I'll Be Seeing You (11 page)

‘My mother did.'

‘That so?' He glanced at his wife, still busy poking around in her shoulder bag, and lowered his voice. ‘I met an English girl when I was over here. Her name was Betty and she was in your Land Army. Matter of fact, I wanted to marry her and she said yes, at first, but then she didn't want to leave England and her family didn't want her to go either. I kept on writing when I got home but in the end I stopped because it wasn't doing any good.' He shrugged. ‘She married someone else, finally.'

‘But you didn't forget her?'

‘I guess you always remember your first girl.'

He took me through to another part of the bar and showed me some old black and white wartime photos from the airfield, framed and hung on the wall. Bombers lined up on the tarmac, another crashed in a buckled heap, a baseball game being played out on the airfield grass, jitterbugging at a hangar dance, local village children gorging themselves at a Christmas party, and several crew groups. He pointed one out. ‘That's me right there – back row on the left.' The man standing beside me was completely unrecognizable as the grinning young man in the photo. ‘And that's Larry, our captain, Bill, our bombardier, Lloyd, our navigator. Down here's Gus, our radio operator, and these four guys are all gunners. Great guys.' He was using the present tense, I noticed. ‘We'd just got back safe from a mission, that's why we look so happy. Jeez . . . I remember it like yesterday.' He went on looking at the photo for a moment in silence. Then he said heavily, ‘I guess we've all changed a bit.'

The next day I moved on to investigate the last American airfield on the list. My reference book told me that, for once, this was within a mile of the village of its name and I was hoping for an easy one. Instead, I got lost in a maze of lanes that seemed to lead nowhere. They twisted and turned between high hedges and through long tree tunnels and I could see almost nothing of what lay beyond. After several miles, just as I was giving up hope of getting anywhere, the lane gave a final twist and emerged onto the wide open, sunlit space of a village green.

I stopped the car to admire it – the green, green grass, the shaven cricket pitch, the pavilion, the duck pond, complete with ducks, the Norman church, the mature trees and the old Suffolk houses ringing the perimeter, some roofs thatched, some tiled, some walls whitewashed, others in soft pink or yellow – gentler versions of the bold colours I had been seeing before. A perfect English village, the stuff of picture postcards and British Tourist Board brochures.

There was a pub – naturally – on the other side of the green and I drove round and parked outside. The thatch-roofed Cricketers had clearly left its spit-and-sawdust days far behind, judging by the brand new thatch, the gleaming paintwork and the profusion of gaudy annuals spilling from hanging baskets and tubs. I went inside and found that the interior had been ruthlessly updated – in the same sort of way as the Oxford funeral parlour. Fitted carpeting, imitation flowers, chintz curtains, polished dining tables, and an impressive menu chalked up on a big blackboard with London prices to match. Only the inglenook had been spared. The place was still empty, except for a young man wiping drinking glasses behind the bar.

‘I got a bit lost,' I told him. ‘Could you tell me where I am?'

He smiled. ‘You're not the only one to do that. You're in Halfpenny Green.'

‘That's rather what I was hoping you'd say.'

I ordered a lager and as soon as he had set the glass down on the bar, I trotted out the usual questions. No, he said, there was no pub called the Mad Monk in the village. The Cricketers was the only one. But he couldn't say for certain if there'd ever been one or not. He actually lived in Sudbury and was a student at Cambridge doing summer vacation work. His aunt was a friend of the owners and she'd got him the job. And there wasn't a village shop or post office any longer. Sainsbury's wasn't far if you took the good road out – not the back lanes like I had done.

‘I believe there's an old wartime airfield somewhere near here.'

‘It's just outside the village. I've been up there myself a couple of times. It's beyond the woods on the opposite side of the green – up on the farm land.'

‘Is there much left to see?'

