Suddenly and without the slightest warning, large, sixpenny-sized drops of warm rain splashed on her hands as she gathered up the withered foliage of the oldest of the rows of peas now ready to go to the compost heap. Emily threw back her head and stared in amazement at the heavy clouds overhead, now the colour of a bad bruise. She simply hadn’t noticed the light level dropping as she pulled out the pea sticks, disentangled the long strands of vegetation from their twiggy branches and bundled them in piles ready to carry to her store behind the garden shed for use again next year.
She dropped her pile of pea haulms and decided there was nothing for it but to dash under the chestnut. If she tried to get back to the kitchen, she’d be soaked to the skin long before she got there. Not that getting wet would do her one bit of harm. The August rain was warm and there were clean everyday clothes ready to pull on, but it was a nuisance.
As she sat down on the stone seat under the tree, she recognised the source of her irritation. She’d been deep in thought and didn’t want to be interrupted, by the rain or by anything else. For the moment, however, she simply couldn’t remember what she’d been thinking about.
The threshing of the rain in the canopy of the chestnut was fierce enough to send some tiny yellowed leaves flying down beyond the bone-dry circle of well-tramped earth where she sat. First to come, first to go, she reminded herself. Even in early August, a chestnut had a few yellow leaves in its crown, like a woman with grey hairs. There might not be many, but they certainly reminded you that time was passing and there would be more.
Was that what she’d been thinking about? Certainly, she’d been miles away and equally certainly she had not yet arrived back. She stared at the opaque, vertical curtain surrounding her on every side. It was so heavy it couldn’t last, but it would leave the ground wet and muddy and the residues of the peas wet and slimy. She never minded the soil being damp or sticky when she planted, but she hated wet hands when she was weeding or doing other garden jobs.
After the dryness and long hours of sunshine in the spring and early summer, she wondered if August might be wet, as it often was in this part of the world. She was always amused when Cathy complained of the heat in London when she’d had to pull on an old sweater over her summer blouse, on that very same morning because of the brisk breeze and the threat of sudden showers like this one.
Life was so varied, so different for individuals, she often wondered how they managed to get on with each other at all. It was always a lovely joke between her and ‘her boyfriends,’ as Alex called them, when one of them used an American phrase and his friends promptly corrected him, because she might not understand.
After all these months, she knew most of the alternatives, but she was always touched by their concern, their awareness of the different ways of speaking they’d already met in their time here, and by their efforts to meet their hosts more than halfway.
Words were one thing, but what about ideas? Some of the boys had such a bitter hatred of the Germans, she wondered what their experiences had been before they came to County Down. It certainly wasn’t Chris Hicks who had taught them to hate.
Chris accepted there was a job to do. Whether it was building bridges or fixing tanks, his boys would often be working under attack. They had to be able to defend themselves just as effectively as fighting troops. If they were responsible for clearing an obstacle or crossing a river, they would sometimes have to attack as well, so the art of killing was a normal part of their training.
She wondered if you could kill without hating and thought of the last newsreel she’d seen.
When they’d gone to see Mrs Miniver, the Newsreel had shown shots of a rain of bombs so dense it had filled the screen. How did pilots feel about dropping death from the clouds? She’d read later that the raid on Hamburg they’d watched from their comfortable seats in the cinema in Banbridge had been so heavy it had caused a firestorm. The estimated casualty figure was so large, she’d had to read it twice to grasp its magnitude.
Bombing the oilfields in Romania to deprive Hitler of petrol was one thing, but incinerating ordinary human beings, most of them civilians like themselves, seemed to her something very different. Or was it that, now, everyone was part of the war effort and became a legitimate target?
Just as suddenly as it had started, the rain stopped. The throbbing roar all around her was replaced by quiet, the curtain of rain by a shower of drips and the dimness, by brilliant shafts of light that caught the wet foliage and struck gleams of brightness from hanging drops of moisture.
At the edge of her circle of dry, tramped earth, the rain had left little pock marks like the trace of ricocheting bullets in a cowboy movie, or a spray of machine gun fire from advancing troops in a newsreel.
She remembered now what she’d been thinking about while she was pulling out the pea sticks. Johnny, probably in the Mediterranean, flying Mosquitoes on his nineteenth birthday. She’d been remembering that day in 1924, when after the most awful time she’d ever had with a baby, he had finally emerged, red and cross, his tiny fists waving in the air as old Biddy McBride held him close to her, so she could see for herself that he really was all right.
