War Brides

by Helen Bryan

  Elsie pitched the flowers back high over her head and pivoted to see who the lucky girl was. “Oi, Frances, you caught it! You’re next then!” she shouted gleefully. Frances looked quite startled, as if she hadn’t intended to catch anything.

  “Know who that’ll be, don’t we,” she heard Albert Hawthorne say, winking at Nell and nodding in Hugo’s direction.

  Frances considered throwing the flowers back to Elsie.

  “Better think of getting changed, you’re off on the train soon,” said Frances as the last of the sandwiches was eaten and the last toasts made.

  “I hate to take the dress off—this has been the best day of me life!”

  “Tanni’s got your going-away outfit in the saloon bar. Harry says you can change there, everybody’s outside in the sunshine. Come along, Mrs. Carpenter.”

  Elsie beamed. “Mrs.!” she whispered.

  Albert Hawthorne confided to Nell that he was looking forward to getting home to a cup of tea and taking off his shoes. They pinched.

  There was a little procession to the station to see Elsie and Bernie off. Albert led the way with the bride and groom, and the other girls followed clutching small paper parcels, the skirts of their summer frocks blowing in the breeze. The children scampered about, playing tag. When the train pulled in, it was crammed full of servicemen who leaned out the windows and cheered when Albert said, “Just married! Let the bride and groom on, lads!”

  Tanni and Evangeline and Frances and Alice undid their parcels and threw flower petals over Elsie and Bernie as they got onto the train, and everyone was waving as it departed. Then Albert went on ahead, anxious for tea and his armchair, leaving the others to wander home more slowly, enjoying the warm evening and the sunset and the glow left by the wedding.

  Behind the others, Alice ran back to the station platform and quickly stooped and gathered a handful of petals from the floor. She wrapped them in her handkerchief and stuffed it into her pocket. “For luck,” she whispered. “Mine.”

  29.

  Crowmarsh Priors,

  August 1942

  After their three-day honeymoon, Elsie and Bernie returned to Crowmarsh Priors to live at Glebe House. Housing was in short supply, with so many people bombed out, so a young couple had to take what they could get. Bernie was thrilled by the idea of living anywhere so grand, and neither of them fancied being squeezed in with another family. With Bernie away so often, Elsie thought it would be nice to have Frances for company.

  But soon after, workmen finally arrived to turn Glebe House into the long-promised convalescent home and from then on the place rang with hammering, sawing, and welding. “Soon have it done,” the foreman told Evangeline, knowing she was calculating how long it would be before she could get her invalid husband back to the village. Frances, Elsie, and Bernie had to shift quarters. They were turned out of their bedrooms but told they could stay on in the huge attic, which was up a steep, narrow flight of stairs and no use to convalescents. Frances and Elsie began shifting Lady Marchmont’s things stored there to clear space up there for their possessions and bedroom furniture.

  In the middle of the commotion, Frances had been summoned away. “Bloody welfare committee!” she had groaned, putting down the telephone on a coded message. “Land Girls’ morals are in tatters, thanks to American GIs with their nylons and Hershey bars. Committee headquarters are flooded with complaints from furious parents demanding we chaperone the girls more closely. Too tiresome, but I must go.”

  So Evangeline and Elsie were left to sort out the attic to accommodate a married couple and a single Land Girl. They piled Lady Marchmont’s trunks and boxes in the middle as a kind of barrier wall and arranged two makeshift bedrooms at opposite ends under the eaves. “Still, it beats the hostel,” said Evangeline, trying to shove a wardrobe into place as part of the barrier. “If you and Bernie take that end you’ll have privacy behind this thing, a big window, and a nice view of the downs. He’ll be surprised to find it all ready when he gets back—even if Frances is at the other end. I’m sure she’ll put a pillow over her ears.”

  “Will you stop messin’ about wiv that wardrobe, Evangeline, in your condition!” Elsie grabbed her friend’s arms and sat her on a mattress.

