Rising Summer (29 page)

‘Well, now you’re a bombardier, I’ll expect you to,’ she said. ‘Only don’t try doing all of it by yourself.’

‘Your tummy all right now?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ she said, ‘the medicine soon cured it.’

‘Be good,’ I said. I felt a bit mournful. I loved my Aunt May and I’d no idea how long it was going to be before I saw her again. She wasn’t a woman to fret about being alone. She’d been alone a lot since I went into the Army. Now she was going to be alone all the time. Bill had said he’d keep an eye on her. All the same, it was a bit mournful leaving her.

‘Off you go now,’ she said and I thought her eyes a little overbright.

I gave her a kiss and a cuddle. ‘Love you, Aunt May,’ I said. I didn’t think I could go without telling her that.

‘Bless you, Tim, you’ve been good for me all your life,’ she said.

‘Mutual,’ I said and hefted my kitbag and picked up my rifle. She came out to the gate with me and stood there watching me go on my way to Browning Street, kitbag over my shoulder, rifle slung. At the corner, I turned and waved to her. She returned the wave.

It really hurt, leaving her on this occasion.

IT WAS ITALY
, of course, where the signoras and signorinas had quickly discovered the GIs had unlimited stocks of candy bars and fully-fashioned stockings, in return for which the GIs asked only for the use of a bed.

‘Ah, whose bed, Johnny?’ The Italians called all the Americans Johnny.

‘Yours, honey.’ The GIs called all females honey.

Italy was where the Allies were trying to get the better of General Kesselring and his German armies. If we were initially relieved to find ourselves here and not in the jungles of Burma, that relief didn’t last long. Kesselring was a demon and a tenacious one. His Germans were just as tenacious as well as grim, mean and moody. They didn’t like the way the war was going now and they showed it.

I wrote home. I wrote to Jim and Missus. I told them that their grapevine had been right. I wasn’t allowed to mention the regiment was in Italy, I merely referred to the grapevine. And I sent my regards to Minnie. I wrote a chatty letter to Aunt May to give her the idea that where I was was almost like home from home, except there was no toad-in-the-hole or kippers. I wrote a lengthy letter to Kit, telling her what my idea of post-war bliss was. I suspected she’d find it old-fashioned, and if
I
knew Kit she wouldn’t hold back from letting me know how she saw our future. Fair enough. I’d have to work out a compromise.

Mail was erratic, but not hopeless. I heard from Aunt May, a long long letter about home, friends and neighbours, with frequent mentions of Bill. He was turning into a fusspot, she said, but I read between the lines and guessed he was turning up two or three times a week to keep an eye on her. I liked him for that, he was a sound bloke with sense.

Kit wrote, putting together a whole heap of affectionate words, plus some humorous quips about my idea of post-war bliss. But she didn’t mention she had a different idea, only that I was basically a comic. But she liked me like that she said and told me to take good care of my assets.

Frisby heard from Cecily and Cecily, apparently, was now a level-headed old scout easily able to cope with propositions from all the GIs who fancied her. She was saving herself for her one and only Limey guy, she said. I told Frisby that that was really nice. Can’t believe it, can you, said Frisby, a lovely girl like her sitting at home waiting for me.

But would he get there? Would any of us? After months of shot and shell, the regiment knew at last that there was a war on. Major Moffat, all vigour and adrenalin, turned 424 Battery into a kind of heavy ack-ack commando unit, refusing to occupy static positions whenever it was obvious he could profitably rush us elsewhere. But his idea of profitability wasn’t always the same as ours. Elsewhere was often close to suicidal,
for
Kesselring had command of experienced
Luftwaffe
squadrons that were as mean and moody as German panzers and there were too many occasions when our guns and rocketry were raked and blasted by cannon-fire from planes that screamed in low.

We took casualties. Frisby and I had gone back to being true gunners, serving with the crews. Italy’s winter was diabolical. Talk about the country of sunshine and ice cream, what a joke. It rained, it snowed and did everything else that was miserable. It was a cold and treacherous winter for all units, with German resistance always formidable. I didn’t envy the infantry.

