Bristol’s biggest cemetery lay at Arnos Vale, about a mile from Temple Meads railway station. In peace time, burials normally ran at thirty a week. In a cold winter, especially when influenza galloped through the city, that figure might double, but nothing had prepared the taciturn men who dug the graves for 2 November 1940.
That night, the bombers came. The Luftwaffe unloaded a torrent of incendiary bombs and hundreds of tons of high explosive on the blacked-out streets below. Thousands of houses were destroyed or damaged and next morning the city’s mortuaries were counting 207 dead. One of them was a forty-eight year old woman from Park Street. Her name was Irene Gallagher.
Billy’s mum had dropped him off at the cemetery gates. He was carrying his kitbag, ready for the train journey down to Exeter, and he gave her a hug before he said goodbye. She’d made an attempt to keep him another couple of days at Blessington Manor but they both knew her heart wasn’t in it. With Billy gone to the war, she had no taste for solitude. That had happened before, in an earlier conflagration, and the results had been catastrophic. Ralph, in his own gruff way, had brought her both company and the security of considerable wealth, but the truth was that he had no desire to share this new life of theirs with a son he’d never met before.
Now Billy made his way down through the maze of headstones and monuments. Two of the cemetery staff were sheltering from the rain beneath a willow tree: thin, gaunt-faced men, spared active service. If you were after a reserved occupation, thought Billy, then here it was. You could always rely on people dying. Especially in times like these.
‘Irene Gallagher?’
One of the men remembered the name. He’d dug her grave himself after that second big raid, spaded the earth back onto her coffin after the interment, refilling the hole.
‘Quaker lady,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t she?’
‘That’s right. And a fine actress, too.’
‘Relative, are you?’
‘No, just a friend.’
‘And a bit of a fan, I expect, seeing she was famous.’
‘Of course. As you might expect.’
The grave was way down at the bottom of the cemetery, a plot protected from the wind by a neighbouring hedge. The ground had been returfed after the burial and someone had sown a drift of wild flowers in the moist grass. In mid-summer, the swirl of colours – startling blues, soft yellows, dots of white and pink – was totally random yet to Billy it seemed to perfectly capture the essence of this woman he’d known so well.
After the formality of other graves, it offered something different, something alive, something spontaneous, everything he’d associated with the woman who’d taken him under her wing. Since her death that night, he’d often struggled to find the word that best described their relationship. On her part, he thought it was a question of belief. Belief and a magical kind of patience that seemed inexhaustible. On his part, it was much simpler. He worshipped her.
And the gravedigger was right. Irene had died a Quaker. He was gazing at her headstone. It still looked new. He loved its simplicity. Just her name, Irene Marigold Gallagher, her date of birth, and the date the bombers had arrived to take her away. Nothing else. Typical.
She’d once tried to explain her faith to Billy. She told him she’d been a believer since she was old enough to think things through for herself. Her family had been Methodists, occasionally fervent, often not. She’d had to accompany them to services when the mood took them but she’d had no taste for the horse-faced minister and his stern list of do’s and don’ts. She’d wanted something different, something nobody else had mucked about with, something that didn’t belong to the ministers and vicars and the bishops and all the rest of the palaver, and in the end it seemed to boil down to a room where she could meet with a handful of people she trusted in order to sit down and think.
This, as Billy now knew, was exactly what the Quakers offered. By then, he and Irene had enjoyed a million backstage conversations, many of which had helped seed Billy’s dawning realisation that she might be right about the career that lay before him, that his talents might extend beyond selling programmes and sweeping up after the audience had gone.
This quiet determination, married to the natural bravado of late adolescence, had won him a trickle of walk-on parts that had quickly become a flood. In the late thirties, for whatever reason, the company had been short of decent young actors and it had been Irene who’d bullied the resident director into giving him a crack at a decent part. Playing Oliver Twist in a stage adaptation of the Dickens classic had been terrifying but the audience had liked it and so – as it turned out – did the management.
