Keep the Home Fires Burning

by S Block

  The observation post had also given Laura an opportunity to think carefully about her part in the affair. Over several weeks, she had been able to isolate moments of wilful blindness on her part, as well as many more moments of manipulation on the wing commander’s. He would come into her office while she was working and simply watch her, for minutes on end. He always made the first move in terms of physical contact. He never invited her to call him by his first name, so it was very clear who held the balance of power in the relationship. He always spoke of his sadness in relation to his marriage, without ever talking of ending it. Perhaps worst of all, he repeatedly told Laura that the time he spent with her helped alleviate the stress of sending young men to their deaths on a daily basis. Laura was willing to admit she had enjoyed the attention Bowers had given her, and the sex they’d had. She enjoyed finally feeling she had graduated to ‘womanhood’ and the feeling of being an important confidante to someone so obviously dashing as a wing commander. She believed she had lost her virginity in a swirl of romantic love; in hindsight she had been forced to admit to herself that she had given it up rather cheaply to a pretty powerful scoundrel. When Laura discovered she had merely been one of many conquests Wing Commander Bowers had made of young women over the course of his in fact very happy married life, Laura was shocked by her own naivety. This was compounded when she expected Bowers to also be punished by the RAF for inappropriate behaviour, only to discover he was going to be allowed to retain his position and rank, but would be moved to a neighbouring RAF station to allow the gossip at Tabley Wood to wind down.

  Laura’s short-lived, unhappy affair with Wing Commander Bowers would have been a scouring experience for a mature woman; for a girl of seventeen it had been emotionally devastating, and the seclusion of the Observation Corps position allowed Laura time and space to regroup and gain some perspective on what had been a cruel baptism of fire into adulthood. Some of the best advice about men had come from her sister, Kate.

  ‘They will try it on, Laura, all the time, under almost any circumstance. Just weeks after I lost Jack, men who knew I was recently widowed tried to get me into bed. It’s shocking, I know. I think they thought my resolve might be weakened. Or that I’d be desperate for company, or consolation. Some men are plain desperate. Some are complete pigs. A lot think we’re stupid. But many more are genuine and lovely. Your task is to rebuff the swine – with a stick if you have to! – and save yourself for someone who deserves you. Look at Mother. Look at me. Campbell women do not throw themselves away on rubbish.’

  Being someone of value was a concept that appealed to Laura. It allowed her to put her old self, and the mistakes made by her, in the past, and re-enter the community anew. She decided she wouldn’t be scarred by her experience with Bowers, but educated by it. She wouldn’t be cowed by the judgement of others, but her actions would show that the tainted girl they whispered about behind her back was long gone. What with her affair with Bowers and her father’s illness, Laura was taken aback by the speed with which events had both challenged then changed her over the last eight months.

  Coming to terms with everything had been helped by the quiet friendship of Air Crewman Tom Halliwell, who had never wavered in his loyalty to Laura as her friend, and then as her boyfriend.

  Laura smiled as she thought of Tom. She loved his unaffected honesty, delivered with kindness. His company made her feel she was with someone who was protective but never indulgent. She wished she had spent more time with Tom before the business with Bowers. Every now and then she gave in to the idea that she was ‘spoiled goods’, and that if she and Tom ever grew too close someone would whisper in his ear that he was too good for her.

  Laura put the binoculars to her eyes once more and looked around the empty sky. Following clouds and birds that floated across her field of vision helped clear her head. As soon as German bombers crossed the east coast, a wave of warnings would be triggered westwards, and Laura would be ready to spot them. Now was the time to acclimatise her vision to the dwindling afternoon light. She let her thoughts drift back to her father. While her mother and sister created, and then inhabited, the pretence that Will’s existence in the house was entirely normal, Laura was struggling to go along with it. She did try, but sometimes she simply had to remove herself from the room, or the house, for a few moments to gather her thoughts.

  The bell of the observation post’s telephone suddenly brought Laura back to the moment. She set down the binoculars and put the telephone’s receiver to her ear. The message was coded and clear: the Luftwaffe was on its way. Thirty bombers. Estimated time of arrival overhead, twenty minutes.

  The sky was quickly darkening as Laura replaced the receiver and the slow drawl of the local air-raid siren started to drift out across the region. Laura gathered her notebook and pencil and took up her position beside the aeroplane recognition chart, next to a mechanical sighting Post Instrument plotter. She set the instrument with the aircraft’s approximate height, aligned the sighting bar with the aircraft and used the vertical pointer to determine the approximate position of the aircraft on the map grid. Once she had everything in place Laura could then report the map coordinates, height, time, sector clock code and number of aircraft for each sighting to the control centre, which would monitor the progress of enemy aircraft into UK airspace and divert RAF fighters to intercept them. Laura was a small but essential cog in the elaborate mechanism that protected England from the Luftwaffe.

  As she worked she imagined villagers hurrying from their homes to the shelter, and thought of her mother, Kate and her father. Will had insisted they leave him in the house during raids, and hurry to the shelter without him to slow them down. Laura imagined her father lying quietly in his bed as people rushed past the window. She wondered if he was scared in those moments.

