A Winter Love Song

by Rita Bradshaw

  ‘Perhaps.’ She raised herself on one elbow and stared at him in the dawning light. ‘But you know as well as I do the lift it gives to the boys far away from their loved ones when an actress or singer or comedian goes out to where they are. That’s what I want to do, Art. I’m not decrying what I’ve done to date and Annie’s right, it is hard work and also worthwhile and all the rest of it, but I just feel the time is right for me to go out of my comfort zone and entertain the troops overseas for a season. Other entertainers do it, so why not me?’

  ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Art, it’s no more dangerous than London. Well, it might be a little, but I got through the Blitz, didn’t I? And that night in May a couple of years ago was like Dante’s Inferno when the Germans tried to bomb London out of existence. But we survived.’

  ‘I know, I know, but it’s not like knowingly walking into the front line. That’s a different kettle of fish entirely.’

  ‘I want to do it, Art. I’ve already made enquiries about joining ENSA, and I’ve got an appointment with Basil Dean at his office in Drury Lane next week.’

  ‘What’s Enoch’s take on this?’

  ‘I haven’t discussed it with him yet. I intended to write to you first.’

  ‘Well, that’s something, I suppose.’

  ‘Don’t go all grumpy on me.’ She dropped a kiss on his mouth. ‘I don’t suppose Gracie Fields and George Formby and all the others were breaking their necks to do troop concerts in the midst of muck and bullets; they do it because they feel it’s their patriotic duty and it’ll do some good, boost morale and so on.’

  ‘Then let them go on doing what they do and you stay here and work the home front.’

  ‘Art, you don’t really mean that.’

  ‘The hell I don’t.’ There was silence for a few moments and then Art groaned, rolling over and sitting on the edge of the bed before standing up and limping over to the window where he moved the blackout blind to one side.

  Bonnie joined him, putting her arms round his waist as she rested her chin on his back and murmured, ‘You’ll have the warden shouting the odds. He’s a bulldog of a man.’

  He didn’t say anything for a full minute. Then he let the blind fall back into place and turned round, pulling her against him. ‘Are you set on this?’

  She nodded. ‘I feel I have to, Art. I really do.’

  ‘Have you thought as far as where you would go?’

  ‘Well, there seems to be no shortage of entertainment for the troops in Italy and the Middle East, but at one of the hospitals I visited a few weeks ago, a soldier told me he thinks Burma’s been more or less forgotten. He was shipped home with terrible injuries –’ she didn’t go into the nature of them which had been on her mind ever since – ‘and he said if ever there’s a place and men who need encouragement, it’s Burma.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Art grimly, wishing he could get his hands on the unfortunate soldier for a few minutes.

  ‘But of course I’d discuss this with Mr Dean next week.’

  ‘The Japanese are devils, Bonnie. They have no respect for soldiers or civilians alike, including women.’

  ‘I shan’t come into contact with the Japanese.’

  ‘And you’d be in the jungle. You’ve no idea what that’s like, have you? We’re talking a heat and humidity you can’t imagine, bugs of every description, poisonous snakes, scorpions and hornets, wild animals and danger everywhere. That’s not even taking into account the lack of sanitation and privacy you’d experience, and the food. Meat goes bad the same day it’s prepared, and cooked rice turns sour in hours. I know. A friend of mine was in the tropics for a while some years back, and he came home a shell of a man with rampant malaria and lung rot.’

  Bonnie stared at him. ‘All that just confirms that if ever the troops need a boost, it’s the ones in Burma.’

  ‘Stubborn as hell,’ he muttered, before kissing her long and hard.

  The kiss led on to other things and they didn’t speak about Burma again until Art was ready to leave. An army Jeep had come to pick him up and take him back to base before he would be transferred to the hospital in Surrey, where Bonnie would be able to visit him.

  As they stood on the doorstep, Art drew her into his arms. ‘About Burma.’ He moved a tendril of hair from her brow. ‘I’m not going to pretend I want you to go, but if you feel you have to, then I won’t try and persuade you otherwise. But I want two promises from you, all right? One, Enoch goes with you to Burma. If he can’t, or won’t, then you knock this idea on the head, Bonnie. I don’t want you going out there without him.’

