‘Where’s he got to?’ Baby said. The skirt of her lovely dress was all creased at the back where she’d sat down and her patience was beginning to crease too. ‘All that carry-on about me not keeping him waiting and now this.’ She looked very disagreeable. ‘Stand still Norman, you’re scuffing all your shoes.’
‘I’ve only got two,’ Norman pointed out, with the devastating logic of the ten-year-old.
But she wasn’t amused.
Finally when the clocks had all struck midday, the curate appeared to say that he was most frightfully sorry but the next wedding party had arrived and as they were due in the church at twelve o’clock he really would have to ask her to make way for them.
‘But I ain’t been married,’ she protested, flushed with anger and humiliation.
‘Yes, yes, I know,’ he said sadly. ‘But we can hardly marry you without a groom, can we?’
‘I shall stay here,’ she said. ‘I shall stay here until he arrives.’
‘You may stay if you wish, of course,’ he said, ‘but your party have already gone back to your house.’
The walk back home was the longest and most humiliating return of her life. She kept her head up and her eyes straight in front of her gazing at nothing, but her cheeks were scarlet and she was panting with distress, and when she got back to the house and had to step inside where all her guests were waiting for her, fury and shame rose in her like a hot tide. She was trapped, marked, rejected. How could this be happening to her? There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide and they were all looking at her, laughing at her, mocking her. She put back her head and began to scream. And once unleashed the scream went on and on, higher and higher, while her guests fell back before her, shocked and deafened.
‘Just like her mother,’ Mrs Geary said to the astonished assembly, as Joan and Peggy leapt towards her and half-led half-dragged her through the throng and upstairs into the relative privacy of her bedroom.
‘Don’t,’ Peggy begged. ‘Oh don’t, Baby please. You’ll make yourself ill.’
But her sister threw herself across the bed and went on screaming.
‘Leave her be,’ Joan advised in a whisper. ‘I reckon she’ll get over it better if she’s on her own. It can’t be much fun to be seen in a state like that, poor thing. Let’s go down and explain to the others.’
‘How can we explain?’ Peggy said. ‘What are we gonna say?’
‘Say he’s been delayed,’ Joan advised. ‘Train not running or something.’
But the guests were already listening to another explanation, which the sisters heard as they went down the stairs.
‘Jilted,’ Nonnie Brown was saying with great satisfaction. ‘ ’S the same the whole world over. Can’t face it when it comes to it, none of them, and off they goes. Men! Wouldn’t give you tuppence for ’em. Leave you in the lurch soon as look at yer. ’S always the same. Cyril was the same. Weren’t yer, mate?’
Cyril looked very surprised at this and so did his neighbours.
‘We might as well eat the food,’ Peggy said, bringing in a plate of sandwiches from the kitchen. ‘It’ll only go to waste else, even if he turns up tomorrow.’
‘Quite right,’ Gideon said, stepping in to help her. ‘Long past my dinner-time. Whatcher got? I’ll have a bloater paste.’
So they fed their guests and poured them beer and lemonade shandies and brown ale for Gideon and a nice port and lemon for Mrs Roderick, and the first embarrassment was eased away. Mr Allnutt said what a shame it all was, and Mrs Allnutt told them she was sure there was an explanation for it. ‘Something to do with the war,’ she said. ‘Bound to be. Trains not running or broken down or something. He’ll turn up tomorrow like Peggy says, you’ll see. Poor boy. It ain’t just Baby. It’s as bad for him really.’
And although they didn’t all believe in her excuses, most of the guests agreed with her if only for politeness’ sake. At one o’clock the party from Dodds took their leave, saying how sorry they were and how much they hoped it would all turn out for the best, and once they’d gone the neighbours left en masse, shuffling out in renewed embarrassment, not knowing what to say. Gideon and Ethel were the last to leave, urging Joan to keep them posted.
‘Anything we can do, you know where we are,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ Peggy said. But what could any of them do? They’d have to wait for the explanation, the same as Baby.
Joan began to gather up the dirty glasses. Now that the guests were gone they could hear Baby sobbing in the room above their heads.