After Oliver Twist came a season of smallish classical parts, mainly Shakespeare and mainly comedy, coming to a triumphant end with As You Like It. Billy’s take on Orlando – his first leading role – won him an admiring review in the Bristol Post but Irene, bless her, had refused to take an ounce of the credit she was due. Three weeks later, the actor playing Eben in Desire Under the Elms broke his leg and Billy, as understudy, stepped into the breach. The performance was a smash hit, at least for Bristol audiences, and it was then – riding the crest of the wave – that Irene invited her young trouper to accompany her to an evening at the Friends Meeting House. This was where the Quakers gathered, an old timbered building down by the weir, and it was there that Billy discovered something even sweeter than applause: the blessings of silence.
Now Billy knelt at the graveside. Earlier he’d thought about flowers but decided against it. Too mundane. Too ordinary. Instead he closed his eyes and recited the lines that Irene had loved best of all. They came from The Tempest.
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again…
‘Billy?’
He glanced round, recognising the voice. She was wearing an old gabardine mac that must have belonged to someone much taller. She had a full figure and a soft, round face with dimples that Irene had once described as proof that God could be in a good mood. Her hair, still blondish, was longer than Billy remembered and she’d gathered it at the back with a twist of scarlet ribbon. The last time Billy had seen her was the night they’d celebrated her thirtieth birthday.
‘Nell,’ he said.
‘That was beautiful, what you were saying. I remember it from the funeral. Do it again. For me.’
Billy obliged. The rain had stopped at last and after he’d finished he could hear the thwack-thwack of nearby shovels as the diggers deepened yet another grave.
Back on his feet, he wanted to know how Nell had known where to find him.
‘Your mum picked me up. She said you’d be here.’
‘You’re still in Clifton?’
‘Yes. Same room. Same view. Half-shares in the same cat.’ She smiled. ‘Do I get a kiss?’
Billy stepped close and kissed her on the cheek.
‘You’re still nursing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Up at the Infirmary?’
‘Yes. We’re on the go all the time. If you want the truth we could do with a few more men around the place.’
‘Is that a hint?’
‘You hated it.’
He kissed her again, properly this time, and held her for a moment. It was true about the Infirmary. By the time war broke out, Billy had already become a Quaker. Quakers didn’t fight wars, didn’t believe in them, and after protracted negotiations with the officer in charge of conscripts at the local yeomanry barracks, he’d registered as a conscientious objector. Conchies, he knew, might spare themselves the fighting but were obliged to take all kinds of other jobs. Thus the order to report to the Infirmary where he was to become a porter.
The hospital, for the first few days, had been all right but the work was heavier and more repetitious than he expected and the saddest of truths was that he missed the theatre. In the last month of peace, Desire Under the Elms had taken him to New York, an experience that had given him a taste for the brightest of lights. Playing Broadway, albeit briefly, he’d suddenly felt that literally anything might be possible, that a whole world out there was waiting for more of Billy Angell. Coming back to the night shift at Bristol Infirmary had been the hardest of landings.
Nell had a bag with her. She wanted to know whether Devon was going to be OK.
‘With who?’
‘With you.’ The smile was less certain now. ‘Only it’s been a long time.’
*
The village of Topsham lay beside the water south of Exeter. The river became tidal here, abruptly widening, half a mile from bank to bank. Billy and Nell walked away from the station as the tiny steam engine and its three carriages headed down the branch line towards the sea. Miles downriver, a jumble of houses overlooked the estuary.
‘Exmouth,’ Nell said.
They were standing in a churchyard above the water, gazing south. It was early evening, the sun beginning to set. The tide was out and the glistening mudflats were busy with bird life. Billy absorbed the view. He’d never seen a landscape so gentle, so perfectly formed, so peaceful. Chopburg, and Cologne, and Essen, and the bare fields of Lincolnshire, might never have existed.
‘Redshank, Billy,’ Nell was pointing upstream. ‘Oyster catchers. And look there, a heron.’
Billy looked. A bird was a bird. He wanted to know when Nell had been here before.
