Churchill’s Angels (14 page)

‘Oh, does little Rose want to play?’ teased Daisy. ‘I’m sure the mum will let you try flying it.’

Rose did not reply. She stood, every muscle in her body tensed as she listened to a low ominous sound. At that instant, out of the bluest of summer skies, shrieked a Messerschmitt.

Daisy saw the mother freeze. ‘Dive, dive!’ she screamed, but it was all over before the second word had left her lips.

They heard the hail of deadly bullets and the scream of the plane as it flew low across the Heath and then up into the blue summer sky, and then there was the deadliest of silences.

‘Are we dead, Daisy?’ whispered Rose.

‘Nothing hurts, ’cept my legs where you’re lying on them.’

Rose picked herself up from the rough grass and for a second, unable to function, looked at what lay horribly mangled just a few yards away. She began to scream, a high-pitched wail of unutterable anguish.

Daisy crawled across the rough grass and, at the sight of the two bodies, she bent over retching. Nothing she had learned in her first-aid course was of any use to either of these pitiful bodies. Above them, released by death from the child’s hand, his kite swooped and spiralled in the air currents.

She forced her unwilling body to stand up. ‘Rose, Rose,’ she said calmly, squeezing her sister’s upper arms tightly. ‘You need to go and get help. We passed a report centre and a first-aid post on the way. They’ll know what to do. I’ll stay with … with …’

Rose wiped her eyes. ‘Oh God, Daisy …’

‘I know, but hurry, just go.’

Rose ran. To Daisy, it seemed that her athletic sister had never moved more quickly. Soon she had disappeared over the brow of a slope. Daisy took a deep breath and kneeled down in the grass beside the mother and child. Tears of which she was completely unaware ran down her cheeks and great sobs shook her entire body. Thoughts and questions chased one another around in her head. Was a young father somewhere down there in the town waiting for his family to come home? Perhaps he was on active service somewhere, unaware that the worst thing that could possibly happen had happened.

Pure innocence on one side, and on the other …

‘It was murder.’

Daisy was startled to realise that the loud condemning voice was her own. But it was murder. The pilot had to have seen the young child playing there with his home-made paper kite. He had seen them and deliberately strafed them. What kind of sub-human species could wantonly murder a small child?

She looked now at the disfigured bodies and this time her stomach remained calm. ‘We’ll get them,’ she told the pathetic bodies. ‘I promise you.’

She was still kneeling in prayer when the rescue services arrived.

Bernie delivered two letters on Monday morning. One, on a good-quality paper, was for Daisy and the other, in a thin buff-coloured envelope, was for her parents.

‘Can’t stop, Daisy, too many of these,’ he held up a fistful of buff-coloured envelopes, ‘but I heard about you and Rose. Well done, pet, you was marvellous.’

Daisy shook her head as the tears threatened to flow again. ‘We did nothing, Bernie, absolutely nothing.’

She sniffed her envelope as she walked slowly, unwillingly, upstairs to the flat where her mother was up to her elbows in soapsuds. The letter had to be from Adair. It smelled of nothing. She stopped on the second stair from the top, her heart thudding. Was she being fanciful? Surely a letter could not smell of death? The newly learned smell of death was still with her from the day before. She wondered if she would ever be rid of it. It had accompanied her as she thought out her plan for the future. She had promised the kite flyer. ‘I promise you,’ she had said.

She felt numb. Otherwise she would be reacting to the buff envelope.

Flora saw her and smiled. She raised her arms from the water and dried them on a rough kitchen towel. She went white as she saw what was in Daisy’s hand. ‘Is it my Sam?’

Daisy held out the letter. ‘I don’t know, Mum. Do you want me to run and find Dad?’

Flora said nothing but held out her hand for the envelope. She closed her eyes as if in prayer, then calmly opened them and then the letter. She read it slowly, closed her eyes and, holding the sheet of paper to her heart, said quite calmly. ‘Your dad’s in the lockup.’

‘Mum …’

‘Go, Daisy.’