He nodded. ‘The runways are still there, so's the control tower and a couple of hangars, and they've kept the old huts. It's quite a place, really. There are some wartime photos of it on the wall over there by the inglenook, if you're interested. The owners left them there because the Americans still come back here and like to see them. And there's a board with names carved on it. One of the Yanks told me there used to be a whole lot more names on the ceiling but they must have got painted over. He was quite upset about that.'

I ordered a prawn salad and went to look at the photos. They were similar to the ones in the Six Bells – bombers lined up, nose to tail; life on the base; groups of air crews. I looked at those especially closely but none bore any resemblance to the men in my photo. The names were carved on a board screwed to the wall – an old scoreboard perhaps – and looked as though they'd been done with penknives, or kitchen knives, or keys, or whatever was to hand. Some of them were RAF but most were American: Lieutenant Willard Clark, Maine; Lieutenant Don Murtrie, Wisconsin; Lieutenant Herman Patzel, Kansas; Captain Floyd Schooler, Texas . . .

I carried my lager outside to sit at a table in the garden, overlooking the village green. A couple arrived in a shiny new Jaguar and went into the pub, and then another in an open Porsche drew up with a spurt of gravel – a girl with long blond hair and a man in a brass-buttoned blazer and cravat. There was no sign of any genuine locals – no rheumy-eyed old men in cloth caps sitting with their pipes over pints. Nobody to ask about times past. And the waitress who brought my elaborately adorned salad was even younger than the bartender.

When I had finished, I drove slowly round the green. As I did so, I passed a thatched cottage with the name on the gate, Elm Cottage, and a discreet B & B sign. A woman was working in the front garden and I stopped and got out and called to her. She came over, trowel in hand, wearing old gardening clothes and a floppy straw hat. Somewhere in her late fifties, I judged – old enough to have remembered something of the war. She only had the one room, she said, and it was free at the moment. I was very welcome to take a look at it.

As I followed her up the garden path between beds overflowing with cottage flowers, into the house and up a creaking staircase, she chattered away non-stop. Wasn't it hot? A real heatwave. The weather people said it was going to last for another week but, of course, they often got it wrong – look at how they missed the hurricane. At least the farmers didn't have anything to grumble about with the harvest, though they'd probably find something else to complain about soon enough. It'd be too dry instead of too wet, and they'd be saying they needed rain. They were never satisfied.

We reached the landing. A pause for breath, and the chatter continued. There was no en suite, or whatever they called it these days, but, so long as I didn't mind that, the room
was
rather nice, if she said so herself. She lifted up a latch and opened a door with a flourish, standing back. I saw that it was, indeed, rather nice: beams the colour of pale honey, white walls, plain blue linen curtains at the open window which gave onto the village green, fresh flowers in a vase on the chest of drawers, and a very comfortable-looking large double bed. No fussy frills, no cute ornaments, no awful pictures. I told her how lovely I thought it was and asked if I could stay two or three nights, which would give me time to do some more painting and sketching. She looked pleased.

‘Most people seem to like staying here. They say it's very restful. Peaceful. Even the Americans don't mind not having an en suite, or a shower.'

‘Do you get a lot of Americans?'

‘A steady stream in summer. We should be very grateful to them for coming over here and spending their dollars. They all seem to love England – heaven knows why. Of course, most of the ones I get have come to revisit the old airfield.'

‘You mean, they served there during the war?'

‘Oh, yes. And you'd be surprised how many come back to see it again – usually with their wives, during the summer. Private visits. They've got a big official reunion coming up this weekend, but they're all staying at a hotel in Ipswich so I haven't got any of them with me this time, else I'd have been full. They'll be having a dinner and speeches, I expect, and all that sort of thing. And there's some sort of do for them up at the airfield. The Laytons are organizing it in their barn.'

‘The family that own the land?'

‘That's right. It's the grandson now, of course, but Richard Layton, his grandfather, was the one during the war and he was very keen on keeping up the contact with the Americans afterwards. He died in the Seventies and the only son soon after him, so it passed to William and he's carried on the tradition – fortunately. Most young people today wouldn't care a row of beans about such things.'

‘Have you lived in the village long?'.

