The Girl on the Beach

by Mary Nichols

  ‘I’m on tenterhooks. I hope Dotty behaves herself.’

  So did Harry. His niece was well named Dotty. She was somewhat spoilt, and as her father was so rarely to be seen, was hardly ever chastised. He really hadn’t wanted Dorothy to be a bridesmaid because she reminded him of George and, today of all days, he did not want that reminder, but when Millie had suggested it, Pam had agreed at once. This, he realised, was to be the big occasion his first marriage had not been, even though it was wartime and it had taken a great deal of organising to get everyone together on the day. Pam’s mother and his own ought to be in charge of the conduct of the war, he thought ruefully – they’d have it won in no time.

  He looked back towards the church door as the organist, who had been quietly playing ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’, struck up the wedding march. He rose and moved out into the aisle, not once taking his eye off the bridal procession as it made its way towards him. Pam looked stunning in a flowing white dress and veil, lent to her by a friend who had married just before the war. She carried a bouquet of red roses. Her cheeks were blooming and her eyes shining and at that moment he knew he wanted this marriage more than anything. Behind her were two of her friends in short burgundy dresses that matched the bride’s flowers, ushering Dorothy ahead of them, in a velvet dress the same colour, trimmed with white lace. She had a little basket of tiny white rosebuds in her hand and looked very solemn.

  Pam reached him, smiled happily and took his arm. He smiled back and together they turned towards the rector. A little shiver ran down his spine as he heard him say: ‘If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not be joined in matrimony, ye are to declare it.’ No one had, of course, and the service continued without interruption.

  It was a moving service, but a happy one; both spoke their vows clearly and then Harry slipped the ring on Pam’s finger and it was done. They signed the register and went back down the aisle, her hand tucked into his arm, smiling at everyone. Rose petals were used for confetti and both mothers fetched out box cameras and took pictures outside the church and again when they arrived back at the bakery, where everyone enjoyed a feast that had taken all the ingenuity of Jane Goodman, Hilda Walker and the landlord of The Papermakers to bring about, not to mention generous contributions from Harry’s American friends. The celebrations went on all afternoon, but Harry and Pam did not stay to the end. Once the speeches were over, Pam changed into a going-away costume and they climbed into the little sports car and drove away with tin cans rattling behind them.

  Harry stopped the car as soon as they were clear of the village and got out to untie the cans. He flung them in the back, got in the car and turned towards her. ‘I haven’t kissed you yet, Mrs Walker.’ And he proceeded to do just that.

  ‘Mrs Walker,’ she said and giggled. ‘It sounds funny.’

  ‘You had better get used to it. You’ve got it for life.’

  ‘I know. Oh, Harry, I couldn’t be happier, not if you were to offer me the Crown Jewels.’

  ‘I’m not likely to do that. Not that I wouldn’t, of course, if I had them to offer. You’ll just have to make do with a plain gold band and five days on the Broads. We can’t go far; the petrol won’t last out.’ He had decided not to go to the coast; for one thing the beaches were mined and they wouldn’t be able to go on the sand, and for another it would remind him too much of Julie.

  ‘That’ll do me. We’ll laze about, take out a rowing boat, go for long walks and we won’t talk about the war at all.’

  ‘That suits me.’

  They did their best to do just that and, at the end of it, returned to Swanton Morley where he had rented a small house close to the end of the runway. It was called Honeysuckle Cottage because there was a vigorous specimen of that plant climbing all over a tiny wooden porch at the front door. Harry was convinced it was the clinging honeysuckle that prevented the porch from disintegrating. Everything about the place was small. It was no more than four rooms, a kitchen and sitting room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, each with a tiny window which was easy to blackout. There was no running water, no gas or electricity, no main drains or sewerage, nothing but four walls and a roof. There was a well which provided water, oil lamps and candles for light when it became too dark to see, and the lavatory was a bucket under a bench in a tiny hut at the bottom of the garden, which had to be emptied but which made good manure for the garden. It was decidedly primitive, but it was home, and they furnished it with help from Pam’s parents and a special chit for furniture given by the Government to people who had been bombed out or were newly married.

