A Woman's War

by S Block

  ‘What are you doing, Mr Bennett?’ Laura asked.

  ‘Seeking the doctor within!’ he declared, lowering the binoculars with a chuckle.

  Laura persisted. ‘Do you think it ridiculous?’

  ‘Why should it be ridiculous?’

  ‘Because becoming a doctor hadn’t occurred to me before he mentioned it.’

  ‘I see. Well, at what age did you learn to ride a bicycle?’

  ‘I can’t remember exactly. About nine or ten, I suppose.’

  ‘Not earlier?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not – a lot of children do?’

  ‘Didn’t want to.’

  ‘And now you ride around like an expert.’

  ‘I don’t know about “expert”, but I suppose I’m as good as anyone.’

  ‘And what happened aged nine or ten to prompt you to learn?’

  ‘My sister told me I should so we could go riding together.’

  ‘Do you see?’ said Brian. ‘It took someone else to spark your interest, but once sparked you dived in and ran – or cycled away – with it.’

  Laura saw the point Brian was trying to make, then just as instantly recognised its flaw.

  ‘But shouldn’t wanting to become a doctor come from within? From a sense of vocation?’ In effect, she was putting to Brian the same argument Tom had put to her.

  ‘These terms – “a sense of vocation” - what do they really mean? What is a sense of vocation, Laura? When does it begin? What doctor or chemist or astronomer can put their hand on their heart and say, “This was the moment I knew beyond all doubt I would become what I am today.” Not one. Perhaps, living in your father’s impressive shadow had made you secretly believe you were not clever enough to become what he was, closing all thought you might be a doctor too. Yet he could see it in you, even if you wouldn’t even look to see it in yourself.’

  Laura looked across at Brian Bennett and felt her heart pump with excitement. What if he’s right?!

  ‘My dear girl,’ he continued, ‘we must each find our own way through life. At times the path is crystal clear. Other times, it’s confusing, or even obscured completely. If, on those occasions, we’re lucky enough to find people who can point us in the right direction we shouldn’t discard their insight because we feel we should have had it ourselves. We need all the help we can get to make a go of things. You’re young. Your head is pulled in all sorts of directions from one minute to the next. You can’t think of – or notice – everything.’

  ‘You think I should listen to my father’s advice?’

  ‘Who knew you better than anyone?’

  ‘My mother and father.’

  ‘And of the two of them? Not who loves you more, because we must assume they loved you equally. But who would you say knows you best?’

  It was a difficult question in one way, and easy in another. Laura didn’t want to be disloyal to her mother but she knew that her father understood her better than anyone else did, or probably ever would. Throughout her childhood Laura was routinely known as ‘daddy’s little girl’.

  ‘My father,’ Laura said quietly.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Brian. ‘There you very much are.’

  Brian returned the binoculars to his eyes and turned his face once more to the stars.

  ‘That doesn’t mean you have to become a doctor, of course. That remains your choice. But in your position, I would at least consider your father’s words as an invitation to take yourself seriously. Don’t forget, when you applied to join the corps you hadn’t been an observer before. I was opposed to you joining. But when you fought for it I saw something in you and decided, yes, this girl might have what it takes.’

  ‘Does it take much to stare at the sky, Mr Bennett?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. But it takes a great deal to sit patiently by yourself for hours on end, and then spring into action when the telephone rings, keep calm under pressure, keep the binns steady and in focus, and provide precise, detailed information that could save the lives of airmen when they are scrambled on the information we give Fighter Command. Without us the air-raid warning system can’t operate, and interceptions can’t be made.’

  Laura pulled her collar around her neck against the night air. She could already taste the frost in it.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.

  ‘Right now . . . Polaris,’ he said. ‘Alpha Ursae Minoris. Also known as the North Star or Pole Star. The brightest star in the constellation of Ursa Minor.’

  ‘You know so much.’

  ‘Some might say that what I know amounts to a mass of useless information.’

  ‘Where did your interest in astronomy come from?’ she asked.

