2

“Trixie, why not save your film for something special? This is sheer waste.”

“Oh, bollocks, Roz. Don’t hold yourself so cheap. Come on, just flash those pearly whites.”

That’s rich. Me hold myself cheap. I know damned well how she got hold of that film. I’ve seen the chap who gave it to her. Preferable, if you ask me, to pay the price on the black market. Or better—far better—to use that ex-RAF stuff, even if they do say that half the time it doesn’t work.

Anyhow, being the soul of obedience, I smile like the Bile Beans girl and although I don’t exactly flash those pearly whites I snatch up one side of my frock, strike what I hope is an alluring pose and for a moment imagine an interesting new me on the cover of Picture Post.

“Oh, that’s nice, hold it,” she cries; and then, picture taken, with quick change of emphasis: “Yes, that’s nice! Right in front of the church, too! Supposing the vicar saw? He’d think that Betty Grable had come to Suffolk.”

“Well, if he’d really think that, let’s go in and offer him a second chance.”

To go in is the whole purpose of the exercise. I’ve wanted to do this ever since the first weekend she and I came here, which was nearly two years ago, in the summer of ’43—but both on that occasion and the ones which followed (Trix being a Philistine) we never got round to it. I hadn’t learned to be assertive.

So now it could be something of an anticlimax.

But it isn’t.

I think the first thing that strikes me is the radiance. Except for the west window the stained glass has all been blown out by enemy action and—as though deliberately to compensate—the light can now flood in through wholly clear replacements, emphasizing the loftiness of the nave, the slenderness of the pillars, the fine proportions of the roof. I wish I knew all the names, because for someone who enjoys looking round old churches I’m pretty unversed in the terminology. I suppose I’m a dabbler who likes the inscriptions and the pews and the paving stones: the connection with past lives. Along with the stillness and the sense of awe. The splendour.

There’s a magnificent and brightly coloured pulpit. There’s also a wonderfully elaborate organ case and a tall painted screen celebrating some of the saints and angels. It’s sixteenth-century but touched up in Victorian times. A typed card charmingly informs us that St Jude—as restored—became very like the rector.

I’m admiring this delightful screen when I hear Trixie talking to someone. This turns out to be a gum-chewing American airman, boyish-faced though burly and bull-necked.

“Excuse me for butting in,” she’s saying, “but I couldn’t help overhearing. Sounds like you and me are in the same boat. Being dragged around to get a bit of culture by our educated friends!” I feel I’d like to slosh her.

“Our boring, educated friends!” returns the airman. “That is—no, lady, I’m sorry—I certainly didn’t mean yours; I meant that highbrow over there.”

The fellow whom he indicates smiles vaguely at Trixie but continues to give his main attention to a small wooden man in armour who apparently strikes a bell on every hour. “Say, Walt, come here a minute. This little guy is getting all set to do his stuff. Any second now.”

“Hey, Roz,” shouts Trixie, “you don’t want to miss this.”

I cross over to where the three of them are grouped; there’s no one else in sight but even so I tell myself crabbily that the church is much too full.

“Come on—hurry! This is Roz,” says Trixie, while I’m still ten feet away. “And I’m Trix.”

“Glad to know you,” says her big, good-humoured new acquaintance. “I’m Walt. And my friend here is Matt.”

He’s hardly spoken when the little man in armour strikes the bell.

And the highbrow laughs.

As he does so my churlishness begins to fade. His pleasure is infectious. Besides—it occurs to me I would have missed out but for him.

“Cute,” says Walt. “And you’d always know this guy was English.”

“Why?” asks Trixie, so willing to enjoy the joke she’s already started giggling.

“Reminding us it’s teatime. And there’s a nice place for tea we noticed on our way to be religious. You ladies care to join us?”

I’m about to decline but Trixie says, “We’d love to!” and glares at me no less tellingly than if my careless talk were costing lives.

She and I know the Sugar Loaf Tearooms. Their bread and carrot cake and soda scones are all delicious and the bread doesn’t even have that greyish tinge. We’re obliged to queue for a table. The teashop has a holiday atmosphere—not unexpected in a seaside resort on the first warm Saturday of spring. It’s the twenty-first of April. The noise level is high and becomes even higher, breaks into cheering and applause, when a waitress—poor woman—drops a loaded tray. (Tearooms for the moment have lost all their gentility. Thank God.) The building is one of the few in Southwold that survived the fire of 1659 and the timber beams speak of precisely that: survival. Indomitable spirit. It’s a good place and even without the Americans is probably where we’d have ended up.

