Cry to dream again, p.56
Cry to Dream Again, page 56
“Jump on board!” he said. “But tell me what are two nice young people like you doing thumbing lifts along the road to Brighton?” Shirley expected him to say “looking like scarecrows”, but he was too polite for that. Ted briefly explained the circumstances, at which the farmer raised his eyebrows. “That’s quite some story!” he remarked. “So you’re a farmer too, young man. I’m happy to help one of my own kind, so climb in and I’ll drive you as far as I can, that is until I have to turn off. Ted climbed into the truck first and then gave his sister a hand getting up. Squeezed on the front seat between Ted and the door, Shirley disregarded the farmer’s propensity to chat about all his main concerns, from pig farming and the price of bacon to his preferred tipple in the local pub, and fell asleep leaning on the rattling door frame.
When the lorry stopped with a jolt, she woke up to hear the farmer saying to Ted, “This is my turning; it’s a short cut for me and I’m afraid this is as far as I can take you, because I need to unload these piglets before lunchtime. The wife doesn’t like it if I come in late. But here, take this loose change: it will pay your bus fare to Brighton,” he dug into his pocket and handed Ted a handful of coins. He then addressed himself to Shirley. “I gather from your brother,” he said, “that you are looking for Dr Ellison. He’s well known round here, and I rather think you’ll find his house is somewhere near the town centre,” he said. “Everyone knows him, so you only have to ask and you’ll be directed to his house straight away.” He glanced at his watch. “I reckon the bus will be along soon and will take you right into the centre.”
Bleary-eyed, Shirley climbed out of the truck and stood waiting while Ted and the farmer finished off the animated conversation about agricultural matters that must have developed while she was asleep, and Ted showered the man with thanks. She noticed that he had stopped by a signpost, one arm of which pointed along the coast and the other to the turning on the opposite side of the road. Although the destinations on both had been erased, the one pointing inland had not been treated to such vigorous scrubbing. Shirley rubbed her sleepy eyes to be able to read it more clearly and could make out a capital “H”, an “m” and a “y” at the end of the word. “It must be ‘Hambley’,” she thought, the scene of Nora Patience’s wedding and of her sighting of Alan’s father; the very name made her feel weak at the knees and made her head swim. She leant against the post, trying to steady herself. Mixed reactions raced through her brain.
She was struck by horror that a memory she had successfully, or so she believed, obliterated could so easily be revived. She told herself that in all the time she had been in France, Alan’s image, and dreams of him, had not crossed her mind at all. She scolded herself for being so stupid as to let a mere signpost bring back that confusing aberration with such force, because that simply was what it was: it was nothing more than a teenage aberration that had encouraged her to fall in love with someone whom she had met for two minutes at most and who had now faded to a fleeting image. At the same time, a compelling curiosity to return to Hambley swelled up inside her. There might be just a chance that this farmer could take her back to the village, and on the way there he could tell her more about its inhabitants. He probably knew Alan’s family because it was such a small village. There might even be a chance that Alan would appear from around a corner. She was on the point of asking the farmer if he would take them with him, but he was already back in his cab and was starting his engine, so it was too late. No sooner had he gone than she realized what a fool she would have made of herself had she so much as opened her mouth.
In contrast to their earlier experiences, the rest of the day passed like a dream. Mrs Ellison was delighted on the one hand and appalled on the other to find her best pupil and her brother on the doorstep, dressed as ragamuffins and smelling of pigs and fish. Without asking any questions, she herded them into her kitchen and quickly gave the two of them food and drinks, and then ran a hot bath, first of all for Shirley and then for Ted. After which she ushered them into delightful guest rooms, where the beds were already made, and told them to sleep for as long as possible. “You can tell me where you have been and we can make arrangements for you later, but for now you must rest and you must stay here tonight. While you sleep, I am going to go down to the Scout hut, where they are having a jumble sale today, and I hope to find you some decent clothes there! Oh, and I have to call on my mother: she’s in an old people’s home now. But I won’t be long.”
Dr Ellison had come home by the time they awoke. His wife brought him to Shirley’s door. “Shirley, dear, I hope you don’t mind, but I thought my husband should examine you, as you looked so ill when you arrived. Goodness knows where you and your brother have been, but I’m sure it was nowhere very pleasant.”
Dr Ellison followed his wife into the room and checked Shirley’s heartbeat, her lungs and her blood pressure. He stood back, paused and then asked, “Now young lady, I suspect you’ve had chicken-pox. Is that right?”
For the first time since leaving Tremaincourt, Shirley looked in the mirror and was appalled to see her face covered in fading, purplish blotches. “Oh, dear, yes! And it still shows!” she groaned. “And,” Dr Ellison went on, “I would say that you and your brother have been through some sort of hair-raising adventure and you need to rest. Is that right?” he pronounced.
“Yes, I suppose you could say that,” Shirley admitted.
“Well then, get yourself dressed in these clothes my wife found for you, then come down to dinner. She said the meal would be on the table in half an hour.” On a chair by the bed a neat pile of clothes had appeared while she had been asleep: it was plain that neither the pretty blue-and-white cotton dress nor the blue cardigan had been bought in a jumble sale. She put them on and went down to dinner.
