I'll Be Seeing You (9 page)

I turned the conversation away into other channels and after another glass of wine, Monica left. I opened the envelope she had brought and took out the letter from America, skipping over the friendly greetings, the apologies for the late reply and the general news, down to the part that answered my question.

Tell your friend in England that our magazine does sometimes feature appeals for renewing old wartime contacts. They usually print a letter with a photo plus the name and any other details – place, dates, etc, asking the guy, or guys, to get in touch with the writer via the magazine which then forwards any replies. That way there's no harm done, privacy-wise. If she writes me with some details, I'll be glad to ask the magazine to run it
.

I'm giving some of the contact names and addresses of other Bomb Group Associations who were based in Suffolk, so she could try these too. And maybe she should write to the 8th Air Force Historical Society. If she's got enough information, they might be able to come up with something. They wouldn't put her in direct touch, but they'd probably pass on a letter
.

Tell your friend it'll be a pretty long shot. I wouldn't want to raise her hopes too much. There were a lot of us guys over there in England and it was a long time ago
.

The letter was signed Ray White and he lived in Wichita, Kansas. He had attached details of a dozen or more American Bomb Group Associations.

I went round to the local chemist and ordered copies of the photo. The middle-aged woman behind the counter looked at it with interest.

‘They're American Air Force, aren't they? I remember them during the war – when I was a little girl. My eldest sister used to go to the dances up at the base near our home.'

‘Where was that?'

‘Suffolk. It was crawling with Yanks.'

‘You don't by any chance know of a pub called the Mad Monk, do you?'

She shook her head. ‘No. Our village had four pubs but none of them was called that. Funny sort of name for one.' She pulled a pad of forms towards her and felt for a biro in the top pocket of her white coat. ‘They'll have to make a negative first to do the copies, so it'll be a bit expensive and it'll take longer. About a week. That all right?'

I called in at a bookshop and looked in
The Good Pub Guide
under Suffolk but there was no Mad Monk recommended. Directory Enquiries, similarly, drew a blank.

‘I'm sorry but we have no number listed anywhere in Suffolk for a pub of that name.'

‘Are you absolutely
sure?
'

‘I'm afraid so. We can find them easily.' The operator sounded sympathetic, rather than impatient, as though he had understood that it was important to me.

Obviously, the Mad Monk no longer existed. Where it had once been common to have four or five pubs in a village, many were now reduced to one. Like village stores and post offices and bakers and butchers all over England, they were a vanishing species – metamorphosed into more profitable private properties. The only chance of tracing the Mad Monk lay in my going to Suffolk and driving all round the county, asking anyone who looked old enough to remember if they had known such a pub in their village. But first I had to finish the illustrations for the nursery-rhyme book.

As soon as the copies of the crew photograph were ready I wrote to Ray White and all the American bomb group associations on his list, enclosing the photo and my appeal.
If any of your readers recognize any member of this B-17 bomber crew, stationed somewhere in Suffolk, England, during the Second World War, and have news of them, would they please get in touch with me. I am trying to trace the pilot, who was a family friend at that time
. I had spread the net to catch not only the one man, but anyone who might be able to help find him.

That done and the letters posted, I settled down to finish the illustrations. By the end of June I had completed them all except for one – ‘Wynken, Blynken and Nod'. In summer the studio was invariably hot and stuffy, even with the dormer window and both skylights wide open. An electric fan helped, but had to be kept at a distance or it dried paint too fast and blew things about on the trestle table. Outside, my attic view had changed now that the trees were in all their glory, camouflaging houses and gardens and reducing the river to an occasional flashing glint between leaves.

‘Wynken, Blynken and Nod' was a pleasure to do. I enjoyed creating pictures for the magical words – the fishermen three sailing off in their wooden shoe on their river of crystal light into a sea of dew, trailing their nets of silver and gold for the herring fish. I was absorbed in it all when Flavia came up into the studio.

‘Still working, Mum? Sorry to interrupt, I thought you'd have knocked off by now.'