When at last we get our table, conversation becomes less superficial. We already know they’re stationed at Halesworth, some eight miles away, but now we hear more of the details. They’re members of the 5^th Emergency Rescue Squadron. They specialize in air-sea rescue work. Walt talks with enthusiasm about their lifeboat-carrying B-17s, their CA-10 Catalina amphibians and in particular their P-47 Thunderbolts. For a minute I wonder if he should be telling us all this but then I realize that at this stage it can hardly matter. He also tells us—probably sensing the need to recapture Trixie’s interest—about the time last August when Glen Miller came to Boxted. (They had moved the short distance to Halesworth only this January.) Trixie wants a rundown on every piece of music that was played, and descriptions not simply of the late major—no one still believes, unhappily, that after all these months he can be referred to any longer as just missing—not simply of him, but of almost every member of the band. While Walt does his best to satisfy her I take the opportunity, surreptitiously, to have a good look at his friend.

Matt’s full name is Matthew Cassidy. Before, in the church, it hadn’t occurred to me he was especially handsome; only that I liked something about his face. But now I must have got my eye in, for handsome he undoubtedly is. Coarse fair hair—though not as short as you’d expect an English officer’s to be; blue eyes, straight nose, firm jawline. For what I think must be the first time, I really know what ‘clean-cut’ means; even his wrists and hands seem to exemplify it. I am twenty-four and probably have never felt so stirred by the way a man is put together.

Or am I allowed to dignify this and say that of course his whole personality must have contributed? That I’m speaking of the full package?

Walt exhausts the charms of August 6^th and of the sweet strains flooding through the main hangar on that golden Sunday afternoon. “We were sitting on the wing of a B-24 that was being serviced—you remember, Matt? And, ladies, I don’t mind telling you, it was swell but it sure made us feel a little homesick.”

“Yes, I’ll bet,” I say. “But at least you’ll soon be getting back there, won’t you? Though do you realize: you haven’t told us yet where home is?”

“For him, Connecticut,” says Walt. “San Francisco, for me.”

“Oh, then you must know that song!” cries Trixie. She starts to sing it. “‘San Francisco…open your golden gate…’” Heads turn towards our table and she giggles and feigns bashfulness. “I remember Jeanette MacDonald singing it in that film with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy and the earthquake. I suppose the song’s called ‘San Francisco’. I can’t remember what the film is.”

“‘San Francisco’,” Walt supplies and we all laugh. I get the passing thought that it was calculated (Trixie is by no means the dumb blonde she pretends, any more than I’m the brainy brunette she also claims) but it’s still quite funny.

“And I once read ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’,” I say to Matt. “So I’m well up on where you come from, too.”

This time it’s only him and me who laugh. Trixie is too busy saying to Walt, “I liked that film; I found it ever so inspiring. Spencer Tracy’s in the one we’re going to see tonight. It’s called ‘Without Love’.”

“Well, is that right? We’ve been wanting to catch up on that movie for months. Didn’t you say so just the other day, Matt?”

“What?”

Walt has to remind him meaningfully of what he had said so emphatically just the other day.

“Oh, sure,” Matt confirms. “I’ve been boring everybody senseless!”

We arrive at the Electric Picture Palace in time for the full programme—and bypass the longest queues by going in the dearest seats and needing to stand on the staircase for only a few minutes. The full programme comprises a second-feature, the news, Food Flashes, trailers, a Pete Smith Speciality, a medley of tunes on the theatre organ… I’m always pleased to get my money’s worth and so, I find out now, is Matt, “even down to your God Save the King,” he shamelessly confesses. But Trixie and Walt decide not to see the end of the big picture (so that we’ll have longer in the pub) and Matt and I fall in obligingly.

“You didn’t mind?” he asks, as we walk together a short way behind the other two—who proceed first arm-in-arm and then, soon after, arm-round-waist.

I shake my head. “But I’m not the one who’s been so frantic to catch up with it.”

