Daisy's Wars (44 page)

‘It would have,’ Daisy said, ‘and he was right. Our house had taken a direct hit and there were no survivors. I couldn’t have coped with the sympathy, so I said they were
abroad, and something bad did happen to me before I joined up. It was why I joined up.’

‘He said you’d eventually have what you wanted all along, though, that you’d be all right. I said you were already and he said you weren’t, you just made it look that
way. I never mentioned it, I didn’t want to upset you, but he really was quite fond of you, Daisy.’

‘I always gave him hell, but I was fond of him, too,’ Daisy said. ‘I knew he didn’t see me the way the others did. Before they went on that last mission I saw them in the
NAAFI and Calli didn’t look too good. He said he was OK, apart from feeling spooked, because he didn’t just have his family to think of, but you, too. I don’t know what I was
thinking, but I kissed him on the cheek – me! Bruiser went wild, you know what he was like. The last I saw they were all rolling about the floor wrestling, with the two new gunners watching.
I’ve thought about it so often. They didn’t join in because they didn’t feel part of the crew, yet they died together a few hours later. How intimate a connection was that? I
didn’t go over to Normandy for the funerals. I’d just buried my husband, you see, I didn’t think I could cope.’

‘The flowers were lovely,’ Eileen said. ‘Pearl was there, she told me you were married.’

‘Pearl?’ Daisy said, eyes wide. ‘Little Pearl with the head to one side?’

‘She still does that,’ Eileen laughed. ‘She had made a date with one of those new gunners, so she went to Normandy to see him buried. Said she hadn’t told you about the
date because she was scared you’d round on her.’

‘I would have! I remember she sat up in the tower that night, and she did seem a bit anxious. I thought it was because of you. Did she, tell you about the boots?’

Eileen shook her head.

‘Before we had it confirmed that Lady Groundhog was lost we heard the sound of flying boots outside and thought they’d made it back. When we opened the door there was no one there.
We all looked at each other and shivered a bit! There were about six of us still waiting, we all heard it, and you couldn’t mistake the sound of flying boots. I’ve never understood
it.’ She looked up. ‘And all the time Pearl was keeping a secret, was she? Wish I’d known!’ she laughed.

‘Well, you’ll get your chance to tell her off – she’s arriving tomorrow! So tell me about your husband. Were you happy?’

‘Very. He was quite a man, just what I needed. He was a lot older than me, so I knew he would go sooner, but it’s still hard. I’m still a bit confused, to be honest. Something
happened to me, too. It was when I was in Australia. Do you remember the Australian Spitfire pilot? The one who kept writing to me?’

‘I had to write “Gone away” on his letters and send them back!’ Eileen recalled.

‘Well, he was Mr Right, I was just too scared to admit it then. He was shot down in 1944, a few months after I saw you and Annie, and I was told he was dead, but he wasn’t. I saw him
on TV in Australia and looked him up.’

‘Really? That must’ve been a helluva shock!’

‘You have no idea! Oh, hell, let’s not talk about it yet, I’m feeling so confused about it. Tell me about Annie.’

‘Well, this is where it gets very strange, as I said,’ Eileen said, glancing at Daisy. ‘You know I said Calli had the second sight? Annie has, too. When she was little she saw
a man in the corner of her room, never questioned it. He was always there, she thought other people saw him too, and when she understood they didn’t she was too confused to say anything. It
was Calli.’

‘My God, another shiver’s just gone up my spine!’

‘Think how I felt! It came out recently when her son – Gavin’s four, by the way – got annoyed because the man he saw had disappeared.’

‘The little boy saw him, too?’ Daisy was aghast.

‘The man had disappeared completely after the boys were buried, and Gavin was really angry, kept demanding to know where he’d gone, and bit by bit it came out. Annie eventually owned
up, said all sorts of strange things had happened throughout her life, but she hadn’t mentioned any of them because she was scared it might cause a fuss. That’s the saddest thing. I was
trying to give her a normal family life, but all those years she knew things weren’t right between Alex and me, she said she felt she had to watch what she said and did. Made me feel such a
failure.’

‘Oh, stop it!’

Then the photos came out, with much Aahing and Oohing.

‘Katie’s a redhead, full of life, a bit too full to be honest; built like me, too, or as I used to be.’

