by S Block
Then everything happened very quickly. Catching the missing pilot had been an absolute priority in the area for both police and army. Six officers were at the farm within twenty minutes. Once they had ascertained that the dead man was the missing German airman, they telephoned for an ambulance to have the body removed. The officer in charge then asked Steph, Little Stan and Isobel what had happened, taking the boy’s words first.
As Stanley spoke, the officer carefully wrote down his account in a small notebook, nodding along with the narrative, stopping Stanley’s flow only for clarification of certain points.
Steph looked up anxiously when she heard Stanley tell the officer that he had been chasing the German, and not the other way around. She assumed her son wanted to appear more heroic in his account, and didn’t contradict him.
Then it was Isobel’s turn to give her version of events, limited to what she had heard and – due to her limited vision since birth – not seen.
Finally, Steph gave her account.
When they had all finished, the officer seemed happy with their combined explanation. Steph asked if the name of the farm could be kept out of the official report. She wanted their lives to be allowed to continue as if this had never happened. The officer seemed doubtful.
‘Difficult, Mrs Farrow,’ he said. ‘Not often a Luftwaffe pilot drops out of the sky and goes on the rampage. People are naturally curious about the details. They’ll want to know where he was found. What he did. What he looked like. Human nature. We can’t help ourselves. The papers will want to know all the relevant details.’
‘But in the story you give to the papers, can’t you just say “farmland” without mentioning which farm?’
The officer looked at her for a few moments, his brow furrowing.
‘Lot of credit coming your way for doing this, Mrs Farrow. Lot of credit. Gratitude. Why wouldn’t you want people to know?’
‘Do you think I’m proud of it?’
‘Most would be.’
‘Did you look at his face? He was no more than twenty years old.’
‘A good Nazi is a dead Nazi. You’ve done a great service to your country,’ he said. Your community’d want to celebrate you, I’m sure.’
‘I just want things to go back to how they were.’
The officer looked at her and could see that Steph had been affected by the event. He nodded sympathetically, and said, ‘I can’t promise, but I’ll do what I can.’
‘Thank you.’
The following day it seemed that the officer had been true to his word. News of the pilot’s death was released. Such was the overall sense of relief, no one seemed interested that the details failed to include specific reference to the land on which the airman had been found – or any mention of the role played by the Farrows in his demise. The statement from the police, as quoted in the local paper, was only that the pilot’s body ‘had been found on farmland on the outskirts of Great Paxford’.
If some Great Paxfordians had been thirsty for more detail, their attention was quickly drawn to the tragic news of Will’s death – a man they loved and revered. Within an instant the dead German appeared to be entirely forgotten; except by Steph, Stanley and Isobel. Steph swore Stanley and Isobel to absolute secrecy about the shooting, despite Stanley being frantic to tell everyone how he had struggled in mortal combat with the armed Nazi, before his mother had killed ‘the Hun’ to save his life.
Steph had wondered if there was to be an investigation into the incident, but the officer thought not.
‘A Nazi was trying to kill your son – you killed him. Case closed.’
Case closed. So why do I see his face everywhere? Why can’t I sleep? Why do I feel like crying all the time? What do I tell Stan? Case bloody open, day and bloody night.
*
Teresa sat beside her new husband, Wing Commander Nick Lucas, in the middle of the congregation, her hand resting lightly on his. She was trying to decide what to say to Erica and her daughters at the end of the service. Teresa’s only previous experience of funerals had been of three elderly relatives, where both the proceedings and consoling words were pithy. Teresa learned that when an elderly person dies you mourn the loss but celebrate the life that went before it. Though Erica and the Reverend James had done their very best to celebrate Will’s life and service to the community, everyone knew that at forty-seven he had died too young.
Teresa knew that Nick had acquired more experience than he could have ever wished of how to respond to tragic death, having to write letters of condolence to parents of young airmen killed in action almost daily. When Teresa had asked him what she should say to Erica on their walk up to church, he suggested she simply say what she felt in the moment.
