La's Orchestra Saves the World (12 page)

She cleaned the floor below the perches and changed the straw in the nesting boxes. Then she filled a wheelbarrow with feed and distributed that amongst the brood. The acrid smell of the coops lingered; it was in her clothes. I smell like a chicken, she thought. I am a fox’s dream.

Henry Madder said, “You’ve taken to this like a duck to water.”

“Chicken,” she said.

He smiled. “They said you didn’t want any pay. Is that correct?”

“I have enough to live on,” La said. “I have more than enough. If they don’t pay me, then the money can go to other land army workers.”

He looked at her intently. “You’re the type who’ll win this war for us,” he said.

“There are people working far harder than I am,” said La. “Miners, for instance.”

Henry thought about this. “That’s something I could never do. Go underground. Crawl around in the darkness. At least we get fresh air in our work. It may be cold and dirty sometimes, but there’s fresh air.”

He looked up at the sky, and La followed his gaze. It was broad, limitless, unclouded now; the wide sky of East Anglia.

She took her leave and began the cycle back. She reached home at about half past eleven every morning, her labours done. Then she read, and worked in the garden. She had started to sew, thinking it might be useful; she could make things for people when clothing became scarce. Everything would become scarce, she thought; soap, clothing, shoes. Hitler wanted to starve them into submission, and they would have to grub around, turning to every little bit of earth to coax food from it. She looked at her lawn. She
would dig it up and plant potatoes. It could yield sacks of potatoes that would see her through the winter, if supplies of everything dried up.

Henry Madder gave her eggs, which she turned into omelettes. There were chives in the garden, and these were chopped up to add flavour. She ate the omelettes at her kitchen table, a glass of cider beside her plate. She would have liked to talk to somebody, but the house was empty.

Occasionally, after one of her lonely suppers, La would retrieve the flute that she kept in a drawer in her bureau. She had rarely played the instrument since leaving Cambridge, and her technique had suffered. But she could still manage most of the pieces in a large book of flute music she had found in a second-hand bookshop near the British Museum: Byrd, Morley, Tallis. At Cambridge she had played a madrigal called “In Nets of Golden Wires.” She thought it was by Morley, and she was sure it was in her book, but when she paged through the arrangements she could not find it. The title haunted her. What did it mean? Was it about love, or belonging, or about capturing a dream?

Music was her refuge. There was madness abroad, an insanity of killing and cruelty that defied understanding—unless one took the view that this violence had always been there and had merely been masked by a veneer of civilisation. La thought that music disproved this. Reason, beauty, harmony: these were ultimately more real and powerful than any of the demons unleashed by dictators. But she
feared that she was losing touch with these values—that her life in the country was simply too limited. She feared that she would forget if she did not go back.

One evening, when she had finished her dinner and had sat reading for half an hour at the kitchen table, she reached a decision. She would return to London where the house in Maida Vale could be reclaimed from its tenant. She would take up with her old friends and bring an end to this unnatural life of seclusion. She wanted company; particularly the company of people of her own age, of her own outlook. She wanted to talk to somebody about books, about music, about the things that nobody seemed to talk about here. There were people in Bury, of course, with whom she had interests in common, but that was Bury, and there was no petrol to go there for purely social purposes. Cambridge would have been even better, but was further away, and she could not go back there; people who did that ended up like Dr. Price.

She telephoned Valerie. “I want to come back to London,” she said. “I’ve made up my mind.”

There was silence at the other end of the line. Then, “Are you mad?”

“I don’t know what you mean. Why is it mad to want to come back to London?”

Valerie laughed. “But, listen La: anybody with any sense is trying to get
out
of London. Have you heard of the Luftwaffe down there in Suffolk?”

La said nothing.

“The point is,” Valerie continued, “the point is that this is a very different city from the one you left.”

La understood that places changed. “I know that. I don’t expect it to be the same. I’ve changed.”

Valerie laughed dismissively. “I don’t think you’re grasping what I want to say. People are frightened, La. Anybody who is in a position to leave is thinking about it. They deny it, of course, but then everybody’s trying to look brave. We have to, because if we started to show what we really felt the whole place would come to a grinding halt. In fact, we’re frightened. London is not the place to be.”

