Bluebirds (74 page)

He smiled slowly. ‘I got a bottle o' scotch too.'

The Code and Cypher officer stopped Anne in the corridor. She was an ex-debutante with a double-barrelled name who reminded her irritatingly of Susan in the far-off Colston days.

‘I say, you know Johnnie Somerville, don't you?'

‘Unfortunately. What about him?'

‘I just had a letter from a friend. Apparently he got shot up the other day and crash-landed. They took him to some hospital in East Grinstead. A special burns place. Frightful shame, isn't it? He was awfully good-looking.'

Anne had been going to hurry on, but now she stopped. ‘Was he badly burned?'

‘Pretty badly, by the sound of it. Jolly rotten luck . . .'

The girl walked on down the corridor and Anne stood there for a moment.
I'd far sooner be dead
. That's what he'd told her when she'd had dinner with him in London. She'd been rather scathing in return, she remembered.
You live a charmed life. It won't happen, you're much too lucky
. But Johnnie's luck, it seemed, had finally run out.

As she sat in the darkness of the transmitting room, Virginia would imagine the Pathfinder Mosquito flying high and fast through the night skies over enemy territory. Her eyes were fixed on the screen, but in her mind's eye she carried the image of the pilot and navigator listening intently to the signal reaching their ears. If they strayed to right or left of the circular flight path, the continuous note would turn to dots or dashes to tell them so. The other transmitting station, far away in East Anglia, would be tracking the Mosquito too and waiting for the last ten minutes of flying time to the target. Then they would send out Morse letter signals and, in the closing seconds, a succession of pips. On the final pip the pilot would release the target indicators and their coloured flares would mark the spot for the heavy bombers that followed.

She rubbed her hands quickly over her eyes. The long hours spent staring at the radar screen made them sore and she often had a headache by the end of the watch. But it seemed a small price to pay compared with the price so often paid by the men flying over Nazi Germany. And when she was concentrating so hard she could forget everything else, including the latest letter from her mother – bitter as ever.

You needn't trouble to come home on your next leave. You've made it very clear that you've no wish to do so. In my opinion you have grown up into a very selfish and ungrateful person. I have only ever wanted the best for you, but I might as well have saved myself the trouble and worry. It was for your own good entirely that I tried to discourage you from a most unsuitable connection and one day, when you have come to your senses, you will find you have cause to thank me for that.

I will never thank you for it, Mother, she had thought, as she read the letter.
Never
. I shall always hold it against you.

There had been some Canadian Army engineers working for a while at the camp site. Just to see the Canada
flash on their shoulders and hear their voices had pained her.

‘Do you know a place called Hamilton,' she had asked one of them. ‘It's near Toronto.'

He'd shaken his head. ‘I come from Edmonton. You know someone from Hamilton?'

‘I did – once.'

Once, but no more. Virginia rubbed her eyes again and concentrated hard on the screen.

‘Took yar toime a comin' over here, yew Amuricans,' Gran greeted Virgil Gillies from her chair by the range.

He grinned at her, quite untroubled. ‘I guess so, ma'am, but then I reckon we was worth waitin' for.'

‘Huh! Tis us'll be the judge o' that.'

Winnie could see Gran's eyes fix beadily on the green canvas bag that he was carrying.

‘What's in thet thare?'

‘Things I figured might come in handy for you folks.'

‘What sort o' things?'

He set the bag on the table and unzipped it. ‘Can of ham.' He took it out and held it aloft.

‘Huh. What else?'

He fished again and produced more tins. ‘Pineapple, peaches, grapefruit . . .'

‘Huh. That all?'

‘No, ma'am.' He dug deeper. ‘Chocolate . . . candy . . . gum . . .' The pile on the table was growing. He dug deeper still and drew a long cardboard carton from the very bottom of the bag. ‘Luckies.'

Gran's eyes flickered. She had been watching him like a child watching a conjuror, her eyes following each emerging item in turn, and now she inspected the assortment before her suspiciously. Her tobacco-stained forefinger jabbed the air.

‘Them thare'ss Amurican cigarettes?'

‘Sure are.' Virgil picked up the carton and offered it to her. ‘Special for you, ma'am.'

Quick as a flash Gran had the Lucky Strikes on her lap, buried in the folds of her black gown. ‘Thet thare chewin' gum . . .'