‘What are we going to do with her?’ Peggy wondered, glancing up at the ceiling.
‘Leave her be,’ Mrs Geary said. ‘She’ll get over it. She’ll probably get a letter tomorrow explaining it all.’
But Joan wasn’t sure. ‘It makes me think of Mum and the way she went on that time,’ she said.
‘If she ain’t better by tomorrow,’ Peggy decided, ‘we’ll get the doctor to her.’
‘The letter’ll do the trick,’ Mrs Geary said.
But no letter came and Baby was still weeping two days later. By then Joan insisted that a doctor was necessary.
She came late that afternoon, a brisk young woman with a weary smile and no time to spare. She took Baby’s temperature, which was normal, and her pulse which was normal, and looked down her throat, which she pronounced ‘normal for a woman who’s been crying too much’.
‘There’s nothing much the matter with you except hurt pride,’ she said. ‘You should get up and get on with your life. That’s my advice.’
‘Shouldn’t she have some medicine?’ Peggy asked as the doctor began to walk downstairs.
‘No,’ the doctor said without looking back. ‘If she starts screaming again, slap her. And now if you’ll pardon me I’ve got some real patients to attend to.’
‘What a perfectly beastly doctor!’ Baby wailed. ‘Can’t she see my heart’s been broke? Oh how could he do this to me? That’s what I can’t understand. If he was here I’d give him such a piece of my mind. And he hasn’t even written to me. He might have written. Oh, if I knew where he was …’
But Sergeant Gary Svenson was beyond her reach and her anger. Operation Tiger, the manoeuvre he’d told her about, had gone very badly wrong. Thirty miles out to sea, at half past one in the morning, the American landing craft and their two escorting destroyers had met up with a flotilla of German E-boats, which they hadn’t expected and weren’t prepared for. In the ensuing battle hundreds of Americans were killed. At the very moment when Baby was walking so unhappily back from the church, Gary Svenson’s bullet-ridden body was being washed ashore. It was found at a place called Slapton Sands and, like all the other casualties of the incident, it was never reported. With the invasion so close too many other lives were at risk to let such a devastating secret out to the press.
But what was good for national morale was devastating to Baby. Despite the doctor’s diagnosis she continued to suffer. She stayed in her room for the next ten days, with the blinds drawn and only the wireless for company, her hair uncombed and her face puffy with tears and pallid for lack of make-up. Mrs Geary said she had too good an appetite to be really ill, because she ate everything that Peggy brought up to her, but her woebegone appearance roused her sister’s tender compassion.
‘I feel so sorry for her,’ she said, ‘being jilted. And I’m sure she was jilted otherwise he’d have written. That doctor was heartless. I think she’s ill with her nerves. Like Mum.’
But on the second Friday morning Baby had a visitor who improved her health quite dramatically. It was Mr Dodds, no less, and Mr Dodds had a question for his employee.
‘We need to know how we stand,’ he said, when he’d waited for Baby to make herself presentable and had been ushered into the sick room, ‘vis-à-vis your reserved occupation. If you’re not well enough to return to work on Monday we may have to make some other arrangements. For Miss Doris perhaps.’
Baby made up her mind at once. ‘I’m ever so much better
, Mr Dodds,’ she said. ‘It was a shock you see, but I’m ever so much better. In fact I was thinking of coming in tomorrow, knowing what a rush Saturday is, only my sisters said I shouldn’t.’
‘Monday would be soon enough,’ Mr Dodds said. ‘It’s just we had to know, you understand.’
‘Of course,’ Baby said giving him her sweetest smile. ‘It’s ever so good of you to come round.’
She went back to work the next morning, looking pale and withdrawn and wearing her oldest cardigan to ensure that people would feel sorry for her.
From then on she went to work as usual every day, but at home she took to her bed as soon as she’d eaten her supper, declaring that her nerves were ‘in shreds’, and she didn’t emerge from her room until after she’d been served breakfast there in the morning. At the weekend she stayed in bed from Saturday evening till Monday morning, listening to her wireless and playing patience, with her hair in curlers and her face covered in cold cream and a bottle of Sanatogen ostentatiously at her elbow.
