Apple Blossom Time (8 page)

She brought a charming young Pole home with her. At least, I think he was charming, but as he spoke no English, I’m not completely certain. He smiled a lot, at any rate, and showed rather too many gold teeth for Tom’s liking. He clicked his heels and kissed Grandmother’s hand, which, of course, reduced her to eating out of his hand! He seemed totally besotted with Kate, but she was rather offhand towards him, so I think that particular spark is cooling. Just as well, perhaps.

Tom still refuses to join the Home Guard. He says that he had quite enough of all that sort of thing in the last lot. When Mr Treadwell asked him what he’d do if he found a German paratrooper in the garden, Tom said he knew perfectly well how to defend his family and that marching round the village with a hoe over his shoulder proved nothing. Mr Treadwell isn’t talking to us any more. He says we’re closet collaborators! ‘Come the day’ and we’ll probably be first on his list for elimination.

Poor Tom – he works very, very hard in the market garden, especially now that Grandmother’s rose garden has been completely dug up – she insisted on it – and planted with potatoes, with only that stupid Ruggles boy to help. Tom finds all this sniping and backbiting very depressing. And you know what happens when he is depressed. Surprisingly, Grandmother is completely on his side.

I have told Tom that he must see if he is allowed a Land Girl to help. I’m sure there’s enough work for at least one. Tom says ‘yes’ and does nothing about it. He’s dreaming a lot at the moment – more than usual – and wakes shouting out, in an awful sweat, and won’t be comforted. He turns his back on me and lies awake afterwards, fighting sleep, as though he’s afraid to lose control of his mind again. I feel so helpless.

Abbie has (at last) consented to become Mrs Frank Horrell and runs the shop with the same vigour that she used to run us. Dear Frank, he may have got more than he bargained for! But Abbie is wonderful to us and Frank still slips round to the kitchen with ‘a little bit of something nice’. I don’t know what we’d do without them.

Poor Mr Millport is looking rather frail. He misses Pansy dreadfully, of course, and, at his age, is finding getting round the parish rather a trial. I’m certain that he’d be allotted a petrol allowance if only he asked for one, but he won’t. His old Austin has been mothballed and put up on blocks for the duration. He calls it part of his war effort and has taken out something – I can’t remember what, something vital – so that the Germans won’t be able to get it started when they commandeer it (he says they definitely won’t have spares for English cars, so that’s all right – how reassuring!). He cycled right out to Thurlow’s farm last week to comfort Mrs Thurlow. Her second boy went down in the Atlantic and the poor woman is utterly distraught. It was a horrid day – absolute cats and dogs – so Mr Millport now has a nasty cough, but won’t go to bed. Perhaps you’d better not tell Pansy. He wouldn’t want her worried. On the other hand, she ought to know, but by the time you get this letter he will probably be better again. I leave it to you to decide.

I think she really ought to come home. Her father can’t manage on his own much longer. I’m sure he’s not eating properly (but then, who would, with Mrs Attwood cooking?). Do you think she could get a discharge? Perhaps on compassionate grounds? He would be so cross if he knew I was writing this to you. Oh dear … what’s for the best?

Grandmother has given up evacuees – much to her relief (the last bunch weren’t even housetrained). She had a terrific row with the billeting officer (Mrs Treadwell in a smart felt hat instead of her usual headscarf) about the state of the mattresses and told her, very concisely, where she could put the next bunch. But someone has to take the poor little mites …

To be more exact, she has started taking in lodgers! I can’t name the aerodrome in a letter, but many of the young men stationed there are married and have nowhere for their wives to stay, either on a visit or permanently, certainly nowhere they can have some privacy. It’s all very sad and romantic. So Grandmother now has her beds almost constantly occupied by young wives (and sometimes girlfriends, but we won’t talk about that – Tom called her a high-class procuress the other day – quite uncalled for and I really mustn’t laugh!). I wonder how many of the next generation will have been begotten in Ansty House? But it’s heartbreaking if a husband fails to come back from a mission. Those poor girls. They need someone …

Grandmother looks terribly chic in trousers and with her hair wrapped up in a turban – she looks younger than she has any right to be! She dashes around everywhere, chairwoman of this, secretary of that, on the committee of the other, putting me quite to shame. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s a dab hand at knocking elderly chickens on the head and skinning rabbits.

