Rosie (5 page)

As Thomas walked on, he sensed that the woman was watching him speculatively. People always did.

Thomas Farley was only thirty, but three years in a Japanese POW camp had aged him prematurely, and he had shrunk a couple of inches from his original six foot. He’d put on some weight to his emaciated body since the end of the war, but his face remained haggard. When he looked in a mirror now, he could see no resemblance whatsoever to the burly eighteen-year-old who couldn’t wait for his basic training to be over so he could be sent out to fight. He’d become an entirely different man.

After the camp was liberated, more than one army nurse had remarked on his similarity in looks to the actor Leslie Howard. Sometimes he could even see it himself. His face had become long and thin, years in the hot sun had etched deep lines which tended to give him a doleful expression, and on rare occasions when his fair hair had grown out of its customary short back and sides, it had the same droopy quality as the actor’s.

But Thomas didn’t linger in front of mirrors. It was bad enough when he undressed to see the scars of beatings and tropical ulcers, to be forced to strap on his artificial leg and know he was unlikely to ever find a girl foolish enough to marry him – a cripple – even if women did keep telling him there was something mysteriously attractive about him. He struggled instead to keep in his mind the few advantages the war and imprisonment had given him: resourcefulness, patience, a deep understanding of other men, and the loss of his once strong cockney accent, He hadn’t actually noticed that his accent had gone until after he returned to England, and he put it down to a close relationship with an officer who had often teased him about his dropped ‘aitches, and had got him to read poetry and literature to him because his glasses were broken and he couldn’t see to read himself. Thomas told himself almost daily that losing his leg and youth for his country was nothing. He might have lost his life out there, like poor Sam and so many of his other friends. He told himself this so often that sometimes he almost believed it.

Thomas was not used to walking so far and he knew he had rubbed his stump raw even before he finally saw the piles of junk ahead.

If it hadn’t been for the woman’s description, he wouldn’t even be considering that this might be the place; when Mrs Lovell, an old friend of his mother’s back in London, had given him the address, he’d imagined a pretty thatched cottage with roses around the door.

There were no roses, not unless you counted a wild one scrambling up over a rusting tractor.

Pausing some ten yards from the house, he leaned heavily on his stick, hoping the woman had been mistaken. The plain red-brick building was almost hidden behind overgrown sprawling trees, but there on the broken gate was the sign, May Cottage, confirmation that he had indeed found the right place.

Mrs Lovell had told him Heather had left London to come here, soon after VE day in 1945. Thomas felt a prickling of unease as he gazed at the farm labourer’s cottage.

Pushing his way through the overgrown trees he knocked on the front door. There was no reply. He knocked again, and again, but he could hear no sound from within. Peering into the lone downstairs window he was somewhat taken aback to see incongruous grand furniture: large armchairs, a huge oil painting above the fireplace, and a highly polished oval dining table very similar to one he remembered seeing in an officer’s home in Singapore. Thomas took a step back and looked at the house reflectively. It was all very odd.

He was just about to make his way round the back of the cottage to see if there was anyone out there, when he heard a rustle. It came from a bush at the side of the house. He sensed that someone was behind it, watching him.

‘Hullo there,’ he called out. ‘I’m looking for Heather Farley. I believe she came to work here after the war.’

No reply. Bees buzzed amongst the weeds and wild flowers; there was a faraway bleat of a sheep and the plaintive cry of a bird.

He called again, louder this time. After all, it could be someone old and hard of hearing. But still there was no reply.

‘Just call out if you’re scared of me,’ he yelled again. ‘I can’t run after you, I’ve only got one leg.’ To prove this point he waggled his stick in the air.

‘Heather left, three years since.’

Thomas almost lost his balance with surprise. He stared at the bush from where the voice came. ‘Come out and talk to me,’ he called back.

‘No, I won’t. And go away now. Me dad don’t like strangers calling at the house.’

The girl’s voice was bold and Thomas had a feeling she was probably more afraid of her father than a stranger. He turned and limped exaggeratedly out of the gate.