  Evangeline was wearing a smock now, which Tanni had made her. She patted her swelling belly. “It’s starting to kick like mad. Richard felt it when I was at the hospital last week and actually gave a sort of laugh. I’m so glad I told him. The doctors were wrong to say I mustn’t. It’s made such a difference to how he feels…is it beginning to cloud over, do you think? It’s supposed to rain.” Evangeline was torn between happiness and anxiety. Who was the baby’s father?

  Elsie leaned out of the window. “Maybe. A bit. I ’ate all this waitin’ about—months it’s been, and two false alarms. Goin’ all the way down that bleedin’ tunnel and nobody there. Worryin’ that we got no idea where the kiddies are, just know that they got away before the Germans came lookin’ and shot the old people wot looked after them. Murderin’ buggers. Wish we’d ’ear sommink, just whether or not they’re, you know, still alive…”

  “I wish we could think of somewhere better to keep them than a cold passage full of bat droppings while we wait for Bernie to bring a car.” And I wish I knew who my baby’s father is.

  “Evangeline, that’s nuffink compared to the rest of it!”

  “I suppose not. It wouldn’t be so bad if Tanni could see them, but Sister Tucker insists she has to stay in bed now until the baby comes. It seems cruel—those poor children won’t understand what’s happened, probably scared to death. Then up to London under a blanket and more strangers, but we can’t risk anyone seeing them.”

  “At least Tanni’ll know they’re safe and she’ll see them eventually. That’s the main thing.”

  “Hello, are you up there?” Alice called from the bottom of the stairs. She sounded breathless.

  Evangeline and Elsie looked down into the stairwell. “We’re moving things, any news?”

  Alice ran up the stairs. “The workmen are having their tea.” She lowered her voice anyway. “Rachel just phoned. She’s had another message the twins are on their way.”

  “Really? She’s said that twice before and the messages were wrong.”

  “It’s certain this time, the local Maquis took them from wherever they’ve been hidden all summer.”

  “They’re right under the Germans’ noses,” fretted Evangeline. “We have to trust some pretty rough characters, and there’s no certainty we can rely on them. The Resistance colonel Frances and I met in London was incredulous, then furious that we wanted them to bring two children across the channel. Asked did we take them for nannies? He refused point-blank until Frances showed him some of her jewelry, said she’d hand over more when the twins arrived. He changed his tune then, but warned that the men he knew would abandon the twins if there was any risk to themselves. He was plying Frances with champagne he’d bought under the counter, hoping she’d finally go upstairs with him, so she told him that was part of the bargain, once they brought the children, and that did the trick.”

  “Did he tell her how they planned to get the girls to the coast?”

  “He wouldn’t say much about how, it was clear he didn’t like it. He called some of his friends over and his friends didn’t like it either, said two children would jeopardize their operations and they’d have to drug the girls to keep them quiet. Frances didn’t like the sound of that, but they were adamant that no one would risk being shot for the sake of two unimportant enfants, no matter what Frances was paying. If worst came to worst, if anyone betrayed them or even if they just got fed up, they would abandon the girls to the Germans and their prison camps.”

  “Maybe it isn’t such a wonderful plan, after all,” said Alice, who had had cold feet right from the start.

  “It’s the only plan if the alternative is leaving them to die in a German camp,” snapped Evangeline.

  Alice remained skeptical. “Do you gues
s these camps really exist? You never hear about them on the news. If they’re as bad as Rachel says, you’d think someone would have noticed. Oh, I know, I know, Evangeline, we don’t hear everything on the news. So we stand by and wait. Again! I don’t know why we let Frances talk us into this.”

  “Of all times for Frances to go away!” grumbled Elsie. “What’s she do on all them committees anyway? What Land Girl welfare! I ask you!”

  “She expects to be home in a few days. Hope she’s in time, because I can’t go down the tunnel any longer and she can. If Frances isn’t back, Elsie’ll have to manage on her own.”

  There was an alarmed squawk of “Bloody ’ell!!”

