Ghost Swifts, Blue Poppies and the Red Star

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

  Harriet and Fraser thanked him and climbed out. The moment that they were out of the car, he sped away.

  ‘Oh, Fraser!’ Harriet said. ‘You have no idea how happy I am to see this hotel.’

  ‘Well, don’t get too excited, Ma. We don’t know if they’ve room for us, yet.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Harriet said, marching towards the entrance with Fraser following dutifully behind with the two trunks.

  She entered a small lobby lit by a dim, green-shaded lamp standing on a wooden counter. Behind the counter was a smart, suited man. He was bald-headed with harsh, crumpled facial features. Despite this, he grinned, as Harriet approached him. ‘Do you speak English?’ Harriet asked, loudly and slowly.

  ‘I would certainly hope so,’ he replied. ‘Seeing as how I grew up in Buckinghamshire.’

  ‘Oh, how wonderful,’ Harriet said.

  ‘Sorry, I’m being facetious. How may I help you, madam?’

  ‘A room!’ Harriet yelped with mock desperation and throwing her hands in the air. And then, calming herself somewhat, repeated, ‘A…a room…please. Wait. Even better, two rooms. Two rooms, a hot dinner and a hot bath.’

  The man grimaced slightly. ‘I can do all of those…’

  ‘But..?’ Fraser put in, pre-empting the man’s own caveat.

  The man seemed suddenly uncomfortable, glancing quickly at Fraser before returning his attention to Harriet. ‘But…as I am sure you’ve seen, Ypres is in rather a desperate state, and we have guests from all parts of Europe, here to work and help rebuild the city.’

  Harriet frowned tetchily, not following. The man either had rooms or he didn’t. Or was he implying that they would have to share a room with a foreigner? What did he mean? ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t understand.’

  The man glanced to the open door over his shoulder, then leant over the counter, and whispered, ‘We have all kinds of nationalities here…including some young German men.’

  ‘Oh!’ Harriet said, understanding now, but not really knowing how she felt about this new information. The idea that they might meet young German men on their trip simply had not entered her mind. She hadn’t much time to think about it, either, for the hotel receptionist was staring at her for an answer. She looked sideways to her son. ‘Fraser?’

  Fraser shrugged. ‘Fine with me. They were just doing the same job, as was I—forced to take up arms against an enemy with whom I actually held no disagreement or quarrel at all. It’s fine—not a problem.’

  The receptionist, having wanted only to avoid embarrassment for all parties, seemed entirely satisfied by Fraser’s answer: ‘So, two rooms, then?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ Harriet confirmed.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said, sliding a thin ledger across the counter. ‘If you could just fill in these details. Your rooms are on the first floor. The bathroom is at the end of the corridor, and dinner will be served just through the door behind me from six o’clock.’ He clapped his hands together, as Harriet completed the necessary paperwork. ‘May I ask the nature of your visit?’

  Fraser explained that they had just come from visiting his brother’s grave, and the receptionist instantly became more solemn. ‘A pilgrimage of sorts, then,’ he said. ‘We have other guests staying here, who have come for similar reasons.’

  Harriet returned the book. ‘Why is there literally nobody in the city centre? We didn’t see a single builder, carpenter, beggar or thief: it was really most queer.’

  ‘It’s a Sunday in a very religious country,’ he explained, giving a light shrug of his shoulders, which either conveyed that the answer was obvious, or that he too didn’t understand why a city, in such desperate need of repair, should grind to a halt because of religious observance.

  ‘Oh, goodness. How silly of me!’ Harriet said, flushing with shame for having made herself sound like a heathen. ‘I’m completely all over the place.’ She slapped Fraser on the arm, thereby bestowing a portion of her ignorance and culpability onto him.

  The receptionist laughed politely, as he removed two keys from a bank of brass hooks hanging on the wall behind him.

  ‘We’ve also come to Ypres to look for someone: a young lady—Lina Peeters—who lived here before the war.’ Harriet started. ‘We’re reliably informed that she returned. What…where might such a person have gone?’

  As he handed Harriet the two room keys, the receptionist answered: ‘Almost everyone, who lived here before the war, lost their homes. The majority of people returning are in the Plaine d’Amour area, just north of the city.’

