The Girl on the Beach

by Mary Nichols

  ‘So would I. Two little Harry Walkers as handsome as you and two little girls to match.’

  He laughed. ‘We’ll need a bigger house.’

  ‘So, we get a bigger house. The Government has promised homes for everyone after the war. It was on the news.’

  ‘Believe that if you like. They’ll have to be paid for and there’s a lot of other things need rebuilding as well.’

  ‘You’re just a natural-born pessimist.’ She kissed him fondly and scrambled to her feet. ‘I’m going to make some cocoa, d’you want some?’

  ‘Yes, please, and then I’m for bed.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘And I don’t have to get up in the morning. Fourteen days, fourteen glorious days. If it weren’t for the baby we could go away somewhere.’

  ‘Do you want to go away?’

  ‘Not without you, I don’t. No, I’ll be content just to laze around here and watch you getting bigger and bigger.’

  ‘I’m not going to get much bigger. Very soon, I’ll be a lot smaller, perhaps while you’re on leave. That would be perfect.’

  She had her wish. Colin Harold Walker was born at four o’clock on the morning of March 1st 1944 and his sister, Louise Jane, ten minutes later. Twins had not been expected and caused a little consternation at first, but when everyone had recovered from the surprise they were delighted. ‘We’ve got half of our four at one go,’ Pam said, looking fondly at her tiny babies, lying head to toe in the cot they had prepared for one. Colin was the bigger of the two by half a pound, but they both had dark-brown hair and dark eyes and equally loud voices.

  Harry, sitting on the edge of her bed, holding her hand, kept looking from her to his children and almost burst with pride and happiness. He knew he would have to go back to the war in a couple of days and there were some difficult times ahead, but he did not doubt that victory was within grasp and then there would be peace. Peace. How good it sounded.

  Chapter Nine

  Julie had been right when she told Alec she expected to be posted. She was given a seventy-two-hour pass at Easter, when she went to Hillside Farm and spent the time amusing Liz and Alice, riding and walking. And on Easter Sunday she went to church with Walter and Maggie, where apart from celebrating the Resurrection, they prayed for the success of the coming second front. At the end of her leave, now promoted to sergeant, she reported for duty at RAF Manston. She couldn’t have been more pleased because Florrie was still stationed there, driving RAF bigwigs all over the place.

  At the gate she was told to report to Section Officer Murray, officer in charge of the WAAFs, before she did anything else. Looking for Florrie would have to wait.

  ‘Welcome to Manston, Sergeant Seaton,’ the OC said, as Julie stood at ease in front of her desk. ‘You have been in the service long enough to know how things are done, so there’s no need for me to repeat it.’ She paused and looked closely into Julie’s face. ‘Nor do you need telling that we are going to be very busy in the next few weeks and some of the things you will be dealing with will seem very strange indeed. You are not to speak of them to anyone, do you understand?’

  ‘Perfectly, ma’am.’

  ‘Good. Report for duty at 0800 tomorrow and good luck to you.’

  Julie saluted and turned about. She had the rest of the evening to find her way about and be reunited with Florrie, always supposing her friend was on the station and not away driving somewhere. She went outside, picked up her kitbag and haversack from where she had left them and asked to be directed to her billet. She was soon unpacking her kit beside her bed.

  ‘Where is she? Where is my soon-to-be sister-in-law? Let me get at her.’

  Julie, in the act of hanging a skirt in her locker, spun round as Florrie came through the door. ‘Florrie.’

  They hugged each other. ‘It’s good to see you,’ they said together and laughed.

  ‘I was going to see if I could find you as soon as I’d unpacked,’ Julie said.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t wait for you to find me. Let me take a look at you.’ Florrie stood back and surveyed Julie with her head on one side. ‘You look good, really good; being in love must suit you.’

  Julie laughed. ‘It does. I could say the same for you.’

  Florrie sat on the end of Julie’s bed to watch her finish her unpacking. ‘We’re lucky, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes, me in particular.’

