Running to Paradise (21 page)

Goodnight,
my love — only four more weeks and then...

Dave

*

I
found the following, written on a sheet of Savoy Hotel note paper in Dave Brent’s handwriting.

29th
January 1940

Charlotte
and David Brent lay in their warm, soft, CLEAN DOUBLE bed in the Savoy Hotel, London, drinking champagne and watching the snow whirling past their window. The bed had been paid for by Charlotte’s father, the champagne by David’s father (if he did but know it). No one had paid for the snow; it simply fell because it wanted to: great big, fluffy flakes floating down on the grey river, covering the barges and the trees in Temple Gardens, blanketing everywhere with silence. It was very, very, very quiet, only a melancholy hoot from a barge now and then breaking the silence.

‘
Is this the end of the world?’ Charlotte said to David. ‘I almost wish it were.’

‘
No,’ said David to Charlotte. ‘The end of the world is a long way off, but it’s the end, perhaps, of something.’

‘
And the beginning of something else,’ said Charlotte and bit David where it hurt.

After
that, they didn’t watch the snow falling any more, or drink their champagne or anything. Until...the telephone rang; jarring, insistent, ripping into the spell that Charlotte and David had woven for each other.

‘
Hullo,’ said David, ‘room 402.’

‘
Your father-in-law, sir, downstairs waiting,’ said the telephone. ‘He thought perhaps you had forgotten — dinner at eight, he said.’

‘
Oh God,’ said David and leaped from the bed, but Charlotte lay there still and cried.

*

Harold’s Farm, Chipping Sodbury

15th
July

Dear
Guy,

Thank
you so very much for your delightful letter and the gorgeous carnations. Such years since anyone has sent me flowers. Giovanni was quite suspicious, I can tell you! They are beside me now, reminding me of the old days and what fun it was to be young. Thank you, too, for the copy of the little thing written by Dave from the Savoy. It made me cry. Is it a poem, I wonder?

You
ask me to write of those War years and Char. A tall order, but I will have a go. Be patient, though, I write with a little difficulty now because of my arthritis, and sometimes memory is slow in coming, but with all this, I will try. Here goes, then.

We
did not see much of Char for the first months of the War. She took a cottage in the village near her mother while Dave was at his training camp. The phoney War was such a strange time for all of us; like waiting for a thunderstorm that did not come. Dick and I moved into a cottage when the Army took over our house. So sad; huts growing up like mushrooms everywhere, the gardens gone to ruin. Char came to us that Christmas: ‘I can’t stand to be alone with Ma; Dave drilling in Yorkshire; Algy has the children; can I come, Nat? At least together we might find something to laugh at.’ And we did, but it was a sad time all the same.

Dave
got his commission and learned to fly. It was a surprise how well he took to service life, almost as though that was the life he had been waiting for all along. And Char became a camp follower! She pitched her tent (Dick’s words), anywhere Dave happened to be and where she was allowed to by the authorities. She would rent a cottage, a couple of rooms in a pub, or even a caravan. I visited her in the caravan — the discomfort, you could not believe! But she had to have her family with her, you see: Beth, Nanny, the dog Raffles and in the holidays the three girls.

Oh,
the rows with Algy! Solicitors’ clerks whizzing to and fro. ‘The girls cannot spend their holidays parked in the middle of a turnip field and no proper sanitation.’ You might have thought with Europe overrun by Germany and Hitler waiting to invade, they had something more important to do, but things were like that then. Algy wanted the girls sent to America, out of harm’s way. Of course, Char said no, no and no.

‘
They’re going,’ Algy said.

‘
They’re not,’ she said, ‘it’s running away, and besides, their ship might be torpedoed.’

‘
Maddy says it’s the best thing,’ he said. ‘All her friends are sending their children.’

‘
Bugger Maddy’s friends,’ said Char. ‘They would.’ Then she went to London to see Algy, right in the middle of the Blitz. She told me afterwards they had spent the time crouched under a table in total darkness. Well, I don’t know what she said (or did) to Algy under that table, but that was the last we heard of the girls going to America. Dick said she’d probably blackmailed him; she was certainly capable of it.

