The Girl on the Beach

by Mary Nichols

  ‘Ted Austen, as I live and breathe, can it be you?’

  Ted swivelled round to face his sister whom he had not set eyes on since, as a twelve-year-old, he had run away from home. ‘Josie, I’d never have recognised you.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. How old was I when you left? Eight or nine. Why didn’t you come home? Mum went out of her mind worrying about you. Didn’t you give her a thought?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I thought of her a lot, but I swore never to go back while the old man was alive and I meant it. How is she?’

  ‘She’s dead, died three months ago with your name on her lips. She kept saying if she could see you one more time, she’d die happy, but no one knew where you were.’

  ‘Dead?’ he repeated, shocked. ‘You mean dead and buried?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.’

  ‘The bugger killed her. I knew he would.’

  ‘Then you should have stayed around to prevent it.’ She gave an empty laugh. ‘As it happens, he died first. Got run over by a bus in the blackout when he was drunk. I wanted to let you know, but I couldn’t find you.’

  ‘No, I move about a lot.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘This and that,’ he said vaguely. That last batch of stolen ration books had sold like hot cakes and the nylons he bought from a certain Yank, whose ideas about trade were the same as his own, had brought in a tidy profit. He lived like a lord, dressed to kill and could afford to treat his lady friends generously, as long as they were generous to him. Otherwise he soon dumped them. He no longer worked the East End, the pickings in the west were much more lucrative; the toffee-nosed women had money to burn and he could get pretty well anything for money. His move to the north of the river had been a wise and fortuitous one.

  He had been strolling past the Walkers’ home in Islington when he remembered they had moved with the factory to Letchworth and the house was shut up. It had been the work of a moment to break in and make himself comfortable. A nosy neighbour wanted to know what he was doing there and he had explained that he was looking after the house for the owners. ‘Too many looters about to leave the place unguarded,’ he had said. It was an argument he had used again when writing to Mr Walker to suggest he could keep an eye on the house for him and make sure no one got in. Mr Walker had no reason to distrust him and had readily agreed to pay him a small fee. It tickled Ted’s fancy to think he was being paid to squat in his one-time boss’s home. It was from here he ran his business. He hadn’t given a thought to the fact that it was only a few streets away from his childhood home.

  ‘You seem to be doing all right on it.’

  ‘I do OK.’

  ‘You could have helped Mum if you were doing so well. I helped when I could, but I never earned very much and I married young. My old man’s in the army, gone to France I shouldn’t wonder. Good riddance to him.’

  ‘Did Mum get a good send-off?’

  ‘What do you think? I did what I could and the neighbours chipped in so she didn’t have to rely on the parish. That would have broken her heart. She’s buried in Highgate in the far corner. There’s no headstone, just a wooden cross. It wouldn’t hurt you to pay your respects.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll do that. And I’ll order a stone.’

  ‘Not much good to her now she’s gone, is it?’ she said. ‘But I suppose it will look better. And then how about visiting us and making the acquaintance of your nephews and nieces?’

  ‘Nephews and nieces?’ he queried. ‘How many of them are there?’

  ‘Two of each. My name’s Porson now. You know where to find us, I’ve taken over the tenancy of the old house.’

  She turned and walked away, leaving him staring after her. She was only twenty-four but she looked a lot older. Her hair was bedraggled and her shoes down at heel, and he seemed to remember his mother wearing that black straw hat with the flopping silk rose on it. He watched her out of sight and then went to the cemetery where he found the grave after a long search. Hidden away in the corner, its simple cross was carved with his mother’s name and the date, nothing more. For the first time in his life he felt remorse, but it did not last. He became angry – angry with his father for his brutality, angry with his mother for not sticking up for herself, angry with Josie for not trying harder to find him, angry with the world.

  He was still angry when he spotted Harry Walker kneeling beside his wife’s grave. The bugger looked so clean and smart in his uniform, his dark auburn hair sleek and shiny, he could have kicked him. He held fire, though, because he remembered the man was handy with his fists. It wouldn’t do to go about with evidence of a beating. It made his customers wary, it made the police suspicious and it wouldn’t look good when he went home bearing gifts.

  The disappearance of Rosie Summers had set him thinking and he had come to certain conclusions, impossible to prove, but if he were right, Julie Monday was not in that grave. What use he could make of that he had no idea, but he smiled to himself imagining the horror on Walker’s face when he told him. He wouldn’t believe him, of course, so there would have to be telling evidence that he knew what he was talking about. A living wife, perhaps. He walked past the kneeling figure and on down the path and out of the gate. ‘One day, Harry Walker, you’ll pay dearly for what you did to me,’ he said. ‘Just you wait.’

  Chapter Ten

  ‘I thought I saw a ghost today,’ Harry told Pam, as they sat together on the sofa with his arm about her shoulders and her head nestling on his chest. As soon as he arrived back, he had reported to the group captain to be debriefed, then run home to grab Pam in his arms and hold her so tightly she had pulled back laughing. ‘Harry, you’ll squeeze me to death. And the children want you to say hallo and goodnight. I let them stay up to see you.’