  He lowered the binoculars and looked at her, and chuckled.

  ‘In all honesty . . . I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Why do you like it so much?’

  ‘Puts everything into perspective. Makes everything very clear, at least to me.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I look up and take great comfort from the fact that there is no sense to be made of anything really. There’s no hidden meaning to any of it. It just is. So why worry unduly? Of course, that’s easy for me to say because I’m sixty-seven, but I like to think I thought the same when I was half my age. Take what I say with a pinch of salt. My life’s on the wane. Yours lies ahead of you. You’ve no choice but to worry about everything until you find a place in all this. So. Forgetting everyone else, what does Laura Campbell want to do with her life?’

  Laura looked at the kindly, lively face regarding her, waiting for her answer. Brian wasn’t being nosey or putting pressure on her to commit to anything she didn’t wish to commit to. He simply wanted to see if Laura could answer the question.

  Laura thought for a moment and then opened her mouth to speak. At that precise moment, the telephone rang from Sector Control, warning of an inbound Luftwaffe raid of up to forty aircraft, half an hour to the east, on the run in to Liverpool. In an instant, all thought of herself evaporated from Laura’s mind and she gave herself over to her training. Brian immediately telephoned Tabley Wood and half a dozen other stations in the region with the information of the inbound raid, and within minutes they could hear the distant crackle of local aircraft being fired up for take-off.

  Moments later, they heard the elegant hum of Spitfires overhead, and then the louder roar of Hurricanes as they set off to intercept the enemy.

  Laura and Brian watched through their binoculars as the aircraft disappeared over the horizon to take up defensive formations high above the altitude of the approaching bombers – from which they would swoop down and wreak havoc.

  They waited with bated breath. They knew they had a few minutes before the sky would explode with tracer fire. As Brian had instructed her, Laura used the time to make a final check of the instruments used to calculate the altitude and distance of approaching aircraft. Brian had his binoculars glued to the horizon throughout.

  ‘Battle stations, Laura. Here we go . . .’

  The distant drone of the German bombers was carried on the freezing air from twenty miles away.

  Laura lifted her own binoculars to the sky and waited for the first pricks of darting tracers to make themselves apparent. The independent focus on her binoculars was set, so she carefully adjusted the main focus. With a tiny movement of her thumb on the focus wheel everything suddenly came into sharp resolution – first the moon, and then, like tiny shooting stars skittering across the dark canopy, tracer fire to and from the approaching German planes.

  ‘Someone’s made a mistake!’ Laura shouted. ‘There’s more than forty coming! Lots more!’

  Brian lifted the telephone receiver and looked at Laura. ‘Estimate?!’ he barked.

  ‘Over a hundred! Perhaps more!’

  Brian swallowed hard and dialled Sector Command.

  ‘Put your helmet on, Doctor Campbell,’ he shouted, ‘this could get very, very busy!’

&n
bsp; Chapter 13

  IT WAS 8.24 P.M. WHEN the air-raid warning spilled out across the region. Where once the siren spurred each Great Paxfordian to race for the community shelter at the Barden house, the alarm had become so familiar, and its consequences for those living beneath it so remote, that only the most neurotic and fearful still hurried to safety. The rest either walked at a leisurely pace, or calculated the odds of being struck by a German bomb and stayed at home. It was hot and sweat-inducing enough inside the cellar, so why make themselves even more uncomfortable by unnecessary exertion?

  Many cautious types – such as Sarah Collingborne, Alison Scotlock, Pat and Bob Simms, Teresa Lucas – stuck by the early estimate that their greatest chance of survival was by taking the least chance at all times. This meant going to the Barden shelter to sit out each and every raid, because the Barden shelter was by far the best in the village.

  Superstitious types – such as Miriam Brinsley, Joyce Cameron, Mrs Talbot – worked a more primitive rationale. For them, going to the Barden shelter during a raid had kept them alive so far, so if they continued going it should keep them alive in future – while this logic was flawed because past safety is no guarantee of future safety, it made sense to them on an intuitive level, and allowed them to feel they were in the hands of a higher power of some sort.