  ‘Why you in particular?’

  ‘You know why. I thought my past, or lack of it, would put everyone off me, but it hasn’t, has it?’

  ‘No, of course not. It doesn’t change who you are, the person you are now, never mind what happened in the past. Anyway, you really were bombed out, so who’s to know that the rest of your story isn’t true? It easily could be.’

  ‘That’s what Alec said. He said the name I go by is unimportant.’

  ‘There you are, then.’

  The last of her kit was stowed away. ‘Are you on duty?’

  ‘Not ’til the morning. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Let’s take a stroll and I’ll show you round. We can talk as we go.’

  Manston, being so close to the coast and on the flight path of bombers returning from raids, had become an emergency landing field and was equipped with one of the longest and widest runways in the country. ‘When it’s foggy, they light flares all down both sides,’ Florrie told her. ‘It dispels the fog and guides the aircraft in.’

  ‘Doesn’t that attract German bombers too?’

  ‘It did, but there aren’t many raids now. One of ours came down only last week. It had been badly shot up and burst into flames and then it exploded.’ She shuddered. ‘The crew were all killed. I saw them being taken away in ambulances. I wish I hadn’t, it made me think of Matt …’

  ‘Don’t dwell on it,’ Julie said quickly, putting her hand on her friend’s arm.

  ‘No, let’s go and look at the sea. We can’t go on the beach, but sometimes I like to stand and look at the waves. There’s something timeless about the ocean, don’t you think? It’s so vast it puts our little lives into perspective and yet it’s part of us, especially in these islands. I like to remember times before the war when Alec and I were children and we used to go on seaside holidays.’ She laughed. ‘I had a knitted costume that covered me from head to foot and drooped when it was wet. Alec had one of those striped costumes with legs in them and straps to hold the top up. He was always a bit of a daredevil and would frighten my mother by swimming out too far.’

  ‘He told me he likes to stretch himself to see what he’s capable of,’ Julie said. ‘Perhaps that’s why he joined the paras.’

  ‘Possibly.’ Florrie laughed. ‘But I think it also had something to do with the fact that you were at Ringway.’

  From where they stood, the coastline went round in a wide curve. Every inlet seemed to be filled with landing craft. ‘They’re not real,’ Florrie said. ‘They’re just empty drums and canvas. I reckon they’re there to fool the Germans.’

  Julie wasn’t really taking in what Florrie was saying because she was looking at the beach. A faint memory stirred, as it had once before, of a crowded beach and a boy – not a toddler, too old for him to be her own child – and he wore a striped costume just as Florrie described Alec’s. There was music too and a Punch and Judy show. When and where had that happened? She strained at it, trying to make it stay and enlarge, but instead it faded, as so many memories had faded in the past, and left her wondering if they were real memories or only products of her imagination.

  ‘It can’t be long now.’ Florrie broke in on her thoughts and the vision faded and all she could see was the deserted beach dotted with seaweed and the odd tussock of marram grass.

  ‘What can’t?’

  ‘The invasion. What else would I be talking about?’

  ‘Sorry. I wasn’t really paying attention. I was remembering a beach …’

  Florrie whipped round to face her. ‘Your memory’s come back?’

  ‘No, it’s gone again. Sometimes I g
et pictures, but they don’t connect up and then they go again.’

  ‘Oh, you poor dear. It must be dreadfully frustrating.’

  ‘Yes, it is. I feel as though I’m living a lie.’

  ‘Well, you’re not. No one could be more honest and straightforward than you.’

  Honest and straightforward? Had that always been true? What was her loss of memory hiding? ‘Let’s go back,’ she said, inexplicably ill at ease.‘I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.’

  They went to the canteen for something to eat and drink. Florrie introduced Julie to one or two of the airmen, but they did not join them, preferring to continue chatting, reminiscing about previous postings, talking about their plans.