What a different world that had been. Quiet and poor. No one had any spare money, even those in work. Without Alex’s skilled job and the low rent for their home at Ballydown Rose had insisted on, they too would have had difficulty keeping four children fed and clothed.
In those days, every person you met was a friend, or an acquaintance. A stranger was such a rare occurrence that you could be sure he or she would be the topic of conversation until every fragment of available information about them had been chewed and digested. You could also rely on a certain degree of invention about the newcomer if facts were hard to come by.
It was not that no one died nineteen years ago, but mostly funerals were for old people who had lived ‘to a right good age,’ as the local saying was. Accidents happened and many people, particularly children, still got tuberculosis, even though much more was then known about the disease than when her own mother had succumbed to it in 1910.
The great loss in that quiet world was a remembered loss. No one would ever forget the First World War and the Battle of the Somme and those endless casualty lists in The Leader and every other local papers across the north.
Now it was all happening again and her daughters were just as much at risk as her son. Just like those young men who smiled from the old photographs, marching down the main street to the railway station waving their handkerchiefs to the cheering crowds. They were still smiling as the train got up steam and carried them away to the waiting troop ships to be transported overseas and mown down by the thousand.
Emily was right about August. It rained at some point almost every day. Fortunately, there was plenty of sun between the showers and a good drying breeze with it, so she was able to keep up her work on the garden. In the first two weeks, however, the drier days were at the end of the week and that was a problem as those were the ones she needed to prepare for a picnic or dance.
By the third week of the month, she’d found the best solution was to start her baking on Monday morning while the garden was still damp, stop as soon as it was dry enough to work outside. If it didn’t rain as much as expected in the next three days, she’d simply catch up on her baking on Thursday evening before one of Chris’s young men arrived late on Friday morning to collect her and her cake tins for delivery to the day’s event.
She had just put a couple of sponges to cool on a wire rack on the third Tuesday of the month when she remembered she wanted to look up Messina. When she’d heard on the B.B.C. news at 8 a. m. that American troops had taken the town and the allies were now in control of Sicily, she’d not been able to remember where exactly it was.
With Johnny somewhere in the Mediterranean area, she felt she needed to know where he might be, so that she could think of him properly.
It was Lizzie’s old school atlas that had remained on the bookshelf in the sitting-room, Cathy having asked for both the others because of the shortage of books in her Cheshire school. Emily thought of Lizzie as she turned the pages, looking for the map of Italy. No under linings or notes in the margins. No scribbles or dog-eared pages, just Elizabeth Hamilton in a small, very legible hand on the flyleaf.
Standing at the sitting-room table, her finger poised over the names of Italian cities now more familiar than they’d ever been when she was at school, she paused as she heard the rattle of the letter box and the plop of letters on the mat.
She smiled to herself. Tom must be behind schedule or have a delivery to the hut that served as an office at the quarry. Usually, he came to the back door, put her letters on the draining board, sat down for five minutes to recover from the hill, or even tramped into the garden to sit under the chestnut if she was outside.
She gathered up the letters shuffling them like a hand of cards. There were four of them. A fat one from her sister Catherine, full of newspaper cuttings no doubt, an Airmail from her new-found sister-in-law, Jane Ross in Boston, a note from Brendan McGinley and a Basildon Bond envelope postmarked Belfast from the boxed writing set which had been her own Christmas present to Jane.
Dear Ma,
I’m afraid I have some very unhappy news for you. I am perfectly well, so don’t worry, but Johann is very upset indeed and is finding it hard to cope with his feelings.
You know that some months back the Red Cross agreed to search for his mother. It seemed to be taking such a long time, but six weeks ago he was told that she had left her home in Hamlin and gone to live with a friend nearby.
We know that houses have been requisitioned in Germany as they have been here, and Johann guessed that she might be very unhappy if her own house was full of strangers.
The Red Cross said they would continue trying to find her in the Hamlin area and they did indeed find her friend Anna. But Anna said she had gone to stay with her sister. The Red Cross have now confirmed that she was staying with her sister in Hamburg on July 24th last and that that particular area of the city was totally devastated.
What can I say to comfort him? His mother was his last link with his home and with his childhood. He is now an orphan, and there’ll be no happy discoveries.
I simply haven’t had the courage to ask if he hates the British for the way they destroyed the city.
I was hoping to come home again at the end of the month, but I know you’ll understand if I try to get an extra pass to see Johann again. There is a kind lady works in the canteen at the camp who told me last time I was there that I can stay overnight with her anytime, if it would give me the opportunity to meet him ‘by chance’ out working the next day.
