by Mary Nichols
She learnt to drive a tractor and milk cows, harness the big shire horses, clean out the byres and the stables, hoe between rows of potatoes, help with the harvest, standing on the rick with a pitchfork as the threshing machine rattled and shook, separating the grain from the chaff, and taking the straw on a pitchfork as it was thrown up to her. She sweated and choked on the dust, and all the time she was thinking of Harry, taking off at night, returning in the early hours of the next morning, perhaps with a holed bomber, always exhausted and glad to be back. She wanted to be with him then, to help him relax and talk about the future, a future they would share.
By dint of much lobbying that her elderly parents needed her to help at home, she was finally sent to work on a farm between Swanton Morley and East Dereham and came home to sleep each night. It meant getting up before dawn to cycle to work, and as the days shortened, it was dark when she left and, in spite of double summer time, dark again by the time she returned home, but she preferred that to living in a hostel and she did get a living-out allowance. She was back where she wanted to be, although even then it was not easy for her and Harry to be off duty at the same time, but they made the most of any opportunities. She knew he sometimes thought about his wife; she was a little jealous, she was prepared to admit, but in time she would make him forget, simply by loving and caring and being there when he needed someone. He would forget his first wife and come to realise the present and the future were all that mattered, and when this dreadful war was over, there was a whole new life to be lived. Together.
‘We’re off on leave on Monday,’ Florrie told Julie, on the day the news of the victory at El Alamein was announced. The tide of war seemed to be turning at last. The Russians had managed to lift the siege of Stalingrad and launched a counter-attack. The Americans and Australians were having some success in the Pacific and the Germans were in retreat in North Africa. After the miserable three years which had gone before, the change of fortune was received with great pleasure.
‘Monday?’ echoed Julie, as a memory flitted into her brain and out again before she could grasp it. Had something significant happened to her on a Monday?
‘Yes, you know, the day after Sunday,’ Florrie said, laughing.
How they had managed to stay together so long, no one knew, except that it was generally accepted that they were joined at the hip and separating them would require major surgery. From Morecambe they had gone to Wales and from Wales to Coningsby in Lincolnshire where they were now, Florrie as a sergeant driver and Julie working in the stores. They were certainly seeing parts of the country they never would have done but for the war. Coningsby was a bomber station and they were close to the aircraft and could watch them take off and return. The first time it had given them a great thrill, but when two of the Sterlings had failed to return it put a damper on their spirits. They had learnt to harden themselves and not become too close to any of the airmen, though they were friendly and often went dancing and to the pictures with them.
Julie had matured a lot in the two years since she had become Eve Seaton. She had lost her diffidence and had more confidence. She knew her job and did it efficiently, and in spite of her small stature had learnt to stand up for herself. She sometimes wondered if she had been like that before the bomb took away her past or whether it was something she had learnt since. War changed people. It hadn’t changed Florrie, though; she was the same good friend – more than a good friend, more like a sister, as she was fond of saying. And she looked forward more and more to spending time with Alec.
He was fun; he had a quirky way of making everything less daunting and he smiled a lot. He had taught her to stifle her nervousness of horses and learn to ride and they would go trekking across the countryside for hours, enjoying the clean air and each other’s company. They went to the pictures in Andover occasionally, sometimes to a dance, and they wrote to each other frequently. It amused Florrie no end and she teased Julie about it. ‘I was wrong,’ she said more than once. ‘He’s not your brother.’
‘Of course he isn’t.’
‘Do you like him? Really like him, I mean?’
‘You know I do, he’s a good friend, but if you think there’s more to it than that, you are way off the mark.’
Florrie’s answer to that was to laugh and tap her nose.
Julie did like Alec, she liked him a lot. He was sometimes funny, sometimes serious, but always caring and he didn’t press her about her past, possibly because he had heard her story of being an only survivor and didn’t want to make her sad. He did not know about her loss of memory and the fact that at some time in the past she had borne a child; no one knew that, not even Florrie. It was a huge barrier which could not be overcome, and the longer she kept her secret the harder it was to tell. Sometimes she didn’t think of it for days on end until something jogged her into a faint memory, like the mention of Monday. If the raid that buried her under tons of rubble had been a Monday, she might have understood it, but it had been a Saturday. She could hear and say the word ‘Saturday’ with no qualms at all.
She didn’t like deceiving anyone but at the same time she was sure her past must hold something of which she was ashamed. Having a child out of wedlock might be the reason, but supposing it was something else, something so dreadful she had to bury it deep inside her where no one could get at it, not even herself. Why did she feel so guilty, especially when anyone was being kind to her, feeling she didn’t deserve it? Could she have done away with her child? The mere thought of that gave her nightmares.
They arrived at Hillside Farm on the late afternoon of 9th November. The farmhouse was warm and cosy after the long cold journey and all they wanted to do was curl up by the fire. Alec had other ideas. ‘What are you two planning to do this week?’ he asked, when he came in after seeing to the animals.
‘Nothing much,’ Florrie said. ‘It’s not the weather for outdoors, is it?’
‘It’s all right if you’re well wrapped up and keep moving.’