‘And how long’s this going on?’ Joan said to Peggy crossly, when a month had passed and she was still playing the invalid.
‘Don’t you be cross an’ all,’ Peggy begged. ‘It’s hard enough dealing with her.’
‘Have you told Jim what she’s doing?’
‘No,’ Peggy admitted. She didn’t like to, because she had a feeling he’d been rather less than sympathetic. Everyone was being so horrid about poor Baby. She couldn’t help having nerves.
‘Well you should,’ Joan said.
‘Give her time,’ Peggy said.
‘I know what I’d give her,’ Joan said trenchantly. ‘That doctor was right if you ask me.’
CHAPTER 39
It was one o’clock on Tuesday 6 June 1944, and like everyone else in Britain, Peggy and Joan and Mrs Geary were listening to the wireless. John Snagge was reading the news with his usual splendid calm, and on that afternoon his calm was even more admirable than usual for this bulletin was the one they’d all been waiting years to hear. ‘Under the command of General Eisenhower,’ he said, ‘Allied naval forces supported by strong air forces began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.’
‘It’s started,’ Joan said. ‘Thank God for that. It’s started at last.’
‘An’ about time too,’ Mrs Geary said.
But Peggy was thinking of all the men who must have died during the morning while she’d been shopping and doing the washing and on call, not aware of what was happening. She could see them falling, hear their groans and cries, imagine their injuries. ‘Poor devils,’ she said. And she thought of Froggy who’d be going over as soon as there was a landing strip, and of Jim, who’d be going too with the Second Tactical Air Force. ‘Poor devils.’
She wasn’t supposed to know about any of these things, of course. There were posters everywhere warning of the danger of careless talk, and, letters had been rigorously censored for months. Even Irish workmen had their mail opened, according to Mr Cooper, because there were plenty of Germans in the South of Ireland primed to listen to gossip. And during the last few months there’d been plenty to gossip about for it was plain to everybody that preparations for the invasion were reaching a climax.
The last time she’d been down to Vine Cottage Peggy had been impressed by the long queues of tanks and armoured vehicles that she’d seen standing nose to tail in every country lane, bulky under their camouflage netting, massively waiting. She was used to the sight and sound of squadrons of American Flying Fortresses passing overhead on their way to bomb the Germans but in recent weeks they’d been roaring past every hour of the day and night and the roads had been choked with military convoys going to and fro in every direction in the most confusing way but with every vehicle clearly marked by the new bold sign of the Combined Armies of Liberation, a simple white star inside a white ring. There was such tension everywhere, such bristling non-stop activity. She and Joan had told one another only yesterday that they couldn’t see how any of it could be kept secret no matter how hard anyone tried.
But now D-Day had arrived and they learned with surprise that the greatest secret of all had been kept from almost everybody, and that was the location of the landings. By skilful misinformation the Germans had been persuaded to expect this invasion in the Pas de Calais, and had sent the bulk of their panzer divisions there in readiness. And now the Combined Armies of Liberation were in France at last, on the beaches of Normandy, where they were least expected. And the final battle had begun.
‘Good luck to ’em,’ Joan said. ‘It all depends on them now.’
That evening the newspapers trumpeted the good news. ‘Landings Succeed.’ ‘Beachheads wider and deeper.’ ‘Nazi defences gunned into silence.’
But among the reports from the front Peggy noticed one small paragraph warning about the likelihood of reprisal raids on London and hinting that Hitler had a secret weapon that he might use at any time. And being Peggy she remembered all the rumours about robot bombs and took it seriously.
‘We’re not out of the wood yet,’ she said to Mr MacFarlane that evening, ‘are we?’
‘No lassie,’ he agreed. ‘Not by a long chalk.’
Froggy Ferguson was sent to France five days after the invasion. They’d been on stand-by since D-Day plus two and it was all such a rush he only just had time for a quick dash to Merston to say goodbye to Megan and little Winnie, who was out in the garden happily making mud-pies when he arrived.