‘You don’t look that different.’

‘Oh, it’s true, old friends are the best friends!’ Daisy teased. ‘The thing I admire about her, though, is that she handles it so well. I hated all the leering that went
on. I had to put on a show every time I walked into the NAAFI.’

‘Mae West!’ Eileen laughed.

‘Yes, that’s who it was – you guessed! But it doesn’t bother Katie, she just takes it all in her stride and gives them a look that would wither any man to a prune if they
sidle up to her.’

‘You did exactly the same!’

‘Yes, but it honestly doesn’t bother her. I was terrified and mortified, I used to cringe inside.’

‘I think I guessed that, Daisy. A lot of us did, but we knew if we suggested you might be a sensitive soul you’d be annoyed.’

‘It was that obvious? And I thought I was carrying Mae off so well that she’d soon be out of a job! So where’s your Annie then?’

‘They’re on holiday; they live in the flat above. You’ll meet her some other time, she’ll be so eager to hear someone else tell her stories of her father.’

‘So what are you doing about his family, then?’ Daisy asked.

‘I have no idea,’ Eileen sighed. ‘Annie says to leave it for now, something will turn up. She’s like that – very intuitive. She’s Calli’s daughter all
right.’

Pearl arrived the next evening and they spent the rest of the night talking about their days in the WAAFs, and how their lives had gone since then. Daisy told them about Frank,
the whole story this time, about finding him again.

‘To tell the truth,’ she said, ‘I don’t know whether he was glad I’d found him or not.’

‘And what about you?’ Pearl asked.

‘I’m confused,’ she laughed. ‘Did I go looking for him because I wanted to see an old friend, or because Peter had died and I was lonely?’

‘You said he was Mr Right,’ Eileen said.

‘Yes, but things have happened, we’ve changed, all of us, haven’t we?’

‘You don’t seem happy to have left him in Australia, though,’ Pearl remarked. ‘Why is that?’

‘That’s what I don’t know. Besides, I’m not the gorgeous creature I once was, am I? Things have moved about a bit, gravity has set in, there are wrinkles in places I
can’t even see.’

‘Tell me something,’ Eileen said. ‘When you looked at him, what did you see?’

‘The scars at first, you can’t really miss them, but after a few minutes I didn’t notice them, strangely enough.’

‘And now, when you think of him,’ Pearl said quietly, ‘how do you see him?’

Daisy thought for a moment and then looked at them. ‘I see him as he was!’ she replied with a shrug.

‘Do you know what strikes me as really funny?’ Eileen asked. ‘Here’s this woman who hated being judged on her looks, and here she sits, thinking this man can’t want
anything to do with her because she thinks her looks have gone off a bit.’

‘Do you mind?’ Daisy said sharply, and they all laughed.

‘But think of it, Daisy. He’s probably thinking you wouldn’t be interested in him because of his looks,’ Eileen suggested, ‘yet even with the scarring you still
picture him as he was.’

‘And?’ she asked.

‘And he probably sees you as you were – not that you’ve changed one iota, of course!’

After three days the old friends parted, each with their own thoughts on their shared memories, and promising to be in touch again soon. All that time had passed, Daisy
thought, yet it had been as if they had last met six weeks ago. They had changed, yet they were the same. She remembered seeing Eileen and feeling sad that their friendship was now over, but it had
been there waiting to be picked up again.

Daisy flew down to Newcastle, determined to see again the city where she had grown up as an unwelcome incomer, the place where so much had happened that had led her to where she now was.
Fenwicks was still there, a different enterprise but still a quality store, she noted. The basic layout of the city centre was still recognisable, and then she made her way to Guildford Place and
was surprised so many of the old houses were still standing. There was a gap, though, between numbers 6 and 25, and somewhere in that gap was where she had once lived and where her family had died.
Newish flats had been built over the crater, sometime during the 1950s she guessed, and they were three-storeys high, one above the old houses on either side.

The strange thing was, though, that standing there looking at the flats, she could still see her old home, and, in a strange way, it was as if her family were still there. She could almost hear
her mother’s tortured breathing, could hear Kay’s beautiful voice soaring, and could see her father coming out of a door that wasn’t there to go on his nightshift at the pit. She
blotted Dessie out of her mind, he wasn’t part of her family, but apart from him and the horror he brought into her life, they were all there still. She could feel it.