It was hard to argue against such a warning, and La did not. Their conversation continued briefly and without much understanding; it seemed to La that they now lived in different worlds. Then the allotted three minutes was up; La said good-bye and rang off.

LA LIVED TOO FAR
from the base at Stradishall to hear the planes taking off and landing, but now, at frequent intervals, she heard the drone of engines as a flight of bombers crossed the sky. Like everyone else, she had studied the outlines printed in the newspapers so that she could distinguish plane from plane, but it was hard to tell when they were little more than black dots against the white of the clouds. Spitfires, of course, were easily recognised, and over that summer and into the autumn she looked out for
them. The battle had begun—the battle that would determine the course of the war—everyone knew that. And the Spitfire, with its stubby wings and its long nose, would, along with the Hurricane, determine the fate of the country—and the world. They had to win this part of it; if Britain fell, then Europe was lost to a devouring evil, and that evil would not stop at Europe.

One afternoon she saw a Spitfire coming in from the coast. The main battle was being fought further to the south, but planes would sometimes chase raiders up over the North Sea until they reached the limit of their range and had to make for home. This one was flying low and was trailing smoke, limping across the sky to refuge at Stradishall. She watched it getting lower and lower and she thought of the pilot within. Sometimes nothing but air separates those who are in deadly peril from those who are safe. He would be twenty, perhaps even younger; a young man struggling to keep his wounded aircraft airborne, gasping for breath against the fumes from his burning plane. And then the plane was gone, vanished behind distant trees, and she did not know what had happened. Mrs. Agg said that the pilot had made it back to the airfield, but Mrs. Agg was optimistic about these things; she did not really know. She wanted him to be safe, and so she said that he was.

An air force officer called at the house one day. He had been given La’s name by a cousin of hers who was working in Whitehall and who met officers in the course of her
work. He drove up to the house one Saturday afternoon, parking his small green open-topped car in the driveway.

“I’m very sorry turning up out of the blue,” he said when La opened the door to him. “I’m Tim Honey. I’m a friend of Lilly’s. She said that I should call on you if I was in the area.”

La looked at the man standing on her doorstep. He was about her age, or perhaps a few years older, in his mid-thirties, and slightly plump. His uniform, she noticed, was pulled tight across the front. Rations, she thought; and then silently upbraided herself: if one was to die, as these men expected to, then they should at least be given good breakfasts.

She invited him in. “I don’t have any coffee,” she said. “But I have some tea.”

Tim smiled, and fished in one of the pockets of his jacket. “I anticipated that,” he said, drawing out a small packet. “This is Jamaican, believe it or not. I don’t know how we got it at the base, but it suddenly appeared. I think that our Canadian friends shipped it across. He laughed. “It’s amazing what you find in the back of a bomber once you begin to unpack it.”

She took the packet and led the way into the kitchen. “Lilly,” she said.

“Yes, dear Lilly. She says she hasn’t seen you for ages.”

“No. I moved down here a few years ago, before the war
started.” She wondered if he would think that she had fled from London. She did not want him to think that.

He nodded. He was looking about the kitchen, appraisingly.

“I’ve got everything I need in this house,” said La. “It’s really quite comfortable.”

“Yes. It looks it.” He turned towards the window. “They look after us pretty well at the base. We can’t really complain. We have a very good mess—all the papers and magazines and your jolly good Suffolk beers. Everything we need, really.”

There was a silence. Except company, thought La. Except women. Home cooking. Love.

“I’m married,” Tim went on. “Four years ago. And I never thought that this would blow up and I’d find myself at one end of the country and Joyce at the other end. She’s in Cardiff, staying with an aunt for the duration. It’s safer there, I think, than where we lived in Kent. In Maidstone. That’s pretty much in the thick of things at the moment.”

“You must miss her.”

“Yes, I do. Awfully. But think of all those chaps who have been sent overseas. Or the chaps out East. What chance have they got of seeing their wives? At least I can go down for the occasional weekend.”

