Avalanche of Daisies (20 page)

There was a reek of petrol, a stink of cordite, an explosion that made the hedges shake, billows of black smoke and long tongues of flame, and he knew that a tank had brewed up and hoped it was the Tiger.

And then it was over, as suddenly as it had begun, and he leant against the hedge and was sick.

The pathway was littered with cartridge cases and strewn with bodies, some blown to pieces, some wounded and groaning, one trying to crawl away. And among them was Taffy, lying on his back, hideously spread-eagled in a long pool of blood. Oh Christ! Taffy!

Get to him quick! What was it they said? Shock was the worst killer. Must keep him warm. How the hell do I do that? Where's the field dressing? Chest wound. Chest wound. What did they tell us about chest wounds? Staunch the blood. ‘Taff! You're all right mate! I've got you.' Struggling to undo the buttons on a tunic slippery with blood.

Dusty was crouching beside another casualty – Johnnie Taylor wasn't it? – holding a cigarette for him. ‘Bloody awful mate! Don't move. They've called for the stretchers. Don't wanna disappoint 'em.'

It was totally incongruous. One man joking, the next man unconscious. ‘Taffy! Open your eyes mate! Taff! Come on!'

The stretcher bearers were standing beside him. He was aware of their boots, their khaki legs, the smell of their sweat. Almost as strong as the sickly smell of blood.

‘He can't hear you, mate,' a voice was saying. ‘He's gone.'

‘Gone? He can't be. He was talking to me a minute ago.' But they were already moving off to attend to Taylor and the Corporal was rounding up the survivors, shouting orders.

‘Get up! Leave them! You can't do any more! We're moving!' Steve obeyed, although his legs were leaden with grief and his brain stuck with a single thought. Alive one minute, dead the next. But there wasn't time for pity. Ten minutes later, a private from A company came hurtling down the road towards them, white faced, waving his arms in warning and shouting that the road ahead was occupied by hundreds of Germans and to get the hell out of it.

Then they found the strength to run and legged it across the field into a thick wood, where they waited, fear returning. It was silent among the trees and they didn't come under fire, although they could hear a tank battle raging below and to the east of them.

Presently the order came through that they were to head through the woods to a line of slit trenches and regroup. And it began to rain.

And so the day continued. They were fired on so often they lost count. Time itself was an irrelevance. There was only action and reaction, deferred grief and that awful, ever-present terror. When the dusk finally arrived and they leaguered for the night, they were so tired they slept where they dropped. It was ten, o'clock and they'd been in the front line for seventeen hours.

The night gave them little rest. There were still sentry duties. The hedges had to be patrolled. A watch had to be kept. So they slept when they could, and at first light, just after their supply column arrived, the battle began again.

For days they slogged it out in the damp prison of the bocage, as the rain filled their slit trenches with mud, the tankies grew more and more irritated to be cooped up in such terrain and the Germans harassed them day and night with shell and mortar fire. They were well supplied and usually well fed, but their casualty rate was alarmingly high and progress demoralisingly slow. And there was never time to digest what was happening to them. And never time to grieve.

They were simply relieved when the order came that they were to make a temporary withdrawal from Villers and its hated bocage because the RAF were going to bomb the place. ‘And about bloody time too!'

They took up their positions on the reverse slope of a hill north of another shattered village called Livry and watched. It was a massive raid delivered by heavy bombers and it seemed to go on for a very long time.

‘There won't be a stone left standing,' Steve said as the noise went on. ‘I pity the poor buggers who live there.' And he suddenly thought of the red tiles of his honeymoon cottage and that peaceful musty bed and their first picnic out in the rough grass of that peaceful garden. ‘I ought to write home,' he said.

‘Do it now,' Dusty advised. ‘You won't get the chance once the bombers have gone.'