She wandered round the area, surprised that so much was still recognisable. Robinson’s Pork Shop was there, and Clough’s Sweet Shop; even the Ice Cream Parlour was still going
strong. In her head she could hear as clear as day the voices she knew from when she was young. And when she turned round she could trace the route she had taken home from the shops, and almost see
herself walking it and turning in where her door used to be, watching the ghost of herself as a young girl.

She had been to the library and seen a picture of the devastation of that terrifying night in 1941, and she reassembled it in her head. Smoke mingled with steam from the fire crews’ hoses
as the water fell on the burning remains of the houses. The voices of the rescuers trying to save those buried underneath intermingled with the sobs of the waiting relatives. And hanging in the air
was the stench she knew so well and could never forget from her days in the tower, as metals, wood, material and human flesh burned together.

She went to Heaton Cemetery and placed flowers on the mass grave where the unidentified pieces of the dead were buried. It didn’t seem enough, but there was nothing else she could do, so
she turned to go and then thought for a moment.

There was one more thing she could do. She could say goodbye to them. When she left Guildford Place in 1939 she hadn’t said goodbye to any of them, so she could at least do it now.
Standing with her hand on the headstone, she broke down in tears and it was a long time before she could get the words out.

She wouldn’t come back here again, she knew that now. The Newcastle Hand had long lost its power, and she was leaving for the last time so much that had pained her and shaped her. She had
spent only eighteen years here, hardly a lifetime. She no longer belonged to Newcastle, not even reluctantly, and it was time to break whatever vestiges of the hold it had ever had over her. So,
after saying her goodbyes to those she cared about, she left without looking back.

27

Back home in Oxford she tried to go on with the life she had had there for the past thirty years. The family came to visit and went back to their own homes again, all of them
trying to keep the traditions they had grown up with, each of these painful for being the first ones without Peter. There were birthdays, Easter, the Flower Show where Professor Theodore Quibbe no
longer exhibited, Christmas, New Year, and the first snow-drops that, as if to mock them, were even earlier than in past years, so that they all heard his voice say ‘I told you so!’ and
stood in a group weeping.

Daisy spoke on the phone to Eileen and Pearl and paid a visit to Glasgow to meet Annie. There she told her as many stories about Calli as she could, watching the eagerness in eyes that were so
like the lovely boy’s. Annie’s little boy, Gavin, a miniature of his grandfather, asked her if she knew a man who flew planes and asked her why she was so sad, when she thought she was
putting on a very good show of being happy.

Frank wrote from Australia, formal letters that gradually became gentler and more personal, then he stopped writing and she panicked in case he might be dead – again. When she phoned his
home she was relieved to hear his voice, but he said he was finding it too hard to keep up the correspondence with her.

‘What do you mean?’ she gasped, feeling afraid for some reason.

‘Daisy, I sometimes feel that it was cruel of you to contact me again,’ he said wearily.

‘But why?’

‘So many things I had buried deep in the past came up again. My wife, she was a good woman, she cared for me and gave me children, but since your visit I’ve been feeling guilty about
her, wondering if I ever gave her as much as she gave me, because the feelings I had for you all those years ago are still there. I keep wondering what might have been, and that’s
disrespectful to my wife. I feel as though you’ve churned up my life for nothing. It might be easier if you left me to find out if I can settle down again.’

Daisy was sick to her stomach when she replaced the receiver, but she knew what he meant. She had been wrestling with similar feelings. Why had she looked him up and told him he was her
‘someone’ and that she had sat by his bed as he lay on the brink of death? To absolve herself of blame for hurting him all those years ago? And if that was the case, she had hurt him
all over again. And she had all the same feelings as he had, that was the truth of the matter.

She had loved Peter, but it was a different kind of love from what she had felt for Frank: not less, but different, and she had agonised over what that said about their life together. Had she
fooled Peter or had she fooled herself, not that there was any difference, because whoever was being fooled it debased the last thirty or more years of their life together. So, unable to make up
her mind, she had kept in touch with Frank, for old time’s sake, she told herself, but the friendship was kept at a distance. She was safe, and it struck her that she had done that so many
times in her life, put a distance between herself and anyone who threatened to get near. She had done it to Frank before, too.