared it, her husband had always understood and appreciated the life cycle that was the engine of all of nature. His own included.

  ‘It’s a form of engine that connects you and I to every living thing on the planet,’ he used to tell Kate and Laura when they were small. ‘We live, we die. New life appears. It eventually dies too. And so on. That’s how things are meant to be. And it’s something to remember whenever you feel unfairly treated or bullied. Everything passes.’

  Erica had always admired the way he had of explaining difficult concepts lightly, stripping them of their capacity to invoke misunderstanding or fear.

  ‘Without the process of death,’ he’d said, smiling, ‘we can’t have new life. Death ensures the world doesn’t become too crowded with people, and plants and animals to the point where everything becomes old and clogged up and would stop working. Death is just a rather dull way of saying “it’s someone or something else’s turn now”.’

  Despite being six and four years old at the time, the girls had understood their father straight away, as his explanation perfectly fitted with what they had been taught about the virtue of sharing. For them, it seemed that death was a fair way to share out life. Every living creature got their share of being alive, and then died to allow others to have their share. And so on. It seemed quite reasonable to them, and because of that not remotely frightening. In this last respect, it helped that they were at the beginning of their own lives, with little awareness of their own time being finite too.

  The ambulance bumped along country roads potholed by the constant gouging treads of thick military tyres passing over them at speed, day and night, in all weathers.

  After Dr Mitchell had told her that Will’s lifespan could now be measured only in days and weeks, Erica discovered that each moment in his company carried a certain charge she hadn’t previously experienced. The imposition of a time limit suddenly heightened everything – colour, sound, movement and, of course, emotion. Erica had mentioned this observation to Will while he lay in the ward, an oxygen mask over his face to help him breathe. He had given a single nod, and slowly pulled the mask to one side to speak.

  ‘Appre . . . cia . . . tion,’ he’d said slowly.

  Erica had smiled. Until now they had lived under the illusion that they could possibly, if they didn’t play fast and loose with their health, live almost for ever. Logically impossible, of course, but human beings plot their course through life between the rational and the emotional, aided by the inability of the conscious mind to grasp the reality of its own extinction. The instant Dr Mitchell placed a fixed cap on Will’s remaining time, Erica became alive to the passage of every minute and hour as one less she would be able to spend with her husband. The knowledge of it would catch her unawares at unpredictable moments, and she would suddenly start to cry. Will’s future suddenly had an end attached. His tomorrows were dwindling in number. Soon, one of them would be his last.

  As Erica observed Will watching the landscape speed past, he slowly turned away from the window and looked at her.

  ‘It is . . . so . . . beau . . . tiful,’ he said.

  ‘Despite the war,’ Erica agreed.

  ‘Because of . . . war . . . it is . . . even more . . . beautiful. We . . . might . . . lose it.’

  Our country. Our marriage. Our lives together. It is only at the point of loss that we absolutely value what we have. And then it’s too late.

  Erica knew this wasn’t an original thought, yet its truth struck her more forcefully now than at any other time.

  Will slowly held out a trembling hand and Erica leaned forward to take it. It felt colder than she’d anticipated. Less warm flesh than cold bones. The hand of an old man, yet Will was just forty-seven.

  The ambulance drove through the southern outskirts of Great Paxford, towards its centre. D
uring the thirteen months since the outbreak of war, villagers had grown used to all manner of vehicles hurtling through their village. Now, no one walking past batted an eye at the sight of the ambulance carrying their doctor and his wife. As the final survivor to be extracted from the ruin the Spitfire had made of their house, Will’s endurance encouraged many to take his longevity for granted. They hadn’t been told that Dr Myra Rosen had been offered the post for as long as she wanted it. Few yet knew that Will was never again going to be their doctor.

  Will turned back and looked through the window as they drove along Great Paxford’s familiar streets. Erica tried to see it as he now saw it – not merely as ‘home’, but as the community to which he had given so much of his life. She recalled the first time they had driven into the village, when they took over the surgery from a retiring German émigré, Dr Guggenheim. There was no tarmac on the roads, and barely a car. They brought with them four packing cases and a baby, Kate. Will stood outside their front door on a warm July evening, looked across at the stunning church opposite, glowing in summer sunlight, tightened his grip on Erica’s waist with one hand, and around his daughter with the other, and said, ‘Perfect.’

  Since that day, there wasn’t a soul under the age of twenty who Will hadn’t delivered, nor an adult over that age who Will hadn’t seen for some illness or other. Many of the older folk developed ailments as a pretext on which to pop into the surgery to see Doc Campbell for a bit of company and a chat. Will always had time for them, never rushed them, and never charged them a penny for popping by.

  ‘I want them to feel that coming to see me is perfectly natural,’ he had once explained, after Erica had become exasperated with a particular elderly ‘patient’ who clearly had nothing physically wrong with them but was just feeling lonely.

  ‘Loneliness is debilitating too. But if they feel they can drop in when they’re feeling well, when they fall genuinely sick they won’t hesitate to seek my help.’

  Erica passionately hoped Will considered his life in the village had been a worthwhile investment of his time on Earth.