The Wrigleys packets disappeared too and she graciously accepted a bar in a brown and silver wrapper. She held it up, turning it this way and that.

‘Whass this'm?'

‘That there's a Hershey bar, ma'am. Chocolate. Made in Pennsylvania.'

‘Hmm.' The bar vanished into her gown. ‘Oi'll troi one o' these here cigarettes . . .' She tugged at the carton.

Virgil extracted a packet for her and bent to light the cigarette that she stuck in the corner of her mouth as attentively as if Gran had been a great beauty and not a cantankerous old woman. She puffed away for a moment, eyes closed, tasting.

‘Ain't bad. Ain't good, neither. But t'aint bad.'

She squinted up at the young American through a curl of smoke, considering him. ‘Reckun yew's a sight better'n thet tibby husband o' Winnie's . . . weren't no good fur naun. Or thet thare pesky Welsh fellah.' She stretched her mouth sideways at him in what was Gran's version of a smile. ‘Reckun yew'll do right well.'

To Winnie's chagrin, her mother also seemed as taken by Virgil as she was by the tins of fruit and ham. She kept on thanking him and exclaiming over them as though they were made of solid gold. And Ruth and Laura clustered round him, squealing with delight at all the sweets and chocolate bars. Ruth hung onto his arm, gazing upwards, and he picked her up by the waist and swung her round high up in the air, making her squeal a whole lot more. Then Laura jumped up and down, begging him to do the same to her.

Dad wasn't so easy to please, though, as she'd known. He stomped into the kitchen for his midday meal, grunting away like Susie and acting at first like there was no visitor there. But the bottle of Johnnie Walker whisky went some way to thawing him – she could tell that by the
way his eyes kept returning to where he'd set it on the dresser, and halfway through eating his rabbit stew he'd relented enough to start complaining yet again about the Yanks in the Pig and Whistle, which also meant having to acknowledge that there was one of them sitting at his table.

‘Time us farmers get there of an evenin', place's near dry,' he said bitterly. ‘Drink like fish they do.'

It was a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black, but Dad wouldn't see that.

‘Sure am sorry about that, sir,' Virgil glanced at the bottle standing sentinel on the dresser. ‘I figure least thing I can do's see you ain't goin' to run dry here.'

Dad grunted again, but it was a milder grunt than when he'd come in. Ruth was still gazing across the table at Virgil. Winnie saw him give her a big wink, and she giggled and looked down at her lap and went pink. Laura started to giggle too, a big smear of Hershey chocolate about her mouth.

After the rabbit stew there was apple pudding with thick cream. Virgil reached the chunks of apple beneath the suet crust.

‘Gee, ma'am, I ain't never tasted nothin' so good since I left home.'

Mum went as pink as Ruth. ‘I make it with plums too. I've got some bottled, so next time you're here I'll cook that for you, Mr Gillies.'

‘Call me Virgil, please. An' I'd sure appreciate it. Ain't nothin' like home cookin'.

‘Where's your home . . . Virgil?'

They listened while he told them about the farm back in Ohio – about the one hundred and sixty acres and the wood-built farmhouse with the creek running close by, and about the seventy-year-old barn that his grandfather had built.

‘See, the Government was givin' out land free then, an' my grandpa homesteaded back in the 1880s. Went out there with my grandma an' worked the land from nothin'.
Then my pa and ma took over when they died. Reckon I'll do the same when it comes to my turn – if I make it back. Guess I'll try to get a whole lot more land, grow more crops . . .'

Dad put down his spoon with a clatter. ‘Seen my corn? Best lookin' crop I've had in years. We'll be harvestin' in a few weeks.'

‘Be glad to give you a hand, sir . . . long as I'm still around.'

Winnie could tell that Dad was weighing up the thought of having a Yank on his fields against the thought of having another much-needed pair of strong hands and, with any luck, another bottle of Johnnie Walker. He wouldn't have noticed the ‘long as I'm still around', or thought what it meant if he had. The flying and the fighting, the living and the dying went on somewhere up in the skies and so long as it didn't interfere with the farm or the animals he took no account of it. Bombers and fighters came and went over his head and he shook his fist at them if they made too much noise, but he never troubled to count them or to wonder how many had failed to come back.

