Last Telegram (22 page)

It turned out to be a good choice: the train to London was unheated on that chilly January day. On the bus between Liverpool Street and Waterloo Station, I used my powder compact mirror to apply lipstick, thought it looked too brazen, rubbed it off with a handkerchief, then applied it again, like a nervous schoolgirl. Now, breathless and sick with anticipation, I barely recognized him, disguised beneath bulky army fatigues, brown lace-up boots, and a brutal military haircut. He was standing under the station clock, along with a dozen or so other servicemen anxiously casting their eyes over the crowds, looking for their sweethearts.

“Stefan? Is it you?”

“Stephen now, remember?” he whispered, kissing my cheek and running his hand over my hair. In person, he sounded entirely English. All trace of an accent had disappeared.

I touched the rough fabric of his sleeve. “This feels like a dream.”

He grinned, his teeth brilliant white in the desert-tanned face, new smile lines at the corner of his eyes. “Wait till I kiss you properly,” he whispered. “Then you'll know it's real.”

“Where are Kurt and Walter?”

“It's a long story.”

“We've so much to catch up. How long have you got?”

“Till tomorrow morning.”

Just a handful of hours, after so long. I took his hand. “Come on then. Let's find a hotel and make the most of it.”

• • •

He smelled of unknown places, musty train carriages, and stale cigarette smoke, like a stranger. When he took off the ugly, scratchy uniform, his body was unfamiliar too: where it had once been pale and slender, it was now muscular and tanned, his narrow shoulders and thighs had thickened, his voice was more bass than baritone, and the once sparse hairs on his chest were now too many to count. But when we kissed, the taste of him and the feel of his lips were just as I remembered, and when our bodies met, every sensation appeared to have been amplified by our long absence.

“I've been dreaming about this for so long,” he said afterward, rolling onto his back, looking up at the stains on the ceiling. “And the real thing was even better than in my dreams.”

We cuddled against the chill air under the frayed spread. The bed that had creaked so embarrassingly a few moments before now felt like a warm cocoon protecting us from the world, reminding me of the last time, at the cottage. That was more than a year ago, yet now we were together again it seemed like only yesterday. No candles this time, of course, no wildflowers in a jam jar. But despite the fusty smells, the cheap ply furniture, and fussy ornaments, the tap dripping steadily into a stained sink, the handwritten sign “hot water between six and seven p.m. only,” the room felt like a little corner of heaven.

He was studying the ceiling.

“What are you looking at up there?”

He reached an arm from under the covers and pointed at the damp stains in the plaster. “Over there, a shuttle. Next to it's a pirn, and there, a skein of raw silk. Is that a warping creel? See, I remember it all.”

He propped himself on one elbow, looking into my face. “Because of you, Lilymouse, this no-good Jewish rebel became a silk weaver, and now I'm a proper English gentleman and a soldier.”

And after he kissed me, he asked, “So what can you see?”

Looking into his eyes, I said, “I see the man I love. Jewish, German, or English. Stephen, Stefan, it doesn't matter a jot to me who you are.”

As dusk drew in, we pulled down the blackouts, but the light from the single bulb above the bed was so harsh we turned it off again and raised the blinds. With no streetlights or car headlamps, London at night was like the countryside, and the room filled with the gentle light of the evening sky.

We couldn't bear to waste precious moments going to a café, so we chain-smoked to ward off our hunger. He asked me how things were going in Westbury and, tentatively stroking the scar on my cheek, about the accident in Cheapside. It was the first time in months that I'd talked about it, and the horror came back, of course, but in Stefan's arms it felt just a little less painful.

“I'll miss him too,” he said. “Mr. Harold would do anything to protect us boys. He was like a father to us.”

When I finally ran out of words, I said, “And now, your story please. Don't leave anything out.”

Along with other internees, Kurt, Walter, and Stefan—or Stephen as he insisted I must now call him—had endured a nightmare two-month voyage on the
Dunera
.

“They crammed in three thousand of us, when it was meant to hold only sixteen hundred,” he said. “Germans and Italians mostly. Some people had lived in England for years, but they got interned all the same because they were classed as enemy aliens. It was horrible, cramped, smelly, airless, disgusting. The second night, there was a terrible crash—we were hit by a torpedo but not badly damaged. After that, we changed direction, started going south instead of west. But they never told us where we were going.