‘When I was a kid. My mum came from Honiton. She had a friend who lived in the village here. This is where I learned to swim. You could only do it properly at high tide but I still remember the feeling of the mud all squelchy between my toes. Some kids hated it. Not me.’
Billy was impressed. Despite his mum’s best efforts, he’d never learned to swim.
They moved on. Higher Shapter Street was a five-minute walk away. Glimpses of the river between the waterside houses convinced Billy he’d stumbled into paradise. Two old men in a rowing boat, drifting slowly with the tide. Distant yelps of laughter from a gang of kids kicking a leather ball. And then, in a moment of silence, a bird call.
Billy paused, his ear cupped. He wanted to know more.
‘It’s a curlew, Billy. Look, I’ll show you.’
She led him down to the water’s edge. Curlews, she said, were shy. Don’t move.
‘That one? The brown one? With the funny beak?’ Billy, his eyes shaded with his hand, was peering into the setting sun.
‘That’s it.’
Billy nodded. Then came the call again. He’d never heard anything so sad. Irene, had she been alive, would have called it haunting. He closed his eyes, wanting the bird to call again, but nothing happened. Then, out of the darkness, swam an image of the Rear Gunner, his leg shattered, his upper body hunched in the roaring darkness. Billy shivered, reaching for Nell, but when he opened his eyes again she was already making her way back to the road.
Ralph’s place lay in a terrace of narrow-fronted houses that climbed up from the river. The key in his pocket was carefully labelled: Number Seven. Billy pushed the wooden gate open and let them in.
The house smelled of damp. Ralph hadn’t bothered with much furniture – a tiny settee and a single armchair in the downstairs sitting room, and two metal-framed single beds in the front room at the top. At first glance, the bedroom reminded Billy of the Infirmary.
‘Honeysuckle Ward,’ he told Nell. ‘My mum says there’s sheets and stuff somewhere.’
Honeysuckle Ward had been a room reserved for the terminally ill at the Infirmary, one bed for the patient, the other for a near-relative. Wake up in Honeysuckle Ward, he told Nell, and you knew your days were numbered.
‘That’s horrible, Billy. This is supposed to be a holiday.’
‘For who?’
‘For you. That’s why your mum asked me in the first place. She wants me to make it nice for you.’
‘You mean us.’
‘Of course.’
She shot him a look he couldn’t quite fathom and then disappeared to look for sheets and blankets before it got dark. Billy stepped across to the window and stared down at the cobbled street. On the train, coming down, he’d been dreading the inevitable questions about his last six months but to his relief she hadn’t once asked about the RAF. Instead they’d talked about the hospital, about people they both knew, about the landings in Sicily, and about just how long this war could possibly last.
She was back with a couple of sheets and a blanket. Their eyes met over the single beds. Nell, like most nurses, could be extremely direct.
‘We push them together?’ she asked.
‘If you want.’
‘You’re sure you’re ready for this?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Only think so?’
‘I dunno. Let’s find out.’
He helped her with the sheets. By now, the light was beginning to fade. It occurred to Billy that neither of them had eaten since breakfast. He was carrying more money than he’d ever seen in his life but where was he supposed to find food as late as this?
Nell told him not to worry. She’d already been through the cupboards downstairs. Tins of potatoes and processed peas. More tins of spam and something else in the meat line. Plus jars of fruit and pickles. In short, a feast.
Billy was grinning. He’d been unpacking his kitbag and at the bottom he’d found two bottles of wine his mum must have liberated from Ralph’s cellar. With them came a note. Dear Billy. I know it’s not much but it comes with all my love. Your mum. XXX
Nell found a corkscrew in a drawer downstairs. Billy was searching for wood beneath the lean-to in the tiny pocket of back garden. It was high summer but the house still felt damp and he yearned for the comfort of a real fire. A charred log in the grate in the front room told him the chimney probably worked and he’d spotted a pile of old newspapers on the bare boards beside the settee. Nell busied herself in the kitchen while Billy built a fire. By the time darkness fell, they’d nearly finished the first bottle.
