Charlie was washing the cow’s udder when he heard a rustling sound in the corner. He lifted a wooden crate to find the last remaining family: a rat and her new pink babies nestling in the straw. She was too drowsy or exhausted to move, so he whacked them with a spade, threw the bloody pulp out into the garden and went back in to finish milking the cow.
*
‘I suppose my dream would be . . . You may laugh, but my dream’s actually very simple.’ Charlie was lying between her thighs with his head on her stomach, listening to it rumble. ‘My dream would be to get together with some chaps and buy a place just like this one, a bit smaller perhaps, a ramshackle old place where we can grow a few crops and fatten a few pigs and do whatever we please, because that’s genuine freedom, isn’t it, when you’re not employed by anyone. There’s real freedom in having your own farm, and I wish people would understand that.’
‘Oh,’ said Georgina, and played with his choppy, tousled hair. ‘Tell me more about the farm.’
And he told her all about the farm. He told her about the old collapsing stone house in a secluded green valley that they would buy for a song, about the chimney breathing smoke over the treetops, about the overgrown fields they would turn into fertile land and meadows, about the pigs the size of cars and sheep so woolly you risked getting lost in them while shearing.
‘And ponies,’ Georgina said, and fell asleep with her hand on his head.
3
In June 1941, the weather was warm enough for them to bathe in the river every day, and Charlie decided it was time to tell the chaps about him and Georgina.
He found Jack in the kitchen with the wireless pressed to his ear.
‘Jack . . .’
Jack scowled and motioned at Charlie to go away.
‘Pin me to the barn door if you like, but what has to be said, has to be said.’ Charlie crossed his arms. ‘I love her and she—’
Jack let out a howl of frustration.
‘She loves me. What can I say? Pin me to the barn door if you like.’
Jack threw the wireless at Charlie, who ducked just in time. ‘You fucking idiot!’
‘Well, what has to be said, has to be—’
‘Will you shut up? I was trying to listen to the news! Will you shut up and listen?’
‘I’m not explaining it well—’
‘Shut up! Shut up and give me the wireless. Don’t you know? Germany’s invaded the Soviet Union. Oh, you broke it! You fucking, fucking idiot!’
Charlie picked up the wireless in panic and shook it, as if that would make it yield more information.
‘But that can’t be,’ he said over and over.
‘Listen, you idiot! Germany’s invaded the Soviet Union.’
Charlie covered his face with his hands. When he looked up he saw that Marx and Engels had entered the kitchen, and Georgina too, and he realized then that it really had happened, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, and the war would not be over any time soon. Now it would be a world war, he was suddenly quite sure of that. He shook the wireless once more and it sprung back on and blared into the silent room. An American journalist echoed his thought: ‘As it becomes more and more clear that this war is going to be a world war . . .’
He looked at the earnest faces of his comrades and knew that this was the last day of the Swarthmoor Hall community. The chaps would all enlist now. They were political conchies, and their political objection had become void. The war was no longer about capitalist and fascist empires fighting each other: it was about helping defend the worker state against the fascist aggressor. And had not Charlie told his friends on his very first day here that he was a political conchie, too? Had he not admired them for their stance and wished he had the courage to object on political rather than religious grounds? In London, Communism had been a game and a pastime to him, a rebellious ideology to fill his big mouth. Yet his friends believed in it so sincerely that they were willing to die for it.
Jack put an arm around his shoulder in silent comradeship and said: ‘I’ll tell you one thing that’s satisfying. That farmer’s never going to accuse us of being cowards and shirkers ever again.’
Swell
The Germans were expected to arrive at 9 p.m. and Grace had no reason to question their punctuality. She drove up to the hospital in the second of ten ambulances and by the time they all jumped off their vehicles into deep brown puddles and splashed up the hospital stairs it was after 8 p.m. already. She feared Greek tardiness might clash with German precision and see them all taken prisoner – Quakers, patients and doctors – but when she pushed open the front door she saw that the reception was empty. They split and Grace ran down a corridor to her left and ripped open the doors as she passed them. The ward was empty. So was the staircase and the floor above.
‘They’re all gone!’ one of the men called over, and they counted their own in the reception area and drove off through rain so thick they could not see the horizon.
The ambulance carrying Lance, who was in charge of the unit, drew up next to her and someone shouted: ‘They were behind the hospital. Now they’re in the village, huddled in the square, waiting for you to pick them up!’
Bugger. Why on earth had they not made themselves heard? They wrenched the ambulances around with much skidding and splashing and raced into the village. A quarter to nine. Drenched figures in bandages and on crutches hobbled across the small flooded square – ‘They thought you were the Germans!’ – only some twenty people, thank God, and they squashed into the ambulances and off they went again, pursued by the howl of the air raid. They swerved around the mountaintop and coiled their way down into the valley and then up again across a knife-edge pass with the Stukas behind. Up and down and up and down between the houses below and the enemy above.
‘They thought we were soldiers! Serves us right for wearing khaki,’ Grace said through the corner of her mouth, and leaned forward to make out the road in the rain. The young doctor who sat next to her nervously checked the sky.
