Someone Special (44 page)

‘Rita Brownlow. I was a shorthand-typist in civvy street six weeks ago, so I expected to be turned into a cook or a pilot, but they tell me I’ll be a shorthand-typist in the WAAF, too. So much for square pegs in round holes. What did you do?’

‘In civvy street?’ Anna smiled to herself at how readily the expression came to their tongues – you could scarcely call them old hands at service life, not after six weeks. ‘I was secretary to a bank manager, so I was a shorthand-typist as well. But I got sick of it and applied for the WAAF. I’m going to be a driver so they’ve been teaching me engine maintenance, which is quite interesting. Now I’m having on-the-job training, which should be even more interesting since Colport’s an operational station. And of course it means I’ve left home at last.’

‘Me too. Mother’s apron-strings were getting a stranglehold, I couldn’t have stuck it much longer. How old are you, then? You don’t look terribly ancient from where I’m sitting … standing, rather.’

‘I was eighteen three weeks ago. You?’

‘I’ll be nineteen in a couple of months. Well, Aircraft-woman Radwell – that sounds good, doesn’t it? – perhaps you’re right and we’d better head for the forecourt. It’s plain no one’s going to claim us here.’

Anna looked around her. Whilst they had been talking
the station had cleared completely and now there were just the two of them on the darkened platform, while the train chugged into the distance. There wasn’t another soul in sight. They couldn’t have been forgotten, could they?

‘I agree; someone’s bound to be waiting out there. Quick march then, Brownlow.’

The two of them, hefting their new white kitbags – What a target for the Luftwaffe, I wonder they don’t make us roll them in cocoa when we’re out at nights, Rita said – went out on to the forecourt. A few people were still there, queueing for a taxi, but there was no sign of an RAF vehicle. Anna plonked her kitbag on the ground – that would help to sully its whiteness – and sat on it.

‘Well, we’re obviously in for a wait,’ she said with as much cheerfulness as she could muster. It was a cold night and the sea breeze, although excitingly salty, was not going to help them keep warm. ‘What time is it? Was our train so late that they just haven’t waited?’ She peered at her wristwatch but could not make out anything but the round whiteness of its face in the dark.

‘It’s two a.m.,’ her new friend said gloomily. ‘It
is
May, isn’t it? We haven’t made some ghastly mistake and turned up in the wrong month? Because it feels more like December.’

Anna chuckled. ‘I think it’s just the time … always coldest before dawn. Look, you can read your watch, so let’s give them fifteen minutes and if they still haven’t arrived we’ll go and find a waiting room and wait there. Anyone searching for a couple of WAAFs is bound to look in the waiting room, aren’t they?’

‘The average AC Plonk probably doesn’t know what a waiting room is,’ Rita said. ‘Is it far to Colport, d’you know? Ought we to try to walk it? Was there a porter or someone we could have asked? Oh help, there’s a person still queueing for a taxi, we could ask him.’

Anna stood up. ‘That’s an Air Force uniform, I’m almost sure; if he’s going to Colport, he might let us share his taxi. I’ll have a word.’

‘Hang on, suppose he’s awfully important? Suppose he’s a wingco or even higher, whatever that may be? Do be careful, Anna. Oh, and don’t say where we’re going because of spies … how do you know he’s really an Air Force officer, it would be quite easy …’

Anna ignored her new friend’s panic-stricken hissing and walked across to where the officer stood. She saluted rather awkwardly, spoke to him for a few moments and then returned to Rita, now agitatedly gnawing her fingernails.

‘He’s coming home on leave so he can’t take us all the way to the station, but he says it’s only a short way outside the town so we can get in the taxi with him and he’ll put us on the right road. Shall we go?’

‘But suppose the transport turns up in five minutes and finds us gone? You said yourself we ought to give them a quarter of an hour,’ Rita objected. ‘We could be in awful trouble. Have you noticed how easy it is to get into trouble in the Air Force? There are so many rules and half of them you don’t know even exist until you’ve broken them.’

‘I know, but two young and beautiful girls like us oughtn’t to have to wait on a station platform all night. Come on, by the time his taxi arrives the fifteen minutes will probably be up. And he’s awfully nice, really, not a bit frightening. I think he’s a pilot officer, so salute. I did.’

The young officer bundled them first into his taxi when it came, reassuring them that the authorities at Colport would be glad the two girls had used their initiative to get back when the transport arrangements had let them down. The taxi-driver, however, was not so pleasant.