  He let her go and hugged the babies, then carried Colin up to his cot while Pam followed with Louise. They went off to sleep almost at once and he and Pam crept down to sit cosily side by side to bring each other up to date on what they had been doing. It was then he mentioned the ghost. ‘I was feeling really low because Tim had died, when I passed this WAAF. She was the spitting image of Julie.’

  ‘There’s no such things as ghosts. You just saw a girl who looked like her.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I kept telling myself that, but I couldn’t get her out of my head. On the way through London, I went to Highgate Cemetery just to convince myself she was dead. Silly, I know.’

  ‘And did you? Convince yourself I mean.’

  ‘Yes, of course. There was her grave and her name and George’s carved on the stone and that silly garden gnome grinning back at me for being such a fool.’

  ‘There you are, then.’ She paused. ‘You aren’t wishing she was back and you weren’t married to me, are you?’

  ‘No, course not.’ He hugged her and kissed the tip of her nose. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  ‘But there’s always a place in your heart for your first love, is that what you’re trying to say?’

  ‘I suppose I am. Do you mind? It doesn’t alter how I feel about you.’

  ‘I can live with it,’ she said. ‘After all, how can a dead woman hurt me? Now can we change the subject? Shall I make some cocoa? Then we’ll go to bed.’ She stood up to go to the kitchen but he grabbed her arm and dragged her down again. ‘I can’t wait.’

  She laughed and fell into his lap where he proceeded to demonstrate that ghosts had no power over his love for her.

  Julie had gone back to Manston on the bicycle she had borrowed and returned to work. She was kept busy the rest of that day and the next. Going off duty the second night, she made her way to the mess, expecting Florrie to be back from London. Her friend wasn’t there. ‘Anyone seen Sergeant Cotton?’ she asked.

  ‘I saw her drive through the gates half an hour ago,’ the mess servant said. ‘Perhaps she’s gone to her billet.’

  Julie went off to find her. She was going to tell her about the three airmen, who had been so stoically ch
eerful and talking about getting back into the air, as if it were some game they were playing. She knew it was all show, a way of covering up their fear and hurt.

  She found Florrie sprawled face down across her bed, her shoulders heaving. She ran to her at once, sat on the bed and put her hand on her shoulder. ‘Florrie,’ she said softly. ‘What’s up?’

  Florrie turned a tear-stained face towards her. ‘He’s missing, Eve, missing believed killed.’

  ‘Matt?’

  ‘No, not Matt. Alec.’

  ‘Alec?’ Julie recoiled. It was like a blow to the stomach and for a moment she felt winded. She didn’t want to believe it. It couldn’t be, not Alec, not the fun-loving man who had captured her heart. ‘No. It can’t be true.’

  ‘It is. I rang Mum from a call box while I was hanging about waiting for the CO outside Adastral House. She’d only just heard. She was in a terrible state, crying all the time. She had to hand the phone to Dad and he wasn’t much better.’ Her words came out in jerks. ‘He said he’d had a call from someone at Brize Norton, who said the Dakota he was flying in never returned to base and they think it was shot down somewhere over the Channel.’ She suddenly noticed the stricken look on Julie’s face. ‘Oh, Eve, I’m so sorry. You’re hurting too.’

  Julie couldn’t cry. She was numb. All their love, all their hopes and plans, all gone. No, she could not, would not believe it. ‘“Missing believed dead” doesn’t mean he’s definitely dead,’ she said, with a strange kind of fury which made her snap it out, but the anger soon abated and left her clinging on to the only thing that gave her hope. ‘He might be picked up. There’s still time.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right.’ Florrie sat up and scrubbed at her eyes. ‘We’ll just have to go on hoping.’

  ‘What about Matt?’

  ‘He’s all right. I spoke to him first. He told me it was pandemonium over in France. The weather was so bad half the troops didn’t land where they were supposed to. He got his glider as near as he could to the right spot to release the tow, but he had no idea whether it had got down all right. And the ground troops were having a tough time of it. He was getting ready to go again with reinforcements. We didn’t have time to talk any longer.’

  ‘Then we will go to church and pray for them both, pray for them all and all those left behind to wait and worry.’ She was determined not to give way to misery, but it was oh, so hard.

  ‘I’m ruddy starving,’ Trooper Langford muttered. They had only been issued with rations for twenty-four hours and some of those needed mixing with water and heating up. Alec would not let them light a fire and they had eaten everything else

  ‘So am I,’ came from Corporal Glover, a sentiment echoed by the rest of the stick. ‘Can’t we knock up one of these Frenchies and ask for food?’

  As Alec had anticipated, they had been well scattered on landing, some coming down in trees, some on one side of a river, some on the other, and it had taken until dawn to get them all together again. They were way off the map as far as the invasion was concerned and had no idea where they were, nor the name of the river, nor, come to that, if there were any enemy troops nearby. For all they knew their parachutes had been seen coming down and they were already being hunted. And would the French inhabitants be too frightened to help them? They might even hand them in. He had ordered the men to bury their parachutes and lie low and they had spent the whole of the following day hiding in woods.