  She stared at him. ‘I’m hardly of an age when I need a chaperone, Art.’

  ‘And that’s just the sort of comment that makes me even more set on Enoch going with you.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘I mean it. Now promise me.’

  She nodded sulkily. Even if Enoch couldn’t go she would need an accompanist so it wasn’t as if she would be on her own. But she couldn’t argue with him, not when he was off to the hospital. His leg had looked awful when she’d examined it although he assured her the doctors had said he would make a full recovery in time. But then that was a mixed blessing. A full recovery meant he would go back to the fighting. ‘What’s the second promise?’

  ‘That you look after yourself, my love. I shall be suffering the torments of the damned if this trip comes off. Just remember that, and take care.’

  ‘Oh, Art.’ For a moment, but only for a moment, Bonnie was tempted to say she wouldn’t go. Instead she kissed him hard on the lips, oblivious to the driver of the Jeep who was a pal of Art’s. ‘I love you so much.’

  ‘And I love you, impossible though you are at times. I could have fallen for any number of women, docile, amenable, sensible women, but who took my heart? A lion-hearted beauty who’s as determined as me, and that’s saying something.’

  ‘So you don’t mind?’ she whispered sweetly, kissing his chin. ‘About me going to Burma?’

  ‘I mind like hell, let’s get that straight, and no amount of soft soap with those baby-blue eyes of yours will make me say different.’

  She kissed him again. He was going to have a further operation in the next few days when he was in the hospital to remove more shrapnel from his leg, and then some weeks of remedial exercise, so for a short while at least she would know where he was and that he was safe. Worrying about him the way she did, she could completely understand why he didn’t want her to go to Burma. And she didn’t want to cause him concern – that was the last thing in the world she wanted – but she had to go. Just talking about it with him over the last few hours had cemented the desire even more firmly in her mind, but what she was going to do if Enoch wouldn’t play ball, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to break her promise to Art but . . .

  She kissed him again and watched as he hobbled to the Jeep.

  She’d cross her bridges when she came to them.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  To Bonnie’s relief and secret surprise, Enoch was fully on board for a trip to Burma. The only fly in the ointment as far as he was concerned was that it meant turning down work for the months they would be away. The fact that they would be flying halfway round the world into enemy-occupied Burmese jungle populated by wild animals and snakes and deadly insects, not to mention the Japanese, was of much less consideration to him than the loss of income. The basic ENSA salary fluctuated between ten and twenty pounds a week which, as Enoch put it, was chicken feed compared to what Bonnie normally earned. However, he manfully agreed to go against all his instincts as an agent and set about clearing a block of weeks from April to July in the following year.

  So it was, not long after the most spectacular and daring operation of the Burma campaign in March 1944, when a large Allied force was landed two hundred miles behind Japanese lines, that Bonnie said goodbye to a tearful Annie and joined Enoch in the taxi waiting to take them to the train station from where they wou
ld go to the coast. According to the newspapers over the last two or three weeks the reinforcements to back the ‘Forgotten Army’ – General Slim’s 14th Army – meant that at last the tide was turning in Burma, although it was going to be a slow and painful process. The British and the Americans working together had delivered a coup that the Japanese hadn’t been expecting, but no one doubted the truth voiced by one old General that when rats are threatened and cornered, they come out fighting all the more viciously.

  Art had continued to be full of misgivings about the trip, emphasizing the dangers whenever he wrote to her. And Bonnie tried to reassure him in her letters and promised every time she wrote that she wouldn’t take any unnecessary risks.

  His recovery in the hospital in England had gone well, and he had rejoined his regiment towards the end of the previous year. Bonnie had been hoping he would remain in Surrey for Christmas but it wasn’t to be. His regiment had been seconded to Italy in the aftermath of the country’s military about-face, when Italy had declared war on Germany – her previous ally – in October, thereby suffering a wave of atrocities at the hands of the retreating Germans.

