In a Dry Season (33 page)

Though the worry and fear gnawed away at her after the
TV
broadcast, Vivian tried to live a normal life: wandering up to Hampstead in the morning; reading the newspaper; sitting down in her study for the day, whether she wrote anything worth keeping or not; talking to her agent and publisher; answering correspondence. All the while waiting for that knock on the door, wondering what she would say, how she could convince them she knew nothing; or thinking that perhaps she should just tell them what she knew and let the chips fall where they would. Would it really make a difference, after all this time?

Yes, she decided; it would.

When it came, though, the shock came in a form she hadn't in the least expected.

That Tuesday night, the phone rang just as she was dropping off. When she picked up the receiver, all she heard was silence, or as much silence as you ever get on a telephone line.

“Who is it?” she asked, gripping the receiver more tightly. “Please speak up.”

More silence.

She was just about to hang up when she heard what she thought was a sharp intake of breath. Then a voice she didn't recognize whispered, “Gwen? Gwen Shackleton?”

“My name's Vivian Elmsley. There must be some mistake.”

“There's no mistake. I know who you are. Do you know who I am?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You will. Soon.”

Then the caller hung up.

Ten

C
hristmas 1943. It was a gloomy, chill and moonless night when the 448th held their first dance at Rowan Woods. Gloria, Cynthia, Alice and I walked there together along
the narrow lane through the woods, our breath misting in the air. We wore court shoes and carried our dance shoes because they were far too precious and flimsy to walk in. Luckily, the ground wasn't too muddy, because none of us would have been caught dead wearing wellies to a dance, even if we had to walk through Rowan Woods in a storm.

“How many of them do you think there are?” Cynthia asked.

“I don't know,” said Gloria. “It's a big aerodrome, though.
Probably hundreds. Thousands even.”

Alice did a little dance. “Ooh, just think of it, all those Yanks with money to throw away. They get paid much more than our boys, you know. Ellen Bairstow told me. She went out with a
GI
when she was working at that factory near Liverpool, and she'd never seen so much money.”

“Don't you try to tell yourself they won't want
something
in return, Alice Poole,” said Gloria. “And don't you forget your poor Eric away fighting for his country.”

We were all a bit quiet after that. I don't know about the others, but I couldn't help thinking of Matthew. A fox or a badger suddenly flashed across the path and scared us, but the adrenaline at least broke the silence. We were still excited, and we giggled like silly schoolgirls the rest of the way.

Most villagers had already seen the newcomers around, and I had even served some of them in the shop, where they had looked puzzled at our meagre offerings and confused by the unfamiliar brand names. Some people disapproved of their arrival— especially Betty Goodall—thinking it would lower moral standards, but most of us quickly accepted them as part of the general scenery. I even helped the local
WVS
set up a Welcome Club for them in Harkside. Thus far, in my limited experience, Americans had always been friendly and polite, though I can't say I really warmed to the way they called me “ma'am.” It made me feel so old.

They were certainly far more casual and confident in their manner than our lads, and they had much smarter uniforms. They even wore shoes rather than the great clodhopping boots the Ministry saw fit to issue to our poor armed forces. Of course, our view of Americans was still almost entirely formed by the glamour of Hollywood films, magazines and popular songs. To some, they were all cowboys and gangsters; to others, the men were handsome heroes and the women beautiful and rather vulgar molls.

That evening as we trudged through the forest, we had little real idea of what to expect. We had all fussed about what to wear for days, and we had taken special care with our appearance— even me, who was generally not overly concerned about such superficial matters. Under the overcoats we wore to keep out the chill, we all had on our best dresses. Gloria, of course, looked gorgeous in her black velvet V-neck dress with the puff sleeves and wide, padded shoulders. She had added a red felt rose at the neckline on the left side. I was a little more serviceable in the Utility dress I had bought in London.

One big problem was that we had all run out of fashion stockings and either we didn't have enough coupons to get new ones or we couldn't find any in the shops. When Gloria dropped by to meet me after I closed up shop, the first thing she told me to do was stand on a chair.

“Why?” I asked.

“Go on. You'll see.”

I could have said no, but I was curious, so I stood. The next thing I knew, Gloria was lifting up my skirt and applying some sort of cold greasy stuff to my legs.

I squirmed. “What is that?”

“Shut up and keep still. It's Miner's Liquid Make-up Foundation. Cost me two and seven pence ha'penny, it did.”

I kept still. When the stuff she had slathered on my legs finally dried, Gloria had me stand on the chair again and she carefully drew a seam all the way down the backs of my legs with a special sort of pencil. It tickled and again she had to tell me to keep still.

“There.” She bit down on the corner of her lip and stepped back to admire her handiwork. I stood on the stool feeling like an idiot, holding my skirt up around my thighs. “That'll do” she pronounced at last. “Me next.”

As I “did” her, rubbing the foundation on her soft, pale skin, she started to laugh. “Marvellous stuff, this,” she said. “I was at my wits' end the summer before last, before Matthew . . . well, anyway, I was so desperate I tried a mixture of gravy powder and water.”

“What happened?”

“Bloody flies! Chased me all the way from here to Harkside, and the damn things even buzzed around my legs inside the hall. I felt like a piece of meat in a butcher's window.” She paused. “Ooh, Gwen, do you remember what that looked like? All those lovely cuts of meat in the butcher's window?”

“Don't,” I said. “You'll only make us miserable.”

We met the others by the fairy bridge. Cynthia Garmen was going for the Dorothy Lamour look. She had a black page-boy hairdo and wore a lot of make-up. She even had mascara on her eyes, which looked
really
strange, as women tended not to use a lot of eye make-up back then. It wasn't good quality mascara. When she got hot from dancing later in the evening, it started to melt, and she looked as if she had been crying. She said she had bought it on the black market in Leeds, so she could hardly go back and complain.