But at least the Italians in liberated towns and villages caused no trouble. Having taken themselves out of the war, they welcomed the Allies. Their short portly leader, poor old Mussolini, had had to run for his life to Hitler. They clustered in their streets to cheer advancing Allied units and all they asked for in return for their hospitality was food. Well-shaped ladies enquired about chocolate and stockings as well. For chocolate and stockings, feminine gratitude knew no bounds. Italian virginity was non-existent, never mind the Pope. I despaired. I hoped Cecily and Kit weren’t giving in.

In action, the regiment supported the RAF against the
Luftwaffe
, usually operating in defence of makeshift RAF landing strips. The German pilots liked nothing better as targets than ack-ack ground units. That kind of lethal threat was responsible for a certain amount of blind response. Colonel Carpenter, the regiment’s commanding officer, was violently blasphemous on the occasion when a message was received from a fighting wing of
the
RAF:
You missed. Try again on our way back
. The culprits were 423 Battery. Lucky for us. Major Moffat would have flayed us alive. He was in the war now and wouldn’t suffer muck-ups lightly.

Mail arrived sporadically. Aunt May kept writing. And Kit answered all my letters. She gave me news of her life as it was at the moment. By the spring of 1944, she was a lieutenant. She didn’t make a big thing of it, she made much more of a suggestion that she knew would buck me up no end. She suggested, in fact, that if I managed to get home on leave our marriage could take place. In my reply I told her that that suggestion was as good as a Christmas present. I thought about her often, not so much while we were in action, but during the mucky boring slogs.

I thought about Aunt May too and kept wondering why she couldn’t or wouldn’t make up her mind about Bill. I was sure her feelings for him were special.

Frisby said that Italy and Hitler and the Jerries were all making a mess of his nerves. He had Cecily on his mind and why not? Cecily was lovable. He suggested in a mad moment to the sergeant-major that if only General Montgomery would push all ack-ack units forward to within touching distance of the Jerries, we could go in and surrender. The sergeant-major did a Queen Victoria act, but in more ferocious terms.

I got no reply from Jim or Missus to my letter. I fancied neither was much of a letter-writer. I wondered if Minnie was still going steady with her RAF bloke. I hoped she’d got her sparkle back.

The Allies slogged on into spring and then into
summer.
I was prodded awake one morning. My head came out from under a blanket on the floor of a bomb-damaged house on the outskirts of a village. Major Moffat, his ruggedness a bit leaner, took the toe of his brown boot from out of my ribs.

‘Who’s this inert lump, Sergeant-Major?’ he asked.

Sergeant-Major Baldwin said smartly, ‘Can’t tell, sir. Not under all that hair. Might be Lance-Bombardier Hardy.’

‘What a sight,’ said Major Moffat, ‘the bugger’s not even shaved. Why’s that?’

‘Answer up,’ said the sergeant-major.

‘It’s not reveille yet, sir,’ I said.

‘Has this NCO been present and correct ever since we embarked?’ asked the major.

‘God knows,’ said the sergeant-major, ‘but he’s here now.’

‘Yes, present and correct, sir,’ I said, coming to my feet.

A German shell struck then, about two hundred yards away, pre-empting reveille. It got men out of their pits at lightning speed. The major didn’t turn a hair. I think he liked war. I think he thought everyone should.

‘Don’t stand about gawping, Bombardier Hardy, move yourself,’ he said and that was how he advised me of my further promotion. Another shell landed. It blew up an already damaged house and the house collapsed in a riotous welter of disintegrating bricks. Clouds of smoke and dusk spewed upwards. I moved myself and later I sewed on my second stripe. And Frisby was given his first stripe.

Italy continued to be a hell of a grind, but Rome was eventually taken and the GIs swarmed all over the Eternal City, asking why the Colosseum hadn’t been repaired. Shortly afterwards the invasion of Normandy took place and in July the regiment was transferred to France.

Just before that came about, I received a letter from Bill. He’d got my army address from Aunt May, having told her he’d like to drop me a line sometime. His letter was all about the fact that she was ill with some kind of stomach complaint that kept recurring and was obviously causing her pain. He had had to bully her into admitting it had been going on for some months, that the doctor had finally made her go to King’s College Hospital for an examination and that the hospital, after the examination, had made a date for her to have an operation. She was going in tomorrow wrote Bill and he was getting time off from work to take her himself. She didn’t want me to know but Bill said he thought I ought to know. In your place, he said, I’d want to. He said he’d let me know how the operation went, then gave me his regards and signed off.