‘You’re up to something.’
‘Well, sort of. You can join in if you want to. We’re going to have a Guy Fawkes bonfire for the kids in the village. You can come and help with that if you like.’
‘Surely we’re not allowed to light bonfires,’ Julie said. ‘What with the blackout and everything.’
‘It’ll be all right if we do it on Saturday afternoon and make sure it’s out before dark. It will cheer all the children up, not just our two. And we do have something to celebrate, after all, what with the victory at El Alamein. If they’re going to let us ring the church bells to mark it, surely we can have a bonfire?’
‘Where?’
‘On the field behind the pub. What d’you say?’
‘Might as well,’ Florrie said. ‘If Eve wants to.’
‘If you’re sure it’ll be all right,’ she said.
‘Course it will,’ Alec said, grinning.
The pub was the obvious place to set the ball rolling for any social event in the village, and Alec, Florrie and Julie strolled down to the Three Bells after dinner to find others there already discussing the idea. Saturday wouldn’t be the fifth, which was Thursday, but it couldn’t be done on a working day, especially as the fire would have to be extinguished by dark. Suggestions and offers of help came from all round. Potatoes baked in the embers were no problem, though other food might need a little ingenuity. Joe Salhouse said he’d do what he could to provide at least one pint of beer for the men and lemonade for the children, which had to be paid for, of course. He couldn’t afford to give it away, not when he didn’t know when he’d get his next delivery from the brewery.
‘We can get the children collecting the wood,’ Alec said. ‘Pity we can’t have fireworks.’
‘We haven’t had any of those since before the war,’ Mrs Green, who kept the village shop and post office, told them.
‘Don’t suppose you have,’ he said. ‘Factories won’t have been making kids’ fireworks, more likely high explosives, bombs a
nd shells and things like that.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘They go off bang too.’ But it had given him an idea. ‘I think I can get some.’
His sister turned to him. ‘You’re joking.’
‘No, I’m not.’ He tapped his nose. ‘Wait and see.’
Joe called time, they drained the last from their glasses and set off home, arms linked.
‘Do you really think you can get some fireworks?’ Florrie asked, as they walked.
‘No, but I can find something to make a bang. It’s easy enough, a few detonators, a little gunpowder and a longish fuse.’
‘You mean you’re going to make them?’
‘Yes, why not? If everyone stands well back and the fuse is long enough, they’ll be safe enough.’
‘You’re mad.’ She leant across him to address Julie. ‘You know he’s mad, don’t you, Eve? Better not have anything to do with him.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ she said, laughing.
When they were not in school, the children dragged branches from the woods and down the lanes. On the Saturday morning, dressed in green cord trousers tucked into wellington boots, and a thick hand-knitted jumper, Alec helped to construct the pile so that it would stay in one piece as it burnt, aided by Florrie and Julie, also in slacks and warm jumpers, and a whole crowd of excited children, including Liz and Alice, who were plump and rosy-cheeked and pining less and less for the home they had left behind. When the heap was twice the height of a man, they made a guy to go on it. It was hardly surprising that it had a black moustache, black hair and a swastika on an armband. They were going to burn Hitler and enjoy doing it. An added bonus was that it brought the village children and the evacuees together in a joint project.
‘Can’t do anything more now,’ Alec said. ‘We’ll go home for something to eat and come straight back.’
The bonfire was a huge success and blazed merrily in the damp November afternoon. Everyone in the village was there; it was as if they had unanimously decided to forget the war for a few hours and enjoy themselves. Potatoes were pushed into the embers and everyone brought something to cook – a couple of sausages, a bit of bacon, bread to toast – for which they had to improvise very long toasting forks out of sticks. The children ran round and round, taunting the effigy of Hitler, and had to be stopped from singing a bawdy song about the dictator’s lack of testicles. ‘Where do they learn such things?’ Maggie asked Walter, trying not to laugh. When the guy had been consumed by the fire, Alec turned to Joe. ‘Come and give us a hand with the fireworks, will you?’
‘You mean you actually got some?’
‘Well, no, they’re home-made. I got hold of some detonators and fuses and emptied the powder out of a few cartridge cases and put it in toilet roll tubes—’
‘God, that’s lethal!’
‘Not really, not if the kids are kept well back. They’ll make a nice bang for ’em. Can’t make pretty coloured fountains and things like that, but they’ll have to be satisfied.’
‘Where are you going to set them off?’
‘On the other side of the field.’
Alec went and told his father, who helped them set everything up so that one bang led to the next and they were angled away from the crowd round the bonfire. ‘Don’t say anything to the ladies about how it’s being done,’ Walter told Alec. ‘Just make sure they all keep well back. We can’t have anyone getting hurt. And you’d better have a few buckets of sand handy. We don’t want to start any other fires. Thank God the grass is still wet.’