Alice was in her Marlene Dietrich period, plucked eyebrows pencilled in a high arch, wavy blonde hair parted in the centre, hanging down to her shoulders. She was wearing a Princess-style burgundy dress with long, tight sleeves and buttons all down the front. It came in at the waist to show how thin she was: almost as thin as Marlene Dietrich.

The dance was held in the mess. We could hear the music before we even got there. It was the song I remembered hearing in Piccadilly Circus a few months earlier: “Take the A Train.” We stood outside the door touching up our hair, checking our appearance one last time in our compact mirrors. Then we took off our coats—not wanting to walk in wearing bulky winter overcoats—stuffed our court shoes in our pockets and put on our dance shoes. Ready at last, we made our grand entrance.

The music didn't stop, though I swear it faltered for a moment the way records do sometimes when they become warped. It was a sextet, playing on a makeshift stage at the far end from the bar, and they all wore American Air Force uniforms. I suppose the odds are that when you gather so many disparate people together, you're bound to end up with enough musicians for a band.

Already the place was crowded with airmen and local girls, mostly from Harkside. The dance floor was busy and a knot of people stood laughing and drinking by the bar. Others sat at the rickety tables smoking and chatting. I had expected the large Nissen hut to be cold, but there was a peculiar-looking squat thing giving out heat in one corner, which I later discovered was called a “pot-bellied stove” (a very apt description, I thought). Apparently, the air force had brought it all the way from America, having heard English winters were cold and wet, like the summers.

They hardly needed it tonight, though, as the press of bodies and motion of dancing exuded all the heat we needed. The men had already covered the walls with photographs taken from magazines: landscapes of vast, snow-capped mountain ranges; long, flat plains and prairie wheatfields; deserts dotted with huge, twisted cacti; and city streets that looked like scenes from Hollywood films. Little bits of America brought over to make them feel less far away from home. A Christmas tree stood in one corner, covered with tinsel and fairy lights, and paper trimmings hung around the ceiling.

“Take your coats, ladies?”

“Why, thank you,” said Gloria.

It was Gloria who had turned the heads, of course. Even with Dorothy Lamour and Marlene Dietrich for competition, she still stood way ahead of the field.

We handed our coats to the young airman, who was tall, slim and dark in complexion. He spoke with a lazy drawl and moved with agile, unhurried grace. He had brown eyes, short black hair and the whitest teeth I had ever seen.

“Over here.” He led us to the far wall, beside the bar, where everyone's coats hung. “They'll be safe here, now don't you ladies worry.” When he turned his back, Gloria looked at me and raised an eyebrow in approval.

We followed him and held onto our handbags. It was always awkward knowing what to do with your handbag when you danced. Usually, you left it under the table, but Cynthia once had hers stolen at a dance in Harkside.

“And now, ma'am,” he said, turning straight away to Gloria, “If I may have the pleasure of the first dance?”

Gloria inclined her head slightly, passed her handbag to me, took his hand and went off. It didn't take long before someone snapped up Cynthia, too, and I was holding three handbags. But, if I say so myself, a rather handsome young navigator from Hackensack, New Jersey, called Bernard—which he pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable—asked me to dance even before his friend asked Alice. I passed the three handbags to her and left her standing there gawping in a way that Marlene Dietrich never gawped.

“First, you have to answer a question for me,” I said, before I let him lead, just to show I could be quite brave when I wanted to, though I was secretly scared to death of all these brash and handsome young men all around me.

Bernard scratched his head. “What's that, ma'am?”

“What's an ‘A' train?”

“Huh?”

“The music that was playing when we came in. ‘Take the A Train.' What's an ‘A' train? I've always wondered. Is it worse than a ‘B' train, for example?”

He grinned. “Well, no, ma'am. I mean, it's just a subway train.”

“Subway? You mean the
underground
?”

“Yes, ma'am. In New York City. The ‘A' train's the subway that's the fastest way to Harlem.”

“Ah,” I said, the light finally dawning. “Well, I never. Okay, then, let's dance.”

After “Kalamazoo,” “Stardust” and “April in Paris,” we gathered at the bar and the tall airman who had taken our coats bought us all bourbon, which we took to the table. His name was Billy Joe Farrell. He hailed from Tennessee and worked on the ground crew. He introduced us to his friend Edgar Konig, whom everyone called
PX
, because on American bases
PX
meant the quartermaster's stores, which was exactly what he ran.

PX
was a gangly young Iowan with a baby face and his fair hair shaved almost to his skull. He was tall, with Nordic cheekbones, pouting lips and the longest eyelashes over his cornflower-blue eyes. He was also very shy, far too shy to dance with any of us. He never quite made full eye contact with anyone. He was the sort of person who is always around but never really gets noticed, and I think the reason he was so generous with us all was simply that it made him feel needed.

When I look back on that evening now, more than twenty-five years ago, especially considering all that has happened since, it seemed to go around in a whirl of dancing and talking and drinking, and it finished before it really began. I still remember the strange accents and the unfamiliar place-names and phrases we heard; the young faces; the suprisingly soft feel of a uniform under my palm; the biting, yet sweet, taste of bourbon; the kisses; whispered plans to meet again.

As the four of us walked tipsily back through the woods, arms linked with our gallant escorts, little did we know how, before long, we'd be using words like “lousy,” “bum” and “creep” in our daily conversation, not to mention chewing gum and smoking Luckies. As we walked we sang “Shenandoah” and after good-night kisses agreed to meet them again in Harkside the following week.