Throughout
this time Char and Dave kept on the lease of the house in Hammersmith. It was empty most of the time, but I think they could not bear to part with it. And sometimes, when Dave had a forty-eight hour pass, they would leave the children and Nanny wherever they happened to be and spend it there, just the two of them. I saw Dave only once during that time. Dick and I had lunch with them one Sunday: Dave was at flying school near London and Char had rented a horrid little terrace house in Croydon. It was so hot, I remember, and we were all of us crammed into this tiny dining room; Beth whining and wasps flying everywhere. Dave was in uniform and looked dead beat, and he and Char spent the meal arguing about something ridiculous, like the mint sauce we had for lunch. Afterwards he slept and we didn’t see him again before we left.

I
must stop now, Guy, I cannot hold my pen any longer. Will try again tomorrow.

*

17th July — Two days’ rest instead of one, how lazy I am! Where was I?

By
1941 Dave was flying on operations and was stationed at Coltishall in Norfolk. ‘So cold,’ Char wrote. ‘Beth and Nanny are one huge chilblain.’ But Dave managed to get home for a night now and then and she was busy sowing veg. Now, Guy, the hard part comes; even after so many years I hate to write of it.

It
was early in May ‘41 when Char wrote Dave had some leave and as the raids on London had slackened off a bit, they’d decided to spend a couple of days at the house in Hammersmith. ‘Mrs Maggs still looks in from time to time,’ she wrote, ‘and says water’s coming in downstairs and several slates are off the roof; D says we must investigate. Why not bring Pa up and we’ll all have a night out? D wants to hear Carol Gibbons at the Savoy...’ I wrote back yes, we would, and bugger the raids.

Such
a jolly evening: the atmosphere then, you cannot imagine what it was like: the fizz, the excitement, everyone so gay, everyone in uniform. We danced and danced and Dick said, ‘He’s not half bad, that young man of Char’s, after all.’

The
next morning, which was a Saturday, Dick and I went home to Amberley, but Char and Dave stayed on. ‘I’m busy plugging rat holes,’ Dave told us. ‘There’ll be nothing left of the place by the time the War’s over if I don’t, and there’s still another thirty years to go on the lease.’

It
was on the Sunday morning, 11th May (I shall always remember the date) when the phone rang. I was upstairs in my bedroom doing my face and heard Dick answer it.

‘
Hullo, Brent,’ and then, ‘Oh, my God, Oh, God, I am so dreadfully sorry...’ I knew at once what had happened; they’d said on the wireless another bad raid on London. Were they both dead? But it was only Dave: his HQ had rung Mr Brent as his next of kin. Char and Dave had been under the stairs when the house came down on top of them, and it was several hours before they could be dug out. Dave was dead when they found them, but Char was unhurt, apart from cuts and bruises and shock. Poor little Mr Brent was quite hysterical and went on about the disgrace that his son should have been killed as a civilian and not fighting the enemy and how they wouldn’t even be able to put ‘Died on active service’ in the newspaper. ‘And the boy was in the running for a gong after that last op,’ he kept repeating to Dick. ‘Now no one will ever know.’

Oh
that dreadful Sunday, so long it seemed, so much to do. Char looked just angry when I saw her, a fiery red spot on either cheek and her eyes glittering. She was sitting up very straight in her bed at the far end of the casualty ward, the beds packed so tight together you could hardly squeeze between them. I put my arms round her, but she shook me off.

‘
Now I’m free,’ she said, ‘I’m going to join the WRNS. Can you take care of the children, Nat?’ It was the most shocking thing to hear in all that shocking day.

‘
We must wire for Con to come at once,’ said Dick. ‘She’ll know what to do with the child.’ Con came next morning and Char, a little girl again, did what her mother told her: no more talk of the WRNS.