But when he'd found pencil and paper, and had written ‘My
darling,'
he couldn't think what to say. He couldn't tell her where he was or what was happening because the censor wouldn't let it through, he couldn't tell her about Taffy – he couldn't even bear to
think
about Taffy – and he certainly couldn't let her know what he was feeling, although the words leapt into his head, straight and simple and honest.
Dear Barbara, I'm frightened. I want to come home.
The very idea of writing such things shamed him to blushing. She
would
think him a booby if he went on like that. In the end he had to settle for platitudes, like everyone else in the brigade.

We have been in the front line since we arrived but are having a spot of rest at the moment. The rain is incessant. We keep as dry as we can with ground sheets and gas-capes. We are all very dirty but the grub is good, tell Mum. I can't say much because of the censor. Give my love to everyone. I haven't had any letters yet but they will catch up with us eventually so keep them coming. At least
we've got the consolation of knowing that we are keeping the Germans so busy here they won't have any planes left over for bombing London.

Love to you all.

Steve

It took five days for Steve's first letter to reach Childeric Road and Barbara worried through every minute of every one of them, waking long before the postwoman was due and prowling up and down the stairs endlessly until she arrived, stamping her feet to urge her on, ‘Hassen you up woman. Where's my letter?' She knew her restlessness was making her mother-in-law irritable but she didn't care. Her anxiety was too acute.

On the first day she had a long letter from Joan, which she glanced at and didn't read. On the second, a card from Becky and a parcel addressed to Mr & Mrs Steven Wilkins which turned out to contain an album full of wedding photographs, neatly arranged from a blurred shot of their scamper up the Town Hall steps to a perfect close-up of their cardboard cake. Bob said they were lovely and even Heather approved of the group picture, although she sniffed at all the others, but Barbara simply couldn't take them in. They were pictures, that was all, of a day that had receded into insignificance under the impact of this awesome invasion and the endless, yearning need to know what was happening.

After two days, little Mrs Connelly, who lived downstairs, joined in the vigil, calling encouragement – ‘She's just coming, so she is.' ‘She's on her way.' ‘I can see her.' – and crooning commiserations when the wanted letter still wasn't delivered. And Bob assured her every morning that it would be ‘bound to come tomorrow'. But nothing made the wait for it any easier.

Its eventual arrival was greeted with relief by every member of the household, even old Mr Connelly, who
usually sat in the kitchen stolidly munching through his breakfast no matter what was going on.

But for Barbara the relief was very short lived. The letter had been written five days ago and, although it proved he had survived the landing, she had no idea what had happened to him since then. Even when she found his second letter waiting for her when she got home from work that afternoon, the anxiety remained. It was wonderful to see his lovely flowing handwriting twice in one day and to know that he'd still been alive and well when he wrote for the second time but now there was another anxiety. It was such a short letter. Almost curt. It hadn't told her anything really. And he hadn't said he loved her.

She read it for a second time, missing him with a new yearning. If only he'd said something personal and loving, something about the time they'd spent together. He couldn't have forgotten it already, could he?

I'll send him a nice long answer, she decided, looking at his nice long row of books, and I'll remind him.

In the middle of the row, set neatly between the blue and orange of all those Penguins, was the white spine of her new photograph album. The sight of it gave her an even better idea. She would send him a photo, not one of those blurred ones and definitely not a group, but a nice one of just the pair of them, looking at one another. There was one at the end of the book that was just right. How young they looked! And what a long time ago it seemed! She eased the little picture from its restraining corners, turned it over and wrote on the back: ‘
Just in case you've forgot what I look like!
'

Then she composed her letter, telling him everything that had happened since her last and adding, ‘
You were right about the Germans not bombing us. It's all very quiet here.'

But she spoke too soon. The very next night she was yanked from her sleep by the sound of a massive explosion.

For a moment she couldn't understand what was happening. Then she sat bolt upright, struggling to wake and feeling very frightened. The window was rattling in its frame and she could hear the explosion still reverberating in the darkness. Oh God, she thought. Thass a bomb. And she remembered her mother's mocking words, ‘Go
to London? They're bombing people in London
.' And her own wild, stupid reply. ‘
I don't care!'
And now here she was in the middle of an air raid, shaking with fright, her mind full of terrifying images – bombs, falling out of the sky, crashing through the ceiling – this ceiling – exploding and destroying and blowing people to bits.