Ted was also smartly dressed, though possibly his clothes, a shirt and tweed trousers, had been purchased second hand at the sale rather than new in a department store. He did all the talking at supper time because his sister was still very subdued. Her hosts put this down to the strain of the chickenpox and her experiences over the past forty-eight hours, though she knew that the cause of her silence was a multitude of additional factors: the tension of the escape, the sound of the guns, the tiredness, the Channel crossing and then to cap it all, that wretched signpost which had reawakened the old obsession. She tried to focus on the conversation. Dr Ellison was talking about the bad news of the British Expeditionary Force that was filtering through to Britain. The soldiers were all trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk, the only major port that the Germans had not yet taken.
Listening to Dr Ellison, Shirley saw how lucky she and Ted had been. That they had been in extreme danger was undeniable, for they had teetered on the edge of war yet were never totally immersed in it, whereas these hundreds of thousands of soldiers, some of them no older than Ted, were on the edge and immersed at one and the same time. Inevitably, she began to wonder whether Alan was caught up in the Dunkirk emergency and to fear that, had he been mobilized, her chances of ever seeing him again were absolutely zero. She vaguely heard Dr Ellison asking Ted if they had seen lots of small boats when they came into port. On hearing that the harbour was full, he shook his head wisely and remarked that the rescue mission was sure to be on its way very soon.
After a good night’s sleep in comfortable beds, Shirley and Ted were treated to a cooked breakfast and then invited to stay for lunch. “We have worked it all out for you,” Nora Ellison declared. “You must stay for lunch, then we shall give you the money for the train back to London. Perhaps you father will be kind enough to reimburse us when it suits him.” She would admit no argument.
Late that Sunday evening they arrived home to find that their father was awaiting them, greatly relieved that both his son and daughter were no longer in France. “I was so worried about you!” he said, the furrows in his brow appearing even deeper than usual, and I am heartily relieved that you are home!” He too was tired after the ordeal of removing his mother to Birmingham. Evidently she had put every possible obstacle in his way, even questioning whether she really wanted to let Ted, her favourite grandson, have the piano which she herself never played, probably because she did not know how to. Ted was delighted with it, and charmed his father and sister that evening with tunes from the shows.
Throughout the neighbourhood Ted and Shirley became heroes: unlike anyone else they had actually been in France during the German invasion and had seen at first hand the brutality that was being inflicted on the population. Customers in the shop were eager to hear the story of their escape, and they were stopped in the street by people they had never met before and congratulated on their bravery, when in fact they would have preferred to be able to consign the experience to the past as quickly as possible.
50
There was no time to recover from the ordeal of the escape from France, yet it was hard for Shirley, who felt that she had been away in another world for years, not simply a few days, to readjust to the way of life that had become normal over the past eight months, since the outbreak of war. She was also trying to come to terms with the confusing shock of seeing that signpost outside Brighton, although other more urgent matters competed for her attention, because both she and her father were gravely concerned about Ted, who, despite the joy of having his own piano, was having even greater difficulty in settling down than his sister. Although he had taken the journey in his stride with far fewer complaints than she, he had become morose and restive at discovering that London, the destination of that arduous journey, was most definitely where he did not want to be. He hated the noise, the bustle, the smoke and the traffic and pined for the green fields, hills and forests of northern France. Standing at the window and looking out at the stream of buses, lorries and cars, he kept saying with a sigh, “I wonder how Pépé is getting on with the silage,” or, “If only Céline could send us some fresh eggs!”
Added to which, he, a strapping lad, used as he was to a plentiful supply of wholesome fresh food grown on the farm, could not reconcile himself to the meagre rations available in his temporary ration book. Even when his full ration book came through, the situation did not improve, because it required him to adjust to a very different culinary experience. “You’re in England now, remember,” Shirley remarked curtly when he groaned at her valiant attempts to concoct a proper meal out of baked beans, tiny morsels of bacon, sliced spam and mashed swede, combined with a huge quantity of potato. For an hour or two at a time he gave a hand in the shop, where in truth there was little for him to do, for with both him and Shirley at home it was certainly overstaffed, but he soon became dejected in there, and would regularly have to go out for a walk. Even that did little to lighten his mood, since he would come back even more discontented at the lack of fresh air and open spaces, as well as at the abundance of restrictions imposed by the wartime regulations.
Reggie found an outlet for some of his son’s excess energy by sending him out on the paper rounds in the evening, when there was always a shortage of paper boys, and at night Ted willingly took over the two ARP shifts from his father and his sister. “As there’s nothing much for me here, I might as well do the night shifts and sleep in the morning,” he declared with resignation. In the afternoons, up on the top floor which his father had converted into a makeshift bedroom for him during his absence, he spent hours engaged in writing long letters to Hélène, after which he would play increasingly morbid pieces on the piano.