Nell arrived in the front room with the supper. Billy’s fire was a huge success. She gave him a plate and switched off the light. Flames danced in the fireplace. Billy pulled the cork on the second bottle. After the chill of the evening, he felt warm at last.
They’d settled on the sofa, lightly drunk, gazing at the fire. Nell asked him why he’d ever volunteered for the RAF. One minute he’d been telling her how Quakers never killed anyone. The next he’d disappeared to bomb the hell out of the Germans.
Billy gave the question some thought.
‘Irene,’ he said at last.
‘But she was a Quaker, too.’
‘That’s right. But they killed her. The Germans killed her. I was the one who took her down to the mortuary. I had to identify her. There was no one else.’
Her family, he said, lived in London. The theatre had closed. He knew she lived in Park Street and the morning after the raid there was nothing left. He’d been with her only a couple of days before.
‘At the Quaker place?’
‘Yes, at the Meeting House.’ He nodded, the remains of his meal untouched. ‘They brought her to the mortuary at the Infirmary, like all the other bodies. I’d seen plenty of dead people by then. You know I had. It was my job to get them down from the wards. But I’d never seen anything like this.’
‘Like what?’
‘How damaged they were. You know how I knew it was Irene? By the ring she used to wear. The rest of her…’ He shook his head.
‘But you carried on working.’ Nell’s hand found his.
‘That’s right.’
‘More dead bodies. And more raids, too.’
Billy nodded. After they’d killed Irene, the bombers had returned to claim more victims. Two raids before Christmas had brought the King and Queen to the city to inspect the damage. Then, after Christmas, yet another visitation, the Germans again. And then another. And a third. By the time spring came, nearly a thousand bodies had been through the mortuary.
Without Irene, Billy said, he was in trouble. He couldn’t work it out, couldn’t understand it. Where was God in all this? How would sitting in silence and trying to start some kind of conversation with God ever bring Irene back?
‘You did that?’
‘I did.’
‘Tried to make God change his mind?’
‘Yes.’
‘And send Irene back?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you thought it would work?’
‘I did. I was crazy. I admit it.’
‘You never looked crazy. You never sounded crazy.’
‘That’s because no one ever asked.’
‘Not your mum?’
‘Not anyone. That’s the thing about Irene. She’d made me so strong. She’d made me so calm. She’d once told me that if anything was ever to happen to her then I still had to believe, still had to go to the Meeting House, still had to be there for everyone else who was suffering. And I tried, Nell. I really did. But then that last raid happened, that following summer, just the one plane, and you know where the bomb dropped? Right by the Meeting House.’
‘You make it sound personal.’
‘It was. That’s exactly what it was.’
Nell was gazing into the firelight.
‘So that’s why you joined the RAF?’ she said after a while.
‘Yes,’ Billy nodded. ‘It was revenge, really. I was so angry. Not just about Irene but about everything. All those raids. All those bodies. You’ve no idea how hard it is to stop being a conchie. It’s all paperwork. They never want to believe you. But I think I was lucky. The Air Force seemed to have broader minds. As long as you qualify, pass the tests, all that, then you’re in.’
‘You told me you wanted to be a pilot.’
‘Of course. Everyone wants to be a pilot. Except I was hopeless. That’s why I ended up as a Wireless Op.’ He lay back on the settee, closing his eyes. ‘I’ve just done my thirty ops, Nell, and I’m still here. That makes me the luckiest bloke on earth. But I’ve seen some terrible things, some truly terrible things. You know what they never tell you? That we’re very, very good at killing people. Not hundreds of people, not thousands of people, but tens of thousands of people. And that’s in a single night. And you know something else? Way up there in the sky, where it matters, the Germans are very, very good at killing us. Does that bring me any closer to God? Will it ever? I don’t think so.’
Nell put her arms around him. The fire was starting to die but the room was still warm.
‘You’re shivering,’ she said.
‘Am I?’
‘Yes.’ She kissed him again. ‘And that’s another reason why I’m taking you to bed.’