  Laura took a deep breath, sent up a brief prayer for the safekeeping of her loved ones – as she always did prior to a raid – and cleared her mind. She lifted the binoculars to her eyes once more and focused them on the eastern horizon. By controlling her breathing she could keep the binoculars steady, as she had been trained to do. Her heart raced with excitement. Within minutes of reporting her observations, fighters would be scrambled from Tabley Wood, and Laura would watch them speed off to attack the approaching German bombers and their escorts. It was life and death in action. She felt the weight of responsibility settle on her shoulders once more. She may have been just one link in a long chain of command, but it only took one link to break through a lapse in concentration to render the entire chain ineffective. Laura was determined to keep up her end. All thoughts about Wing Commander Bowers, his wife, the village gossips, her parents, sister, Tom and her father disappeared.

  For the next thirty minutes, nothing else mattered on planet Earth for Laura, except what would take place directly overhead.

  Chapter 54

  Great Paxford was deserted for two hours while the air raid came and went, its population keeping itself distracted in shelters while training one ear on what was happening above them. German aircraft soared overhead, as RAF fighters raced to intercept.

  When the all-clear finally sounded, the women from the WI were the first out of the shelter, hurrying to resume preparations for the nightly arrival of refugees into the village, which had been taking place since they had started making food and accommodation available two weeks earlier. While some less experienced women in the WI wanted to try every initiative that had been suggested, wiser heads counselled that overreaching could lead to the collapse of all of them. As a consequence, the original idea of distributing exhausted refugees to homes around the village had proved too controversial, and was quickly dropped. Limiting the WI’s operation to providing food in one location and shelter in another kept everything clean and simple. If a refugee wanted to eat they went to the church; if they wanted to sleep, they went to the village hall, which also doubled as an air-raid shelter for the refugees. If they wanted to do both, they could, but in that order.
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br />   The village hall could accommodate many people, and being at the centre of Great Paxford meant it was easy to locate, even in the blackout. The hall opened at 6 p.m. each night, and provided a place to bed down in the warm and dry for any who needed it. In the fortnight since the scheme began, the hall had been well occupied but had yet to reach capacity. Mrs Talbot had voiced a manufactured concern to the effect that the hall offered little protection from stray German bombs, but Steph had swiftly shot it down.

  ‘First, no shelter can survive a direct hit. Second, Great Paxford’s not a target for German bombers. The two bombs we’ve had were strays. The chance of another falling on the village is small. The chance of one falling on the village hall even smaller. We offer what we can under the circumstances.’

  The WI would offer refugees only basic food and shelter. Following some discussion about the suitability of a private home for use as a soup kitchen, it was decided that hot vegetable soup and bread would be better distributed from the church than the Barden house. The soup would be cooked on-site on gas in the vestry, while the bread would be baked in people’s homes, and brought in. Evoking Jesus feeding the multitudes after his sermon on the mount, Sarah encountered little difficulty in persuading Adam’s acting stand-in, Reverend James, to allow the church to become a nightly soup kitchen – though she was quick to make clear that no theological succour would be added to the victuals by members of the strictly secular WI. Again, and somewhat predictably, Mrs Talbot raised an argument against, now claiming the church would become dishevelled and spoiled by trekkers pouring in every night, tramping up and down the aisles with muddy feet. Joyce effortlessly wrestled the concern to the ground.

  ‘The church does not belong to us, Mrs Talbot. It is God’s house. And Jesus is the son of God.’

  ‘I know who Jesus is, Mrs Cameron.’

  ‘Good. Then you won’t have any difficulty imagining what Jesus might do if faced with tired and hungry people knocking on his front door. Would he turn them away because they had a little mud on their sandals? Or would he welcome them in for a lovely bowl of vegetable soup and fresh bread?’

  ‘What about the dirt and the mess?’

  ‘I don’t believe it will be beyond our abilities to mop up a bit of mud, do you?’

  Joyce had been among the first to volunteer to help. It took her out of the house, and provided her with an opportunity to be a significant force within the WI once again. She couldn’t turn down the chance to help organise a major initiative.

  Pat was less free to leave the house to help. If Bob was writing, Pat would need to be on hand with refreshing cups of tea on the hour, whatever the hour. There was little she could do about it without provoking Bob’s anger. Though he kept his grinding animosity towards Pat well hidden while Joyce was present, when she left he could be unsparingly harsh towards his wife.

  On this night, however, Bob wasn’t working but going through a list of prospective properties he was considering purchasing with income from the success of his new novel. The thought of moving somewhere where Bob’s behaviour towards her could go unchecked by the presence of someone else in the house filled Pat with dread. She had asked if he wanted to go through the list with her in order to ensure they didn’t move far away from her friends and neighbours.

  ‘I need to find somewhere conducive to work.’

  ‘I understand that, Bob. But wherever you choose, I’ll have to live there too.’

  ‘I’ve always liked the idea of peace and quiet that somewhere remote would bring. I think it would greatly enhance my productivity. Don’t worry. You’ll have a decent enough kitchen to work in.’

  ‘Don’t you think I should have a say beyond the kitchen?’

  ‘Why? You won’t be paying for it.’

  He looked round Joyce’s front room with disdain.