  ‘Oh, right. Thank you,’ Harriet said. ‘That’s most helpful.’

  ‘The Belgian Ministry of Internal Affairs has provided temporary pre-fab houses for the people returning to live in. That’s the most likely place you’ll find her, to my mind.’

  ‘Splendid,’ Harriet said.

  ‘That’s our name,’ the receptionist quipped, but Harriet didn’t understand to what he was referring, so she smiled politely, tilted her head away and said, ‘Come along, Fraser.’

  At the top of the stairs, they found an inadequately lit narrow corridor, which fed six solid green doors. On each door was tacked a brass number.

  Harriet examined the numbers burnt into a small wooden rectangle attached to each of the room keys. ‘Six or seven?’

  ‘Seven,’ Fraser said, with an odd immediate decisiveness.

  Harriet handed him his key. ‘I’m going to bathe. What say, we meet downstairs for six o’clock, then?’

  Fraser nodded. ‘What say, you knock on my door at five-to-six because I’m certain to be still asleep.’

  ‘Settled,’ she agreed, plunging the key into the lock, before picking up her case and stepping inside.

  Following their stay in Mrs Tillens’s house, the room, into which she entered now, was positively palatial. She closed the door behind her with a contented sigh. The room was of a good size, with a clean double-bed, a narrow wardrobe, a washstand, a velveteen armchair and a dressing table. She set down the case and sat in the chair a moment. The bed looked decidedly appealing, but then the idea of taking a long hot soak in the bath was even more so. She looked at a wooden carriage clock on the dresser; it was only just gone midday.

  ‘Goodness me,’ she blurted out, standing up sharply. ‘What on earth are we thinking?’

  Striding over to the washstand, Harriet splashed her face with water and freshened up, then picked up her bag, marched out of the room and knocked on Fraser’s door. She heard a groan of displeasure and the sound of feet shuffling heavily across the room.

  ‘What?’ he snapped, appearing in his blue-and-white-striped pyjamas with a severe scowl etched on his face.

  ‘Have you noticed what time it is? Come on. Get dressed,’ Harriet instructed. ‘We’ve got a good few hours yet before dinner: let’s go and find Lina.’

  Fraser blew out a puff of exasperated air: ‘No.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘No,’ he repeated more earnestly. ‘Let’s just do what we agreed: rest, bathe and have a meal. Tomorrow we go looking for Lina.’

  Harriet stared at him for a moment, measuring her reply. She didn’t want to waste a moment of time out here, but she saw the tiredness, the vulnerability in her son. ‘Yes, quite right, too. Go back to sleep and I’ll wake you, as arranged.’

  Fraser closed the door, and she heard the sounds of retreating scuffing feet and the grumbling give of the bed springs, as he dropped back onto the mattress.

  Harriet placed the key into her door and went through the motions of opening and closing it, all without moving from where she was standing in the corridor. Quietly, she stole down the stairs and into the lobby.

  ‘Everything okay with the room, madam?’ the receptionist asked, leaping up from reading a newspaper behind the desk.

  ‘Oh, perfectly, thank you,’ Harriet replied. ‘How far away is that area you mentioned earlier – the plaine de…something-or-other?’

  ‘Plaine d’Amour,’ he corrected,
putting on some sort of affected French accent, which made her wonder why it wasn’t called something Flemish.

  ‘Doesn’t that mean ‘plain of love’ in French, or something like it?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘How very odd. Where will I find this Plaine d’Amour?’

  The receptionist crouched down and reached under the counter. ‘Here,’ he said, placing a piece of paper down between them: a map, she realised, although one clearly made of the city before the war. She watched, as he drew a pencil circle around a building. ‘We’re sort of here.’ He briefly flipped the map around and drew another circle, this one much larger, and then turned the map back to face Harriet. ‘That’s sort of the Plaine d’Amour.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, sort of understanding.

  ‘The roads are all the same, just don’t take any account of the buildings marked on the map.’

  ‘Oh, may I keep it?’

  ‘By all means,’ he enthused. ‘Good luck.’