‘If you try and think of the right thing in advance the danger is it will sound rehearsed and rather hollow. You’re a highly intelligent, intuitive woman. See how you feel at the time. I guarantee that whatever you say, it will be the right thing.’
‘Is that how you write your letters? What you feel at the time?’ she asked.
‘There’s a world of difference. I don’t know the bereaved. I’m a figure of authority representing the RAF. And I have too many of these damned letters to write. If I wrote what I felt each time they would be unfit to send. But Erica is your friend. You might not know the right thing to say now, but it will come. Trust me. I’ve never known you to put a foot wrong in the time we’ve been together. Not once. It simply isn’t in you. You make everyone you encounter feel at ease.’
When the service ended and the villagers shuffled silently out of St Mark’s, Teresa walked towards Erica standing beside Will’s coffin, and wrapped her arms around her and held her tight.
‘I’ve not known him as long as most here today, Erica. But in the short time I’ve been in the village I’ve come to appreciate what a wonderful, wonderful man he was. I can’t begin to understand how you’re feeling, but if there’s anything you or the girls need, come to us. Please.’
Erica whispered, ‘Thank you . . .’
‘I mean it.’
‘I know. Look after Nick,’ Erica said softly. ‘We never know what’s around the corner.’
Teresa stepped back to watch Erica and her girls become encircled by well-wishers waiting to offer their profound condolences. She relocated Nick, who had been watching Teresa from the main entrance.
‘How was it?’ he asked as she approached.
‘Fine, I think,’ she replied, thinking Nick looked the most handsome man present in his uniform.
‘You’re incapable of putting a foot wrong.’
Teresa kissed him on the cheek and felt a sharp pang of guilt as she recalled the moment she had leaned forward and kissed Annie passionately just a week before in hospital. How could she betray her new husband like that? And with one of his closest friends? Having crash-landed a Hurricane she had been delivering to Tabley Wood, Annie had come close to losing her life. Motionless and pale beneath the white bedsheets, Annie had looked so vulnerable and helpless as she lay recovering from surgery.
By any normal measure, I certainly put a foot wrong by doing that. Two feet. I wish Nick didn’t think I was perfect. When I visit Annie, it isn’t out of duty, as a ‘friend’. Life would be so much easier if it was.
Teresa felt Nick thread his arm through hers.
‘Let’s go home and make love,’ he whispered in her ear, with a smile. ‘I have an urgent need to re-affirm the life-force!’
*
Pat and Bob Simms stood in silence in the cemetery grounds that encircled St Mark’s, as Joyce, Frances, and Sarah chatted with Erica. Pat felt acutely self-conscious that they were standing within sight of the flat headstone on which she and her lover had hidden notes for one another when he was stationed nearby with his regiment. Bob had discovered their means of exchanging notes via the headstone while Marek had been stationed in Cheshire, and Pat now wondered if he felt its proximity as she did. Her pulse surged for a moment in panic, then subsided to
its resting rhythm.
Let Bob fixate on the past. Marek and I are focused on the future. Pat watched Alison Scotlock engaged in an intense conversation with Laura, who was nodding intently. Pat wondered what Alison might be saying to the girl, then remembered Alison’s husband George had died just days before the end of the First War, and imagined she might be telling Laura about her own experience of grief and loss, and how all things eventually pass. It’s what she believed herself about her thirteen-year marriage to Bob, which had long-since turned sour. Pat glanced at him. Bob was quietly rolling a cigarette.
If you had been killed at Dunkirk, I wonder what I would have felt? At the time, I assumed I wouldn’t grieve at all. I hated you intensely, and remember lying in bed hoping you’d be killed. But if it had actually happened, I suppose it’s possible I’d have remembered the man you were when we first met, and grieved for him? And by extension, in time, for the life we might have had in place of the life you forced upon us? Grief for time lost. I think that’s the only way I could have got through any kind of funeral service for you – focused on the man you used to be, and might have been. Not who you became.