“We lived in the cargo holds. Some had hammocks, but most of us slept on the floor. There wasn't enough food and water; people fought over it. They let us out on deck for exercise just a few minutes a day, if we were lucky. Like prison. The guards treated us like prisoners, stole stuff from our suitcases. They were genuine crooks—can you believe it? Yes, really. They'd let them out of jail so they could guard us. Crazy.”

What a bitter twist, I thought, criminals guarding innocent people. But there was a silver lining, Stefan said. Later, some of the internees wrote to the British newspapers and Government ministers, complaining about the way they had been treated. There were questions in Parliament and an official enquiry, which resulted in them being freed and allowed to come home.

“What about your things, were they stolen too?” I asked.

“Some, yes, but nothing valuable. I'm glad I left my writing case with you and the photos. You still have it safe?”

“Yes, my darling. Of course, I'm sorry, I should have brought it with me.”

“Don't worry, I will come to Westbury soon. Keep it safe for me a little longer.”

When they finally arrived in the Australian desert, there was no camp; they had to build their own huts. Stefan spoke without bitterness, apparently sanguine about his experiences, about their incarceration behind barbed wire with a thousand others, in scorching heat with not enough to eat.

“At least the Aussies weren't cruel,” he said. “And I had Kurt and Walter. We were a family.”

He pulled out a wallet from his jacket pocket and gave me a paper note. “We even had our own money.” I could make out the roughly printed words:
Hay
Camp
One
Pound
. “To earn money I taught piano lessons. I brought this note back as a souvenir for you. It won't buy much here, I'm afraid,” he said wryly.

“Wherever did you get a piano, in the desert?” I asked.

“I don't know,” he said, “I think the local town gave it to us. They called it Joanna but I never found out why. Isn't that an English girl's name?”

“It's rhyming slang for pianna,” I said, laughing. “They must have been Cockneys.”

He frowned, not understanding, and went on, “My most talented student was a German Jew who'd lived for years in France and got out just before the invasion. In exchange for my music lessons, he taught me French. Good bloke. We talked all the time and I got fairly fluent.”

He took my face in his hands, “
Lilymouse, tu es la plus jolie fille de toute Londres. Je t'aime, ma petite souris
.”

“
Je
t'aime aussi. Tu es un trés
sexy Frenchman,” I replied in my schoolgirl accent, and we lost ourselves in kisses once more.

“What about Kurt and Walter? Why aren't they with you?” I asked, a little later.

“They told us we could come back if we agreed to enlist with the Allies. So we had to have a long talk about this. Kurt does not want to fight Germans, and Walter is too young to join up. So when we heard that they could get Australian visas instead, they decided to stay.” He went quiet. “It was hard for us to be separated, but I had to get back to my Lily.”

“I love you,” I whispered.

“And I love you, Lilymouse,” he said, leaning over to kiss my nose. Then he lay back, and after a thoughtful pause, “It is also…for my family…you know?”

I nodded, only half understanding. “Did the army make you change your name when you enlisted?”

“No, but they suggested it would be a good idea,” he said, almost whispering. “Coming back here.”

“I see why you chose Stephen. But Holmes? After your friend Sherlock?” I asked gently.

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” he said, smiling now. I remembered that deep bow, the twirl of that imaginary umbrella. Stefan the clown. The boy I first fell in love with.

“So what happens next?” I asked, praying he would not tell me he was going to the front line.

“This,” he said, handing me his beret. The metal badge glistened. “All of us internees, we've been signed up to the Pioneer Corps. They seem like a good bunch, Italians, Germans, all kinds. The King's Own Enemy Aliens, we call ourselves.”

“Why the pick and shovel?”

“We do the things front-line troops don't want to: digging, building, fetching and carrying, cleaning. The dirty jobs brigade,” he said cheerfully, sitting up to light a cigarette.

“Where will you be you based?”

“Ilfracombe,” he said, struggling to pronounce the unfamiliar syllables. “I go there tomorrow.”

“In Devon? That's a seaside resort.” At least it's in England, I thought, and he won't be going to the front line. But then he added, “With a bit of luck, I won't have to dig latrines for long. I plan to transfer to a fighting regiment, as soon as they'll have me.”