  Harriet smiled, thanked him, and left the hotel with a confident stride. When she was safely out of sight, she paused to scrutinise the map, not having the foggiest where she was going, or even if the area was within reasonable walking distance. Just in front of her was a crossroads and she searched for any indication of the names of the intersecting streets. It was all very well to say that the roads had not changed, but there was not one sign to give any indication of a name.

  ‘Mrs McDougall!’

  She recoiled slightly, knowing that the voice belonged to the hotel receptionist. She knew, also, what he was about to say, so she decided to pre-empt him. ‘It’s that way,’ she said, as if to herself, and turned to see him.

  ‘Yes, it is that way,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Then the next right, then carry on straight ahead for a while, then left… I can’t remember precisely after that, but you’ll almost be there by then.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ she responded, trooping back past him self-assuredly.

  She took the right turning and continued down a long straight road, which was cluttered with an unsightly fusion of damaged abandoned buildings and new hastily erected ones devoid of architectural style or merit. The whole area reminded her of pictures, which she had seen from the Wild West of America, where whole towns full of gold-speculators had sprung up overnight.

  Looking at the map, she could see that she was making very good progress and needn’t march at such an athletic pace. The sky above the motley collection of buildings was an empty lacklustre shade of grey, ostensibly reflecting the mood of the city below it.

  ‘Goeiedag. Hallo. Bonjour,’ she greeted the first person upon whom she clapped eyes.

  The lady—an old woman—nodded with a mistrustful, suspicious air about her and continued past.

  ‘Ik zoek iemand, die Lina Peeters heet,’ Harriet called, but still the old lady walked without turning.

  After a few minutes more, she reached a junction and, hammered into the ground, was a white sign with one end pointing across the street with black writing, which read PLAINE D’AMOUR.

  She needed only to continue a short distance further before the map became purposeless: in the near-distance was a great profusion of pre-fabricated homes.

  Harriet stopped and stared at the mini-city of identical homes, single-story wooden structures with low-pitched roofs. Each had one window on the back, one on the front beside the door and two on the side. Territorial divisions between each house were non-existent: dogs and small farmyard animals seemed to roam the area freely. Compacted dirt had engraved well-trodden paths through the mud upon which the estate had been erected.

  Through the general stillness of the place, which Harriet now attributed to the Sabbath, she caught reassuring glimmers of life: a baby crying somewhere in the distance; the low, barely audible babble of men in conversation; a dog barking; a window closing.

  Harriet began to follow the nearest path, entering the Plaine d’Amour. She intended to stop and talk to the first person that she met, but as she continued to walk, she saw nobody; just endless rows of indistinguishable pre-fab houses. A sudden wave of panic came over her, thinking that she might never be able to find her way back out again. She spotted the remnants of the Cloth Hall tower in the distance, and realised that, if she just headed in its general direction, then she should eventually get herself out of this strange maze.

  She was startled by a sound to her left and whipped around to see an equally startled elderly lady standing in an open doorway. Harriet hastily composed herself and smiled. ‘Hallo,’ she said, before repeating the phrase, ‘Ik zoek iemand, die Lina Peeters heet.’

  The old lady’s eyes widened. ‘Ja, die ken ik wel.’

  ‘Ja?’ Harriet repeated, quite surprised to have found someone, who knew her so quickly.

  The old lady nodded. ‘Ja.’

  ‘Where does she… Zij… woont… waar?’

  ‘Naast de stallen,’ the old lady said, pointing down the path.

  If her very limited Dutch was correct, then Lina Peeters was to be found next to something, but quite what stallen were, she had no idea. Her look of bewilderment prompted the old lady to whinny and raise her head up and down. ‘Ah! A horse—stables! Yes, thank you.’

  The old lady grinned a wide toothless smile, pointed down the path again, and then whinnied once more for good measure and guffawed. It lifted Harriet’s spirits to see someone able to achieve such an expression of happiness in this oasis amid such utter desolation.

  Harriet almost skipped down the path, so excited was she to finally meet Lina. When a stable complex came into view, her pace increased almost to a trot. It was a long wooden building painted black with a dozen stable doors, most of which were open at the top, giving a view of the horses inside.