  “But we’re ready as we’ll ever be, aren’t we?” said Evangeline, stretching her back, which ached. Her mind returned to the baby. If it was Laurent’s there was a chance it would be quite fair-skinned, he was half white. Or more, because his mother had white blood too…

  “Blankets, dry clothes, handkerchiefs, first aid kit, brandy for the boatmen, sandwiches, and a flask of cocoa.” Alice went over the list again, although they knew it by heart.

  “I fink we got everything except the sandwiches and the cocoa, and there’s no sense in makin’ them ahead. ’Ow’s Tanni today?”

  Tanni was trying to pretend she was fine, but it was clear to all of them she wasn’t.

  “Not too well. Sister Tucker didn’t care for her color and is worried that her ankles are so swollen. Worry is bad for her, and naturally she’s worried sick. Upset too that she can’t see the twins.” Evangeline chewed a fingernail. What if the baby looked white but had that telltale coppery hair?

  “She’ll be fine as soon as this is over.”

  “Evangeline, are you feeling all right?” asked Elsie. One minute her friend was glowing, the next she looked like she was in another world and didn’t hear when you spoke to her. “Evangeline! Are you listening?”

  “Fine. Why?” She was obsessively calculating for the millionth time when her last period had been.

  Below in the front hall a door slammed and someone ran up the stairs. “Hello—anyone up there?”

  “Frances! You’re back early.”

  “Just in time, Frances! Rachel phoned, wait till you hear…” They all began to talk at once.

  Frances knew she looked remarkably fit and tanned for someone who had been stuck in a London office with the old biddies of the Land Girl Welfare Committee. When Alice commented she said, “My Land Girl glow,” and hoped it sounded plausible. In fact, she was fresh from parachute training at a Manchester airfield. Her practice jumps had been too thrilling for words and she had hoped that finally she would be sent to France. But to her dismay and annoyance Frances had been sent back to Crowmarsh Priors.

  But there was one compensation: her mock exercise had become real. There had been a briefing at the training camp. Military Intelligence was redoubling its efforts to find “Manfred” on the south coast. Auxi agents in southern England were on red alert after a panicky report that two German airmen had escaped when their plane was shot down over Kent. One was believed to be a senior member of the SS, with orders to assassinate Churchill and the king. There had been similar alarms ever since the start of the war, which had proved false, but alarms could not be discounted when invasion remained a real possibility.

  Military Intelligence had drawn up a comprehensive list of possible fifth columnists with real or suspected German connections or sympathies—anyone with whom German agents or spies might shelter. Its accuracy was doubtful—the list did not discriminate between those people known to have had pro-German, if not pro-Nazi sympathies before the war, or to have attended Oswald Mosley’s rallies, and those, like Alice Osbourne’s father, on the grounds he had twice travelled to Germany as a student and had drunk beer at the Oktoberfest among German students who had included several now prominent Nazis.

  The little man who had interviewed Frances looked grim as he ordered her to step up surveillance in her area. “What we do know is that before the war, the country house set invited a mixed crowd for weekend house parties that included their Continental friends. We know some Nazis were among their guests, and these would have had an excellent opportunity to reconnoiter in the area, gather information that would be useful for a German invasion, photograph the area where the coastal defenses are now. You know the sort of thing, ‘Walk before tea? Jolly splendid scenery on the coast—I think I’ll take a few photographs, hobby of mine.’ For now keep your eyes open for anything suspicious, and if there’s nothing, eliminating suspects will save our time.”

  To Frances’s chagrin, she had let slip that Hugo de Balfort had proposed to her and she had turned him down. Her superiors had made a joke of it. “She’ll probably marry him eventually—very suitable, though she complains he’s been damned persistent, won’t take no for an answer. May as well keep her watching Gracecourt. We’ll be able to eliminate the de Balforts from the list right away and stop her pestering us to go to France.”

  Since the Auxis were stretched thin in the south, Frances was to extend her surveillance over a wider area, and her Land Girl Welfare Committee was the perfect cover. “Manfred’s down there somewhere,” the little man reminded them. “We need to comb the countryside.”