  Harry could sleep at home every night when he was not on standby. Pam was blissfully happy with her airman husband and he with her. They began to make plans for what they would do when the war was won – a proper home, a good job and a family were high on the list.

  * * *

  Julie settled back at Ringway, watching the men come and go for parachute training, being cheerful, friendly and efficient without getting close to any of them. She wrote frequently to Florrie, who was now driving bigwigs all over the place, and to Alec, though her letters to him were a little constrained. She had half suspected he was becoming fond of her and that last leave had filled her with alarm. She was in no position to commit herself to anyone, but she could not bear to cut him off altogether. He was a kind of lifeline to normality and she longed for normality. Time and time again she thought about telling him about her loss of memory, that she had no idea of her real name or if she had a family who might be thinking her dead, worst of all that she had been a mother. So much had happened since, it seemed unreal, a distant dream and sometimes she had to pinch herself to prove she was alive and awake. What would he make of such a confession?

  At other times she was tempted to tell him she reciprocated his feelings and say nothing of her past, but how could she do that to him? He was too obviously sincere, much too nice a person to deceive. In a way she was glad they were apart; if they were together, within talking and touching distance, she would not be able to hold out. She still had odd snatches of memory, at least that’s what she thought these fleeting visions were. Unless she was psychic. One such twinge came in late May when she was at the cinema watching a newsreel about the raid on the German dams. The destruction had been caused by bouncing bombs, so it was explained, which were dropped at low level and skimmed along the surface bouncing off the waves. ‘Like skimming pebbles into the sea,’ the commentator said. This was followed by a demonstration of someone doing it and Julie sat bolt upright. She had done that, some time in the past she had done that and she had not been alone. She groped and groped at her memory, but nothing more came to her. Too unsettled to sit still, she left the cinema and caught a bus back to Ringway, where there were friends and colleagues to take her mind off it.

  ‘I don’t know where she is,’ Ted Austen told the couple who faced him. The woman might once have been a big woman, but she appeared frail, with hollow cheeks and a haunted look in her eyes. The man looked as though he could handle himself, and though he must have been in his late forties, Ted did not want to tangle with him. He could beat him all right in a scrap but it would draw attention to himself and that he most definitely did not want.

  He led a semi-nomadic life, trying to avoid the police, not only because of his black market activities, but because he knew he should have registered for call-up and he hadn’t done so. He changed his lodgings often and at first kept his illicit stores in his various wardrobes, but he didn’t trust his landladies not to snoop and latterly there had been too much to hide successfully. He had taken to concealing it in bombed-out factories and warehouses, moving it regularly, until the council had started demolishing the buildings as unsafe and flattening the ground. So he had hired two adjoining lock-up garages. He kept his stores in one, where his favourite customers knew they could contact him on certain days. Usually he met them in different pubs, going round in a battered van using black market petrol. The van wa
s dressed up to look like an ambulance, which had been a stroke of genius on his part. He had only to wear a white coat and set the bell ringing and he whizzed through roadblocks and cordons and no one questioned him. He kept it in the second of the two garages.

  Someone had ratted and sent these two to him and he’d have his guts for garters if he ever found out who it was. He was thankful the garage doors were shut and there was nothing for them to see. ‘I haven’t seen her for goodness knows how long – it must be nearly three years, when we both worked at Chalfont’s.’

  ‘But you knew her quite well?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Not well,’ he said guardedly. ‘Sometimes we sat together in the canteen, sometimes when the siren went we’d go to the shelter together. I took her to the pictures once or twice, that’s all.’

  ‘But it’s not all, is it?’ the man said. ‘You got her into some dodgy business with the black market.’

  ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the wrong man there. If she was into the black market it wasn’t anything to do with me.’

  ‘If not you, who then?’

  ‘How should I know? I didn’t ask her business and she didn’t ask mine.’

  ‘Did you know any of her friends?’

  ‘Only Julie Walker and she’s dead.’

  ‘We know that.’

  ‘Then you know as much as I do. If your daughter didn’t die on the same day as Julie, she might have left London for somewhere safer, or she might have died in any of the raids afterwards. I never saw her again.’

  Stuart handed him his calling card. ‘If you do get news of her, will you be good enough to contact me at this address? Even if it’s only something very tiny. There’ll be a reward.’

  ‘OK.’ Ted took the card and stuffed it into his pocket without bothering to look at it. They thanked him and left. He breathed a huge sigh of relief but their arrival worried him. Had they been to the police? Perhaps he ought to lie low for a bit, or go somewhere else, perhaps north of the river. He waited until they had gone, then set off in the ambulance to reconnoitre a new patch.

  ‘He’s lying, isn’t he?’ Angela said as a taxi carried them away.

  ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure he is.’ It had taken a long time to trace the man and that had only been done through Mr Walker who had found someone at the factory who remembered Rosie being friendly with him. Mr Walker had given them Austen’s last known address but he no longer lived there. His landlady had had a forwarding address for his mail, but she couldn’t remember it. ‘I wrote it down on a piece of paper but I don’t know what happened to it. It was a long time ago. If I find it I’ll send it to you.’ They had given her their address and gone back home to the endless waiting and uncertainty which was taking its toll on Angela’s health.

  They had decided the woman had forgotten all about them, when almost a year later she wrote saying she had found the address while redecorating after having some bomb damage repaired, so the next weekend off they went again, enduring hours on unreliable trains. Ted Austen hadn’t been at that address either, but they had been told he frequented a pub not far away.

  Stuart had taken Angela back to their hotel and left her there while he went to investigate. He was glad he had; it had been a sleazy kind of place, where he imagined all sorts of shady deals going on, and that reminded him of the store of cached goods in Rosie’s digs. He had hung around and pretended to want petrol. Someone heard him ask. ‘Ted Austen’s the man you want to see,’ he had told him.

  ‘Where can I find him?’

  He had been told the whereabouts of the garages, gave the man a fiver and returned to the hotel to tell Angela, who had insisted on accompanying him. ‘Do you think he does know where Rosie is?’ she asked him now.

  ‘That’s another matter. I’m not sure. We’ll have to keep an eye on him.’

  ‘Do you think we should report him to the police?’

  ‘What for? We’ve got no proof. And if he’s arrested, we’ll never know what happened, will we?’ He had long ago stopped talking about finding their daughter alive.

  She sighed. ‘I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever know that.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time to let go.’

  ‘I don’t want to, not yet. Let’s go and see Miss Paterson. You never know …’

  Donald Walker had given them Miss Paterson’s address at his son’s suggestion, but they didn’t expect to learn any more from her than they had from Rosie’s landlady and that dreadful man they had just left.

  In that they were wrong. Miss Paterson had not met Rosemary, but she did know that she and Julie Walker were good friends. ‘Your daughter would go and visit Julie quite frequently,’ she told them. ‘I’m not sure, but I think she was looking after George the day Julie was killed. Julie wanted to see me about something important and Rosemary had offered to stay with the baby, so she could be quicker. Julie got back home to George and they died when the Anderson shelter had a direct hit, but as Rosemary was not also in the shelter she must have decided to risk going home. I didn’t know she had disappeared.’

  ‘She never arrived back at her lodgings.’

  ‘Oh, I am so sorry. She must have been caught out.’

  ‘Caught out?’ Angela queried, startled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I meant caught out in the open when a bomb dropped.’

  ‘Then why did no one find her body?’

  ‘It was all very confused that night. It was the first really big raid and things weren’t as organised as they might have been and have been since. I’m dreadfully sorry I can’t help you any further.’