  She arrived at the stables, breathless but grinning like a fool.

  ‘Kan ik je helpen?’ a young voice asked from somewhere beside her.

  She turned to see a youthful-looking man pushing a wheelbarrow of hay towards her. Harriet greeted him, then repeated her memorised phrase about looking for Lina Peeters.

  The young man nodded and pointed to the pre-fab house to the right of the complex.

  ‘Dank uwel,’ Harriet said. This was it. She drew in a breath, not having the foggiest of what she was going to say, or how she was going to say it. She knocked on the door and waited.

  It took just a few seconds for the door to be opened by a pretty lady, who appeared to be in her early thirties. Her hair, dark with grease for want of a good wash, was pulled back behind her head and she wore dirty, unkempt clothing. ‘Hello. I’m looking for someone called Lina Peeters.’

  ‘Pardon? Ik begrijp u niet.’

  ‘Lina?’

  The woman nodded but then changed to shake her head, as she continued: ‘Ik spreek geen Engels.’

  Harriet was confused. She was certain that Miss Yavuz had said that Lina had had a good grasp of English by the time that she had left Woolwich. ‘Lina Peeters?’

  ‘Lina Peeters, ja.’

  ‘Woolwich? England? Malcolm McDougall?’ Harriet said, painfully slowly.

  Lina shook her head. ‘Ik begrijp het niet.’

  Harriet sighed, as the realisation that this woman could not be the correct person began to sink in. She pointed at Lina and, just to be absolutely certain, said, ‘You, England. War. Erm…?’ Then, she found herself sounding very much like Arthur Dooley, making sounds of explosions with her fingers erupting from clenched fists.

  Lina shook her head firmly. She had understood.

  ‘Malcolm McDougall?’ Harriet persisted.

  Lina shook her head once more, but this time not disguising her growing irritation. Without saying anything further, she retreated and closed the door.

  Harriet’s newfound vigour suddenly faded, and a heavy tiredness returned to consume her. For today at least, she admitted defeat and turned back on herself to retrace her steps out of the Plaine d’Amour, chin tucked to her chest.

 
She arrived back at the hotel, exhausted.

  ‘How did it go, Mrs McDougall?’ the receptionist asked. ‘Any joy?’

  ‘Unfortunately not, no,’ Harriet answered. ‘I found the place, no problems with that, thank you, but no sign of the correct Lina Peeters.’

  ‘Oh, terribly sorry to hear that.’

  Harriet shrugged, as she strode towards the staircase, trying to muster at least a light resilient indifference. ‘I can but try again tomorrow.’ She stopped and called back, ‘Oh, I’d be awfully grateful if you could keep from mentioning this little…excursion of mine to my son, he does like to worry so and—’

  ‘Ah,’ the receptionist replied, in what could only be the commencement of a confession. ‘I’m afraid he already knows. Terribly sorry. He tried knocking for you and, when you didn’t answer, he came down here asking me to open up the room to check if you were alright. I rather felt I had no choice but to tell him that you had in fact left the hotel…’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Harriet agreed, swallowing down her annoyance. ‘And where is he now? He didn’t go looking for me, did he?’

  He indicated to the room behind him. ‘No, no. I believe he may be waiting for you in the saloon, Mrs McDougall.’

  ‘Right,’ Harriet said, changing direction for the saloon, feeling oddly child-like, as though she had just been sent to the headmaster’s room for misbehaving. She was expecting to see Fraser facing the door, arms folded and sporting a severe, officious expression. Instead, she found him sitting at a round table with three men of a similar age, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and looking rather jovial indeed.

  ‘Ma, nice of you to join us!’ he called. ‘Come and sit down.’

  Harriet smiled and approached the table, not finding herself able to match their established jaunty mood.

  ‘These are my friends,’ Fraser said, pointing first to the chap on his left, then proceeding to introduce the other two men. ‘This is Stefan, Kurt and Franz.’

  Baffled, Harriet watched, as the three men each stood in turn and shook her hand. They greeted her in English but with an unmistakable lilt of German. ‘Hello,’ she said meekly.