After he drifted off, I listened to his gentle breathing, wishing that my every night could be filled with it. I thought about the choice he had made, coming back to this war-torn country to join up and possibly to fight, instead of staying in Australia, all for me. I heard again the sadness in his voice as he talked about having to change his name, about what his parents would think, and wondering how they were faring. What would the next few months bring? I lay unsleeping, partly from excitement, partly from dread, till the sound of the landlady going downstairs, the crashings in the kitchen, and the smell of frying bread signaled that our precious night was over.

Once dressed, we became shy of each other again.

“Keep yourself safe,” I said, as he picked up his kit bag, “and come home to Westbury soon.”

“Home, that sounds good,” he said, kissing my cheek. “I'll telephone as soon as I can.”

Then he was gone.

I sat on the crumpled bed and lifted the pillow to my face, but his smell was already fading. I checked my lipstick in the mirror, picked up the Hay Camp pound note from the bedside table, snapped shut my handbag, and prepared to meet the world again.

While China has been the world's main producer of raw silk for many centuries, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Japanese introduced mechanization and quality control to produce yarns of a new and remarkable consistency. During wartime, raw silk was sourced from the Middle East, but this never matched up to Japanese quality.

—
The
History
of
Silk
by Harold Verner

Compared with many, we considered ourselves fortunate. Stefan served with the Pioneers for more than a year, being posted all over the country. So although we didn't get much opportunity to see each other, and he never had long enough on leave to come home to Westbury, at least there were telephone calls and the luxury of letters that took just a week to arrive.

There was little time for moping. Although it seemed as though the tide of war was at last turning, at the mill work was frenetic, and in the past few weeks things had been going horribly wrong.

As I unlocked the heavy green door and let myself into the mill that morning, I could hear the phone echoing through the empty offices. Sprinting up the stairs two at a time, I missed my footing and stumbled, smashing my shin on the top step. Cursing, I pulled myself up and fumbled to find the right key for the office door.

The insistent ringing continued, but when I lifted the receiver, there was only a dialing tone. Damn and blast. Who the hell was ringing so early? If it wasn't a wrong number, it was probably bad news. I tried to catch my breath, rubbing my bruised shin.

Usually I loved being in the mill in the morning, before everyone else arrived. The sweet smell of silk hanging in the still, silent air, mixed with the sharp tang of engine oil, was familiar and comforting. And yet, that day, it reminded me of the trouble we were in.

With the heavy bunch of master keys clinking from my belt, I could let myself into every part of the mill, click on the lights at the main switchboard, and wander freely down the aisles of gray-green looms, along the rows of spindly winding machines, past the warping creel with thousands of threads hanging limply, their tension released.

Without the eyes of the weavers and throwsters on me, I was free to examine their work without fearing they'd think I was finding fault. The machines were stilled but not sleeping, crouched in readiness for the day's action. Once or twice I found myself talking to them, even stroking them, as if they were alive.

At this hour, the canteen, normally the carefully guarded domain of Kathleen and her team, was also mine. That morning I treated myself to an extra ration of evaporated milk, hoping its sweetness would disguise the bitter aftertaste of chicory in the coffee concentrate. I savored it, looking across the weaving shed roof where the morning sun slanted through the rows of cricket bat willows, and remembered Stefan's curiosity about them, that day by the boiler shed. So long ago. A tint of green washed through their wintry branches and, for a moment, lifted my spirits.

But walking back through the packing hall, this fleeting moment of optimism disappeared. Stacked on the shelving beside the door were several rolls of pure white parachute silk. The weavers had warned us, but we'd been under such pressure to produce more and more, we told them to carry on weaving in hopes they would produce enough yards of fault-free cloth to satisfy Camerons' demands. Now, the pickers had scrutinized each roll, and loops of red thread knotted into the selvedge marked every imperfection.

They were festooned with what looked like drips of blood.

With this number of faults, the silk was unusable for parachutes. We hadn't even bothered to send it for finishing. We'd wasted two bales of precious raw yarn. We might find another use for it later, but with the parachute manufacturers desperate for more supplies, this was a disaster.

Back in the office, the telephone was ringing again.

“Lily?”

