Gifts of War (7 page)

Sam looked a picture. She wore a pale blue woollen coat, with a matching Alice band. If anything, she was more beautiful than on any of the previous occasions I had seen her.

Before I could say anything, two young children—who had spotted her before I had—rushed up to her.

“Miss!
Miss!
We’re going to Bristol, like you said,” shouted one breathlessly.

“Our Colin’s a sailor on a boat,” chorused the other.

“He’s going off somewhere secret and we’re saying good-bye.”

Sam was sitting on her haunches, down at their level. “Now calm down, Maureen. Don’t shout, Brian.”

She was back in her playground role, as I had seen her the very first time. Friendly, but firm.

She looked up at me and smiled, as she listened to what they had to say. They had obeyed her instantly, crowding closer to her and talking away nonstop, but much more quietly now. As the signal clanked down and the hiss of the train could be heard, they broke off and ran back to their parents, along the platform.

Sam stood up.

“What was that all about?”

She took a handkerchief from her bag and wiped her lips. “I have a thing about travel. I’ve always wanted to visit every place on earth and now, with this war on, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. I was reading to the class the other day, from a travel book, and we were talking about far-off places. I said everyone should travel, as soon as they could, as far as they could. They have the chance to go to Bristol—that’s a long way for them—and they wanted me to know.”

“They’re going to Bristol and back by train?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “Poor mites—they’ll probably fall fast asleep in class on Monday, but they’ll have seen Bristol. All the other children will want to know what it’s like. Maureen and Brian will be … what’s the word, what do they call Mary Pickford? A star, that’s it. They’ll be stars for a day.” She smiled again.

The 11:38 moved off at 11:48 and, soon after we left the station, the train passed the lockkeeper’s cottage where Sam lived. I was surprised to see, standing outside the cottage and waving, the young girl I’d observed when I’d called on Sam, the girl who sang in the choir. That set me thinking.

The train wasn’t busy and we had a compartment to ourselves. Sam unbuttoned her coat and sat back in her seat. As the train picked up speed and the smell of smoke from the engine came at us in wafts, she pointed out various villages we passed: Charlecote, Littleham Bridge, Avoncliffe. The line crisscrossed the green-dark waters of the Warwickshire canals a few times, and she knew their names as well. Her body, under her coat, was more than a match for the countryside.

“Have you been sailing on the canals?”

“Of course, many times. But it’s a bit slow for me. I like speed.”

Why hadn’t she wanted to go on my motorbike, I wondered.

At Stratford we got off and Sam waved to the children who were
going on to Bristol. Away from the station, we decided to have a walk around town to begin with, to work up an appetite, then have lunch at a pub we both knew, the Crown, and take a longer walk by the river in the afternoon. I knew the main streets of Stratford pretty well by now, but Sam knew the back alleys and mews, the secret yards and dead ends where many of the older establishments were to be found— blacksmiths, stables, foundries, saddlers. The road led us by the ferry, past a church and a water mill. I noticed the high proportion of women working in the blacksmiths and in the foundry—the men, I assumed, were away fighting. It may sound odd, but at times I was grateful for my limp. It explained why
I
wasn’t abroad, doing my bit.

At one point we stopped off at a small mews house that, according to the sign outside, was a woodworker’s shop. “Come on, look inside,” said Sam. “This is where to come if you ever need a new walking stick—or a wooden leg.” She flashed me a grin.

I did as I was told.

Inside, there were three men working—one man and two boys, really. But they were not what drew the eye. What you couldn’t help but notice was what was on the walls. Those walls, made of old, long, brown bricks, were covered in every type of tool you could imagine. All pegged to the brickwork in a neat arrangement, each with its place—where the workmen knew how to find them—were the most beautifully crafted implements: planes, in shiny polished wood, bradawls, bodkins, drills, awls, hammers with different kinds of heads, prongs, small pickaxes, knives of varied shapes and sizes, chisels, spokeshaves, cleavers, adzes, whittles, naked blades, and rasps. The overall effect was like the huge abstract collages I had seen in Munich.

“How did you stumble across this?” I asked.