  The newspapers had reported that Naples had been subjected to a five-day reign of terror as retreating German soldiers took revenge on their Italian ‘betrayers’, murdering civilians at random and looting and blowing up buildings. Hospitals had been attacked, water mains and sewers dynamited, and any resistance put down with a savagery hitherto unprecented. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of disarmed Italian soldiers had been crammed into sealed trains under guard and taken to Germany as slave labour.

  Art had written of the grief of Neapolitan mothers mourning for their sons, killed during guerrilla battles with the Nazis, and Bonnie could tell their despair had affected him greatly. Much as they both wanted children, they had agreed that to bring little ones into a world that was so volatile and uncertain was out of the question, and Bonnie had been glad that she had no sons who would be called upon to fight. It was bad enough that Art was in the thick of it; what she would have felt if their children were in the firing line didn’t bear thinking about. Thomas would be fifteen soon, and Bonnie knew Nelly was desperate for the war to be over before there was any chance he would be expected to fight.

  But for now she was thinking solely about the forthcoming trip, and flippant as it might be, her main concern centred on what clothes to take with her, bearing in mind they were going to be in the middle of the Burmese jungle. She would be wearing her ENSA uniform, an unembellished military-looking outfit that didn’t have a whiff of show business about it, but when she performed she wanted to be able to bring a touch of glamour to the proceedings. It was all part of the show and, for men living hand to mouth in the most appalling conditions, even more important, she felt. Basil Dean had warned her to travel light, so eventually she decided on a closefitting red dress that moulded to her curves and flared out from knee to ankle, and a more demure midnight-blue one, packing them carefully into her trunk amid layers of tissue paper.

  Enoch smiled at her as she plumped down beside him in the taxi. He had seen to most of the practical arrangements for the trip and had been like a fussy old woman for weeks, worrying about this and that and fretting that he had forgotten something important, but this morning he seemed bright and perky.

  ‘Well, gal, this is it. We’re off.’

  Bonnie beamed at him. ‘I’m so glad you’re coming with me, Enoch. It makes all the difference to how I feel about everything.’

  Enoch patted her hand. He wouldn’t have let her go without him. No one would take care of her the way he would – except Art, of course – but in truth he’d had the skits for the last few days since the newspapers had reported the death of Orde Wingate, the hero of Burma, in an aircraft crash. The unorthodox general had been the leader of the Chindits and they’d wreaked havoc behind the Japanese lines; if they couldn’t provide him with a good pilot and aeroplane, what chance did he and Bonnie have? He’d asked himself this in his more panicky moments, before trying to reason that accidents could happen to anyone and it had just been bad luck. Nevertheless, the enormity of all the travelling they were embarking on had hit home in the last week, not that he had mentioned his concerns to Gladys or Bonnie. Funnily enough though, this morning he felt better. Whether it was because they were actually on their way, he didn’t know, but a feeling of ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ had quietened his nerves, for which he was grateful.

  For the umpteenth time since he’d opened his eyes that morning he went through the travel arrangements in his mind. They were flying to Gibraltar for the first step of the journey, but because they couldn’t fly a more direct route across occupied France he’d been told the flight would take seven hours across the Atlantic. After an overnight stop the next port of call was North Africa, and then Cairo where they would stay for three days while Bonnie did a couple of performances to entertain troops who’d just returned from fighting in Italy. After a few radio broadcasts they were flying across the Suez Canal, then Transjordan and Iraq, before stopping at Basra. Names of countries and places Enoch had never thought to see went through his mind as he ticked off the route – Bahrain, Dubai, Karachi, Bombay, Calcutta, Chittagong and then finally Burma. And on most of the stops Bonnie would be doing open-air camp shows, as well as visiting hospitals, making radio broadcasts, signing records and pictures and doing any impromptu visits for places like orphanages and displacement camps that they found time for.

  Bonnie was wearing her ENSA uniform, and he glanced at her feet which were encased in sensible brogues. She saw his look and lifted one of her feet as she said, ‘See, I did what you told me and wore good solid shoes, even if they are spectacularly ugly.’

