Out of the Blue (6 page)

Aunt Vi had the kettle and two saucepans on to boil. The enormous green enamel teapot was warming on the stove and she was placing cups on to a tray. A mixing bowl on the table stood beside the
stone flour jar; one batch of scones was already waiting to go into the oven as soon as it was hot.

‘Ah, Kitty,’ she said, ‘pop and fetch the willow, there’s a good girl.’

Kitty hesitated.

‘Hurry up, Kit, there’s thirsty men out there and they’ll not hang around all day.’ She turned and poured the scalding water into the teapot and refilled the kettle from
the tap. Kitty went to the dresser in the parlour and carefully took down the willow-pattern china teacups that Aunt Vi reserved for special occasions.

For the next hour, Kitty carried trays of steaming tea and plates of hot buttered scones out to the gate. She stood in the early morning light, smiling shyly, while a boisterous queue of
soldiers downed the cups of sweet tea and helped themselves to half a scone. Kitty watched their hands as the cups were lifted full and lowered empty, rarely raising her eyes to see the faces of
the men who thanked her. Occasionally, a ‘Cheers, love’ in a familiar London accent made her glance upward. When her tray was empty, she hurried back to the kitchen and Aunt Vi reloaded
it. Uncle Geoff stood at the sink washing and drying the teacups, something that Kitty couldn’t remember him ever doing before.

‘Shall I do that, Uncle Geoff, and you can take the next tray out?’ Kitty asked.

‘You’re all right, Kit,’ he replied gruffly. ‘I think they’d rather get their tea from a pretty girl than a dry old stick like me.’

Several soldiers asked her to marry them and, when a young Scot begged for a wee kiss, Aunt Vi, who had come out to the gate with another plate piled high with scones, teased him.

‘It’s a spanking not a kiss you’ll get, you cheeky monkey!’ A cheer went up from the men around them and the next proposal of marriage went to Aunt Vi.

More shouts from up ahead and the soldiers began to disperse. A few last men hurried up and took what was left on the tray and one, a wiry Cumbrian, when he had drained his cup, passed it
absently into Aunt Vi’s hand and murmured a low ‘Thanks, Mam.’ Kitty noticed Aunt Vi’s chin tremble at this and saw her bite her lip before wishing him good luck.

‘Oh Kitty,’ she said, turning to go inside, ‘I pray to God to keep them safe, I do.’

Charlie had cycled down the line to see how long the convoy was. Soon after the army was on the move again, he came back carrying an American comic and a baseball magazine. He stood with Kitty
and watched them pass.

‘I wish I was going with them, Kitty.’

But Kitty didn’t answer him. She was thinking about Sammy. What would happen to him now?

At ten to six June lets herself into her father’s bungalow.

‘It’s me, Dad!’ She places the Tupperware box she carries in one hand on the hall table and closes the door behind her. ‘Brought you a bit of fish pie – I’ll
heat it up for you. Do you want peas with it?’

As June moves through to the kitchen she hears a sound coming from the bedroom. She calls out to her father again, questioningly this time, and his muffled reply has her frightened. She thinks
he has fallen and hurries to the bedroom.

‘Dad, whatever’s happened?’ she asks, alarm in her voice. June moves round the bed and sees Bert. He is down on one knee, waving his walking stick about beneath the bed. His
breath comes in rasps and wheezes and, as June rushes towards him, he struggles to speak.

‘There’s a box . . . can’t . . . reach the . . . blessed thing. You get it, Junie, please.’

He uses the stick as a prop and slowly heaves himself up from the floor and sinks on to the bed. June goes down on both knees, tips her head sideways to the floor and peers past his slippers
across the shadowy carpet. She retrieves a black metal box that was once used for storing cine-film canisters and places it beside Bert on the bed.

‘You still got my old school reports in there, Dad? I should take them and show Martin. See if I can get him to do something with himself, instead of lazing around all day.’

Bert opens the box and begins lifting out documents and placing them on the bed. June sees the reports and picks them up from the pile. Bert continues to look. He is upset but June does not
notice yet. At last his fingers fall upon a letter and he takes it up and holds it against his chest. A spell of wheezing becomes a coughing fit, slow at first like a reluctant starter motor trying
to bite, then it takes hold and the cough consumes him, brings tears to his blue eyes. He rocks backwards and forwards and clutches the letter to him. The sun, which has been creeping along the
wall outside, suddenly streams in at the window and a brilliant shaft of golden light illuminates Bert, but not June. She looks at her father and sees his distress.