“There’s a woodwork teacher in school. He brought me here. I love tidiness. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

“Not in Stratford,” I said. “Someday I’ll tell you about my time in Munich. But this is stunning, stunning.”

We waved good-bye to the three men.

Gradually, we worked our way back to the Crown. Sam knew one of the waitresses there, who was introduced to me as Maude, and she gave us a good table with a view of the yard, where, in the old days, the coaches would have unloaded. The yard contained a number of barrels—empty, I presumed—which were waiting to be exchanged for full ones the next time the brewery made a delivery.

There wasn’t much choice on the lunch menu—it
was
wartime, after all—but it was a good deal less brown than the canteen at the Ag and I remember the hotel actually served a fish course after the soup: very civilized.

I don’t remember too much about the Crown itself on that occasion because by now I was totally smitten with Sam. I have only fallen in love once in my life and it happened immediately, totally, and right there in the back alleys and dead ends of Stratford. Sam, I realized, was trying to keep her distance even as I was trying to get closer. As we had poked about the hidden side of Stratford she’d spoken as if she were a guide and I a paying tourist. Had she given Wilhelm this treatment to begin with? I put it out of my mind. During our “tour” there were no intimate little glances or smiles, there was no squeeze of my arm, no physical contact of any kind. But I could tell she was not indifferent to me either. She was seeing how I responded to what she had to say, how I dealt with the difficulties she was putting in my way. And yes, she was a bit shy. I was just glad to be with her.

Before lunch we both had a sherry. With the food I had a pint of bitter and she drank shandy—half beer, half lemonade. By now she had taken off her coat, to reveal underneath a white frock, buttoned down the front. When she shook off her coat, she also released more perfume. This, plus the fact that the frock was a shade—though no
more than a shade—too small for her, was the most alluring experience I think I had ever had to that point, not excluding the Eleven Executioners cabaret in Munich, or Crimson. It was, conceivably, the most erotic moment of my life.

During the first part of lunch she said it was my turn to talk, that she was talked out after our tour of the town. I wasn’t sure that was the truth—she was still keeping a distance from me—but I was happy to let it go. So I did what lovers (or would-be lovers) do at times like that. I gave her my life story, or an edited version of it, designed to make her think well of me.

I told her how I had grown up in the Cotswolds, not on a farm exactly—we lived in a large house next to the church in a small hamlet—but otherwise surrounded by farmland and the beech woods of the wolds.

“So, from an early age I was familiar with which mushrooms could be eaten and which toadstools were poisonous, where the badgers came out at night, and where the bluebells formed their plush, iridescent carpet in spring. I remember even today the damp smell of bluebells in the beech woods in late April—I was so familiar with those beech woods, and so familiar a sight there myself, that even the foxes learned to recognize me and stopped being afraid.

“In the summer the foliage of the beech trees formed great cathedral-shaped spaces high above, bathed in a green-golden light, through which sunbeams sliced down in dramatic diagonal shafts. At other times of the year, when it was cold and it rained, my sister and I would bend twigs into a hoop and collect wet—or, better still, frosted—cobwebs from the hedgerows, so that they formed intricate, beautiful lacework patterns that we held up to the light. Endless streams cut through the wolds, in deep, secret folds, where water rats, moorhens, and the occasional snake could be glimpsed.

“Everyone—all the local children, anyway—knew in which field
the farmer kept his bull and for us younger ones—admonished sternly to keep away—that only made that field seem lusher, greener, more mysterious, and altogether more desirable than all the other fields put together. The iron fence to the field contained a kissing gate. This kept the bull in but didn’t keep us children out when there weren’t any adults about. We devised a daring game in which the aim was to see how long we could stay in the forbidden field before the bull saw us, or smelled us, and came looking, first at a trot, then, as he got closer, at a rush (we called the game ‘Bullrush’). Then you scampered back through the kissing gate and taunted the bull from safety. I remember we once stayed in the field until we had counted to four hundred and forty-four, a magic number for my sister and me ever afterward. Then I was given my first pocket watch and we timed how long we could remain in the field. It wasn’t the same, and soon afterward we began to lose interest.

