Before the Poison (40 page)
Authors: Peter Robinson
‘Which paper?’
‘Can’t say for certain, but it would have been the
Northern Despatch
or the
Northern Echo
, most likely. Those were the papers we took back then.’
‘What was the date?’
‘I don’t know, do I? It was seventy years ago, for Christ’s sake. It was early September, though, I remember that, not long after war was declared. That doesn’t give you a lot of ground to cover.’
I heard a grunt of pain and a glass break over by the bar.
‘I told you there’d be trouble,’ Wilf said.
I turned in time to see Melissa twisting Frankie Marshall’s tattooed arm up his back, his face pressed down on the wet bar towel. A glass had tipped over and rolled to the floor. The young barman was torn between doing something and fear of getting involved. Melissa leaned forward and whispered something in Frankie’s ear. He nodded as best he could for a man in his position, and she let him go. He shook himself off, scowled, picked up his jacket and stormed out of the pub. One or two of his mates laughed when the door closed behind him. Before anything else was said, Dave hauled himself over to the bar and bought a round of drinks for the house. That brought cheers, and the incident was quickly forgotten, the glass was swept up and everyone returned to their evening of fun. Nobody bothered Melissa or Heather again, and some of the lads even started to regard her with a certain expression of awe. She broke a few hearts that night, and Dave was probably the envy of the town. I remember him once asking me, not so long ago, ‘What on earth does she see in a short, fat, balding Jewish guy like me?’ I couldn’t answer him then, and I can’t now. Put it down to the mysteries of love.
We didn’t stay much longer. The incident took some of the wind out of our sails, and we’d all had more than enough to drink. The pub-crawl idea quickly lost much of its appeal, as I had suspected it would. I thanked Wilf for our little chat, wished him a happy new year, and set off with Dave, Heather and Melissa to get a taxi outside the Green Howards Museum.
‘What was all that about?’ I asked Melissa as we walked carefully up the cobbled square, keeping an eye out, just in case Frankie Marshall had gone to seek reinforcements.
‘He grabbed my tit,’ she said. ‘Wanted to know if it was real.’
‘He wouldn’t be the first,’ said Dave.
Melissa shoved him playfully. ‘Yeah, but he didn’t do it in a
nice
way.’ She linked arms with Heather and they started singing ‘Love Is Teasin” as we got into the waiting taxi. Dave and I quietened them down, though the taxi driver was one of those types who has seen it all. As long as we didn’t vomit all over his upholstery, which the sign said would cost us a £50 soiling fee, he didn’t much care what we did or said. ‘Most of your friends were real gentlemen,’ Melissa said to Heather. ‘I had a really good time.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Heather, clearly thrilled at Melissa’s approval. But she didn’t want to come back to Kilnsgate, not with Jane and Mohammed staying there. I could understand that. We made arrangements to meet in a couple of days and dropped her off at the Convent. As the taxi headed for Kilnsgate, Melissa dozed on Dave’s shoulder, and I thought about what Wilf Pelham had just told me. I should have a chat with my neighbour, for one thing. Then there was the evacuee. Billy. I couldn’t see how yet, but maybe he was the missing piece in all this. I prayed he was still alive and able to tell me why he had met Grace shortly before her husband’s death.
21
Extract from the journal of Grace Elizabeth Fox (ed. Louise King), February–March, 1942. Sinkep Island, Sumatra
Saturday, 28th February, 1942
They told me later that a fishing boat found us, the three of us who were left. They thought we were dead, but they took us on board anyway. I have only very hazy memories of what followed, but I now know we are in a Dutch hospital in the town of Daboh on Sinkep Island, just off the east coast of Sumatra.
The doctor visited me yesterday morning, as usual, and he said the Japanese would be here very soon, and if I wanted to have any hope of escaping, I must make the journey to Padang, on the west coast of Sumatra, where I might possibly find a British ship. He told me that he thought I was well enough to travel, as my heat stroke was not too severe, though my friends from the raft, two civilian women whose husbands had remained behind in Singapore, were not well enough to accompany me. I must keep out of the sun, he told me, and keep myself covered at all times, as I had suffered terrible sunburn, and even now my skin is peeling.