“In fact, I have an admission.” I’m sure he already surmises, from the little he’s drawn out of me, that he isn’t really spoiling my enjoyment. “I found it talkative and dull.”

“Oh, what a letdown! I’m truly sorry.”

“And irritating! All those ‘by gums’ which were clearly meant to be so full of charm!”

“I know! You sat there almost waiting for the next! And what about her proud and tearful memory of her dying husband—who ‘grinned that grin of his’? I think I’d even have accepted a couple of extra ‘by gums’ in exchange.”

“Careful! Two more might have brought us to screaming point!”

So in a way, although the film undoubtedly had entertaining moments (which we conscientiously acknowledge), we have more fun pulling it to pieces than we got out of watching it.

“Anyhow, despite all that, it was a good night out at the pictures. A very good night,” I add on impulse.

“For me, too. Though I’d have to say not entirely on account of the movie. I don’t know if you gathered that.”

“Thank you for treating me.”

Then we talk about how wonderful it is that the last blackout restrictions have finally been lifted and that the streetlights are on again; no more being obliged to carry torches which could only be directed at one’s feet. No more need, even, for headlamps to wear a covering—nor traffic lights—although admittedly there isn’t much traffic now except for bikes. It’s like a glimpse of El Dorado to see the light from the pub spilling out across the pavement.

Through the open door there comes the welcome of a singsong,

“Yes, we have no bananas,

We have no bananas today,”

which suggests that dealings in contraband must be at a remarkably low ebb, since a bent old seaman with a beard and runny nose tells me while we wait for Matt and Walt to do battle at the bar—well, he tells Trixie too but she plainly isn’t listening—that the Lord Nelson has a dormer window on its seaward side, from which signals could be flashed to smugglers coming in below the cliff, and that there’s many a whispered tale of blocked-up passages which once led from the cliff into the cellars. Matt gives the man one of the two glass tankards he’s brought, and heroically returns to fetch himself another. By the time he comes back, Walt and Trixie have been able to muscle their way onto a crowded bench—she’s sitting on his lap—and the seaman has swallowed his drink and has moved off in search of some other sucker (Matt’s phrase). “The artful old lush—well, good luck to him,” he says.

We then decide to join the group around the piano; yet just as we get there it disbands. So we eventually manage to edge into a corner, holding our glasses up high, apologizing as we go and meeting with cheerful reassurance. We could of course have taken our drinks outside and sat on a parapet overlooking the sea but, despite the cardigan I’m now wearing, the night feels chilly. Besides—it’s exciting to be part of a good-natured crowd that’s soaked up the warmth of the day, even if at times it’s a little difficult to hear what each of us is saying. He asks where Trixie and I are putting up in Southwold and I tell him about Mrs Herbert’s guesthouse.

“It’s simple but seems luxurious compared to our farm-worker’s cottage—where the plumbing is so primitive it’s sometimes hard to get rid of the day’s caking of mud.”

“No wonder you need to escape.”

“But it’s a good life, being a land girl.”

“Will you be in Southwold next Saturday?”

His question takes me by surprise. “Well, usually we only get away once every—”

“I wish you would,” he says. “We could meet earlier in the day and go for a picnic—fit in a swim. I think I could probably wangle us a jeep.”

“It sounds fun. I—”

“And I’ll take care of the picnic. I mean it. No arguments.” He looks round briefly. “I guess Walt’s probably making similar plans with Trixie…aiming to get off on their own.” I glance round too; we both smile. “But Rosalind?” Suddenly he seems embarrassed.

“Mm?”

“I don’t quite know how to put this, without sounding bigheaded. But, you see, back home… Well, back home I’m engaged to be married.”

A slight dip of disappointment—silly, I suppose, on the strength of merely a six-hour acquaintance. Come to that…not such a slight dip, either.

“Congratulations, Matt.”

“You’ll still come out next Saturday? Maybe even Sunday as well?”

“I’d like to.”

“I damn well wish that I was free tomorrow. You’re just about the nicest person I’ve met in England. And that’s not to say England isn’t very full of nice people.”

“Thanks. And you must tell me about your family and your fiancée and we’ll keep our fingers crossed that the weather next weekend is at least half as good as today’s.”

I laugh.

“Especially if you’re serious about that swim.”