I felt slightly sick at the sound of his voice. These days our usual dealings with Camerons were through his manager. “Robbie? What's the problem? It's half past seven in the morning.”

“Listen, we've got a real panic on. The ministry's on my back about parachute supplies—I reckon they've got a big push in the offing. Promised them we'd double it this week but we're well off target. What happened to your delivery yesterday? Why did you send our van away?”

“I told you on Wednesday about the problems we've been having,” I said, trying not to sound defensive.

“But you didn't say you couldn't deliver even a yard of the stuff. Don't you realize there's petrol rationing, Lily?”

Of course I did. “I'm sorry. They didn't tell me till it was too late.”

“You're the ruddy manager. You've got to keep on top of these things.” He was right, of course; his driver had had a wasted journey. It had been my mistake. “And to cap it all,” he went on, “I had a call from Cartwright himself last night.”

“Cartwright?”

“Head honcho at the ministry. Bloody man phoned me at home, would you believe? He's not happy, threatening all kinds of things.”

“The finishing plant's playing up again,” I said, keeping my voice as steady as possible. “And you know we've been having to use that Syrian raw for the past few weeks. It's a nightmare to weave.”

“He knows. Your mate Michael's in for a bollocking.”

“That's not fair. At least he's getting us something. It's hardly his fault it isn't up to Japanese quality.” Poor Michael, he was doing his best. But Robbie neither knew nor cared.

“Look, it's very simple. How many rolls can you get to me next week?”

“Hard to say, Robbie,” I said, panicking slightly. I was playing for time, trying to placate him but also being realistic. I couldn't let him down again.

“Thirty?” he said.

“That'd be a stretch.”

“Twenty then. At least. End of Tuesday latest. And they'd better be up to scratch.”

“Don't worry, we test every roll.” Dancing before my eyes were Bert's figures, the erratic porosity results we'd been having this past week.

“Seems to be a problem with you, Lily, promising what you can't deliver. And if you can't deliver this time, we really will have to reconsider Verners' contract. Okay?”

He hung up without saying good-bye. I shouted into the receiver, slammed it down, ran into Father's office, and banged the door so hard the glass rattled in its frame. Robbie's jibe hurt more than his threats. How dare he bring that up again? I was tempted to run home and weep in Gwen's arms, but she'd still be getting up and having breakfast. No, I must sort this out myself, be strong, display real leadership. I'll bloody well show the bastard, I thought.

It wasn't just the poor quality raw. We also had problems in the finishing plant. The thermostat and timing mechanisms were on the blink again but our engineers were unable to fix them, baffled by the Swiss technology. We'd searched for replacement parts without success, and importing new kit was impossible.

After Father died, I'd shut the door to this office, leaving everything untouched, unable to accept that he would never again sit at his desk. Finally, at Gwen's insistence, I'd moved in. “It's symbolic,” she said. “Feels like a ship without a captain.” I wished now, more than anything, that I could hand the ship back.

I looked out of the office window, trying to quiet my jangling heart. In the yard below, the morning shift workers were starting to arrive, some on foot and others by bike, some alone with the sleep still in their faces, others in groups animated by chat and laughter, encouraging each other at the end of a long week. In all the chaos of wartime, these steadfast, decent people were depending on me.

I picked up the framed photograph of our family from Father's desk. We were posed formally in Sunday best. Mother was smiling, seated on an elaborate cast-iron garden chair with three-year-old me on her lap and John, aged five, at her other side. Father, every inch the confident successful businessman in his prime, stood behind us.

I scrutinized his face. “Now, what would you do?” I said out loud, trying to hear his voice. Then I sat at his desk, on the wooden chair I knew so well from spinning on as a child. Before long, the ideas began to flow, and I started to write. When Gwen arrived for our usual morning catch-up, I handed her a piece of foolscap paper. On it I had written:

Problem
1:
Syrian Raw: variable quality leading to unacceptable level of faults in woven piece. But is all we can get, so have to use.

Solution: greater care in preparation. Need to run twisting & throwing at slower pace. To increase output, add extra half-shift from next Monday. Pay overtime &/or recruit more throwsters—internally? Fred re: numbers & training existing & new workers—must understand importance of extra care. Get him to calculate additional costs. Where to make savings to cover this? ASAP. Believe he can be entrusted with this.