‘Look after yourself,’ he said, being brisk about it because it would have been a poor show to break down or weep or anything.
‘You’ve got to come back, Froggy,’ Megan said, blinking back her tears. ‘I’m not sure ‘cos I’ve only missed a month, but that’s not like me, you know, so I think I’m expecting again.’
Emotion caught him by the throat despite himself. Another child, just when he was going to France.
‘Good show,’ he said, gulping. ‘You’ll look after yourself, won’t you. Take the orange juice. That sort of thing. And look after little Winnie.’
‘Oh Froggy,’ Megan said flinging her arms round his neck. ‘Please don’t get killed. I love you so much.’
‘Me too,’ he said holding her close, his face strained and pale. ‘Promise me you’ll look after yourself. I can’t bear to leave you. You mean everything to me.’
‘Yes, yes, yes. I promise.’ Say you love me, Froggy. Say it. I couldn’t bear you to go without saying you loved me.
‘I’ll be thinking of you,’ he said. He was half-way into the driver’s seat as if he was eager to be off. Which in a peculiar sort of way he was. The sooner they got stuck into this war and finished it for good and all, the better. And yet going meant leaving her. And leaving her meant he might never see her again.
‘Oh God, Megan, I do love you so,’ he said. And started the car.
The long battle continued as the invading armies struggled to get off the beachheads and capture the hinterland, and Froggy’s Typhoons were in the thick of it from the moment they arrived. But it wasn’t until 12 June that news broke that the American Airborne Division had captured a town. It was a place called Carenton, and its capture meant that the Allies were on their way to the port of Cherbourg. That night when Peggy and Mr MacFarlane came on duty Mr Goodall had all three evening papers ready for them to read all about it.
There was so much to talk about that at the end of their shift they were still discussing the progress of the campaign, standing outside the Post and watching the sky, not that they expected to see anything in it, but out of force of habit.
Mr MacFarlane was the first to hear the engine. ‘Yon plane’s in trouble,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ Peggy said, for she didn’t recognize the sound of the engine. ‘Ours or theirs?’
It was making a very peculiar noise whatever it was. A terrible rattling and clattering.
‘There it is,’ Mr Goodall said. ‘It’s on fire.’
There was a bu
rning plane heading towards them from the south-east. They could see red flames spurting out of it into the dark sky. But to their amazement it was flying straight. Straight and fast, about 400 mph according to Mr MacFarlane, and very low. Much too low for an enemy aircraft.
They watched as it rattled overhead and flew on towards the river. To Peggy’s eyes there was something alien about it, something dark and sinister and unnerving.
‘I don’t think that’s a plane at all,’ she said. ‘On fire and flying straight?’
And the engine suddenly cut out. There was a long pause and then a very loud explosion, much louder and longer than any ordinary high explosive bomb, more like the sound of an exploding bomber fully loaded.
Next day the newspapers reported that a German aircraft had been shot down in the East End. But the wardens were told the truth about it. They had seen the first of Hitler’s vengeance weapons, the flying bomb he called VI.
‘God help us all,’ Mr MacFarlane said, when he’d read the bulletin. ‘Have we no’ had sufficient?’
But it appeared not. For three days there was no further sign of the robot planes, but then the attack began in earnest, and they were launched against London one after the other.
They looked even more sinister by daylight than they had at night, flying at such speed with flames trailing behind them, black and quick and mindlessly cruel. And as everyone in London soon became aware, the damage they did was much much worse than that of an ordinary bomb. The explosion shattered windows a quarter of a mile away such was the force of the blast. People were blown into the air and hurled against walls and furniture. Some were stabbed by spears of flying glass or injured by the rubble that was flung in every direction, and those directly under the impact of the warhead were literally blown to pieces.
After attending her first horrific incident Peggy came home to tell Joan that she must send the kids out of harm’s way the minute she could.
‘Megan would have them, I’ll bet,’ she said. ‘They’d be company for her and Winnie now Froggy’s gone. Why don’t we write to Megan?’
London Pride Page 52