Daisy ran and when she returned a few minutes later with her oil-covered father, Flora was still standing silently in the middle of the kitchen, tears streaming down her face. She held out her arms to Fred. ‘It’s our baby boy, Fred, our Ron. A sniper. It were quick, Fred, love. He felt nothing. This is from a major. That’s a proper top one, isn’t it? “Ron Petrie was one of the ablest young soldiers I have ever commanded and he will be greatly missed by everyone.”’

Her control snapped and she fell wailing into her husband’s arms.

It was several hours later before Daisy even remembered her letter. Her parents were finally in bed and she and Rose had cried themselves hoarse. No one had eaten. The vicar, alerted by Bernie, the postman, had sat with them for some time and had eventually encouraged the twins to make their parents hot drinks, which he had laced heavily with brandy. He had not prayed with them.

‘I’ll pray, girls, and they’ll pray when they’re ready. Prayers are so much more than words, you know.
Laborare est orare
. Do you know what that means?’ He did not wait for an answer but answered himself. ‘To work is to pray, and you are both exceptionally good at hard work. I will come at any time. Don’t hesitate to send for me.’

‘Let’s have some cocoa,’ suggested Rose when they had seen Reverend Tiverton out into the night where a bright moon, a bomber’s moon, shone in the starry sky.

Daisy nodded. She didn’t really care whether she had cocoa or not. She put her hand into her pocket to find her sodden handkerchief and found the letter. She read it quickly and stuffed it back into her pocket. It was words, merely words. She could feel nothing.

Tomorrow she would look at it again.

Dear Daisy,

Dartford’s having a beastly time.

I see your street is undamaged – no, I’m not spying from the cockpit but we receive detailed reports.

The
Daisy
is terribly lonely but I rarely have more than a few hours free and all I do then is sleep. What a lot of time I’ve wasted. Had I swallowed my stupid male pride and asked for your help last year, I’d have had you flying solo by now.

Daisy, please try to get into the WAAF. There are tests you have to take but be brave and make sure they know that you have actually worked on an aircraft engine. They won’t ask you because no one expects women to do such work. Feel free to use my name, if it’s of any use.

Do let me know how things are going. I wish your people had a telephone. I’ll ring Alf when I have any time and, if you’re still in Dartford, I WILL TEACH YOU TO FLY. Now that I think of it, there’s a Czech pilot here, Tomas Sapenak, who’s a real ace. He’s sharing the teaching hours with me. First time we’re free I’ll bring him home with me.

Take care, Daisy Petrie,

Adair

A Czech pilot? Her somewhat limited geography lessons had not, so far as she remembered, involved Czechoslova-kia. Where was it located? Not that it made the slightest difference, not today. Ron, not even twenty-one years old and he was dead. Her sweet, funny brother, who had gone into the army because he idolised his big brother, was gone. All his short life he had wanted to be just like Sam – and now he was dead and Sam was missing. After all this time that had to mean that Sam, too, was dead. Why didn’t the army just write and say so and put them all out of their misery?

She crumpled up Adair’s letter. Join the WAAF, learn to fly? Dreams were not for shop girls. How could she leave her mother now?

Daisy looked at herself in the mirror of the little dressing table she shared with Rose, the dressing table Dad and the boys had made for their sixteenth birthdays. She saw an ordinary girl with a very pale face, swollen, red-rimmed eyes and soft brown hair that had just reached the length where it needed cutting to avoid the dreaded unfashionable curls growing.

Dreams are for rich girls, Daisy Petrie.
She tossed the crumpled sheet of writing paper into the wastebasket and walked out of the room.

But before she had reached the head of the stairs she ran back, picked up the letter, smoothed out the wrinkles and, after folding it carefully, slipped it into her drawer.

The next black day was when Ron’s effects arrived. ‘Effects’, that’s what the army called his belongings, and how pitifully sparse they were.

‘They’re sending his wages. I don’t want his wages,’ sobbed Flora, who, all her life, had had to budget in order to buy a new pair of shoes. ‘I don’t want their money. I want my son.’

No, Daisy could not leave.

‘If we could just get some good news about our Sam …’ Fred was suffering too. ‘Good or bad. It’s the not knowing that we can’t handle.’

Daisy said nothing. Reminding them that parents up and down the land were suffering just as they were would not help. She remembered the curtain project.