The smell of coffee began to pervade. La took a deep breath. It reminded her of Cambridge, for some reason. Dr.
Price; that was it. Dr. Price had served coffee at her very first supervision, when she had been nervous. “Coffee will clear your head,” she had said. “It always works.” And they had drunk a small cup of strong coffee and then Dr. Price had sat there with a rather pained expression on her face as La had read the first essay she had written.

“We can drink our coffee in here,” said La. “There’s a drawing room of sorts, but it’s more comfortable in here.”

“I’m happy,” said Tim, laying his cap down on the table. “I should have changed into civvies, but sometimes, when you’re visiting people, they like to see the uniform.”

They talked. Tim told her about what he had done before the war and what he did now, approximately. “I shouldn’t say exactly,” he said. “Not that I imagine you’re a German spy, but you know the rules. Suffice it to say that I sit behind a desk all day and talk on the telephone, telling other people what we want. I’m in charge of supplies for the whole base. Not that I should probably tell you that. Do you know anywhere where I could get some supplies of aviation fuel?”

La laughed. “Or Jamaican coffee?”

“We’re all right for that. Fuel is the big thing. I live in fear of what might happen if they really get going on dispatching our tankers to the bottom of the ocean with their U-boats. What then? You can’t fight a battle for control of the skies if your planes can’t take off.”

They talked about what La was doing. She told him about the chickens, and her battle against the fox.

“Gerry’s a fox,” said Tim. “Trying to get in under the chicken wire. And Goering’s the biggest fox of all.”

Her own war, as she looked upon it, was so small by comparison with his: a few eggs added to the national supply, that was all. She told him about Henry Madder and of his determination to continue farming, in spite of his arthritis.

“They’ve been promising him somebody,” she said. “But he must be at the bottom of the list. A smallish farm, tucked away out of sight. The bigger places will be getting whoever becomes available.”

Tim frowned. “I know how he must feel. I have to ask for aircraft. I have to ask for all sorts of things and often they just ignore your requests. They tell you that you’ll get things shortly, but it’s never like that.” He paused. “He’d be paid?”

“I assume so,” said La. “I’m not, but I said that I didn’t need it. Henry paid the boy who helped him. And he’s got a cottage on the farm that’s empty. The boy stayed there.”

Tim looked up at the ceiling. “I might know somebody.”

“To work?”

He nodded. “Yes. We’ve got a Polish chap. Feliks Dabrowski. We call him Dab for short. Like most of those people he’s had a pretty frustrating war. He got out to Romania and then to France. They set up something called the Groupe de Chasse Polonaise there and gave them worse
than useless planes. The Gerries shot them out of the sky. Dab was badly hurt—lost the use of an eye, in fact, although it looks almost normal to me. But he’s blind as a bat on that side.”

La sighed. “Poor man. Mind you, he’s alive. Which is something these days.”

“Indeed it is. You know how many we’ve lost in just one of our squadrons …” He stopped himself. “Sorry, I shouldn’t talk about that.”

“I can imagine.”

“It’s hard …”

She was not sure what to say. “Yes. Your men are so brave.”

Tim shook his head. “No, they aren’t. Well, maybe some are, but most of us are just very ordinary, and scared stiff half the time. When I was on active flying duty, before I had trouble with my back, I remember shaking when I got out of the cockpit at the end of a sortie. I knew that my number was up—that I had defied the odds and that they would catch up with me sooner or later. I knew that. And I was not at all brave about it. Nightmares. Sweating. Stomach turning to water. I had all of that.”

He reached for his coffee cup and drained it. “But this chap, Dab, I was talking about. He pitched up when the Poles started to get out of France. One of our medical officers looked after him—tried to do something about his eye, but couldn’t. So there was no chance of any more flying for
him. And he had nowhere to go, so we kept him on the base, gave him maintenance duties and so on. But you can’t let a chap with one eye tinker with the planes—he might get it wrong. Too risky. So we need to find something for him.”

La listened. She had heard the stories of other displaced persons; there were so many of them. “You think that he might work for Henry Madder?”