Though I was loath to leave my fellow survivors, the doctor insisted that it would be foolish to wait any longer, and so, feeling as guilty as a deserter, I slunk off, travelling with some Dutch and Australian nurses who were also anxious to escape the Japanese atrocities we had been hearing so much about back in Singapore.
It was a long journey, over three hundred miles, and we travelled mostly by road and riverboat. Some members of the Dutch Home Guard, who were bravely on their way to face the invading Japanese forces, gave us a lift over the final range of mountains.
When we finally got to Padang, the harbour was crowded with troops and civilians, the whole scene so chaotic that my heart sank. There was not a ship in sight. We slept on the docks that night, and I had terrible nightmares of rolling into the water.
Sunday 1st March, 1942
Amidst rumours of Japanese landings in Java, and even as close as the east coast of Sumatra, this morning I saw three ships come sailing in, and of course, I could not keep the song out of my head, though it was not Christmas, and I am no longer a Christian. Some may have taken the arrival of the three ships as a miracle, but for me it was pure luck, or good timing. At any rate, they were able to take the entire harbourful of refugees. I was fortunate enough to be one of the small company of women on one of the Royal Navy vessels, here to refuel and replenish its stocks of food and water after a big battle in the Java Sea. We sailed as soon as darkness fell. She is heading for Bombay, where I can report to a hospital unit and arrange to be shipped home.
Tuesday 3rd March, 1942
Though water is still rationed, at least we have some, and we eat very well. When I told the captain I was a QA, he put me to work immediately in the sick bay. There are many wounded soldiers from the recent sea battle, with dressings to be changed and drips to be attended to, and one or two with severe infections. We also have on board a number of civilians suffering from dehydration, heat stroke or exhaustion. I am happy to be working again, even though I tire easily and often feel far from well, myself.
The Australian nurses I work with are wonderful girls. They have all suffered so much, like me, shipwreck and near-capture, but they manage to maintain a devil-may-care spirit and hold their heads high in the face of tragedy. I wish I could be more like them. Some were in Hong Kong just before it fell, and they have terrible stories to tell of Japanese atrocities. I fear even more for Kathleen and Doris, and worry that the Japanese probably slaughtered Stephen along with the other men.
I am also happy to be reunited with several acquaintances from the ill-fated
Kuala
, and in the long evenings we sit out on deck and tell each other our stories. The best moments, though, are the ones I spend alone leaning over the railings staring at the moon reflected in the water. I can lose myself in that beauty, and for a few moments at least, let go of my thoughts of poor Brenda, Kathleen, Doris and Stephen, and whatever may have become of them, and let my mind simply float there, like a lily on the moonlit water.
January 2011
The bad weather returned in January, after a brief thaw, and when it snows in Kilnsgarthdale, as I had learned in December, nothing much has changed since Grace Fox’s day. Again, schools closed, vehicles were abandoned, and the local authorities ran out of grit after the first day. Train and bus services came to a halt. My lane was blocked for a second time, and I couldn’t leave the house for three days. I couldn’t even get in touch with my friendly farmer, who had gone to the Maldives for a holiday, or so the person who answered the phone told me. Luckily, I had plenty of supplies left over from the holidays, so I wasn’t likely to starve or go thirsty, and there was nowhere I had to be. My guests had all left before the new year, which I had celebrated by a quiet evening at home with Heather. Melissa had told me she liked her, I was pleased to hear, and Jane had said she was glad to see me looking much happier and more relaxed than I had been in a long time.
It had been wonderful having Dave and Melissa and Jane and Mohammed to stay, but I enjoyed having the house to myself again after they had gone – the silence, the late-night movie marathons, not shaving every morning, wandering around in my dressing gown and slippers, Heather stopping over for the night. I didn’t think Jane would have disapproved of our sleeping together, though these things can be hard to predict, but Heather had said she would have felt uncomfortable, and I didn’t blame her. It meant we had a lot of making up to do on New Year’s Eve.