The men who were in on the secret were like schoolboys themselves, gleefully rushing round and arranging everything. It was left to the ladies to organise the children behind a screen of the hotel’s picnic tables turned on their sides. A sizzling line of fire was the first sign that something was happening and then there was a terrific bang which made many of them scream. It was followed by more bangs, one after the other. The bigger children were bright-eyed and jumping up and down in excitement, but the noise made one or two of the smaller children cling to their mothers in fear, and a couple of recently arrived evacuees, thinking they were being bombed again, screamed. ‘It’s all right,’ their foster-mother said, gathering them into her arms to comfort them. ‘They’re not bombs. No one’s going to hurt you. You’re quite safe.’
Julie stood beside Florrie and Maggie, apparently calm, but she was listening to a voice inside her head, a male voice saying, ‘All right, miss, we can see you. We’ll soon have you out of there. Don’t move or you’ll have everything down on top of you.’ Standing with her friends as the last of the bangs died away and the end of the field was obscured by smoke, she remembered screaming – was it her or someone else? – choking on dust, unable to breathe, and how sweet the cup of water tasted when it was handed to her through a tiny aperture. That was a true memory, not one of her fantasies, but that had been after the bomb. What had gone before? And why, as they were digging her out, had she not shown more concern for family and friends? She remembered being in pain. Had she passed out? She looked about her at the crowd of villagers, the excited children, Florrie laughing beside her, and Alec, looking pleased with himself, and the recollection faded like a bad nightmare with the coming of dawn. She didn’t even try to drag it back; it was too frightening.
Alec, who had only been thinking of amusing the children with a few innocuous fireworks, had been dismayed by the size of the explosions. He was even more embarrassed when a platoon of local Home Guard, who had been on a training exercise nearby, turned up with rifles at the ready to repel invaders. It took all Walter’s diplomacy to persuade the platoon commander that the war hadn’t come to Harston and they had only been amusing the children with a few Guy Fawkes fireworks.
‘Fireworks?’ the lieutenant queried. ‘I’m sure there’s a law about not letting off fireworks in wartime.’
‘If there is, I haven’t heard of it,’ Alec said.
‘Where d’you get them anyway?’
‘They were stock left over from before the war,’ Joe lied. ‘We thought we’d give the kids a treat.’
‘I hope he doesn’t decide to go and inspect the evidence,’ Alec whispered to his father. Aloud he said, ‘They’re all gone now, Lieutenant, and I think we’d better get that fire doused before blackout, don’t you?’
The lieutenant, his attention diverted from explosives, turned to look at the glowing embers and agreed. ‘Get on with it, then,’ he said, and marched his men away.
Alec, turning to do so, noticed Julie’s pallor. ‘Eve, what’s the matter? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.’
‘That’s what it felt like. I’ve heard explosions before and guns going off and not been bothered by them, but this time, for some reason, it sent me back and I suddenly remembered being buried in rubble and choking on dust while the ARP dug me out. It might have been the children screaming that triggered it.’
He came and put his arms about her shoulders and pulled her to him. ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry, I wouldn’t have had you upset for worlds. I didn’t think it would be as noisy as that.’
‘It’s all right. I’m over it now.’ She smiled to prove it.
‘Go home with Mum and Florrie and have a good stiff drink. I’ll help clear up here.’
Florrie took her arm. ‘Come on, Eve, try not to dwell on it. You’ve got us now.’
‘Yes, I know. I’m very lucky.’ She felt a terrible fraud, keeping her secret from them, and that made her quiet for the rest of the evening. Tactfully, no one commented on it, for which she was grateful, and the next morning she and Florrie came down to breakfast ready to go back to Coningsby. Doing her job, surrounded by others doing theirs, her past did not matter. She could tuck it away out of mind.
‘I’ll be joining you in uniform soon,’ Alec said, as they went out to the car. There was no such thing as petrol for private mileage now, but as a farmer Walter was allowed a certain amount, and as usual Alec was going to drive them to the station. ‘I’m joining up.’
Flo
rrie stared at him. ‘You can’t mean it.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘What on earth for? You’re in a reserved occupation and Dad needs you.’
‘No, he doesn’t. He’s got a couple of Land Army girls to help him and I can’t let you girls strut around in uniform while all I’m doing is milking cows.’
‘I’m sure you do more than that,’ Julie put in.
‘Not much. Anyway, I’ve been feeling guilty for a long time about not doing my bit.’
‘What do Mum and Dad say about it?’
He shrugged. ‘Mum wasn’t too happy, but Dad understood.’
‘When are you going?’
‘Dunno. I’m waiting to hear.’
‘I told you he was mad, didn’t I?’ Florrie said, addressing Julie.
Four days later, on 11th November, the day of the Armistice of the Great War, the church bells rang out for the first time since 1939 and Churchill was reported saying: ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’
Julie wondered if that could be true of her too. Was it the end of her beginning to accept that her memory would never come back, except in tiny incoherent fits and starts?
Chapter Seven
‘Do you think we’ll stay together this time?’ Julie asked a few weeks after they returned. Christmas had come and gone and 1943 had begun on a note of optimism, though men were still dying in their thousands, planes still took off and were shot down, ships were still being sunk, and those at home still struggled with air raids – fewer now – and rationing, which was becoming more and more restrictive. Those in the forces were lucky in that respect: they were well fed and clothed, albeit in uniform.