Mr
Brent wanted poor Dave to be buried in the cemetery at his home at Westgate-on-Sea, but at that time the South coast was a forbidden area, even, it seemed, for the dead, so he is buried in the churchyard at Amberley. After the funeral was over, Char, to my knowledge, never again visited the grave. Dick used to pay someone to keep it tidy, but now I expect it’s gone to rack and ruin.

For
the rest of the War Char and Beth lived with Con at Cuckoo Farm. Char would come to us now and again, but she never mentioned Dave, or, as I have said, visited his grave. I found her attitude a little difficult to understand, but that is how she was; it was better to hold one’s peace on such matters. For those years she kept men at arm’s length (and there were plenty about), dug her garden, read her books, fought with her mother, visited the girls at school, and that was her life. Then came George. But I will write you of George another day, dear Guy. My daughter tells me it is time to sleep.

Natasha

*

I
remembered Beth and I visiting Dave Brent’s grave in the early sixties. To our surprise, the grass was neatly cut, a bunch of snowdrops placed at the foot of the granite headstone, which read simply: ‘In memory of Flt Lt David Malcolm Brent, born 1912, killed 10th May 1941, a victim of enemy bombing. RIP.’ Someone still cared; we never found out who.

I
thanked Natasha for her letter and received, almost by return, another one from her.

Harold’s Farm

30th
July

My
dear Guy,

Thank
you so much for your letter. It is good to have news of Amberley. I have not seen it for nearly forty years: I ask myself, how can this be, but it is so. And you say it’s still beautiful and unspoiled and lived in by a ‘pop star’! I like the idea of a swimming pool in the shape of a penis; which is the deep end, I wonder? And you say the churchyard, too, is neat and tidy and a bunch of roses on Dave Brent’s grave. To think that the boy would be over seventy if he had lived! Perhaps he was lucky, who knows, to go when he did.

Guy,
I have little more to tell. By 1945 I had chosen to break with Dick and start a new life with my dear Giovanni (and never have I regretted that decision). Because of this, my only contact with Char, after she had married George, was our annual exchange of letters. It was I, nevertheless, who introduced them to each other and it happened in this way.

Char
was staying at Amberley the week the War in Europe ended. ‘If I don’t get away from Ma for a bit, I swear I’ll kill her,’ she said on the telephone, so of course I said come.

Giovanni
and I had fallen in love by that time. What a courtship! I could speak no Italian and he no English and certainly no Russian. Char said it was like your Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper — for you see, Giovanni was an Italian prisoner of war and worked in our garden — but it was not like that at all. His parents were rich business people in Milan, not simple peasants as the gossips said. But never mind all that. There was Char at Amberley the last week of the War. Such lovely weather, do you remember? No, of course you don’t, you are far too young to remember such things, I keep forgetting. And there was George, a young handsome captain in the Army, liaising with somebody or other, temporarily billeted up at the house.

The
Army gave a cocktail party the day Char arrived. ‘Nat, I’ve got nothing to wear, I can’t possibly go,’ she said, but I lent her a Paquin model from before the War, in sea-green chiffon. We had to pin it up, I remember. It was much too long, but she looked good in it all the same. Did you know her hair was already grey?

The
band was playing ‘In the Mood’ on the lawn when we arrived, and Colonel Stevens said: ‘May I introduce you to Captain Seymour? He’s paying us a brief visit before dashing off to sunnier climes.’ And there was George: tall, handsome, brown curls and bright blue eyes, all very correct in his uniform. There was something I didn’t like about his mouth, though: the lips were full and red and pouting like a girl’s, and he smiled too widely and too often. Anyway, he looked at Char, Char looked at him: oh, dear, I thought, not him surely, he’s not her type at all, but of course I was wrong. He fell for her that very instant, I think; she took a little longer, but all too soon she did. All Dick could say was, ‘Seems a reasonable sort of fella to me.’

‘
He’s another Algy,’ I said, ‘but not as bright or as strong. We must stop it if we can.’