The noise faded and stopped, and now she could hear voices in the front bedroom, curtains being drawn, a light being switched on. I mustn't let
them
see I'm frightened, she decided. No matter what. And she made an effort to stop shaking, got out of bed and began to put on her clothes.

The light on the landing was switched on, there was a patter of feet outside her door and her mother-in-law appeared in the doorway, putting on her dressing gown.

‘Don't go near the window,' she ordered. ‘If there's another one you could be cut to pieces.'

‘I know,' Barbara said. The thought of it made her feel panicky again but she made a great effort and spoke as calmly as she could. ‘That was a bomb, wassen it?'

Heather didn't show any sign of fear at all. ‘Big one by the sound of it,' she said. ‘What's the time? Can you see?'

Barbara peered at Steve's bedside clock in the light from the landing. ‘Nearly half past four.'

‘The sirens'll go in a minute,' Heather said shortly. ‘Put your shoes an' socks on. We might have to go downstairs.'

The first shock was passing and, now that the night was quiet again, Barbara realised that her heartbeat was steadying. She sat on the edge of the bed and put on her
socks and shoes, her movements slow but quite controlled. Heather ran back to her own bedroom. Mrs Connelly called up the stairs to see if they were all right. ‘You coming down, are you?' And Bob's voice answered, ‘I think so, don't you?'

Within minutes, the five of them were gathered in the Connelly's musty front room, sitting round the Morrison shelter, dressed and drinking tea and speculating as to why the sirens hadn't gone and why the guns weren't firing. The shelter looked huge and clumsy, like a cage for some poor wild animal, but it was better than waiting to be bombed upstairs.

‘I thought we'd finished with this shenanigans,' Mr Connelly grumbled, rubbing the grey stubble on the side of his face. ‘Bloody Jerries! You'd think they'd shut up with the invasion an' all. Have we not had enough?'

‘I reckon it was a loner,' Bob said. ‘Come over on the off-chance an' they shot him down.'

‘He had a bloody big load,' the old man said. ‘Must've done a fair bit a' damage.'

Mrs Connelly finished her second cup of tea and set it down on the table with a crack. ‘If they don't sound the sirens soon I'm off back to bed,' she told them. ‘I've lost enough sleep in this war without sittin' up for nothin'. My feet are like ice, so they are.'

And as the air raid warning didn't go, that's what she did. The rest of them sat on for another half an hour but it was still quiet so they turned in too.

‘A loner,' Bob said, as they climbed the stairs. ‘See if it ain't. We'll hear tomorrow.'

But there was nothing about it on the wireless and nothing in the papers either. ‘Too small,' Heather said. ‘It has to be a big raid to get a mention nowadays, with the Second Front and everything.'

Barbara's passengers were full of it. ‘Did you hear it, duck?' they asked. ‘Bloody Germans. Startin' up again. They don't know when they're beaten.'

It wasn't long before the tramway bush telegraph was in action and drivers and clippies were passing on the news of what had happened. It
had
been a plane and it had come down on the railway bridge in Grove Road in Bow, blocking the Chelmsford-Liverpool Street line. ‘Winders out for a quarter of a mile,' Mrs Phipps told Barbara. ‘Ten killed, so they say, an' ever so many casualties. Flying glass, you see.'

It was quite a triumph to be able to come home that evening and tell her in-laws all about it. In fact Bob had heard the story that morning too, but he kept quiet and allowed her the floor, pleased to see how sensible she was being and how clearly she explained.

‘A one-off,' he said when she'd finished. ‘An' just as well. We don't want all that starting up again.'

‘We won't tell Steve,' Heather decided. And she gave Barbara her fiercest expression to make her understand that this was an order. ‘There's no need to go upsettin' him over it. He'd only think the worst. It's over an' done with now.'