Naturally he would scan the post for a reply from Switzerland, and only when a letter came would he cheer up for a day or two. Generally he would feed Shirley titbits of information, telling her for instance that Hélène was fine and was untouched by the conflict. On one occasion he told her that Hélène had written that her mother, who was living with her sister in the south of France, was concerned by the German occupation of the château in Trémaincourt in case the invaders were wrecking it. In the same letter Hélène vaguely gave Ted to suppose that Jean-Luc had somehow been involved in making the château available to the enemy. In another she mentioned that her mother was openly claiming that her son, Jean-Luc had taken the petrol from the cans stored in a shed at the château, filled the cans with water and distributed the petrol to the villagers of Trémaincourt. Of Hélène’s brother and father there was no news: no one, least of all Hélène, seemed to know where they were. Some of this news brought a smile, either of indignation or glee, to Shirley’s lips, but, on hearing about Jean-Luc, she thanked her lucky stars that at least her obsession with Alan had saved her from his clutches.
Ted went to the cinema with his father to see the Pathé newsreels three times a week, then he would go down to the pub for a drink with his pa’s friends before setting out on his night-time patrol, which, given the time of year, was inevitably rather late. Otherwise, he followed the news closely in the papers and was particularly absorbed by the Pathé film of the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of British and French soldiers from Dunkirk. The news on the wireless and the film in the cinema revealed why there had been so many small boats assembling in that harbour on the south coast where he and Shirley had been dumped by the naval “trawler”. The discovery that he and his sister had had such a narrow escape only days earlier from the horrors of the Nazi invasion of his beloved France struck him to the core, so he decided there and then that he would sign up to defend and avenge his two homelands, Britain and France. Gone was the happy-go-lucky young farmer, and in his place there appeared a determined fighter, ashamed of being idle while others bore the brunt of war. Such was the sum total of Ted’s life in Britain, at least for the first ten days or so.
In no doubt that the authorities would know of his return to London, despite his lack of a passport, his hope was that his call-up papers would come through at any time since he was ready and willing to go into battle. Meanwhile, however, a much more attractive proposition fell into his lap when, on 18th June, he heard, over the wireless, the exiled General de Gaulle insisting that the war for France was only then beginning, unlike Marshal Pétain who had the previous day had told his countrymen that the war was over for them. De Gaulle appealed to Frenchmen via the BBC to respond to his call to arms and join him in London. His eyes moist with joy, Ted packed a bag and told his father and sister that the moment had come. He would have walked out immediately, had not his startled family compelled him to eat something before leaving. Reggie was heard to joke ruefully that Ted was going in search of better food on the other side of the Channel, but this half-hearted attempt to lighten the atmosphere was lost on Ted. Then he was gone, on his way to the Olympia Exhibition Halls, one of the first of many recruits to the cause of the Resistance.
The abrupt separation from his only son, with whom he had so recently been reunited, was almost more than Reggie could bear. He sank into the depths of despair, the like of which Shirley had witnessed so often in the past and which might herald a recurrence of the symptoms of shell shock. She too was taken aback at the speed of Ted’s departure, though unlike her father she understood his sudden decision to leave at the first opportunity, an opportunity that would restore his self-respect and fulfil his urge to participate in the conflict, for she had no doubt that he had felt guilty at abandoning France at her lowest ebb and in her hour of greatest need.
Ted’s departure was in fact only temporary. The next evening he reappeared, bursting with excitement and full of news. He told them that Olympia had been packed with volunteers, with scarcely standing room, let alone space to lie down for the night. There had been rousing speeches from the General and his colleagues, much cheering and singing and a great deal of recruiting, for which he had been the first in one of the queues. Using the identity papers that his mother had sent, he had signed up as a French citizen, but was frustrated then to be told to go home to his London address and there await further developments. He was, however, confident that his fluency in both languages would qualify him for a job on the General’s staff at first, then active service in the field later. He did not specify what this active service meant, and neither Shirley nor their father were very inclined to find out too much detail, so great was their relief at having him home for a little longer.
Like most of the population they were forced to grasp at small straws, since there was little else to celebrate. It was bad enough that the days of the phoney war had come to an abrupt end with the German invasion of France, but with the enemy in sight of Britain across the Channel, tensions were mounting steadily. The withdrawal – no one liked to talk of “defeat” – of British and French troops from Dunkirk, leaving thousands of bodies on the beaches, brought home to the population at large the enormity of the danger facing the country. Although Ted and Reggie continued to go to the cinema for the news, and they all read the daily papers, a tacit understanding prevailed that, in the home, talk of the war was kept to a minimum to preserve the sanity of the occupants.
The lack of discussion meant that Shirley found herself isolated as she tussled with the question of her own contribution to the war effort. She did not feel the same urge as Ted to fight, but, on the other hand, she wanted above all to contribute in a useful way. The ballet, which to date had been such a fundamental part of her existence and, in effect, her only talent, now appeared to be frivolous and even futile. What could a troop of dancers do to aid the battle against the monstrous evils of Nazism? While her ballet shoes and her leotard lay untouched in her wardrobe for days on end, her records and her gramophone gathered dust and the paper for choreographing new dances faded as it lay in the in the sunlight on her table, she agonized over the options open to her. She was not ready to let Madame Belinskaya know that she had returned from France, so she studiously avoided the dance school. Instead she took herself off to the council offices to look at the posters and enquire whether there might be some useful occupation that she could take up.