It left me worrying myself sick about what she was suffering from exactly.

I spoke to Sergeant-Major Baldwin about being allowed compassionate leave. He grimaced.

‘Not now, Bombardier Hardy, not now,’ he said.

‘Have a word with Major Moffat, Sergeant-Major.’

‘Sorry, not a chance and he wouldn’t wear it, anyway, you know that. It’s only an operation and only your aunt.’

‘She’s as good as a mother to me.’

‘Sorry,’ said the sergeant-major gruffly, ‘it’s no go.’

So I was left with nothing but worry.

Two days later, when we were lining up on the quayside of an Italian port and about to embark, further mail was distributed to the regiment. There were three letters for me. I recognized the handwriting on two of them. Aunt May’s and Kit’s. The third I didn’t recognize, but the postmark was Sudbury, Suffolk. There was too much going on for me to read any of the letters in peace, so I waited until we were established aboard a troopship. I opened Aunt May’s first.

‘Dear Tim,

I thought I’d better write and tell you the news. I wasn’t going to, I didn’t want you to worry, but I decided I’d better. First, it’s this silly tummy of mine, it’s been playing me up, so I’m going into King’s College Hospital tomorrow, they gave me an examination and X-ray last week.

‘I’ll be all right, I’m sure, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately. There’s things I ought to tell you now you’re a grown man and know a lot about life. I don’t know I’m doing the right thing, though, they say it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie, don’t they? But I don’t think I should keep secrets for ever, I think you ought to know just who you are, though I don’t want to hurt you.’

I read on, mesmerized by the words that came to my eyes from several sheets of writing paper. At the end, I was far from hurt, I just felt a great wave of deep
affection
for her and my whole being was concentrated on a desperate wish for her to come out of that hospital alive and recovered, because I knew exactly why she had written this letter. She felt, or she’d been told, that at the most the operation was only going to give her a fifty-fifty chance. So she’d decided to tell me who she was and who I was.

It was all there, the story. In 1917, when she was thirteen and her brother Leonard twenty-one, she was a bridesmaid at his wedding to a lovely young lady, Edith Palmer. He was home on leave from Flanders. Afterwards he went back to the trenches, but was invalided out early in 1918 because of the results of serious wounds. He recovered, he pushed himself like a Trojan and his wife Edith was a loving help to him. He managed to get a decent job. Aunt May, still at school, went to see them often, being very attached to her brother and liking her sister-in-law Edith very much.

But early in 1920, just before she was sixteen, an awful thing happened. She developed an intense girlish crush on a young man, a lodger with neighbours next door to her home in New Cross. It was her first crush and a fateful one and she fell headlong into the trap set by emotions and the devil-may-care charm of the young man. The consequences were a dreadful shock to her family and appalling to herself. She nearly died when she realized she was going to have a baby.

At a family conference, a solution was offered by her brother Leonard and his wife. Because of the original nature of Leonard’s wounds, it wasn’t possible for him to father children, so willingly they would take the
unwanted
baby immediately it was born, register it as their own and bring it up as their own. Its real father had disappeared. Aunt May, now sixteen, begged her parents to agree. They did more, they helped to arrange it all with Leonard and his wife. Three months before the baby was due, Aunt May and her sister-in-law went to stay in a rented flat in a house in Brighton, where Leonard visited them on Sundays. Mr and Mrs Hardy senior visited once a month, getting a friend to look after their shop on those occasions. A careful eye was kept on Aunt May and her condition, her mother giving her all kinds of helpful advice and Edith a great deal of companionship and affection. Aunt May endured her nine months in remarkably healthy fashion and when the critical time arrived, her mother was there, as well as Edith. Her mother took her to the hospital in a taxi at just about the right time. She was wearing a wedding ring. Her mother asked for her to be admitted to the maternity wing, giving her name as Edith Margaret Hardy, her daughter-in-law, eighteen years old. She was ready to field questions, but the hospital made no fuss. Aunt May was already in pain and she was admitted immediately. A nurse, writing down details given by Aunt May’s mother, including the patient’s address which was Lewisham, asked who her doctor was. Mrs Hardy senior said you’ll never believe this, but the poor girl never ever realized she was pregnant, she simply complained she was getting fat. The nurse smiled and said that wasn’t the first case of that kind.