  ‘When this war is over, Matt and I are going to look for a house in the country,’ Florrie said. ‘All mod cons and three bedrooms for the children. You and Alec could live nearby and we could see lots of each other. Do you realise our children will be cousins?’

  ‘Of course I do, silly.’

  A home of one’s own; how many people longed for that, Julie asked herself? People who had been bombed out, people who had been evacuated, people newly married, all praying that the invasion of France would signal the beginning of the end that Churchill had spoken about. She could not remember a time when there had been no war, but she could imagine it. Peace. The sky would be full of birds and butterflies and maybe the odd leisure aircraft, not the roar of warplanes. There would be no air-raid sirens, no bombs exploding, no great guns going off, and the children – all children – would be able to play in safety. It was a long time since she had asked herself what had become of the child she had given birth to, but now she found herself wondering what had happened to it all over again.

  Maybe it was triggered by Florrie talking about children, or the fact that she was going to marry Alec and they had talked of having a family; maybe it was the brief stirring of something that might have been a memory earlier in the day. Whatever it was it made her feel uneasy. ‘I’m for bed,’ she said, standing up. ‘It’s been a long day.’

  The strange things Flight Officer Murray had talked about turned out to be inflatable rubber tanks, lorries, guns and gliders, which arrived deflated on the backs of lorries and were taken out to sites dotted round the countryside and inflated. Even from a short distance it was difficult to tell them from the real thing; from the air it would have been nigh on impossible. An attempt was made to camouflage them – not too well, but well enough for enemy aircraft to believe there was something to hide. Tails of gliders stuck out from under trees and the undergrowth round them trodden down and wheel marks of heavy vehicles made in the grass to make it look more realistic. The contraptions were left in situ for a few days and then moved somewhere else, giving the effect of one vast army gathering, ready to invade the Pas de Calais. What it did for those on the ground was to tell them that Calais was not going to be the real invasion site, though when and where it would be Julie had no more idea than anyone else, but she knew, without being told, that Alec would be involved in it; all that training was not for nothing.

  She longed to be able to talk to him, to compare notes, to tell him he went with her prayers for his safe return and she could not wait for them to be together again and the war over. She was not such a fool as to think everything was going to be plain sailing. There would be difficult times ahead, but she would not let herself dwell on the possibility of tragedy.

  Security was tight, and towards the end of May everyone, except those who had official business outside like Florrie, who had been detailed to drive truckloads of airmen from stations in the north and east to the West Country, was confined to barracks until further notice. No telephone calls were allowed, except in the line of duty, and all letters were more heavily censored than usual. Sitting outside her billet in the warm May sunshine, Julie wrote to Alec, a loving letter of hope and optimism, but a little melancholy too. ‘I miss you, darling. I miss not being able to talk to you or write to you properly. I wonder where you are and if you are as nervous as I am. Pray God, all this waiting will soon be over and we can be together again. Be sure you are in my thoughts all the time, especially when I hear aircraft overhead. Take care of yourself because I want you safely back, to feel your arms once more about me …’

  She couldn’t say half of what she wanted to, but he would know what she was thinking and feeling.

  Alec was at Brize Norton where his training had continued, day in, day out, without let-up. They had practised jumping with kitbags, which they carried on their legs and released on the end of a line once they were in the air with the parachute opened. At first they had jumped from a single aircraft, and then been put through their paces in a mass drop at battalion strength. It was nerve-racking and at the same time extraordinarily impressive the way the sky appeared to be full of parachutes and aircraft dropping more and more, until the sky seemed full of them. How they didn’t get tangled up with each other was a minor miracle. There were one or two incidents but little was made of them for fear of deflating morale.

  From battalion strength they graduated to brigade strength and were flown in Dakotas with American crews. The Dakotas carried a stick of twenty and the exit was through a port door and not the floor, as in the Whitley. After flying out over the Channel to give them an idea of what it would be like, they turned for home. Below them the sea was packed with shipping, line upon line of it of all shapes and sizes, filling all the ports and every inlet. It was an awesome sight. They couldn’t admire it for long because they were approaching the dropping zone and the usual drill began: hook up, red light, shuffle to the door, green light, ‘Go!’