Sorry Ma, to make you sad, but I know you’d want to know.
Love and hugs and kisses to you both,
Jane
Emily sat down and wrote to Jane right away. She said she couldn’t think of anything to say either, but sometimes, when someone was very unhappy all you could do was sit beside them, literally or metaphorically. It was knowing someone cared about them that sometimes helped in the first sharpness of grief. She sent Johann her love and said to remind him, when she felt the moment was right, that one day he would have a new family. She and Alex were looking forward to the day when they were free to welcome him to Rathdrum and take him to meet all their friends and cousins.
She put the note in an envelope and propped it up beside the breadbin, so she wouldn’t forget to ask Danny to post it for her when he got back into Banbridge. It would get to Jane more quickly than if she posted it herself in the box near the foot of the hill.
Either the note from Dublin had taken a long time to come or had been mis-delivered somewhere on the way. It was a very lively missive from Brendan to say he’d be delivering books to a private collector in Belfast next Tuesday afternoon and then heading back south. He would like to call to see her. If he didn’t hear from her in the meantime, he’d be like the beggar man and arrive when he knew the kettle was on and the household could not drink their tea without offering him a cup.
She smiled at the thought, then looked at the date again. She registered with a shock that Tuesday the 17th was today. She didn’t mind that the remains of her lunch were still on the kitchen table, but there were dead flowers in the sitting room and she hadn’t combed her hair since breakfast. If it was going to rain again, which looked more likely with each passing moment, then a bit of a fire would be nice and the ash from the last one was still in the grate.
‘My goodness Emily, that fire looks good. Apart from chopping up my bookshelves, I’ve no hope at all of a fire these days,’ he said, settling himself comfortably in front of the blaze.
‘I saw a cartoon in a magazine last week with a butler bringing in coal to Her Ladyship,’ he began. ‘He had it on a silver salver and the punch line was: ‘One lump or two, my Lady?’
Emily laughed, partly at the joke, but even more at the way Brendan was eyeing the tea tray. Dublin was still a long way away, so she’d made him some egg sandwiches and there was even a choice of cake because she’d baked on both Monday and Tuesday mornings.
‘We can’t get much coal either,’ she agreed, ‘but it looks as if all the dead wood that lay around the local forests for years is now in great demand. Amazing the things that suddenly have currency. According to the Impartial Reporter there are firms down in Fermanagh advertising for rabbits in tens of thousands.’
‘You’re very well informed, Emily, and not just on matters literary, for which I have particular cause to be grateful. If it’s not a rude question, how do you keep tabs on Fermanagh?’
‘My elder sister,’ she said promptly, as she poured tea and handed him his cup. ‘We were never close and she seldom wrote to me until just recently, but since then she’s really made up for it. She retired from teaching some years ago and now she has a plan to reveal the delights of country life,’ she went on, as she passed over the plate of egg sandwiches.
‘She sends me the most remarkable stuff. She can’t make up her mind whether to devote the whole volume to smuggling back and forth across the Border, or to broaden it out to include the crimes, follies and misfortunes of the local worthies. They really are quite remarkable when they pontificate.’
‘I don’t think that gift for pontificating is confined to the North,’ he said sharply, ‘though there are those who might suggest it was. Did you read about a certain person who said that “The Irish people would have to be made to understand that they should speak Irish?”’
‘I did, Brendan, I did, and I thought of you at the time,’ she said grinning. ‘And what about the happy maidens?’
‘Ah, but you mustn’t leave out the sturdy children and the athletic youths, and, of course, ourselves,’ he replied, his tone ironic. ‘Do you think we qualify for sitting beside ‘those firesides which would be the forums for the wisdom of serene old age?’ he asked, his eyebrows raised quizzically.
‘Well, we have the fireside, but I do rather wonder if anybody will ever have a serene old age again.’
‘Why so?’ he asked, regarding her with piercing dark eyes.
‘I think the world is changing,’ she replied. ‘It’s as if the war has opened out our world. We know more about countries and people we’d never even heard of. There are new inventions, not all of them designed for killing. New ideas, new possibilities. If we could jump back fifty years, to when we were children and walk around in that world and then jump back to today and the invasion of an island we’d never even heard off, that would be a beginning. But even better if we could jump fifty years forward. What then? What sort of Brave New World might we perceive in 1993?’
Brendan nodded briefly.
‘We’ll be dead and gone, Emily, but I think we can be sure that the happy maidens won’t be speaking Irish, even if they’ve found a way to stay in Ireland in the first place, or managed to find happiness if they have.’