Problem
2:
Thermostat in
finishing plant. Unreliable, cannot be repaired.

Solution: Need to override vat control on manual & monitor with stand-alone thermometer and stopwatch. Talk to Bert, task to implement & train Ruby in use of same. ASAP.

N.B. Is he capable of this? Can he be relied on?

Gwen read in silence, then looked at me curiously. “Have you been communing with the gaffer this morning?”

“Kind of.” I gestured to the photograph. “I thought about what he would do, and how irritating it was when he insisted on going back to basics.”

She laughed affectionately. “I remember it well.”

“Seemed to work for me this morning though—I feel a lot better than I did after Robbie's phone call.”

“Robbie? What was that about?” she said, raising her eyebrows suspiciously.

Her face flushed as I repeated the conversation. “That's outrageous. How dare he threaten you? So what if he's got the ministry on his back? It's no excuse for that kind of behavior. I always said he was a bully.”

“You're right, but he's pulling the purse strings, I'm afraid.” I stood up and stretched. “Come on, time for action. We'll show him we can deliver on our promises. If we get the throwsters sorted out today, we could have enough yarn for a weekend weaving shift, what do you think? We might even have enough to start finishing on Monday evening. We'll have to pay overtime and say good-bye to our weekend, but with a bit of luck we could have the delivery ready by late Tuesday.”

She nodded. “With a bit of luck and a following wind, perhaps.”

“Can you get hold of Fred and Bert? My diary's free most of today. Say ten o'clock?”

“Your word is my command.”

“Thanks for being such a brick, Gwen. I owe you,” I called as she bustled out of the office.

She turned with a half-smile. “You bet. I'll call it in one day.”

Fred said he was up for the challenge if we'd pay the throwsters overtime. But in Bert's weathered face, the rheumy eyes were skeptical. He listened morosely as I told him how we planned to bypass the thermostat and run the finishing plant on manual.

“That's all very well, Miss Lily, but how're we supposed to know the water temperature's even?” he grumbled. “And I don't know about them stopwatches. It'll pretty much be guesswork, whatever. We'd have been better off without this new-fangled machinery in the first place, I reckon.”

I'd never trusted him since he sneaked to Father about me and Stefan. Watching his departing back, I imagined what he was thinking:
Wouldn't have happened if Mr. Harold had been around. See what you get when you have a chit of a girl running the place. And she consorted with that German lot.

“C'mon, Lily,” Gwen said after he'd gone. “We'll just have to prove it can be done. Present him with a
fait
accompli
.”

“We can't just waltz in and take over his machinery.”

“You're the boss, Lily. You can do whatever you like, whatever you need to do.” She came around the desk and gave me a hug. “We'll do it together.”

• • •

By Sunday, Fred's team had managed, by scrutinizing every inch and dumping some of the worst sections of Syrian raw, to throw two thousand bobbins of almost perfect yarn. It was slow work, but it paid off. The parachute looms were weaving again.

On Tuesday morning, my alarm rang at half past five. I reluctantly dragged myself out of bed, feeling sick with sleeplessness and apprehension. A thousand square yards of silk had to be finished and tested perfect by five o'clock that evening. Without stopping for breakfast, I crossed the kitchen garden, let myself out of the gate into the yard, and walked down the slope. I could see the lit end of Gwen's cigarette in the gray dawn as she waited by the finishing room door.

She was right; we made a good team, working side by side. The bright lights, gleaming steel, and steamy warmth perked us up, and by half past seven we had boiled, dried, and stentered a whole roll of parachute silk, using a manual vat thermometer and two stopwatches.

My hands shook as I tried to thread the end of the roll into the porosity tester.

“Let me have a go.” She pushed me aside and took over, pulling a few yards of material and laying it flat on the base of the machine, lowering the lever and pressing the button. Our eyes were fixed on the dial as the machine hissed and sighed, and as the needle settled, we shouted simultaneously, “Fourteen cubic feet per second!”

As we measured and tested, I wrote the results in Bert's red-backed ledger with the stubby pencil tied to it with string: 14; 14.6; 14.2; 14.8. With each hiss and sigh of the machine, we held our breath. With each settling of the needle, we whooped like schoolgirls, as each result came in within the required porosity tolerance.