‘I’m not calling at the house,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘All I want is to find out where Heather is. I’ve come all the way from London.’

The bush quivered, some tall weeds parted and out came a girl. She looked about thirteen or fourteen, small but robust, wearing a woman’s shabby faded cotton dress several sizes too large for her. She was barefoot with a mane of copper-coloured tangled curls and freckles across a small snub nose. Thomas smiled, she reminded him very much of the kind of children he’d grown up with in the East End of London – not just her shabby clothes and bare feet, but the sharply suspicious expression in her blue eyes.

‘That’s better,’ Thomas said, keeping his distance in case she ran away. ‘I never was much good at holding a conversation with a bush.’

The girl giggled. Thomas thought there was something rather enchanting about her, as he leaned back against an old oil drum.

Rosie had been watching this man’s approach for some time. She’d seen him coming up the lane while she was hanging out washing in the orchard and she was curious about him even before he knocked at the front door. Holidaymakers didn’t usually bother with this part of Somerset and men with bad limps and a stick didn’t go in for hiking. Besides, he had an intriguing face. Not exactly handsome, but interesting.

He looked too smart to be looking for work; his trousers were neatly pressed, the white open-necked shirt spotlessly clean and his boots were well polished too. Something about the tilted-back angle of his trilby, the nonchalant way he’d slung his jacket over his shoulder along with a canvas knapsack, suggested he was an exserviceman, a wounded one at that. She wondered how he knew Heather.

‘You’ve got two legs,’ she said reproachfully.

‘One and a bit to be precise,’ he said and bent down and pulled his trouser leg up a couple of inches to show her the dull beige artificial one. ‘I lost my real one when a wound became infected during the war.’

‘They chopped it off?’ she said in horror, but moved closer as if she wanted to inspect it.

‘Sawed it off.’ Thomas had been very lucky that the infection only got a grip on him after the camp had been liberated. He’d witnessed several amputations at the hands of the Japanese, and every one of the men concerned had died slowly and horribly, as the foul-smelling gangrene crept through their bodies. His own amputation had been without anaesthetic, but at least it had been carried out in reasonably sterile conditions in a field hospital, with proper dressings and clean water to wash the wound. ‘I was a prisoner of war in Burma, then in hospital for a long time afterwards. But never mind me, where did Heather go, and why?’

The girl put her hands on her hips. ‘What’s she to you?’

Thomas didn’t think she was afraid of much, even though she’d said that about her father.

‘I’m her brother, Thomas Farley.’

The insolent look vanished. She clamped one hand over her mouth.

‘You can’t be! She said you was dead, and anyway you don’t sound or look like her.’

‘I thought she was dead too, until a few weeks ago,’ Thomas shrugged. ‘I heard our old home was bombed and when I didn’t get any letters from her in the camp I thought she must have been killed there. The war certainly messed up a lot of people’s lives. As for us not looking and sounding the same, well, brothers and sisters aren’t always alike. Now where did she go? I must find her.’

‘She went back to London,’ the girl said. ‘Like I said, three years since.’

Thomas felt a dull thud of disappointment. He slumped back against the oil drum, wondering what he should do next.

He wished he’d thought of some contingency plan in case he lost touch with Heather. But then no one had expected there to be so much destruction in the East End, or that so many civilians would be killed, and he certainly hadn’t imagined he’d be captured by the Japs either. Of late the phrase ‘If only’ seemed to pepper his speech and thoughts. If only he’d been able to get compassionate leave when their mother was killed in the Blitz, if only he hadn’t been in Singapore when it fell. If only there’d been medicine at the camp he might not have lost his leg. If only he’d gone straight to London after the war.

He’d been shipped home to a hospital in Bournemouth in the spring of 1946 where he remained for almost a year. Believing there was nothing and no one left for him in London, he stayed on in the town after he was discharged from the hospital, living in a hostel for ex-servicemen, hobbling around on crutches, waiting for the time when he could have an artificial leg fitted. During that time he had heard the government were offering re-training courses for men like himself, and he managed to get on one to learn clock and watch mending. He might never have left Bournemouth but for hearing about a job in a clock and watch repairers in London’s Hampstead, with a small flat above the shop thrown in.