  When the air raid sounded the women clearing away that night’s soup kitchen looked up for a moment, then continued to clean up at the same pace as before, knowing they would get to the shelter soon enough, and wait with mounting boredom for the all-clear.

  *

  Before leaving for the evening shift at the soup kitchen, Teresa had set out a cottage pie for Nick to heat up in the event he came home for supper. She cycled through the village smiling as she reflected on the hospital visit she’d had with Annie that afternoon. They’d played Scrabble for a while, before Teresa gently turned the conversation towards Annie’s convalescence.

  ‘I haven’t given it any thought, if I’m honest,’ Annie replied.

  ‘Don’t you think you should?’

  ‘I suppose. I rather hoped I could stay here, and you could keep visiting as often as you have been.’

  Teresa smiled. ‘Not much fun for me, though is it? Cycling over here every day to play Scrabble with someone who’s barely literate.’

  ‘What chance do I have against a schoolteacher?’ Annie protested. ‘The odds are stacked against me.’

  ‘Ex-schoolteacher,’ Teresa reminded her.

  ‘You’ll be back in a classroom soon enough. Things will change after the war,’ Annie said, with a certainty Teresa had always found immensely appealing. ‘Women are capable of everything men are in every sphere of life. Do you really think shooting planes out of the sky comes naturally to boys? Flying doesn’t come naturally to our species. They’re not unaffected by what they do. Far from it. But they go up the next day and do it all over again, because that’s their job. It would be the same for women.’

  ‘You really believe you could do that?’

  ‘Easy to be told I couldn’t when I’m not even given the opportunity to try. We’re at war. We’re all finding out what we’re capable of in extremis, wouldn’t you say?’

  Teresa nodded. She had certainly discovered all manner of new things about herself since war broke out.

  *

  As her shift at the church drew to an end, Teresa imagined what life might be like with Annie at the house. She pictured them taking walks together, and reading together, though Teresa had never seen Annie read. She imagined Annie at the kitchen table, laughing as Teresa struggled to achieve another new recipe for Nick’s benefit. Mostly, she saw them sitting with one another at night while Nick was away at Tabley Wood; or sitting as a trio when Nick returned from the station, drinking whisky and sitting in silence. The thought of entering almost any room in the house and finding Annie within excited Teresa greatly. She was still thinking about it when the air-raid siren sounded at 8.24 p.m., and wrenched her from her reverie.

  ‘Off to the shelter?’ Alison asked, approaching from the makeshift kitchen.

  Teresa turned to her oldest friend in the village and smiled.

  ‘I assume nights like this are when you worry most about Nick. I know he doesn’t go up with the rest of the boys, but he must find it excruciatingly stressful waiting to find out who’s made it back and who hasn’t.’

  Teresa nodded, accepting the opportunity to pretend to Alison that she had been thinking about Nick’s welfare, and not Annie’s.

  Not that she wasn’t acutely sensitive to Nick’s state of mind when he came home after each raid. Teresa took great pride taking care of her husband on those occasions; making sure he ate properly, and didn’t drink too much; listening to his feelings about the losses; and holding him tightly when he broke down in her arms. It was simply that for much of the evening she had been distracted about Annie leaving hospital, and where she might go afterwards.

  Teresa wanted to deflect Alison away from talking about Nick, as it inevitably led to a conversation about ‘married life’ in which Alison coaxed Teresa to deliver reassuring nuggets of information that confirmed that getting married to Nick was the best thing that could have happened to her.

  ‘I haven’t seen John for a while,’ Teresa said. ‘I thought he was developing something of a pattern of coming most nights you’re here.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s the case,’ Alison said, dismissively. ‘I don’t think that’s possible.’

  ‘My understanding,’ said Teresa playfully, ‘is that he finds out when you’re going to be on shift at the soup kitchen, and makes a point of coming on those nights.’