I rinsed out my brush in the water jar beside me and wiped the tip. ‘I was just going to. Stay and have a glass of wine with me.'

‘Actually, that's what I was going to ask
you
to do, and if you'd like some supper as well. Callum's away doing the detective series, so I'm on my own.'

‘I'd love to.'

‘Lamb chops, if that's OK.'

‘Sounds lovely.'

She came closer and admired the illustration. ‘It's “Wynken, Blynken and Nod”, isn't it? One of my favourites.

All night long their nets they threw

To the stars in the twinkling foam –

Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe
,

Bringing the fishermen home
.'

‘Those are wonderful pictures.'

‘Thank you. I only hope the art editor agrees with you.'

I started clearing up at the sink while she wandered about the room, looking at some of the paintings I'd had framed and hung. ‘I don't remember this one, Mum? Where is it?'

‘Somewhere in the depths of Kent. I drove out there last autumn. Would you like to have it?' Landscapes made a change from the bunnies. Sometimes I painted outdoors, other times I made sketches and then did the painting back in the studio. In fact, I never went anywhere without a sketchbook. Daily life is wonderful fodder – the park, a bus queue, a doctor's waiting room . . . ordinary people and ordinary places can inspire just as much as extraordinary ones. I thought of that other sketchbook in the desk drawer; its owner had known that too.

‘Very much – if you're sure.'

‘Quite sure.'

She prowled on. ‘Who are these men?'

I turned from the sink to see that she had picked up the bomber-crew photo that I had left on the side table. ‘I don't know,' I said truthfully. ‘It was just an old photo I came across in Grandma's desk when I was clearing it out.'

She took it over to the window to see better. Once again, I wondered at its magnetic effect. ‘It's from the wartime isn't it? When Grandma was in the air force. But they don't look like RAF.'

‘They're not. They're Americans.'

‘What was she doing with a lot of Yanks?'

‘Apparently, her station was taken over by the American Air Force.'

‘Hey, maybe she fell for one of these. I wouldn't blame her – they look pretty hunky to me. Specially this one at the back. And she kept the photo all these years. Grandma's secret past!'

She was smiling and joking and so close to the truth, and I was so close to telling her. After all, she was no longer a child who needed to be shielded from anything that might upset her. The moment passed.

I said, ‘She already knew Granda then, so it's not very likely.'

‘So she did. They were a wonderful couple, weren't they? A perfect marriage. And now they're together again.'

I turned off the sink tap. ‘I'm ready for that drink now.'

She put the photo back on the table. ‘OK. Let's go down, then.'

On the Underground, one day, I saw my married man – the one I'd been potty about. He was strap-hanging further along the crowded carriage, his back turned to me, reading a newspaper. I thought of Adrian's acid comment about the wasted years and my coming to my senses at last. I found that I could look at him dispassionately without any stomach-churning or racing hearts. Nothing much at all. The cure, it seemed, was complete. He folded his newspaper and got off at the next station and I watched him walk away out of my life.

The evening classes stopped for the summer holidays in mid-July. After the final session, Monica and I adjourned for our usual coffee round the corner and she produced a newspaper cutting from nowhere and laid it like a conjuror's trick card on the table before me.

‘I happened to see this in the
Standard
the other day. I thought it might interest you.'

I picked it up. The headline said:
War baby meets American GI father fifty years on
. There was an unflattering photograph of a plump, bespectacled, middle-aged woman with her arm linked firmly through the arm of an elderly, bald man; the woman was beaming happily, the man, I thought, looked rather confused and not quite so ecstatically happy.

Monica said, ‘I know it's not the same as your case, but there's some useful stuff about how she found him. Somebody helped her and it gives their name.'

I folded the cutting and put it in my bag. ‘Thanks, I'll read it later.'

‘Any progress?'

‘No. It seems rather a hopeless cause.'