‘I’m not taking you on to RAF Colport when I’ve dropped this gentleman,’ he growled, turning round to give them a fulminating glance. ‘Bin on dooty since eight o’clock yesterday morning, I have, so I’m goin’ home to get some kip.’

‘Is it very far?’ Anna asked apprehensively. ‘We don’t want to arrive there dead on our feet.’

‘It’s probably three miles on foot, but it’s more like nine by road, because you can only cross the river by the roadbridge, whereas if you go the way I’ll send you, you can cross by the footbridge,’ the pilot officer explained. ‘Don’t worry, I wouldn’t put you in a bind on your first day.’

‘It’s their fault; they should have sent a transport,’ Anna said calmly. ‘If anyone says we’re in trouble I’ll tell them where they get off.’

‘That’s the spirit. And if I ever make an emergency landing at Colport I’ll be sure to ask for you both. Ah, here we are!’

‘I was almost asleep,’ Rita grumbled, getting out of the taxi. ‘Wasn’t the driver cross?’ she added as the cabby did a three-point turn and roared back the way they had come. ‘I don’t see why he wouldn’t take us out to Colport – we would have paid him, after all.’

‘What with?’ Anna asked tartly. She was tired.

‘Promises,’ Rita said equally tartly. ‘That’s all I’ve got – I’m totally skint. I bought a cup of tea and a wad on some tiny station and that was the last of my cash. I
say
, isn’t it dark?’

‘As pitch,’ the young officer agreed, making Anna jump. She had forgotten he was still there. ‘Now come with me down to that stile – can you see it?’

They could, just. They followed him down and saw, in the faint light, a thin but definite path wending its way across a field of corn.

‘See that little path? Follow it across three fields, it
goes pretty straight, and then over another stile and into a lane. Turn right along the lane …’

The instructions seemed to go on for a long time but they were plain enough and the officer made both girls repeat them until he was satisfied they knew when and where to change direction. Then he helped them over the stile and stood and waved them off.

‘He was nice; quite young to be an officer, wouldn’t you say?’ Rita remarked as they plodded across the field, carefully sticking to the narrow path. ‘I wonder what he does in the Air Force?’

‘Flies, or at least goes up in an aircraft; didn’t you notice the wings on his tunic?’ Anna said. ‘They all seem rather young, the aircrew I’ve met so far. I suppose it’s because they lost so many of the more experienced ones during the Battle of Britain.’

‘Probably. I say, are those cows? I don’t mind cows I don’t think, but I don’t fancy meeting a bull.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s a bull, not roaming across a public footpath,’ Anna said reassuringly. ‘If there is, he won’t mind us. Just keep walking.’ She had seen a bull, unmistakable even in the semi-dark, but thought it best not to mention the fact.

‘Oh. All right,’ Rita agreed. ‘Tell me, Anna, do you have brothers and sisters?’;

‘One brother, Jamie. He’s fourteen, or will be in August.’

‘And were you happy at home?’

‘Yes, happy enough,’ Anna said shortly. She remembered the day she had signed on for the WAAF, how Constance had shouted and she herself had wept.

‘You don’t understand!’ Constance had shrieked across the bedroom at her stunned, scarlet-faced daughter. ‘You’re only a child. For nineteen years I’ve known that JJ was unfaithful to me and I’ve put up with it and told myself it was just his way and gone on loving
him and being faithful. But to start on Cressie, when his leave only lasted a week, and she was no more than a child herself …’

‘I really don’t understand,’ Anna had said coldly. ‘What on earth are you talking about, Mummy? I come in and find you … the way I found you, with an American soldier, and all you can do is try to blame Daddy!’

‘Because he’s been making love to
Cressie
,’ Constance had shouted, indifferent who heard her. ‘Your father, the man you think is so wonderful, your dearest Daddy, was found by me,
fornicating
in the back bedroom with a fifteen-year-old evacuee who is in my care. Do you get it, Anna? Do you understand now?’

‘And you took Chaz Palmer into your bedroom and let him make love to you because Daddy did it with Cressie? And you think that I shouldn’t mind? Mummy, really!’

Anna tried to sound sophisticated, unshockable, but her voice trembled and her hands kept clasping and unclasping.