  Then, to Frances’s alarm, they stopped joking about Hugo. The Old Man had suggested marrying him would provide her with the best cover of all. Frances’s eyes took on the steely look her father knew so well. She would stay in Sussex but she would not marry Hugo. She could always divorce the man later, they said, placatingly. The Old Man did not like being thwarted.

  The possibility she would be ordered to marry Hugo struck her as absurd at first. Then it forced her to recognize something else: she was in love with Oliver Hammet.

  Frances knew that no matter how much Oliver liked her—and he did like her, she could tell, very much indeed—and for all his breaking of minor rules of the church, he was a clergyman. She remembered the sermon he had preached at Elsie and Bernie’s wedding about the permanence of the marriage bond. If she married Hugo it would put her beyond Oliver’s reach forever. He would never accept that those whom God had joined together could be put asunder, except by death. He would feel bound to follow the Church’s position on divorce, even if it broke his heart and hers. If she married Hugo she could never marry Oliver.

  She wouldn’t let the damned Germans and their war ruin her life that way!

  The minute she was finished she grabbed her things and fled the training camp just as someone came with a message the Old Man wanted to see her…

  Now, in the attic of Glebe House, when she should have been paying attention to Alice, Elsie, and Evangeline, who were all talking at once, she was listening fearfully for the telephone. She knew that when he learned she had gone, the Old Man was likely to roar an order at her down the line. How could she refuse a direct order?

  “Frances! Are you listening?” Alice demanded. “Oliver wants to…”

  Oliver!

  Below in the hall the telephone shrilled. What could she do if it was the Old Man?

  Oh, Oliver!

  She felt trapped until a crazy idea occurred to her, and she knew that if she hesitated she would never act on it. She must go now, before she lost her nerve.

  Alice had started for the stairs and the phone. “Don’t bother, I’ll get it,” said Frances, racing past Alice. “Then I’m going out for a walk to clear my head.”

  “A walk? Now? But Frances, you’ve only just come in and we have to tell you—”

  She wasn’t listening. She threw a cardigan round her shoulders, ignored the telephone, and walked as fast as she could to the vicarage. Her knees felt weak and Frances, who was never normally at a loss for words, had no idea what she was going to say. She was terrified.

  If she paused to knock, she might reconsider, so she didn’t. “Oliver,” she called, opening the door. “Oh, Oliver, please be at home, I so need to talk to you.”

  “Up here,” he called
from the study. “Be down in a jiffy.”

  But Frances was already running up the stairs. “I need you to do me the greatest favor in the world! You’re the only one I can trust to help me.”

  She dashed into his study as he stood up behind his desk. “What can I do for you?”

  For a minute as she looked into his steady brown eyes she couldn’t say it. Then she thought about Hugo and the wedding night. “What if a person needed to get married very, very quickly? At once, even. Is there a special license?”

  “Yes, the bishop can sort out an immediate license if necessary.” A look of sadness crossed Oliver’s face, and Frances rushed on: “I want to ask you something…a girl doesn’t normally do this…but you might want to, and if you did want to it would have to be now, right away. Unless you do it soon it may be too late. It will save me from a great deal of misery and allow me to keep…doing something important, without losing…something that is also important And…and…if you think for a moment you don’t want to you’re too honest to…agree to…” Tears sprang to her eyes. “The thing is, would you trust me even if I couldn’t tell you everything?”

  Oliver wondered what on earth was upsetting her so. She was making no sense and she was almost crying, nothing like her usual insouciant self. “Frances, as long as it’s legal I’d do anything you wanted.” He came round the desk and stopped himself from putting his arms around her. Vicars mustn’t do that with upset parishioners. Even if the vicar loves the parishioner more than life itself.

  Frances gulped. She gazed up at him, her sapphire eyes wide, and blurted out, “Oh, it is legal, but it has to be kept secret.”

  “Very well. You know vicars are bound to keep the secrets entrusted to them, so I promise to keep any mysterious secret of yours, whatever it is.”

  “But you would have to trust me…and not ask me questions.”

  Oliver had no defenses left. “I’ll trust you till the grave and beyond, if necessary. I’ll do anything you ask of me. Anything. And never ask questions.”