Bob was now looking at Erica and the girls.
‘I suppose you need to go and say something to Erica and the girls,’ he said, clearly wishing to leave.
‘Shouldn’t you as well? Will was very good to you when you came back from Dunkirk.’
‘He performed a service for which I paid him.’
‘He made himself available day and night.’
‘Uhuh . . . so he could charge me more.’
‘Bob, not everyone is obsessed by money.’
‘I’ve yet to meet a doctor who isn’t. The man thought we were beneath him, Patricia, and you know it.’
Pat felt a small wave of fury rise within.
‘I’m going to offer our condolences,’ she said.
‘Fine. I’ll see you at the house.’
Pat walked away from Bob, towards Erica and her daughters.
Don’t look back.
If she had, she would have seen Bob skulking away from St Mark’s, a cigarette already between his lips.
As she approached the Campbells, Pat felt less afraid of Bob than she had been for as long as she could remember. Whether it was because he had been unable to physically attack her while they lodged with Joyce Cameron, or whether it was because the contact she now had with Marek gave her greater strength to endure any onslaught from her husband was difficult to say. Marek was a source of inspiration and strength in his own right. Whatever the reason, Pat had recently started to respond to Bob’s digs and sporadic outbursts with a grain of disdain mixed into her sense of dread. Standing up to him still left Pat feeling sick to her stomach. Yet the nauseous feeling was worth the look in his eye that she hadn’t previously seen: a glimmer of panic that his power over her was no longer as complete as it had been. As she drew level with the Campbell women, Pat cleared her head of all thoughts of Bob, and held Erica in her arms. It reminded her of the last time she had held Erica, in the aftermath of the Spitfire crash that had decimated each of their homes.
‘Will was the most remarkable man,’ she whispered. ‘I always felt blessed to be your immediate neighbours.’
Erica knew she was referring to Will’s ability to patch Pat up whenever Bob had struck her, without ever prying.
‘He knew what you put up with,’ said Erica, only slightly cryptically.
Pat nodded. ‘He always respected my privacy. Never asked me what had happened. Never put me in a difficult position.’
‘He’d always wait for a patient to take the lead with a matter like that.’
Pat’s eyes opened a little wider with surprise. ‘There were others?’
‘Of course, Pat, dear. Many others.’
As Erica said the words Pat instantly felt how naive it was of her to believe that what happened between her and Bob happened to no other woman and their husband.
‘It never occurred to me,’ she said.
‘Will saw it almost every month. He respected the difficult position most of the women were in. He didn’t want to add to their burden by prying.’
‘I was lucky to have him as my doctor,’ Pat said after a moment. ‘We all were.’
‘As was I to have him as my husband and companion,’ said Erica. ‘The luckiest woman in the world.’
Chapter 4
ON THE NIGHT following Will’s funeral Steph struggled to sleep. The bedroom was dark enough, and with just a light breeze blowing through the farm beyond the window there was little noise to keep her awake. Yet she was unable to settle into that dark, quiet space where consciousness dissolves. Instead, her mind began repeating Stanley’s pleas for help and the German pilot’s shouts for Stanley to stop crying out. And then the blast from the shotgun that Steph had been holding, which had silenced both young men. And it wasn’t only the sounds that repeated in Steph’s mind. It was also the images.
After what seemed like hours, and with a long day in the fields ahead of her, Steph gave up. She lay in bed doll-like, staring up at the ceiling. She turned her head to the left and imagined her husband lying in his customary position, his back curled away from her. She stretched out an arm and placed her hand on his pillow and wondered how much longer he would be in training before he got deployed. After a few moments, Steph pulled the pillow over and buried her face in it to see if there was any vestige of Stan’s aroma left. Some trace of his sweat perhaps, or the oil he used in his hair. But the pillow only smelled of carbolic soap.
Steph suddenly pictured the dead pilot’s face staring up at the sky and felt wretched to her core. She covered her face with her hands and began to silently cry. The surge of despair subsided after a few minutes. Steph lay face down on the mattress with her eyes open, the pillow now tear-damp on her face.