The egg sandwiches disappeared rapidly once Emily had assured him that she would not share them. She explained that she and Alex were once again bidden to Major Chris Hicks well-supplied table, to meet his new Lieutenants prior to the arrival of his next consignment of young engineers.
‘Do you ever hear what happens to these young men you feed and encourage, Emily?’
‘Individually no,’ she responded shaking her head sadly. ‘The most we hear is when a group has been attached to some larger unit, American or Allied. For instance, there were some of Chris’s lads attached to the Fifth Army in the 160,000 troops that landed in Sicily so we hear the good news from the BBC, like today. But we know the casualty figures get censored. I don’t think Chris knows anything more than we do, certainly he hasn’t up till the present. Though things change all the time, even for him,’ she ended, thinking of the new, larger team they were to meet that evening.
‘Now tell me about this good husband of yours. What news of Lofty?’
‘None whatsoever, I’m sorry to say,’ she replied with a wry smile. ‘Unless Mrs Campbell is struck by memory, I think that’s as far as we can go, but we have solved the puzzle of little Jane Ross being Mrs Jane Ross even though she married the son of a lawyer from Boston. Apparently she married a cousin of her adoptive family. A first cousin, rather older than herself, but of course not actually related to her at all.’
‘Ah, I see. And that’s why Hank the Tank was studying to be a lawyer. Has Jane any other family?’
‘Yes, she has two more sons, one older and one younger than Hank. The older one, Robert, joined a Canadian regiment, the Ottawa Cameron Highlanders, and the young one, Bruce, is in the American Air Force. He’s only a month older than Johnny.’
‘So you have three girls and she has three boys. I wonder if she wanted a girl as much as Alex wanted a boy.’
‘I never thought of that, Brendan,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ll ask her one of these days. Alex wrote to her after he’d been to Manchester, but since then he’s left it to me and she doesn’t seem to mind at all. I’m really rather delighted to have a sister-in-law.’
‘Not surprised she doesn’t mind,’ he said crisply. ‘I’d trade Alex’s letters for yours any day, however much I like the good man.’
Brendan glanced at the clock and down at his empty cup and plate.
‘Like the proverbial beggar, I eat and rise,’ he said, moving slightly in his chair. ‘Look, there’s one thing I must say before I go. There’s going to be massive security in the run up to the Second Front. They’re talking about closing the border to prevent leakage of information. Not only will I not be able to come up, but they’ll start censoring letters. Don’t let it stop you, Emily. Even if we can only talk about literature, at least I’ll know how you are. Promise me you’ll go on writing?’
She nodded vigorously and thought of all she’d read about security.
‘You’re probably right about closing the Border,’ she agreed. ‘Some of what the newspapers are saying about spies able to move up and down quite freely does seem quite sensible. My friend Dolly says they never even look in her handbag when she goes to see her sister. She could have a sheaf of State Secrets in it, for all the attention they pay. In fact, in Dolly’s handbag, you could probably conceal the parts for a new tank,’ she said, smiling. ‘But I promise I’ll still write and so must you.’
‘Oh yes, you won’t stop me doing that,’ he replied forcefully, as he pulled out a small packet from his jacket pocket. ‘A little offering,’ he said sheepishly. ‘Food for the mind, but the sandwiches will be much more use to me on the way back to Dublin.’
She walked out to the car with him and observed the change in the colour and texture of the panelling where repairs had been done after his brush with an Army lorry back in April ’42. What a long, long time ago it seemed, she thought, as she waved him off down the avenue.
‘Do you really think they’ll close the Border before the Second Front?’ Emily asked, as they drove down Rathdrum Hill, turned left at the bottom and headed for the Castlewellan Camp on what had turned into a lovely, summer’s evening.
‘Can’t see how they can myself,’ Alex replied, relaxing at the wheel. ‘There’s thousands of Southern workers coming over the Border to work every week and going home at weekends and there’s legitimate trade as well as smuggling. Think what problems stopping all that would be.’
‘So if people have to be kept out, it means they’d lose their jobs. And if trade had to stop, that would be even more jobs. That would be dreadful. And we wouldn’t know how long it was going on for, would we?’
‘No, we wouldn’t,’ he agreed matter-of-factly. ‘Sometimes the powers that be don’t know themselves what’s happening. Sometimes they have to put out false information as part of strategy. If you lose your job, it doesn’t matter which it is. You still have no money for next week.’