  The next day they began ground exercises in which they were to seize a bridge against Home Guard opposition. They soon discovered that if they surrendered they were taken to the Home Guard headquarters and entertained with tea and biscuits and took no further part in the exercise, a ploy which did not go down at all well with those in command and they had to do it again, but this time there were dire penalties for surrendering. Knowing the real thing could only be days away, they decided to be more cooperative. All they were waiting for was the time and place, and that was as closely guarded as ever.

  Alec dearly wanted to see Eve, to share his experiences with her, tell her how much he loved her and that he had every intention of coming safely back to begin their new life together and she was to start planning their wedding. But he couldn’t do any of that. The south of England was sealed off from all communication with the outside world: the local population and all evacuees had been sent away, telephone lines to call boxes cut off, postboxes sealed and the perimeter patrolled to make sure no one chanced his luck on creeping out.

  Tension was building alongside the boredom of waiting, even though they were kept busy with last-minute training and checks, topped off with a night drop from Sterling aircraft. Towards the end of May they were told there would be a full rehearsal and half the battalion were sent to a tented transit camp at Broadwell while the other half stayed at Brize Norton. No one was fooled by this tale of a rehearsal; they knew it was going to be the real thing and spirits were high.

  They were allowed to write one letter, which they were warned would be heavily censored for any clue about what they had been doing, where they thought they were going and any guesses about the timing. ‘“Love and kisses and hope to see you before long” is about it,’ they were told. Torn between writing to his mother and writing to Eve, Alec decided to send it to his mother but expect it to be shared with everyone in the family, including Eve. If he wrote to Eve it would be one she would not want to share and he could not leave his parents out. Consequently it was a difficult letter to write. ‘I’m fighting fit, so don’t worry about me,’ he wrote. ‘I don’t suppose there’ll be any leave for a little while but when I do come home, we’ll have a party. Tell Eve it’s to be a proper engagement party and I can’t wait to hold her in my arms again. So Mum, get making the wine, and Pa, fatten up the porker. Gi
ve my love to Florrie and Matt and keep some for yourselves. And to Eve, my continuing and everlasting devotion. See you again soon, Alec.’

  It seemed a stilted and inadequate description of how he felt for her, but he was mindful that it would be read by all the family and acutely aware of the censor’s eyes scanning it. He would tell her properly to her face when he saw her again, show her too in as many different ways as he could think of. The letters were collected by their platoon officer and taken to be vetted before being sent on, and the waiting continued.

  The last Monday in May was Whitsun Bank Holiday and the weather was glorious, but for those waiting for the call, confined to their various transit camps, not one they could enjoy. The officers had been briefed and had briefed their men; now they knew where they were going and what was expected of them. Alec would be one of those parachuting into Normandy on the night of 4th June, ahead of the seaborne invasion of British, American and Canadian troops. C Company’s task was to clear the landing ground of the forest of upright poles put there to deter gliders, and when that was done to join the assault on Ranville, one of the villages on the Cotentin Peninsula. The weather held right up to 3rd June, then, just when they needed it to be good, it broke with squally rain and wind, which meant a postponement and had everyone feeling despondent.

  Alec, already tense, felt sick and disinclined to eat the meal prepared for them. They should have been in the air by now and here they were still on the ground and kicking their heels in frustration. The weather showed no sign of abating but they were still on full alert. He spent the time reading Eve’s last letter over again and looking at the snapshot he had brought back with him after that last leave together. She was standing under a sprig of mistletoe in the hall of the farmhouse and laughing, her head thrown back and that lovely dress she had been wearing for the New Year dance straining across her bosom. He ran his fingers over it, wishing he could be with her, but on the other hand not wishing to be anywhere but where he was at that moment.