*
They off-loaded the patients and doctors in a safer town further south and rested for a few hours; drank hot soup. Then they boarded their ambulances again for the second run. There was another hospital beyond the pass and over a bridge, where the patients were waiting to be evacuated. The rain stopped as if to collect its breath and then washed over them with renewed force. When the ambulances had crossed the pass and reached the bridge a British unit stopped them.
‘You don’t want to cross that one.’ A soldier pointed his thumb back over his shoulder at the bridge. ‘We’re about to blow it up.’
They turned round, hid their vehicles in an olive grove and camped beside a stream. Lance went off to consult with the army in the chaos of a general retreat. They drove towards Athens and stopped by several hospitals to assist with the evacuation. When all communications had broken down they decided to continue to Athens and help where needed along the way. There was a village that had been strafed not more than an hour before they arrived, and either the bombs had been particularly efficient or anyone who was not wounded had fled. Dozens of bleeding men lay scattered in the village square and all the ambulance crews could do was carry them into a small church that stood unscathed, and bandage them up. When they left the village three men tottered after them and pleaded with them in Greek. They were Greek soldiers, fearful and exhausted, and they wanted a lift to the next town. One of them pulled away the tongue of his boot to show Grace the red open sore that was his foot.
She looked at the foot, looked at Lance.
‘You said we wouldn’t take soldiers.’
He squatted down to inspect the sore. Then he helped the men into his ambulance. He slapped Grace on her back. ‘We won’t tell the Elders.’
*
Lance went back up north to join the Australians, but Grace and six others were sent to Athens. They stayed in Kifissia, cool and leafy in the hills above the city, roads lined with jasmine bushes and orange t
rees. Some of the trees were still in bloom and others bore fruit. When Grace awoke from her first rest there, she closed her eyes again and inhaled the scent of jasmine and orange blossom, allowing herself one deep breath before evacuating the next hospital.
*
Their own evacuation began in the middle of the night. The scent of jasmine was at its heaviest and Grace thought that if she survived she would always remember that sweet dark smell and return to Greece one day to seek it out. They set out in a train that stopped every time a Stuka came near because the driver would jump out and hide in the bushes, until an RAMC officer climbed into the cabin with a revolver and then the journey went on smoothly to the end of the railway.
*
They changed into a lorry that tipped them into an olive grove near the beach, hid under the olive trees all day with the Stukas overhead and when night fell they marched down to the beach with RAMC chaps and soldiers and anyone in khaki who could make it. Grace had cut her hair and was taken for a boy in her baggy uniform. That suited her. They waded far into the sea to reach the landing craft that was waiting for them.
Just when she reached the ramp, it went up.
She stood hip-deep in the water with hundreds of soldiers around her and more on the beach: a jumble of Allied soldiers who had turned into frightened men trying to get on a boat. There was one more boat and she waded towards it. Already full. Still the men moved towards it, grabbed the ramp, hoisted themselves up, while the officers shouted at them to keep away.
Then three officers walked to the top of the ramp and drew their revolvers.
*
Grace spent hours in the hip-deep water. Eventually another boat took her out to the destroyer.
They drew guns against their own men, she thought. They drew guns against their own men. What animals we are.
‘Did everyone get out?’ she asked a fellow on the deck.
‘Everyone?’ He stared at her and she bit her tongue.
‘I’m sorry. I meant the ambulance services.’
‘How would I know?’ He spat into the sea but then his voice softened. ‘I heard some of your chaps in the north ran into the Germans. I suppose they were taken prisoner.’
Then to Crete and from there to Suez and from Suez to Alex.
*
There was a rocky outcrop near the pension where they stayed in Alexandria. While they waited for reinforcements Grace sometimes used it to go swimming. The others were more interested in ping pong and the wireless, but she did not mind swimming alone.
Rumour had it that the British-American ambulance corps was donating a dozen desert ambulances. Once they arrived in Alexandria Grace’s unit would start to work again and carry casualties from ships to hospitals. It was a reduced unit. The Friends left behind in Greece had indeed been taken prisoner.
There would be no time for a ritual swim once work started again: all the more important to savour it now. Around three o’clock was the best time, when the noon heat gave way to a glow. Grace took off her sandals to grip the dry rocks underfoot. Someone had carved a path between the rocks that petered out half-way down to the water. It must have been a project conceived in the coolness of the early morning hours: today I shall carve a path to the sea. By ten o’clock, the anonymous mason would have been scorched and desiccated. Time to give the tools a rest and continue tomorrow, only tomorrow never turned into today. He must have been a foreigner, with a foreigner’s hunger to improve what he found.
Up on the hill, on the road that led to her pension, a man and a donkey were locked in a tug of war. She would show him later how to move a donkey. Certainly not by pulling at the rope.
Still so bossy, Grace!