‘The border is amazingly long for such a small country,’ she began, ‘it’s so full of twists and turns. And there’s bog and mountain and lakes and forest along it, as well as towns and villages.’
She’d gone back to the atlas after Brendan had left to study the wiggly line that had caused so much heartache in the course of their lives. She been even more surprised than she’d expected at the length she traced with her finger.
‘Think of trying to close off the border in Fermanagh when half of it is lake or islands,’ she said, ‘and then there’s the Sperrins and the hill country of South Armagh down to Slieve Gullion and …’
‘And if you’re determined to get through and have local knowledge, what chance do British or American troops have of stopping you?’ Alex demanded, interrupting her. ‘Smugglers seem to have no difficulty from what you read to me,’ he said, his tone lightening.
‘That’s true.’
She smiled to herself and looked across at him, his face sombre, his eyes on the road.
‘I haven’t told you the latest from the Impartial Reported.’
‘Do proceed.’
‘Well some of the practical problems will be quite insuperable,’ she began. ‘I am reliably informed that, in one dwelling, the bedroom is so aligned that whoever sleeps in the bed has their head in the North and their feet in the South.’
Emily watched Alex’s face as it broke into a grin. However often it happened and despite the many years in which she had observed the sudden transformation, she could never quite believe the difference it made when Alex smiled. What a sombre little boy he must have been. Or could it be that it was the other way round. That the little boy who could smile so winningly had been turned into a frightened child and a sombre young man.
‘Here we are then,’ Alex said, as they stopped at the barrier.
The guard checked Alex’s pass meticulously, leant over to look at Emily and then waved them on with a broad smile and a salute.
Camp security, stores, supplies and medical services were provided by personnel from other regiments and they had remained unchanged since Chris had first arrived. Emily knew them all and had ensured from the beginning that they too were included with the activities set up for the young engineers.
‘Emily, Alex, it’s good to see you,’ Chris said, shaking hands and beaming at them. ‘Come and meet my new team.’
Emily couldn’t remember exactly how many times they had now met a new team. Five, perhaps six, since that evening at Millbrook when she herself had talked to Chris and introduced him to Alex.
Coming to the camp was now a familiar and most pleasurable routine, not least because she loved the handsome reception room where such care had been taken of the original furniture, the flock wallpaper and the heavy velvet curtains.
She shook hands and studied the young faces, tried hard to remember the new names and knew she wouldn’t manage it. Faces she always remembered, but names had a bad habit of getting away from her. Places were rather better and she often found herself asking friendly questions about a young man’s town, or city, or state, to give herself time to try and retrieve his name.
Tonight was going to be more difficult than usual, she reflected, not because her fellow guests were other than pleasant, but because there were more of them. She shook hands and smiled at nine of them and then realized that the tenth young man was not nearly as young as the others.
‘Emily, this is Giovanni Hillman, Captain Giovanni Hillman, and my new Number 2. Thanks to him, I shall now be able to accept your kind invitations to come and have supper with you … if you haven’t changed your mind, of course,’ he said lightly, amid general laughter.
Captain Hillman was tall and dark-haired with rather splendid dark eyes that looked down at her attentively as he took her hand. This was one name she would certainly be able to remember though for the moment she would certainly make no comment.
The evening proceeded with much good-humour assisted by excellent food and several bottles of wine. Chris made his usual speech of welcome. She was always impressed that even when what he had to say was the same each time, it never lost the freshness of a genuine welcome and he always managed to make little jokes that revealed how much of a relationship he’d made with his new lieutenants, just in the two days since they arrived.
As she listened to Chris, Emily thought of Hank the Tank and how he had introduced him formally as Lachlan Alexander Ross before referring to his more familiar name. Hank was the young man she had liked more than any of the others, so how happy a chance it was that he had turned out to be her nephew by marriage.
Chris’s speech was as warmly received as ever. To her surprise, Giovanni Hillman got to his feet as Chris sat down. He smiled across at her and began to speak.
‘Ma’am, Sir, Mr Hamilton, colleagues,’ he addressed them, gazing round the candlelit table, ‘it is my pleasant duty to respond to our welcome from Lieutenant Colonel Hicks and to have the honour of being the first Captain to address him by his new rank. In saying thank you for your kind welcome, Sir, may I commit us to doing our best for this training unit which has been so very successful under your guidance. Let us raise our glasses and drink to the health and continuing success of Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Hicks.’
Emily raised her glass, looked across at Alex and then at Chris, saw the broad smiles they exchanged with each other and felt sure this was a moment she herself would remember for many a long day.