“The vicar in our village had five daughters and a big scandal arose when one of them was made pregnant by a local farmhand.” Sam’s cheeks reddened, but I pressed on. “She was fifteen at the time, a year older than me, and my secret shame and embarrassment was that I had once kissed her, in the back corridor of the dark and rambling vicarage. I later found out that she kissed anybody and everybody, but at the time I remember being worried sick that
I
had made her pregnant by that illicit kiss. But the police never came looking for me and after a while my guilty feelings subsided. The daughter was taken away and I never saw her again, much to my regret. I had enjoyed that kiss and would have risked it again.

“My sister was two years younger than me and we always did everything together—well, she didn’t kiss the vicar’s daughter, obviously. I was the leader in all games and expeditions and she was content to be my trusty lieutenant.”

“What’s your sister’s name?” said Sam, between mouthfuls.

“Isobel. Izzy.”

“Was she a tomboy?”

“Not really. Why do you ask?”

“One of my sisters was a tomboy—always bullying the rest of us and leading us into scrapes.”

“No, Izzy was—is—really quite feminine. Not a tomboy at all. She’s become a bit of a bully now, though. She’s a nurse, or training to be. Bossiness seems to go with the job.”

“Will she join up? You can travel as a nurse, especially in wartime. Teachers don’t get to travel.” She made a face. “Sorry for interrupting. Go on.”

“I don’t know what my sister has planned. She’s been living in London and we’ve lost touch a bit. But we used to be close.”

And I told Sam about the first expedition my sister and I embarked on, if you can call it that. It occurred when I was about seven and Isobel was five, when we were allowed to sleep out in a tent in the garden overnight. “We lit a fire, with the aid of our parents, and cooked—or, rather, burned, cremated, sacrificed,
incinerated—
some sausages, which we then nibbled and pretended that we were enjoying. Isobel was a bit frightened by the owls later in the night and, to tell the gospel truth, so was I. But I played the big brother role to perfection, and we fell asleep with our arms around each other, inside the same sleeping bag.

“Our biggest expedition was to watch the Severn Bore. The river Severn was about ten miles from where we lived and at certain times of the year, especially in the spring and autumn, when tides were strong in the Bristol Channel, a wave, about four feet high, was produced by the sharp narrowing of the channel, and moved steadily up the river, certainly as far as Sharpness and maybe even farther, for all I know. People traveled for miles around to see the bore, but for children the game was to sit somewhere on the bank where you were at risk of being
caught by the wave, and then play “Chicken.” You sat or stood on the bank until the last possible moment, before the wave got you— and then you ran. Oh, how you ran! The last person to move won.

“Of course, our parents would never have let us play this game, had they known, but Isobel and I sneaked off as soon as we had bicycles. It wasn’t hard to cover the ten miles to the river, even though there were some hills in the way. When the tide was right, we could get back easily before dark. Our parents were very strict about us being in the house before nightfall at all times of the year, which meant we couldn’t play the really dangerous game of beating the bore at nighttimes. We heard the older children talking of this, when we reached the river, and we were both truly in awe of them. To wait by the river, without being able to see the bore coming, and to judge its speed and distance only from the sound it made was truly impressive. People occasionally got it wrong, of course, and sometimes drowned. There were children we saw by the river every time we went who we didn’t see at other times of the year. They were curious friendships, but intense for the short time they lasted.”

“We had big tides in the Bristol Channel,” said Sam, chewing hard. “That’s where I grew up, Bristol. The tides occasionally caused floods. Afterward, my sisters and me would go down—when we were allowed to—and look at the fish and eels that had got trapped when the water receded. Ugly things, eels.” She shuddered. “Untidy things, floods.”

I nodded. “But village life in the Cotswolds was not all owls and bluebells. In Edgewater we had an epileptic who had regular fits, and all of the children were taught that if we saw Martin having a convulsion, we had to take out our handkerchiefs—we were not allowed out of the house without a handkerchief in our pocket—and hold his tongue with it, so he didn’t swallow it and choke to death. Then another
child ran for help. No one laughed at epileptics in our village, nor were we frightened of them, as some people are in towns.”