Constance shook her silky, white-blonde hair off her face and sat down on the bed. She rummaged in the bedside locker for a packet of cigarettes, got one out, lit it and took a quick, nervous puff, then blew smoke at the ceiling. She was wearing an apricot silk dressing gown and she was naked underneath it, as Anna knew only too well. Colour Sergeant Chaz Palmer was in the bathroom next door, no doubt getting dressed very hastily and feeling more of a fool than even Anna felt.

‘Anna, darling,’ Constance said gently. ‘I’m not a wicked woman, but I am human. Daddy isn’t cruel to me, but in a way indifference is cruelty, if not the worst kind. When a man gets a week’s leave and comes home and … and spends it carrying on with a fifteen-year-old child and ignoring his wife, that comes as near cruelty as dammit. And I can’t stand it because I need love and attention. People do. I realise I can’t
justify what you saw, but it was so good, you see, to be the centre of attraction for one man, even if JJ couldn’t care less about me. I’ve tried so hard, but I’ll never make you understand, will I? Just don’t say anything to anyone, please. I’m not proud of what I’ve done, and I’d hate anyone to be hurt by it, particularly Jamie.’

She sounded beaten, almost pathetic. Anna’s initial disgust and horror at finding her mother heaving and grunting beneath the large black American soldier had already begun to fade, and she felt a sudden surge of sympathy and even a degree of understanding. Her mother had been unfair to her often, sometimes even unkind, but she had never lied. Now she was saying that Daddy … JJ, her very own father, had been carrying on with that loose-mouthed, big-breasted Cressie Carruthers, who might be only fifteen years old, but who was a Methuselah in experience, or so the other evacuees said, and Anna knew that her mother was speaking no more than the truth.

Looking back at her father’s last leave, standing there in the bedroom as Constance blew smoke from her nostrils and stared at her neat, pink-enamelled toenails, Anna began to remember. She remembered how envious she had felt because he took so much notice of Cressie and had made it plain to his adoring daughter that he did not want her along on expeditions with the younger girl. She had not realised that there was an ulterior motive, had actually accepted that he needed time alone with someone not too demanding … what a fool she had been not to realise that JJ was up to something. Long ago there had been maids, a friend of her mother’s, a teacher at school … Oh Daddy, Daddy, Anna mourned, how could you do it to us, when we loved you so?

It was far worse for her mother, of course. To find the man she worshipped in such a degrading position,
humping and heaving over the eager body of an oversexed little girl who would tell everyone – everyone but Anna and Constance. No wonder Constance had done what she had done.

‘Mummy?’

Anna’s voice was tentative. She put a gentle hand on her mother’s silk-clad knee. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. But now you’ve said, I think perhaps I did have an inkling; Daddy didn’t take any notice of me either, and I was hurt by it. I would have loved being taken out in a boat on the river, or for long walks, but he took Cressie. I’m sorry I said what I did, and I’ll try to understand, only …’

‘Thank you, darling. Only what?’

‘Only you won’t do it again, will you? Jamie might have come in, and he’d be most awfully upset.’

‘I’ll be good as gold,’ her mother said, ‘I wouldn’t upset Jamie, you know that.’

But something in the way her eyes met her daughter’s and immediately slid away told Anna that Constance wasn’t speaking the truth. Her mother would like to be good, but looked as though she doubted her own ability now that she had experienced someone else’s lovemaking. Constance might be unable to deny herself such pleasure and reassurance if it was offered a second time. But Anna could scarcely say that, she must pretend to take her mother’s words at their face value.

‘I know you wouldn’t upset anyone if you could help it.’ Anna leaned over and kissed her mother on the forehead, thinking as she did so how smooth and white her mother’s skin had looked, against the richly shining blackness of the American’s brawny body. ‘I’m going into the city. I’ll tell you why when I get back.’

She had always intended to join the WRNS on her eighteenth birthday because JJ was in the Navy, but suddenly she found the thought of the Senior Service repelled her. How could he do it, deny his own wife and
ignore his own daughter, and start an affair with horrid Cressie, whose only claim to anything was her insatiable appetite for men. So she’d gone into the recruiting office and asked to join the WAAF, asked that she might go quickly, boasted about her abilities as a secretary, her ARP experience, her work with the Women’s Voluntary Service and that she could drive and had driven a good deal.

‘I can read maps and I hardly ever get lost,’ she said hopefully. ‘I drove an ambulance in Norwich for a bit, too.’