‘Whatever is it, Dad? What’s the matter?’

Bert leans forward, one hand on his stick, the other pushing down on the bed beside him.

‘Help me back to my chair.’

June gets up and takes her father’s arm and he rises shakily. He thrusts the stick in front of him and leans on it as he swings his leg forward from the hip. Back in the sunroom June helps
him into his chair.

The letter shakes violently in Bert’s hand as he holds it out towards June. It looks as though he is admonishing her with it.

‘What is the matter, Dad?’ June asks again and there is an edge to her voice, concern perhaps or irritation, it is not clear which. She waits, she has no choice, while Bert’s
rasping breath slowly quietens. At last he says, ‘I’ve done a terrible thing, June.’

‘Oh now, I’m sure you haven’t, Dad.’ June sits beside him and reaches for the letter, but Bert pulls it to him.

‘I have, June, I’ve done a terrible thing. You have to help me.’ He shakes his head then looks down at the letter. ‘It was for Kitty, you see – he asked me to give
it to her. He loved her, June, he loved her. And she loved him, I know that now. She loved him – I saw it, saw it in her face just now. It broke her heart.’

‘What, Dad? What is it that you’re saying? Who are you talking about?’

‘It was a mistake – I see that now. I’ve done a terrible thing.’

Aunt Vi held the
Picture Post
towards the lamplight and peered through her spectacles.

‘They wrote all about it last month – course I didn’t pay too much attention to it then. But, now that our boys are back in France, it helps to know what they’re going
through. Like moving the city of Birmingham, that’s what it says, imagine that.’

‘Read it out, Auntie,’ Kitty asked, not because she wanted to hear it, but because she would be able to daydream and watch the clock uninterrupted while her aunt was occupied. Aunt
Vi shook the magazine free of its crease and settled back in her chair.

‘Let me see . . . oh yes, listen to this. “
Something comparable to the City of Birmingham hasn’t merely got to be shifted: it’s got to be kept moving when it’s
on the other side . . . there will be no food to eat, no water to drink, no roads or railways to travel on . . .
” Good heavens, Kitty, imagine – all that going on in that awful
weather? Those poor men. There weren’t even any harbours – they took them over with them. Can you believe it, Kitty?’

Aunt Vi sighed and fell quiet. It was a few minutes before ten o’clock and twilight was falling. Kitty stood up and went to the window. The sky was dark blue and the wind threw a fine
spray of rain against the glass.

‘I’m going to put my coat on and go out for a little while.’

‘At this time of night? And it’s raining Kitty!’

‘I’ll not be long and it’s hardly rain, more like drops of moisture in the air.’

Aunt Vi smiled and shook her head, shooing her away with a flap of the
Picture Post
. She guessed where Kitty was going and who she was going to meet.

Kitty put a scarf over her hair and tied it beneath her chin. She put her gabardine over her shoulders and stepped out into the garden and ran the few yards to the gate. As she stepped out on to
the road, Sammy turned the corner and she ran to meet him. Sammy placed his hands on either side of her face and grinned at her before pulling her towards him and kissing her.

‘Every time I leave you I think that you can’t really be so wonderful, and here you are, just look at you.’ Sammy kissed her again. Then, placing his arm across her shoulders,
they walked together up the lane away from the village.

‘Dora came round today. She was fed up because her sister Gwendolyn sent word to say that she couldn’t get home and didn’t know when she next would. It’s Dora’s
birthday at the weekend and she was hoping Gwen would be here for it.’ Kitty talked on about Charlie and Aunt Vi and the letter that she had had from her mother, until she sensed something
was not right and stopped mid-flow.

‘You’re quiet,’ she said, finally slowing her pace. Sammy lifted a curled hand and gently brushed his knuckles against Kitty’s cheek. Kitty walked on slowly, suddenly
finding it difficult to lift her feet.

‘Are you going away?’ Her voice came in a small, frightened whisper.

‘I’m not going to be able to see you for a while, kitten. I have a couple of days’ leave and then I’ll be gone.’