  ‘There is one thing,’ Stuart said, after some hesitation. ‘Do you know anything about any black market dealings?’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘You do?’ Angela seized on the note of regret in Miss Paterson’s voice.

  ‘Well, Julie did say something.’

  ‘Then tell us, please. We must know.’

  They listened as she recounted what she knew. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t anything really dreadful,’ she said. ‘Rosemary had this friend who could get things and Julie was always anxious about George and wanting to have everything she thought he needed, so she accepted what was offered. It got a bit out of hand and Julie owed Rosemary money. I lent her a little so that she could pay her, but last time I saw her, she said she wouldn’t do it anymore.’

  ‘I knew that man was lying,’ Angela said.

  ‘What man?’

  Stuart told Grace Paterson about Ted Austen. ‘He denies all knowledge of Rosie,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe he’s telling the truth,’ Miss Paterson said. ‘If he knew where she was, he wouldn’t have broken into her lodgings to retrieve his goods, would he? Always assuming that’s what did happen.’

  They conceded she might be right, and though they had learnt a little more, they were no nearer finding their daughter, or, as looked most likely, her remains.

  ‘Angela,’ Stuart said carefully as the taxi took them back to Liverpool Street Station for the journey north. ‘I think we have to accept that Rosie died in that raid. If, as Miss Paterson says, she was caught outside …’ He dare not put his thoughts into words: that she had been blown into little pieces too small to identify.

  She was in tears. Her fierce conviction that her daughter was alive somewhere, perhaps injured or frightened, was fading. She could not make the evidence fit. In a way she was glad they had pursued the search, in a way she was sorry because then there had been hope; now there was none. ‘If only we could have had a body to bury,’ she said, mopping her face.

  He put his arm about her and drew her to him. ‘I know, love, I know. Perhaps we should have a service – not a burial but a remembrance, and a little plaque to put in the wall in the kirk. We could lay her to rest that way.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, but she still wasn’t sure.

  Chapter Eight

  Everyone was talking about the second front that summer – when it would happen and where – but
it was largely conjecture. Those in the know realised there was a great deal of work to be done before that happened: planning, raising the troops, gathering the equipment, arms and ammunition, and training, a great deal of training. Alec heard that volunteers were needed for a new parachute division and put himself forward. He liked the idea; it had a certain glamour attached to it and there was a shilling a day extra pay once you passed out. Not only that, he knew Eve was stationed at Ringway where the training was done. He had no intention of giving up on her.

  He found himself in the newly formed 13th Battalion and stationed at Larkhill on Salisbury Plain, with no idea what was in store for him. Being in the south it was a long way from Ringway, but they were not there long before they were sent to Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. He did not tell Eve what he was doing; he was determined to make her see that he would not accept defeat and the element of surprise might help.

  Hardwick Hall was one of the most historically important stately homes in the country and they weren’t allowed anywhere near the house. Their quarters were huts on the estate. The training here was meant to toughen them up and weed out any who were not up to the physical aspect of the job. Alec found himself on assault courses set up in the woods, where they clambered about like monkeys in the treetops and wallowed in mud, and undertook route marches in full kit, carrying arms and ammunition. These started at ten miles, which had to be done in two hours, then twenty miles in three hours, and ended up with fifty miles to be done in twenty-four hours. Alec, used to working all day on the farm, considered himself fit, but this was something else altogether. The disgrace of being sent back to their units as unfit was a spur to most, but Alec had the extra one of being determined to go to Ringway. He arrived there in July 1943.

  He had no time to make enquiries or go looking for Eve, the training was so intense. Apart from the continuing physical exertions – they were up at the crack of dawn for PT – he soon found himself in one of the hangars, where they learnt to fall, jumping out of an old fuselage onto matting, keeping knees and feet together and learning to roll, both forwards and backwards. They did it over and over again until it became second nature.