  ‘Anywhere that doesn’t include the ghastly Joyce will be better than this.’

  Though she hadn’t been a natural ally of Joyce’s for many years, Pat nevertheless bridled at Bob’s ingratitude towards the woman who had immediately offered them a roof over their heads when their house had been irreparably damaged by the Spitfire.

  ‘I don’t think that’s very generous. Joyce can be a little overbearing at times. But she’s been extremely kind to us.’

  ‘On the contrary. She’s thoroughly enjoyed being able to live vicariously through my success. “Kind” is what she’s had to pretend to be in order to do that. Though she does have her uses,’ Bob uttered with an ugly smirk.

  His comment left Pat with a great sense of unease. Between the decimation of their house, the move to Joyce’s and the success of Bob’s novel, Pat worried she’d been lulled into a false sense of security, believing Bob had been too busy to be plotting more behind her back. However, she also knew there was no getting anything out of Bob in this mood.

  ‘If you’re not working, and you have no interest in my view about where we might live next, do you have any objections to my helping with the WI tonight?’

  Bob was engrossed in paperwork from the estate agent and barely heard Pat’s request. He caught the words ‘the WI’, which Pat knew he would, and looked up suspiciously.

  ‘It’s not a Thursday.’

  ‘It’s not a branch night, Bob,’ she said patiently. ‘We’re assisting people fleeing nightly bombardment.’

  ‘More pointless do-gooding.’

  ‘If you say so,’ she said wearily.

  Bob looked at her for a moment before deciding that nothing of what Pat had just said was of interest to him, then dismissed her with a wave of his hand.

  ‘Don’t be late back.’

  Though the WI operation to help the refugees had been up and running for two weeks, this was the first night Pat had been able to leave the house and assist.

  She struck out for the village hall, where she found nearly seventy people being settled for the night. Alison, Teresa and a team of WI volunteers clearly had the situation in hand. They were assisted by John Smith, the man who had found Noah and brought him back to Frances. After returning Noah and eating a large breakfast, Frances had told John about the WI initiative to help the refugees, and asked if he would help spread the word among those who came regularly into the area from Liverpool.

  ‘I’d be happy to,’ he had said. He was greatly impressed by the women’s initiative and kindness.

  ‘You would be a terrific intermediary between us and your fellows,’ Alison had suggested. ‘I think your support for the initiative could only encourage people to take advantage of it.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Mrs . . . ?’

  ‘Scotlock,’ said Alison.

  John had walked into Great Paxford on the first night they opened with over thirty refugees from his home city.

  Pat looked round the hall and thought about writing what she saw in her next Mass Observation report.

  Low light by oil lamps. The women of the WI moving among them, checking they have everything they need for a good night’s sleep. Blankets. Pillows. Most households offered at least one of each. People of all ages. Families with children. Some very young. A few coloureds. A Chinese family.

  Pat wasn’t needed so she made her excuses and slipped out. She contemplated returning to Joyce’s house, but didn’t think Bob would be in bed quite yet. She pulled the collar of her coat up against the cold night air and set off in the opposite direction, towards the church, where she might be able to help those giving out soup and bread.

  Each time Pat now approached the church, day or night, images from the day Marek was shipped out flashed through her mind. The incessant rain. The trees bending in the wind. Teresa’s wedding. Bob’s smirking face. Running along a drenched road in her best shoes. The Spitfire sticking out of the Campbells’ house, like a dagger plunged into its heart.

  In the six weeks since, Pat had almost given up hope of ever seeing Marek again. His letter not only made immediate daily existence alongside Bob bearable, it had changed Pat’s outlook
on everything. In two tightly written pages of military-issue foolscap, Marek reignited her hope that they might one day be together, and lifted the enervating grey veneer that seemed to have settled on everything around Pat. Though he had offered scant detail about his military duties, he had reiterated his hope that they might be reunited after the war.

  If I survive, Patricia, it will be because I will be driven to return one day, and to once again hold you in my arms. If such a thing could ever happen I would never leave you again.

  Bob’s sudden determination to leave Joyce’s and find their own place to live unnerved Pat, but changed nothing in her mind. Knowing Marek was alive, and that he felt towards her as she continued to feel towards him, was as sustaining for Pat as food and drink. In her reply, Pat had restated her love for Marek, and begged him to take care of himself.

  As long as I’m able to receive Marek’s letters it doesn’t matter where I am. Hearing his voice in my head as I read his words will be enough for me to hold on until he returns. And then . . . ?

  Pat dared not imagine the answer to the question. Too many obstacles stood in the way of a future life together. Marek’s survival. Her own. Bob. The war. Each obstacle might be overcome, one after the other, but taken together a future life with Marek seemed almost impossible. Almost. She allowed herself to create a perfect image of them walking slowly through the fields surrounding Great Paxford a few years from now, hand in hand, and returned to it as and when she needed to calm herself, or endure a difficult encounter with Bob.

  Pat approached the church and saw silhouettes entering and leaving through the front entrance. A delicate skeleton of scaffolding had been erected on the left-hand side of the edifice to facilitate repairs to the damage caused by the Spitfire as it fell to earth.