It had been in an attempt to rid himself of the memories that haunted him that he eventually went back to Poplar just a couple of months ago. Perhaps if he walked through the streets he grew up in, once more, he would come to terms not only with losing his mother and sister but also with his disability.

He hadn’t wanted to linger when he saw the devastation: whole rows of houses gone, weed-filled areas where tenement buildings, including the one he’d been born in, had once stood. He tried to tell himself that the wholesale destruction was a good thing, that at last slum dwellings and all the deprivation that went with them would be wiped out for ever. Yet as he looked at the pictures on hoardings of the blocks of flats the government was intending to replace them with, he felt even more saddened. They might have electricity and bathrooms, but old folk couldn’t sit on doorsteps eight or nine floors above the road, neighbours wouldn’t drop in as they used to. He looked sceptically at the pictures of children’s playgrounds and wondered how far away the parents would be. In the old East End children had been almost shared, watched over as they played by often exasperated but always caring neighbours. The new health service might wipe out diseases, and fear of the workhouse and the means test become a thing of the past, but would the welfare state support and nurture in quite the same way as the old community spirit had?

He heard from a man in a paper shop that most of his old neighbours had been rehoused out in Dagenham, and he might have just turned away and put aside his past for good, but for stopping for a pint in the Nag’s Head and bumping into old Jack Crowhurst.

Jack Crowhurst owned a fish and chip shop down by the West India docks, and Thomas used to peel potatoes for him after school. Jack had looked about seventy then, a small, stooped, bad-tempered man with a permanent frown. But he’d been kind to Thomas, often giving him parcels of fish and chips to take home to his mother and sister.

Jack hadn’t changed a bit. He still looked about seventy, even though twenty years had passed, and was just as grumpy. When Thomas told the old man who he was, Jack looked as if he was seeing a ghost.

‘We all thought you’d copped it out in the Far East,’ he said. They chatted for a while about how Jack had kept his fish and chip shop going right through the war, only to lose it to a fire in 1946. He said how sorry he was that Mrs Farley had been killed, and asked if Heather had got married.

When Thomas said he thought she was dead too, Jack shook his head. ‘Never! She came in for some fish and chips one night just before the end of the war,’ he said. ‘She was on her way round to see Ada Lovell. She told me she was working up West somewhere in a cafeteria.’

That news was more thrilling to Thomas than hearing he had won the Pools. Jack Crowhurst told him Ada Lovell was now living with her daughter in a prefab on the Isle of Dogs, and Thomas was off there immediately, knocking on doors until he eventually found her.

It was Mrs Lovell who filled him in about all that Heather had gone through back in the Blitz. Of his mother’s death and how Heather had taken on her jobs and kept the flat going. Of the day their tenement was bombed, and how his sister had found a room in Bethnal Green and work in a laundry. She spoke too of the agony Heather had been through when she heard nothing from Thomas, and finally her devastation when she heard he was ‘Missing, presumed dead’. It made Thomas very angry to think she’d suffered such unnecessary grief, just through some slip-up in administration.

But with these thoughts there was also terrible guilt for Thomas. He’d been back in England for six years. He could excuse himself for the first of those because he’d been too sick and weak to do anything but lie staring at the ceiling. But the truth was that he’d continued to wallow in self-pity and apathy instead of getting help and advice on how to find out what exactly had happened to Heather. He’d been afraid of finding confirmation that she was actually dead, so he’d chosen instead to slip into a deep depression of denial.

Thomas was suddenly aware of the young girl again; she was standing silently, watching him. ‘What made Heather decide to chuck it in here?’ he asked.

‘I dunno exactly,’ the girl said with a shrug. ‘Dad said she missed London.’

This seemed a fair enough explanation to Thomas. After the mayhem of London during the war it must have been bliss to come here and live in the peace and fresh air. But given time any young girl would begin to yearn for company of her own age, for dancing, freedom and fun.

‘I’d better come back when your dad’s here, then. To see if he’s got her new address in London.’