Kitty felt her stomach turn. A few minutes ago, waiting to meet him, she had felt giddy with happiness. Now, she felt sick with fear that she might never see him again. She didn’t trust
herself to speak. She began to shake her head and covered her face with her hands.

‘Kitty? Kitty, please, listen to me . . .’ His voice was gentle, apologetic. ‘I don’t want to leave you. It’s hard enough saying goodnight to you.’ He tried
to pull her hands from her face, but she dipped her head and wouldn’t look at him. He wrapped his arms around her and bent his head over hers. When he spoke his mouth was close to her
ear.

‘I don’t have any right to ask you this. We only just met and, if the world wasn’t so crazy and mixed up, then we’d be going for walks and picnics. I want to take you
dancing – just a normal couple having fun. But everything is mixed up and crazy, Kit – and jeez, if it wasn’t I would never have met you. The thing is Kitty, what I’m trying
to say is, I’m so glad that I’ve met you. I’d like you to be my girl – if you want to? If you can wait for me?’

Kitty lifted her face to his and though she was smiling, she began to cry uncontrollably. Sammy threw his head back and laughed.

‘Oh-oh, now we’re done for – Kitty Danby crying in the rain – quick, someone build an ark!’

He pulled her to him and held her tight.

‘I love you, Kitty, and when this war is over I want to be with you all the time, I want to marry you – if you’ll have me?’

By the time she reaches home, Bert’s words have stirred memories that Kitty has not allowed herself to have before.

He fell for you Kitty . . . he was over the moon about you.

The neighbour calls across the fence as Kitty locks her car.

‘How are you, Mrs Poll? Hot again – we could do with some rain.’

Kitty raises a hand and smiles and is thankful that her glasses have darkened in the sun and her tears are not visible.
What a silly old fool I am,
she thinks as she lets herself in at
the front door.
After all these years.
Kitty drops her keys on the hall stand and goes upstairs to the glass-fronted bookcase on the landing. She slides back the glass and takes out the
anthology of Robert Graves. She carries it into her bedroom and sits on her bed. She lets the book fall open in her hands and it still finds that page. It is all she has of Sammy’s now. She
destroyed his letters the night she had agreed to marry Roy but she had not felt the need to be secretive about the book.

The photograph is still inside, tucked between the pages. She lifts it out and stares at it.
And this is the girl who became Sammy’s wife,
she thinks.
This is the girl he went
home and married
. Kitty reads the poem on the page where Sammy left the photograph all those years ago. It is a poem about hopeless love. About their hopeless love, so she had always thought.
There was a war, there was tragedy and death and sadness, and they were young. All her adult life, Kitty has reasoned that their youth and the extreme circumstances of war threw her and Sammy
together and that it had been infatuation, not love. She had convinced herself that it would not have lasted the cold light of peacetime and was best forgotten. She believed that he had made a
promise to a girl back home and that, with the war over, he had come to his senses and kept his promise. Kitty had, she thought, come to terms with these things many years ago. But now, sixty-two
years later, she sits on her bed and is in tune once more with her sixteen-year-old self.

Suddenly, it is not Roy Poll, her husband of forty years, whom she thinks about, despite their happy marriage. Something long lost to her has been reawakened and it is Sammy Ray Bailey that she
misses. She reads the poem and the last line blurs as the tears come again. She closes the book and holds it against her. She rocks gently and allows herself to imagine how her life might have
been.

The bus was already crowded when Kitty and Sammy squeezed past the conductor. Packed against the other passengers in the aisle, Sammy held on to an overhead strap with one hand
and Kitty with the other, resting his chin on the top of her head. A man Kitty couldn’t see was telling a joke and began laughing loudly as soon as he finished it. A few nearby passengers
joined in good-naturedly. A woman beside Kitty was recounting the latest invasion news to the elderly man beside her who nodded as he listened.

They got off the bus close to Ashford’s market and walked arm in arm towards the town centre. There was a short queue outside the photographic studio, four soldiers in uniform and two
women dressed for the occasion, one in a dress coat, the other in a two-piece suit, both with hat and gloves.

‘Hey, now here’s an idea,’ Sammy said, stopping behind the women and gently pulling Kitty into line beside him. ‘Let’s get our picture taken.’