‘Mum, why don’t you and me go down the market and get some of that material you was talking about? Just think what a nice surprise Sam and Phil’ll get when they walk in. Lovely sunny days for bleaching it.’

Flora frowned. ‘Don’t feel much like sewing in this hot weather.’

She went off into the kitchen.

‘Don’t push her, love. She’s working it out.’

‘Will she go to a matinée with me? She hasn’t been out, not even to church, and there’s cowboys and Indians on at the pictures.’

‘Remind her of Ron, love. Give her time. I’m going off down the shop to start the accounts before there’s another blooming raid.’ Half-way down the stairs he stopped. ‘You don’t want to tell me what that boy said?’

‘Weren’t nothing important.’

‘If you say so,’ he said sadly, and continued down to the shop.

This time Daisy answered Adair’s letter; only polite, she told herself. She made sure that the layout of her letter was just like his. She had learned how to set out a letter at school, but that seemed like such a long time ago. Address on the right and the date under that. Then you wrote the letter and signed it. When was she supposed to write ‘Yours faithfully’
and
when
‘Yours sincerely’?
She could not remember, but
Adair used neither and so she would be just as casual
.

Dear Adair,

Thank you for your letter.

I can’t join anything at the moment as we have had a death

No, she could not tell him about Ron. She took another sheet of Basildon Bond notepaper, blue, and started again.

Dear Adair,

Thank you for your letter and the advice. This is not a good time for me to enlist but I will as soon as I can. Maybe I will be gone the next time you get to the farm.

Thank you for letting me help you with the plane. I will never forget it.

Be safe, Adair Maxwell,

Daisy

There, that was it done and she was glad that she had not needed to ask where Tomas Sapenak’s country was. Just lately there had been an article in the
Chronicle
about the pilots from different countries who were joining the RAF and fighting with the British for their own countries, most of which had been overrun by the advancing German armies. Pilots from a country called Czechoslovakia had featured strongly in the article. Perhaps one day she would meet the Czech pilot. If she was accepted by the WAAF, she would probably meet pilots from all the countries mentioned.

She sighed. How exciting life could be.

Life, at least life as the country had known it, seemed to have changed. The summer sun still shone out of a clear blue sky but few, if any, summer games were played. The green playing fields of England no longer echoed to the sounds of cricket or tennis balls, and few picnic baskets were unpacked and enjoyed in soft flower-filled meadows. Children playing in the streets were watched by frightened mothers, who looked too often towards the sky. The children complained that, day after sunny day, they were rounded up and ushered indoors before the game was completed. Heavy rain fell, not gentle healing water but bombs, bombs of every shape and description that the mind of man could create: incendiary bombs that could light as many as three hundred fires in a few minutes. Houses were destroyed and others were so badly damaged that they had to be razed to the ground. The toll of dead and injured grew at an alarming rate, and parents who had found it unbearable to send their children away as evacuees now begged the authorities to send them somewhere, anywhere, that offered the slightest hope of safety.

Fred’s hours of voluntary service had to be increased as needs became greater and casualties grew among ARP wardens themselves. His family saw less and less of him as the raids continued. He would stagger home, exhausted, hungry – but too tired to eat – and smelling always of smoke and destruction. He would not have wished it to happen this way, but it seemed that the harder he worked, the more Flora found strength within herself to take his place in the shop.

In early September, Rose was slightly injured during a daylight raid in which her factory was hit. She was taken to the County Hospital – and to the same bed that Daisy had occupied just a few months before. There she was treated for fairly minor injuries. A few days later two wards of the hospital were destroyed and many patients and two nurses were killed. Rose made light of her injuries, preferring instead to tell her family of the incredible courage of one of the nursing staff.

‘Can you believe, there was this sister and she filled a bowl with syringes – they all had morphine in them, which is ever so strong – and she crawled in the dark and smoke, Mum, over broken furniture, under beds, looking for injured patients. Twice she was lowered headfirst into wreckage to get to the patients. She followed the screams and moans until she found someone, treated her, and then moved on looking for the next one. I think she’s the bravest person ever.’ She was quiet, remembering the dead bodies on the Heath. I wasn’t no use, she thought to herself. Daisy was the one told me what to do.