  ‘Now that is completely untrue. And it’s the kind of untruth that could be quite damaging, so I’d rather you kept that kind of gossip to yourself if you don’t mind.’

  It was dark, but if it was possible to hear another woman blush then Teresa could have sworn she heard Alison do precisely that just then. She smiled. However, the last thing she wanted was to make her old friend uncomfortable.

  ‘I’m only playing with you, Alison. I didn’t mean any harm. He’s a really lovely fella. I’d be made up for you if he took an interest.’

  ‘Really,’ said Alison as tartly as she could muster. ‘Take an interest in what?’

  ‘In you, of course. You’ve always been meticulously private, and I respect that, I really do. But this is me you’re talking to. What haven’t we told one another while I lodged with you? I can’t think of anything.’

  ‘I’ve told you before how easily gossip can get whipped up from dust in the gutter in a small village like this.’

  ‘I’m not trying to make gossip. And I’m certainly not passing any on. It’s just an observation I’ve made whenever John comes into the church.’

  ‘What observation?’

  ‘He comes through the door and immediately looks for you. And when he sees you, he makes a beeline for you. You’re not telling me that’s not true.’

  Alison hesitated, and decided she could allow her guard to slip a little with Teresa.

  ‘I’m not going to tell you that, no. He does seem to do as you say.’

  ‘And you’re not telling me you don’t enjoy that he does?’

  Alison had gone as far in this conversation as she was prepared to go.

  ‘Any friendship that may have been struck between myself and Mr Smith—’

  ‘No, no—’ Teresa interrupted, ‘I’m not having that “Mr Smith” nonsense. You call him John now – I’ve heard you, so you can’t pretend it’s still oh-so-formal between you . . .’

  Alison sighed. ‘Any friendship that may exist between myself and John is purely that – a friendship. There is much to admire about him, and it is easy to be in his company. But that’s as far as it goes.’

  ‘For the moment.’

  ‘For all time!’ Alison declared conclusively. ‘Now can we please change the subject?’

  They walked on in silence for a few moment
s, and then Teresa said, ‘You are allowed to be happy, Alison. God knows there’s little of it around at the moment, so when you stumble across it, no one’s going to hold it against you for grabbing some of it.’

  Alison didn’t speak. Instead, her hand found Teresa’s and she squeezed it for a few moments in appreciation before letting it go.

  ‘Is it because he’s a coloured?’ Teresa asked, unable to let the subject drop.

  ‘Is what because he’s a coloured?’

  ‘That you’re so worried people might think there’s a romantic connection between you?’

  ‘I’m not worried anyone would think that because there is no romantic connection between us.’

  ‘Or might be in the future . . .’

  Alison stopped and faced Teresa. There was enough ambient starlight for the younger woman to see the intense expression on her friend’s face.

  ‘You grew up in a city with all sorts of people from all over the world living in or passing through it. You’re used to that. I’m used to that. But a lot of people here are not. Anyone who doesn’t look like them is not merely a stranger, but potentially strange. Consequently, to be feared just for being different. People don’t like other people who are different.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me that.’

  ‘No, I don’t. You may not have seen the way some in the village look at John when he comes in with other coloureds. The fact that their ancestors were torn from Africa and shipped like cattle cuts little ice with the likes of Mrs Talbot. They just see “different”. They just see “strange”. And it makes them fearful and unpleasant.’

  ‘But not you.’

  ‘I see someone who is simply interesting. I see someone with a different perspective on the world – even on this war. I see someone who makes me smile even when I don’t feel like smiling. I want to protect him while he’s coming here.’

  ‘Why is it so difficult for people to live and let live, do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s human nature to be constantly looking over our shoulder for potential danger. Dangerous animals. Strange-looking people. We live in civilised colonies like towns and villages but that doesn’t mean we’re as sophisticated as we’d like to think. And of course, quite a lot of people don’t want to be sophisticated. They’re quite happy living a simple life, with simple pleasures, and simple thoughts. They wish to get on within a small circle of operation, untroubled by anything beyond their own experience.’