I’ve been feeling a bit dreary and sorry for myself recently – not for any reason that I can think of. My fingers are so stiff from weeding carrots, all I can do on the piano is make beastly, Bartok-like noises. Maybe I’m coming up to that awkward time of life. What a horrid thought. Mustn’t grumble, grin and bear it, women always say, but I feel as though I’ve done quite enough grinning and bearing lately. A jolly good grumble would probably do me the world of good. Oh dear – how depressing … I’m sure Mrs Miniver would just give a sweet smile every time she felt a hot flush coming on and offer it up as part of her war effort.

Both my girls are well and happy. There’s no bombing here. We’re eating well. The weather’s good. Tom has been on the straight and narrow for months. You see – I’m counting my blessings – always a worthwhile treatment for a fit of the glums!

Plums – I feel I shall never be able to look a plum in the face again. Bottled. Jellied. Jammed. Pickled. Can one curry plums? Use the skins to sole shoes? Send the stones to the ack-ack battery for ammunition? And still they plop down from the trees for the wasps and blackbirds to guzzle. There just isn’t enough sugar, so the jam will probably not keep anyway, though I boiled it good and hard. It seemed to set well enough, so fingers crossed. I exchanged some eggs for sugar with Mrs Gifford, who doesn’t have a sweet tooth.

As Mr Millport says, the Lord is bounteous – but sometimes He gets in a muddle: the gooseberries got sawfly and powdery mildew (one or the other would have been quite sufficient) and apples this year are going to be very scarce here. Our trees only seem to bear fruit every other year, which is very inconsiderate of them.

Well, my darling, this must all sound very petty to you. You are worlds away from worries about powdery mildew and sugar rationing. You are always in my thoughts and in my prayers. We are very proud of you and the fine work you are doing. Say hello to all of your chums from us. We all send heaps of love to you.

Mother.

The prisoners weren’t rolling in the way they used to. Life in CSDIC was getting a bit stale for Major Prosser. So after training in the use of an encryption machine, I was moved on to coding and decoding signals. It was shift work, a painstaking and thankless task – one mistake, maybe no more than a single letter, could turn vital intelligence into gibberish – and I frequently ended my shift with a crashing headache.

I knew everything and nothing. If I’d been put up against a wall and threatened with instant execution, I couldn’t have told the enemy anything interesting, unless you call knowing that Major Prosser liked three sugars in his tea vital information! It was like trying to work out what a 3,000-piece jigsaw represented by looking at a handful of pieces – all of them sky. A spy could have gleaned more useful information simply by watching the way different cap badges appeared and disappeared in Cairo.

British in berets and ‘fore-and-afts’ with a sprinkling of red caps, Australians and New Zealanders in wideawake Boy Scout hats, Indians in
pugrees,
Free French in
képis,
Poles in
czapkas,
South Africans in solar topis – and all topped by cockades, badges and flashes of every colour – it was a spy’s delight. There was a story going round that two intelligence men wandered around Cairo dressed in German uniform, just to see who would challenge them. After two days without even being noticed, let alone arrested, they gave up the project!

Any intelligent spy would simply prop up the Long Bar at Shepheard’s. It was said that the whole Order of Battle for the desert war could be discovered quicker there than at HQ. Joe, the Swiss barman, was widely believed to be a spy, but that didn’t stop men from being indiscreet in the chummy, all-jolly-chaps-together atmosphere.

But something was certainly brewing. Even I could tell that. The daily flurry of paper became a blizzard. Equipment, fuel and men flooded into Alexandria and Port Said. Soon the question was not if there was to be a westward offensive, but when …

*   *   *

James was back in Cairo. No letter or phone call. Just a car waiting outside the gate when I finished shift. His eager smile. His shy laugh. Browner. Thinner. Quieter. Daring now to kiss me when we met, gently, respectfully.

I’d run down to the gate and there he was. I’d surprised myself by running. I’d been caught by surprise again when I saw him. I’d read in books all about hearts dancing and leaping – silly things like that – but it was true. How unexpected. How odd. My insides gave a sudden lurch, a flip-flop of delight. James. I
wanted
to see him. It was so
good
to see him.