  Alec had ventured out into the open at dusk to try and work out where they were. He thought they ought to strike out in a northerly direction but he’d lost his compass and the cloud cover was too thick to see the stars. He could see a village a little way off and ventured up the road towards it. He heard the sound of a motorcycle and dived into a ditch. It roared past him, a helmeted German riding it. He emerged from the ditch and went back to his men. ‘There’s Jerries about; we’ll wait until dark and cut across country.’

  Cutting across country was more difficult than he imagined. The area was heavily wooded in places and where there were no trees it was criss-crossed with waterways, some merely ditches, but others several feet from bank to bank, which engendered some debate whether they should try to wade or swim across or whether to try and find a bridge. Bridges, he felt sure, would be guarded. After he had insisted on wading across, holding their weapons above their heads, they emerged wet, cold and too fed up to carry on walking, only to come across a bend in the selfsame river, which meant they had to wade through it again.

  ‘I don’t reckon you know where we’re going, Sarge,’ Langford said, after they had spent three days hiding and three nights walking.

  ‘We’re going to find our own lines.’

  ‘Are you sure you know which direction they’re in? I haven’t heard a single shot in anger, so we must be a long way from where we should be.’

  ‘We knew that when we jumped.’

  ‘Yes, but the Frogs are supposed to be our allies, so I don’t see why we can’t ask them. They might give us something to eat too.’

  ‘Shut up moaning, Langford,’ the corporal told him. ‘And be quiet. D’you want the whole German army down on us?’

  They stumbled on in the darkness unable to see where they were putting their feet. Sometimes the ground was firm, sometimes it was marshy. The wind was strong and rain spattered on their heads. June it might be, but they had never felt so wet, cold and hungry.

  ‘I can’t believe we’re so far from the action, we can’t even hear it,’ Corporal Glover said quietly so that the rest of the stick could not hear. ‘Are you sure we’re going in the right direction, Sarge?’

  ‘No, I’m not sure, but it’s best to keep moving. Sitting on our arses waiting to be taken prisoner is not an option.’

  ‘D’you think they know at home what’s happened?’

  ‘The invasion? No doubt there’ll have been some sort of announcement. I don’t suppose they’ll give away many details.’

  ‘No, I meant what’s happened to us, being missing an’ all.’

  ‘The pilot will have reported dropping us, won’t he? Perhaps in hindsight he might be able to pinpoint where. In any case, the sooner we find the rest of the battalion the better.’

  ‘Yes, but where are they all? You can usually hear Colonel Luard’s hunting horn for miles.’

  ‘He won’t be blowing that now, he’ll be stuck into the job he was given.’

  ‘And doing it without us.’

  ‘I don’t suppose we were the only ones dropped off course.’

  They had come out on a country road and looked up and down for signs of traffic, but it appeared empty. ‘There’s a farmhouse up ahead,’ the corporal said. ‘Couldn’t one of us knock on the door while the rest cover him?’

  ‘OK.’ Alec stopped and turned to gather the men about him. ‘We’ll keep on the road and recce that farmhouse. Corporal, you take half the men and go round the back. If there’s any sign of a Hun, give a whistle to warn us and then make yourselves scarce. The rest of you follow me and cover me. I’m going to knock on the door.’

  Their caution was in vain, because as soon at they entered the farmyard a couple of dogs set up a ferocious barking. Alec swore as the door of the house was opened and a middle-aged man stood in its frame. ‘Who’s there?’ he called in French, squinting into the darkness.

  Alec gave up trying to hide and walked boldly forward. ‘Je suis anglais,’ he said, holding out his open hands to show he meant no harm.

  ‘Anglais, mon Dieu!’ This was followed by a stream of questions at such speed Alec’s schoolboy French could not keep up with them.

  ‘Germans?’ Alec interrupted this. ‘Where are the Germans?’

  The man shrugged and pointed up the road in the direction they were going.

  ‘Good job we didn’t keep going,’ Langford said.

  Alec ignored him and continued to address the farmer. ‘We are hungry and thirsty.’ He pointed to his mouth. ‘Have you food and drink?’

  By this time
the rest of the men had come up behind him. The man came out of the house and beckoned them to follow him. They did so cautiously as he led them round to the back of the house, where those Alec had sent there emerged from their hiding places among the outbuildings, rifles pointing, startling the Frenchman who thought the whole British army must be on his doorstep.

  Reassured by Alec, he led them into a barn, lit a hurricane lamp and pointed to a heap of straw. ‘Attendez,’ he said, turned on his heel and went back into the house by a back door.

  ‘You reckon he’s gone to alert the Jerries?’ Corporal Glover asked.

  ‘Could be, though he didn’t seem antagonistic. We’ll post a guard where he can see anyone coming along the road. Corporal, take Smith with you. Any sign of Jerry, you double back and we’ll make for that group of trees over there. If you can’t get back, make your own way there.’