‘She thought so too – the woman in that article. The American authorities didn't want to know . . . wouldn't help her at all. Apparently, their servicemen over here were actively discouraged from continuing relationships with British girls. She says her mother was offered a hundred pounds if she signed an agreement not to try and get in touch again with her father or make any demands on him.'

‘I hope she refused.'

‘Yes, but she didn't try very hard and, eventually, she married someone else. It wasn't until five years ago that the daughter – the one in the photo – thought she'd have a go and see if she could find her father. She knew his name and service number.'

‘
Five years!
It took her
that
long to find him, even with that information?'

‘She said she came up against a brick wall at every turn. The American Embassy gave her the addresses of some government departments to write to and they sent back forms with a long list of questions she couldn't answer. She found out later that even if she'd been able to answer every single one, they still wouldn't have released any information on a veteran. They have something called a Privacy Act.'

‘Yes, I've discovered that. None of which gives me much hope.'

‘Ah, but this woman persevered. She hung on like a bull terrier, in spite of everything, and her luck turned in the end. Apparently, she heard an interview on her local radio with another woman who
had
managed to find her GI father and knew all about the problems and how to get round them. So she got in touch with her and she helped. It can be done.' Monica put down her coffee cup. ‘Of course, you probably wouldn't want to go to all that bother for an old friend of your mother's.' She looked at me with no particular expression, but, as I said, she was nobody's fool. ‘Have you had any replies from the Bomb Group Associations?'

‘Yes, several.' After the Embassy experience, their warmth and friendliness had restored my shaken faith in Americans. One of them had even sent their Group magazine – shorter than the RAF one I had seen, but otherwise very similar. Articles, photos of reunions and wreath-layings at memorials, old wartime, photos, personal memories, poems, and, at the end, letters which included three appeals from researchers for information and, encouragingly, one asking for names to be put to faces in an old group photo. ‘They all said they'd try to find space to print the photo and my letter in their magazine. No promises because they get so many, and it wouldn't be for months. It's a long shot, of course.'

‘But worth a try. Don't you have any other clues at all about your chap? Did your mother ever say where he came from in the US?'

‘No, I'm afraid not.'

‘Well, if she met him during the war, she would probably have been stationed somewhere near him, wouldn't she?'

‘As a matter of fact, she was on the
same
station. The Americans took it over from the RAF. But I don't remember the name of it, and nor does anybody else. She didn't talk much about the war to us – more's the pity.'

‘So unlike John's dear father who never stops talking about it, bless him.'

‘There is one thing, though . . .'

‘Oh? What one thing?'

‘There was a pub called the Mad Monk near the bomber station – or there was once. My mother mentioned it in a letter to her sister. Only it doesn't seem to exist any longer – I've tried looking it up.'

‘Weren't the Mad Monks the Hellfire Club lot?'

‘They were in Bucks. This is Suffolk.'

‘Well, it's not your common Red Lion or your White Horse. You ought to be able to trace it.'

‘I thought perhaps I'd go and do a trawl round Suffolk – see if I can. Next week, probably. I'd like to do some sketching there anyway.'

She said regretfully, ‘I'd come with you like a shot if I could, Juliet, but my son's coming over from Vancouver with his family. I'm booked to be mum and grandma for a month.'

It was good of her, but I knew that this was something I wanted to do on my own.

I read the news cutting Monica had given me later and contacted the woman who had helped to find the GI father. The paper had given her name as Stella Morrison and mentioned the town where she lived; Directory Enquiries provided the rest. I told my story to her briefly and related my complete lack of progress. She was understanding and sympathetic.

‘I'm afraid that even if you knew his name, rank and service number, the American government departments wouldn't do a thing except send you forms that are impossible to fill in. They ask questions you wouldn't have a clue about and, even if you
did
know all the answers, they'll only offer to forward a letter which you have to leave unsealed so they can read it first before they put it in the rubbish bin. One of their excuses is that there was a big fire in the Seventies which destroyed lots of records, but what they
don't
ever tell you is that they have other records that could give the same information.'