The sea was wild and whipped up by the spring winds, which brought seeds and cloudless skies. It foamed with rage and crashed against the cliffs. Grace had decided to go in, and once she had decided on something she did not like to change her course. She pushed herself off the rocks hard and fast to beat the waves and cut her toe on a barnacle. When she had swum far enough to escape the sucking currents she turned on her back and inspected the wound. It was deep and bleeding. She dipped it back in the water, determined not to let it spoil her swim. The next few years might well be spent rumbling over a dust track with her legs dangling over the back of the ambulance and one hand holding on to the canvas frame. A few days by the sea, ping pong and a rocky outcrop – what were the chances of that happening again?
The waves came high and strong. Not like the Ladies’ Pond, is it?
When the war was over, she and Max would move to the seaside. Somewhere southern. In the best English tradition, she would be an eccentric lady who rode mules and sailed her own boats like a man. Nut brown and salt-cured. The Englishwoman and her husband in the cottage on the hill. A small hotel, a retreat for Friends and pensioners.
The water was inky blue in the shade, and green and golden where the sunlight hit the waves. Rising and falling with the waves was tiring, and when she tried to swim back to the cliffs the current kept pulling her away. She lunged at a rock and dug her fingers into a crevice. It was a stupid, risky manoeuvre: the next big wave almost dislocated her shoulder. She let it wash over her face and hair and clung to the rock. In the tiny pause between the sea crashing against the stone and sucking back its water in a vicious undertow she hoisted herself up onto the cliff.
This was the most delicious moment of the day: the salt and the short breath and the hammering heartbeat. Of course Max would like it.
It did not take more than fifteen, twenty minutes, her afternoon swim, but it was like starting the day afresh.
The fellow on the hill was still pulling at the donkey. Another tug and he would rip its head off. Poor creature. Grace dried herself, pulled her dress over her damp swimming costume and climbed up to see to the problem.
‘Need a hand?’
The man turned round. A round face with a stub nose. You could mistake him for a Boy Scout. The freckles were covered by ferociously red sunburn. He was not as tall as she remembered. Max was far taller.
‘Gee, thanks! This donkey is quite a handful.’
Gee. He must have picked that up from his wife. She helped him dislodge the animal with the help of a crust of bread she kept in her bag. They led it to headquarters and unloaded it, and only then did she tell him where they had met before.
‘Of course!’ He slapped his forehead. ‘I knew you looked familiar.’ And he laughed and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Swell.’
That, too, he must have learned from his wife.
She paused to give him time for a better and kinder reaction, but apparently he had nothing more to add. So she mentioned quickly that her husband was in London.
He could at least have showed a little disappointment, a hint of sadness at the lost opportunity, their lost opportunity. Instead he expressed sympathy. How hard it must be to be separated. He and his wife were lucky. They both worked for the American Friends and had come to Alexandria to handle the delivery of the twelve desert vans. Next destination, China. Ambulances for the Burma road. The wear and tear there was terrible. He made an upside-down victory sign.
‘That’s the Chinese character for man.’
Swell.
That night she went to her room and after writing her daily letter to Max, she picked up her diary and noted the high waves and stormy weather. After a thought, she added: ‘M. arrived today (with wife). The Lord moves in mysterious ways!’
She washed the salt off her skin and went to bed. How strange to think that something that had meant so much to her had, in fact, meant nothing at all. Had he come back to London and rushed back into her arms, then their one night on the fire escape would have been deeply significant. But because he merely passed through London on his way to America (with wife), the fire escape meant nothing, his bandit’s beard in the morning meant nothing, and the fact that she had lied to him about being a big swimmer meant nothing, nothing at all.
She got up, lit a candle and added a
line to her letter to Max: ‘Today I learned the Chinese character for man: 人’
The sea was calm at sunrise and she decided on a quick dip in case the wind returned later. Her feet were already in the water when he appeared above her on the cliffs.
‘May I join you?’
‘Good morning.’ She jumped in.
‘I know you love to swim. You told me last time we met.’
It had taken him sixteen hours to remember it.
M. joined me for a swim in the morning (without wife).
He began unbuttoning his shirt. She stopped him with a wave of her hand.
‘The sea can be quite wild, perhaps you should get used to this place first.’
He raised an eyebrow and turned his round red face towards the perfectly still water.
‘As you wish. Come in, then.’ Curiosity got the better of her. They held on to a protruding cliff and trod water like two old ladies in a thermal bath. He told her about Pennsylvania where, as you would expect from a place founded by Quakers, everything was swell.
‘How did you manage to get to America?’
‘I went to London with one of the children’s trains and stayed behind. Then I caught a passage across. The Friends helped. And my wife.’ He could at least have the manners to look a little guilty, she thought. It would only be polite. But his voice was frank and easy and his legs pedalled through the water.
‘I heard. And I did wonder about that. You told me you couldn’t stay behind, you couldn’t stay in London because if you did, they might not let the next train leave.’
‘I figured they wouldn’t let out another train anyway. And they didn’t.’
He was not as handsome as she remembered him. Sunburn never enhanced a person’s looks and he was really very young. There was a smug grin on his face whenever he explained something; smugness at his superior knowledge. It was on his face now as he gripped the cliff tight with one hand to free his other. He made the upside-down victory sign again and said: ‘Can you guess what the Chinese character for big is?’
Of Love and Other Wars Page 21