  ‘Believe me, you’ll need them. It’s going to be military aircraft and army trucks from now on.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘I’ll remind you of that in a few days when we’ve been bumped and jolted from pillar to post and we ache all over.’

  Now it was Bonnie who patted his hand. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be fine,’ she said happily, glad the months of waiting were over and she was finally about to do what her heart had been yearning for. ‘You’ll see.’

  They left England’s shores in a Sunderland flying boat, and within a very short time it became apparent that poor Enoch was going to suffer with air-sickness. This, along with the change in climate, prickly heat and the hectic schedule, played havoc with Enoch’s equilibrium over the next seven days before they reached Burma. Bonnie on the other hand felt reasonably well, apart from itching all over from an attack by bedbugs in the first hotel they’d slept at, in Gibraltar. Mosquitoes were proving to be a constant aggravation and she made sure she slept under a net. She felt terribly sorry for Enoch and tried to smooth his way as much as possible – making him sleep in where he could, if it wasn’t essential he accompanied her, and making sure that he didn’t become dehydrated and so on, but at no point did she regret the trip.

  She knew she was meant to be doing this, and it wasn’t only a sense of patriotic duty, as she had said to Art months ago. From the first time Burma had been mentioned, something had happened – a feeling, a conviction, a certainty, call it what you will – and from that point on the pull had been irresistible.

  She hadn’t tried to explain it to anyone because she didn’t understand it herself, but it was real and the driving force in this whole undertaking. Whatever was thrown at her, she would deal with it and get on with her job, she was determined about that.

  She glanced at Enoch now. They were staying in the Officers’ Club at Chittagong which was by no means as grand as it sounded. There was no running water for a start, but at least Bonnie had been able to fill an old tin bath with enough tepid water for a soak of sorts which had been wonderful, although as soon as she had dried herself and got dressed the heat and humidity had made her clothes damp on her back.

  They had been in Chittagong for a day or two and Enoch was feeling a lot better for th
e break from flying. They had done a round of concerts and hospital visits, travelling from venue to venue in an army truck with a driver and NCO, while another soldier drove a lorry holding Enoch’s piano, the microphones and other equipment. Enoch had to plug the amplification system in wherever he could, often into the headlights of vehicles, for the larger concerts. It was difficult because the size of audience could range from a few dozen men in one place to several thousand in another, and they never really knew what they were going into. But Enoch coped manfully with these inconveniences now he was on terra firma.

  Bonnie watched him down his third gin and tonic before she said, ‘So, we’re off into the proper jungle tomorrow. No more civilization.’

  ‘Is that what it’s been thus far?’ Enoch grimaced. They had been told that day that the next leg of the journey was into the hottest and most humid part of Burma along the Bazar–Teknaf Highway to Bawli Bazar. There would be nowhere to stay in some places but grass huts with mats to sleep on and no toilets apart from buckets, just dirt floors and life at its rawest. ‘Make sure you wrap your mosquito nets round you at night,’ one friendly officer had warned them both. ‘And if there is any way you can sleep raised up off the ground, take it. The creepy-crawlies just love soft pink flesh.’ He had grinned at them and Bonnie had laughed, but Enoch hadn’t found it funny. ‘Don’t worry,’ the officer had added, glancing at Enoch’s grim face. ‘The boys’ll make sure you’re all right, even if you sleep in one of the string hammocks the natives use. They’re damn uncomfortable and your back’ll be killing you in the morning, but it’s better than a scorpion or snake bite.’

  Thinking about this previous conversation, Bonnie said, ‘Don’t worry, Enoch, worse things happen at sea.’

  ‘I’ve always thought that saying ridiculous but never more so than this evening.’ Enoch stretched his legs, flexing his ankles which were swollen with the heat as he thought longingly about Gladys and their little house. It had been cold and rainy when they had left England’s shores, and he knew he would never complain about the weather at home again. This combination of heat and humidity was beyond anything he had known before, verging on the unbearable, and the thought of it getting even worse was frightening. It was draining, sapping you of energy and killing your appetite. He’d already had to tighten his belt by a couple of holes.