Ten minutes later, still awake, Steph got out of bed, slipped on her dressing gown, and crept downstairs so as not to wake Stanley.
At the bottom of the stairs Steph crossed to the kitchen window behind the sink and looked out. The night’s gloom reduced the farmyard to indefinable dark shapes and lumps. But as her eyes grew accustomed Steph began to see beyond the farmyard and into the field. There she could just about pick out the figure of her son fleeing across the far field, and the figure of the German pilot in pursuit. She heard Stanley’s screams and the pilot’s shouts. And then she heard the shot.
Steph felt herself unsteady on her feet and turned away from the window. She was breathing hard. She crossed to the dresser and opened the left-hand drawer that contained the farm’s paperwork. Slipping her hand beneath the documents she allowed her fingers to root around for a few moments until they made contact with a slim, soft leather wallet. She pulled it out and took it over to the kitchen table. She sat and held the wallet in her hands, staring at it, feeling the weight of it as proof that what she could no longer stop thinking about had really happened. As she had already done many times, Steph opened the wallet and saw the German pilot’s documentation from the Luftwaffe. She looked at his name. Christophe Hauer. He was twenty years old. There were other details, but the pilot’s name and age were all the information Steph could comprehend.
Christophe Hauer. Christophe. Not Christopher. Here he would be Christopher. But in Germany he was Christophe. I prefer it. It’s softer.
When the officer who had taken their statements asked if either Steph or Little Stan had found any personal effects on the airman, or in the small camp he had made for himself in the wood beyond the far field, both shook their heads. It was true in Stanley’s case. However, after they’d moved Christophe’s body into the barn as protection from crows and foxes, Steph had found herself alone with the corpse for a few minutes.
In the silent, still air of the barn, Steph hadn’t been able to take her eyes off the lifeless German at her feet.
When the authorities arrive, he’ll be taken away. It’ll be like this never happened.
Eager to find out what sh
e could while she could, Steph had knelt beside the dead man and searched the pockets of his flying jacket and trousers. She’d quickly found the wallet she now held at her kitchen table, and slipped it into her trouser pocket.
In addition to the pilot’s identification papers, the wallet also contained a little German currency and a photograph of the pilot dressed in his Luftwaffe uniform with two smartly dressed older people, who Steph presumed were Christophe’s parents. The trio were photographed in a formal, unsmiling pose, seated side by side at a table inside a photographer’s studio. The words on the back of the photograph read, ‘München, 1939’. The absence of anyone else in the picture made Steph believe Christophe was an only child.
Like my Little Stan.
She estimated Christophe’s mother was around her age, and wondered if she knew that her only child was dead. Or would she just be told he was missing in action? Or would she know nothing at all, and continue to believe he was still alive, fighting for his country? Steph had little idea how the English government relayed news of dead personnel to loved ones, let alone how the Germans handled such news.
Perhaps Nazis don’t care what happens to their boys. Perhaps they celebrate the sacrifice for the Fatherland.
Steph couldn’t understand how any mother could celebrate the death of their child, Nazi or not. She felt tears once again begin to roll down her cheeks. She cried often since the incident, sometimes without even knowing she was. She could be walking around the farm and catch sight of the far field, and stop and stare at it, as if it had forever changed into something hostile and fearful. The next moment, tears would fall from her face onto her overalls.
I never shouted at him to stop. I never gave him a chance to look up and see the shotgun. I just aimed and pulled the trigger. I panicked. There’s no other word for it.
In Steph’s mind death was part of the seasonal rhythm of the farm, a state of no return, with no time for sentimentality. With so much work to do, the concept of heaven made little sense to her, except as something reassuring for those who needed it. In her view, the constant renewal of death with life underpinned the natural world. But the incident with the pilot was different. A life had been taken unnaturally, before it should have been. And she, Steph Farrow, had taken it – another thing that should never have happened in the natural course of things.