The extra pair of hands and the whisky won. Dad nodded grudgingly. ‘Reckon you'd come in useful.'

After the meal was over Winnie was hustled out to show Virgil round the farm. She could never remember so much fuss being made over a visitor. She wondered uneasily how it would all compare with the hundred and sixty acres in Ohio. Everything in America, it seemed, was bigger and better than in England. Not that she cared – except for pride's sake. In his eyes, she supposed, it would all seem small and old-fashioned, and now that she tried to see things as he might, she noticed the shabbiness and the untidiness as well. The Fordson had left thick tracks of mud all across the yard, the flint wall had tumbled down at one end and the cow byres had been patched up with planks, any old how. She suddenly felt ashamed of the rusty, cast-off machinery and tools lying about in
corners, of the broken cart, lopsided on three wheels, of the dung heap covered in flies. Even the farmhouse looked dingy. Its plaster walls were cracked and grimy and fat green cushions of moss grew over the thatched roof. She couldn't remember when the window frames had last been painted, it was so long ago.

Rusty, lying by his kennel, muzzle on forepaws, thumped his tail and followed them with his eyes as they passed.

‘Got a coupla dogs back home,' Virgil observed. ‘Different kind, though.'

‘He's a sheepdog. Dad uses him to round up the flock.' But she blushed as she said it. Rusty was getting too slow and blind to do more than pant after the sheep, who mostly knew their own way without him.

The sheep and the cows and the two Suffolks were all out in the fields, but Susie was in her sty, snuffling and grunting over some choice morsel. Winnie picked up the long stick she kept by the wall and leaned over to scratch her back.

Virgil leaned over too. ‘Hi there, Gorgeous! Ain't never seen a black an' white pig like you.'

‘She's an Essex Saddleback.'

‘That so? I guess the white part's the saddle. Well, she sure is a fine old lady. Kinda small, though. Reckon ours're a whole lot bigger'n that.'

‘She's supposed to be that size,' Winnie said coldly. ‘It's the breed. She had ten piglets last time.' And don't tell me yours have fourteen, she thought to herself.

‘They still around?'

She shook her head. ‘They all went to market, 'cept one. He's hangin' up on a hook. We're only allowed to kill two pigs a year. Mum cures them for ham.'

‘Ma does the same. Better 'n out've a can, huh?'

Winnie was surprised. Somehow she had pictured his mother, all neat and trim in a pretty apron, taking things out of one of those big refrigerators she'd seen
in American kitchens in films – not going through the long, messy process of curing a pig.

‘I've never tried ham out of a tin,' she said.

‘Aint' like home-cured. Or home-anythin'.'

‘Mum boils the trotters,' she volunteered. ‘They get a kind of jelly over them when they're cold. Do you have those?'

He shuddered. ‘Ugh! Won't touch that kinda stuff. Me, I like real meat. Steaks an' things.'

‘She boils the head, too,' Winnie went on gleefully, seeing his disgust. ‘Takes out the eyes and the brains first, then boils it down. Then she mashes it all up and lets it go cold. That's called brawn. It's a bit like jelly too. Haven't you ever eaten that?'

‘Jeez, no! I'll bet you eat it with Brussels sprouts. You Limeys . . . you'll eat anythin'. An' there's another thing you call different – like corn. Jelly's somethin' you spread on bread to us. You mean jello.'

‘No, I don't,' she said indignantly. ‘I mean jelly. Stuff that wobbles. It's
jam
you spread on bread.'

‘Ain't jam 'less it's got lots o' fruit all mixed up in it.'

‘Yes it is. It's jam. You don't put jelly on bread. It's our language. We started it. It's you that's got it all wrong.' She turned her back on him, scratching some more at Susie.

‘OK,' he conceded. ‘We'll call it quits. It's jelly over here. But in America you're goin' to have to call it jello.'

‘I shan't ever be goin' there, so I won't have to do any such thing.'

‘Sure you will, when the war's over . . .'

She was still scratching at the sow's back, not looking at him. ‘All those things you brought today . . . seemed all wrong to me. Like you felt you had to. Like a bribe, or somethin'. I thought it'd be all right – just for Gran's sake. For the cigarettes, see, an' she likes the sweets and gum, too, but I don't want you to bring any more. It's not right.'