‘Twenty-two years. My husband died five years ago and I started the B & B to keep myself occupied. I love it, I must say. You meet all sorts of interesting people from all over. Dutch, French, Germans, and the Americans, of course. They're the easiest, really. Something to do with speaking the same language, I suppose – more or less. Though the Dutch are very nice and always speak good English. I suppose they have to because nobody knows a word of Dutch, do they?'

‘I expect the village has changed a bit since you first came here.'

‘More's the pity. It used to be a real village with real villagers but now it's mostly commuters. You can get to London by train in less than an hour since the line's been electrified so commuters have snapped up nearly all the houses – priced the old locals right out of the market. It's a shame. And we had the Dutch elm disease, of course, and lost all the elms, including ours by the cottage – that's one thing I do hold against them, though I never say anything.'

‘I had lunch just now at the Cricketers. I expect that's changed too.'

She sighed. ‘New people bought it last year and spent a fortune on wrecking it. They cater to the commuters, of course – fancy food and fancy prices, but that's what they all seem to want. We've still got a cricket team but it's not the same as it was in the old days. But then nothing is, is it?'

I agreed with her, though it was fuddy-duddy of us both. ‘Were there ever any other pubs in the village?'

‘There used to be two more – the Plough and the Barley Sheaf – but they closed down a good while back, before the commuters arrived with the spending money. We had a post office-cum-general stores, too, but that's gone as well. Everyone's got cars now, so I suppose it doesn't matter but it was handy to be able to pop over for a pound of sugar, or whatever.'

I almost didn't bother to ask the question, but all stones needed to be thoroughly overturned.

‘There was never a pub called the Mad Monk, then?'

‘Well, yes, there was.'

I stared at her, hardly believing my ears. ‘There was?'

‘The Cricketers used to be called that. But the people who bought it changed the name. They didn't like the old one for some reason. I suppose they thought it didn't fit the new image. It
was
rather an odd name, I must admit, although you can have Jolly Friars as pubs, can't you, so why not Mad Monks? I don't know why it was ever called that – something to do with the old abbey near here, I imagine, though of course that's been in ruins for hundreds of years so there wouldn't have been any monks about, sane or otherwise, for a very long time.'

She talked on – about the price of the room, the tricky ways of the hot-water tap on the bath, the double tug necessary to work the lavatory (one short, one long), the need to keep the bedroom door shut so that the cat didn't get in . . . I wasn't really listening. I'd found the right pub, the right village and the right airfield: Halfpenny Green.
It was a nice sort of name. Some funny country name
. Between them, Joyce Atkins and Aunt Primrose had actually given me a big clue and I should have twigged long before. I had just been standing in the very bar where Ma had stood and where the Yanks had chatted her up. Perhaps where she had met my father.

‘What time would you like breakfast?'

I came back to earth and we sorted out a time and whether I wanted the full works or the Continental. ‘I thought I'd go up and see the old airfield. The young man in the pub told me there's still quite a lot of it left.'

‘Thanks to the Lay tons. I haven't been up there myself for a while but my American visitors are always thrilled to bits with it.'

‘I gather it's quite easy to find.'

‘Oh, yes. Just drive on about fifty yards from my gate and you'll come to Nightingale Lane. Go up there and you'll see a turning on the left by the old water tower. It takes you straight up onto the old perimeter track and you can drive all round the airfield. The Laytons don't mind so long as you steer clear of the crops.'

I thanked her. ‘Are there really nightingales?'

She smiled. ‘There used to be, but I haven't heard one singing for a long time. The commuters and their flash cars have probably frightened them all away.'

I found Nightingale Lane and the turning below the water tower. The car bumped and jolted up a rutted track and, at the top, the land levelled out onto a plateau of wheatfields. I could hear the clatter of a combine at work somewhere. I turned the car onto the old concrete perimeter track and drove round, scaring up some little brown and black birds – quail, I thought – that whirred into panicky flight before vanishing into the cover of the wheat.