He hadn’t stopped in Cairo on his way to Maadi. He still wore scuffed desert boots and shabby shorts, topped by a fearful, grey jersey with holes in the elbows and a scarf tied round his neck to keep out the sand that rubbed and caused desert sores. Tossed into the back of the car were a smelly sheepskin waistcoat and his hat. He needed a haircut. He looked wonderful to me.

Right there, in front of the guards, he’d kissed me: just a quick peck of welcome on the cheek, but I’d heard a chuckle and an appreciative smacking of the lips from behind. Then, further down the road, he pulled in at a quiet spot and kissed me again, this time like a man, not a brother.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said, raising his head, and there, for a moment, was the ghost of the shy schoolboy looking out at me.

I smiled. I cupped my hands around his face and drew him to me again. His lips were firm and his mouth tasted sweet and cool, like water in the desert. I laced my fingers in his hair, feeling the scrunch of sand in its softness. His chin scratched mine.

‘I’ve missed you so much,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘so much.’

I sat on the terrace at Shepheard’s Hotel until James came back. No-one would appear in filthy shorts here. Elegant women and parade-ground-spruce men lounged in basket chairs under the shade of a wrought-iron balcony, listening to the tinkling tunes played by the resident trio and watching passers-by on Sharia Ibrahim Pasha, the restless pantomime of Cairo’s streets. In Ezbekiah Gardens, sellers of magazines with names like
Saucy Snips
and
Laffs
were thrusting their booklets under the noses of bored soldiers who’d read too many already. The quack doctors of Ezbekiah were lifting their shutters from windows filled by jars of lurid, dubious elixirs.

Bathed, shaved and changed, James looked more like the young man I’d first met. He flopped into a chair beside me and ordered lemonade for us both from the waiting, white-robed
sufragi.

‘That’s better. I don’t know how you could bear to be in a confined place with me – I smelt like a ferret! Gosh, I’ve dreamed of this,’ he said when the drinks arrived. He held up the glass. Beads of condensation trickled down the outside. James ran his finger down and licked off the moisture. ‘Better even than a cold beer. I went to the lavatory upstairs—’ James gave an apologetic grin. ‘Sorry to mention it, but even I’m human – and as I pulled the chain, I thought, there goes three days’ water ration! Have you ever tasted water filtered through an Italian gas mask? No, I don’t suppose you have – I hope you never do. Foul and always hot. It even curdles the tinned milk in your mug of tea. Never anything cold to drink. You clean your teeth and save the spit. When you’ve got half a pint, you have a wash. Then you wash your socks in it.’ I shuddered and he laughed. ‘Oh, we’re all terribly resourceful. I shan’t tell you half the tricks we get up to. It’d only put you off your dinner. So, before that happens, tell me where you want to go. I’ve got eight hours and a lot to pack into it!’

‘Eight hours? Is that all?’

I felt a stab of dismay that caught me unawares. Like the pleasure I’d felt on seeing him at the gate, all my emotions suddenly seemed more intense and more painful. Colours were brighter. The light was whiter. Everything was paler, darker, louder, quieter, sweeter, sharper, than I’d ever known before.

‘Well, it was eight.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ve used up nearly three of them already, I’m afraid. I’m with a Jock column – mixed infantry, armour and artillery. I’ve only come back to pick up a convoy of reinforcements and guide them out to join the column. We have to be back in position before daybreak. Laura, I’m sorry. It’s the best I could do.’

‘Don’t say it – yes, I know there’s a war on! I just thought you must have some leave due, or something.’ Was that really my voice: the thin one with the quaver at the end of the sentence?

‘No. There won’t be any leave just yet. Not for a while, probably,’ he said quietly.

It was the nearest he could get to confirming what I’d suspected from all the signals activity. Something was brewing.

Eight hours. Less.

James leaned forward and covered my hand with his own. ‘Let’s go somewhere we can dance,’ he whispered. ‘I want to put my arms round you and it had better be somewhere public – for your sake!’

We went to all the smart places, but we didn’t, after all, do much dancing. Everywhere was full of people having a good time. Young men, briefly back from the desert, had brought with them a terrible thirst and more money than they knew what to do with. We drifted aimlessly in and out of the Scarabee, the Kit Kat Club, Madame Badia’s, and everywhere we went the noise and the crowds drove us out again.