Their Finest Hour and a Half (52 page)

‘Parfitt,' she said, getting her breath back, ‘do you have any idea how I could get a travel permit to go to Leigh-on-Sea?', and Parfitt, who seemed to lack curiosity in the way that some people lacked a sense of smell, replied, ‘Tell Baker's secretary you're researching a short on fisher-folk for the Ministry of Agriculture, and ask her to send a chit to Home Security about it. Give it a title.'

‘
Cockles and Mussels?
'

‘That'll do.'

It took six weeks for the permit to come through, and she set off for the coast on a morning of numbing sleet. There were puddles in the carriages, and greatcoats dripping from the luggage racks. Catrin sat in a corner next to a Gurkha with a head-cold, and rubbed her frozen hands together and stared out of the window at a sky the colour of cocoa. The parcel of signed photographs was in her bag, wrapped in a piece of oilcloth. Her plan was rudimentary: she would loiter on the pavement opposite the twins' house, hoping that one of them would spot her and sneak out. She was prepared to wait all day.

By the time that the local train reached Leigh-on-Sea, it was nearly eleven o'clock. The temperature had risen a little and instead of sleet there was heavy rain, and over the half-mile walk from the station, Catrin's shoes began to disintegrate, the uppers bagging, the cardboard in the insteps turning to fibrous porridge. She arrived in Whiting Walk at a slow shuffle, concentrating so hard on keeping the damn things on her feet that she nearly bumped into another pedestrian who had come to a sudden halt in front of her. It was an old man holding a string bag containing half a cabbage and a tin of butter beans, and he gave her an empty stare before letting himself in to one of the houses and closing the door. Number 15.

Catrin stood transfixed. The door was unchanged, the glass still missing from the occasion when a boot had been thrown at Rose, the gap still roughly patched with a section of tea chest. There was a movement in the front window, and she turned to see the man gazing out at her, cabbage still in hand. He was of average build, ordinary-looking, round-faced like his daughters, badly-shaven, his hair colourless and thinning; she'd expected to see something else, a monster, violence incarnate. He made a gesture at her –
go away
.

She took a step backward, and then crossed the road and looked round at the house again. He was still watching.

Behind her, a door opened. ‘There's no point in waiting,' said a woman, scornfully, ‘he won't talk to anyone about them.' She stood on the mat, arms folded. She was plump and pretty, her hair in stiff curls, her eyes like twin searchlights, missing nothing. She gave Catrin a quick head-to-foot inspection, dwelling on the leaking umbrella, the ruined shoes. ‘You'll be from the papers,' she said, ‘one of the weeklies.'

‘No,' said Catrin, ‘I'm a . . . a friend of Rose and Lily's'.

‘Can't be much of a friend if you've come here looking for them. They've been gone six weeks.'

‘Gone?'

‘Joined the ATS. After the picture came out. Rose went along to the office in Southend and told them that if she could mend a boat engine she could certainly learn how to mend an army lorry, and so could her sister, and they got signed up straight away. Did a moonlight flit. You should have seen him when he found out. Went round the bend, the
bastard
.' The word was startling, dropping from that neat little mouth. Involuntarily, Catrin turned to look at Mr Starling again but the window was empty.

‘He went all the way to the office to complain,' said the woman, with a glint of pleasure. ‘They told him the girls were over twenty-one and he'd have to put up with it. Have you seen the picture?'

Catrin found herself shaking her head.

‘It's still on at the Corona, up by the station.'

‘Have
you
seen it?' asked Catrin.

‘Course I have,' said the woman. ‘Three times. It's our picture, isn't it? They're our girls.'

The hand-made banner outside the cinema read ‘S
EE YOUR LOCAL FILM STARS!
' and even on a Tuesday afternoon, the Corona was almost full. Catrin took her seat in the stalls and slipped off her shoes. She watched the end of a newsreel report about a Cossack dance display in Trafalgar Square, followed by a Food Flash urging her to eat more potatoes, and then the curtains closed briefly before opening again to show the Baker's logo, a loaf in the shape of the letter ‘B'.

And what she had told the woman in Whiting Walk had almost been the truth, for although she
had
seen the picture before, it had been at the trade show in an auditorium stuffed with important business people, every seat filled, and she'd stood right at the back of the circle, beside the exit doors, and whether it had been the fault of the distance from the screen, or the tensions of the hour, or her own simple misery, the fact was that she'd scarcely been able to follow the plot. It had been nothing more than a collection of lines, each one hooked to a memory, so that she'd watched not the tale of the Starling sisters, but the ghost of her own story.

Now, as the Baker's logo dissolved into a shot of the gentle heaving sea off Badgeham Beach, and a voice somewhere in front of Catrin hissed, ‘Wake up, mother, it's starting', and the violins on the soundtrack played the first notes of a shanty, she leaned forward and watched the title rise up out of the waves.

And over the violins came the deep rich voice of Hannigan, ‘
I wasn't there at the beginning of the story
 . . .'

And this time, in a cinema that smelled of damp coats and parma violets, where the dialogue was competing with the sound of someone shelling nuts in the row behind her, she could see beyond the script, could follow the twin threads of the plot as it moved between France and England, could duck as the Stukas roared overhead, could feel the release of tension as Rose Starling managed, at last, to untangle the propeller, could join in the scatter of applause as the
Redoubtable
reached home, as Hannigan spoke his final words over a panorama of the quayside (‘and if this doesn't get the Yanks into the war,' Buckley had remarked, immodestly, ‘then nothing will.' ):

Someone in the front row gave a shrill whistle of approbation, and then the shot of the quayside was replaced abruptly with a screen that read

COULD PATRONS WHO HAVE SEEN THE ENTIRE PROGRAMME PLEASE LEAVE THE AUDITORIUM TO MAKE ROOM FOR OTHERS
.

No one moved. Catrin checked her watch; it was only half past two. She could see the whole thing over again and still have time to get back to London. After all, spending an entire afternoon at the cinema could be counted as an essential part of a screen-writer's job.

She glanced around at her fellow picture-goers, and felt a flicker of pride that they too wanted to stay.

It was a good film.

Some day she'd write one that was even better.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Roy Ward Baker, Keith Barber, Pat Crosbie, Phyllis Dalton, Patricia Hayers, Mary Llewellyn, Julia McDermott, Peter Manley, Joe Marks, Myrtle French, Bernard Phillips and John Porter, all of whom were generous enough to share their memories of the era with me; to Barry Davis for his help with the Yiddish; to the incomparable staff of the BFI library – patient, knowledgeable, helpful and endlessly good-humoured; to Bill Scott-Kerr and Katie Espiner – it took me eight years, Bill, but I got there in the end – and to Georgia Garrett, for practically everything. Finally I want to thank Norman Longmate for writing
How We Lived Then
, which I first read when I was thirteen, and which awoke in me an abiding interest in the home front.

About the Author

Following a brief career in medicine,
Lissa Evans
spent five years as a producer in BBC Radio Light Entertainment. She then moved to television where her credits as producer/ director include
Room 101
,
Father Ted
and
The Kumars at Number 42
. After a decade of running a red pencil through other people's work, she eventually began to write for herself.
Their Finest Hour and a Half
is her third novel. She lives in London with her husband and two daughters.

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First published in Great Britain

in 2009 by Doubleday

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Black Swan edition published 2010

Copyright © Lissa Evans 2009

Lissa Evans has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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