On the second day of my incarceration, I stood by the French windows at the back of the house and looked out. The branches of the trees were heavy with snow, bent under its weight, the woods a bare tangled black and white world. As darkness fell and the shadows deepened, I thought of that night fifty-eight years earlier, when Grace, Ernest, Alice and Jeremy had sat down to dinner and noticed that it would be impossible for anyone to go home. I also thought of the days following the dreadful event, the four of them stuck in the house,
this
house, with a corpse upstairs.
As the days drifted into one another and the snow drifted against the French windows, I lost track of the time, sleeping when I felt tired, eating when I was hungry. I kept the log fire burning most of the time, and my supplies of wood grew dangerously low. Mostly I worked on my sonata. ‘Grace’s Theme’, as I suspected, became its emotional and melodic heart, its motif and the basis of variations in all four movements. It still needed a lot more work, especially the final movement, the ‘allegro’, where I was having a lot of trouble with the tempo. But on the whole, I was very happy with what I had done so far.
The rest of the time, I watched old movies in my den:
Sunset Boulevard, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Peeping Tom, The Fallen Idol
. The telephone and Internet connection still worked, as they had last time, so I wasn’t completely cut off from the outside world the way Grace and the others had been. I talked to Heather, to Louise, and to Jane in Baltimore and to Dave, back safely in LA. Louise said she would help me track down Billy when I came up with a bit more information. I tried the Internet and, while I found out a great deal about evacuees in general, including one or two interesting personal stories that backed up some of the vague ideas I had been entertaining, I could find nothing about Billy. I did, however, discover that Darlington Library had a large collection of newspaper holdings, including the
Northern Despatch
, the
Northern Echo
and the
Darlington and Stockton Times
. I would have to wait until the weather improved, of course, but I would get to Darlington as soon as I could.
Try as I might, I could find out nothing else about Kilnsgate House during the war, the Special Operations Executive, or any other group that might have commandeered the place. Neither Nat Bunting nor the foot-and-mouth outbreak were mentioned anywhere. I did find a book about the SOE called
Forgotten Voices of the Secret War
, though, which I ordered from the Castle Hill Bookshop. I doubted that it would contain any revelations. Wartime was the perfect cover for any number of shabby, secret operations, and the worst of them left no traces in any of the record books. The best you could hope for was an eyewitness with a believable story. I reminded myself that this was a distraction from the main theory I had been forming about Grace and Billy’s meeting, a side street off the main route, however interesting it was.
Eventually, the snow stopped and the sun came out. The view from my bedroom window over the dale was almost too bright to bear. The little stone bridge and the lime kiln were completely buried, mere bumps in the undulating stretches of snow. As far as I could see, in both directions, the landscape was blindingly white.
Even then, it was another day before I heard the sound of the snowplough making its way down Kilnsgarthdale Lane. Of course, that was only the beginning, I still had to dig out my front path and my car, and that took me the best part of an afternoon, after which I was too exhausted to go anywhere. I phoned Heather, and she came by for dinner with the Indian takeaway I had been craving, and the previous weekend’s papers. She told me that the roads in and around town were still awful, and cars were slipping and sliding all over the place. The police were inundated with accidents, including a huge pile-up on the A1 near Scotch Corner. The A66, the main east–west artery in this part of the world, was, of course, closed.
For the next few days, the temperature fluctuated around freezing point, which made things even worse, as it had around Christmas. The snow would melt to slush during the day, and then freeze at night into miniature mountain ranges of ice. People slipped on the unshovelled pavements and broke arms and legs. Most stayed at home if they possibly could. Many of the services remained closed, including the libraries.
I made my way carefully into Richmond for the first time two days after Heather’s visit. I was stir crazy by then, and willing to risk even the roads for the cheer of a pint and a noisy pub. Not to mention Heather’s company for lunch.
I bought a newspaper and settled down to wait for Heather with my pint of Black Sheep at a table in the dining area of the Black Lion, where a fire crackled in the hearth. It was quieter than I had expected. No tourists, no walkers. Most of the news was still taken up by stories of the weather, an English obsession, I had come to realise, and the rest with the economy – poor pre-Christmas sales, because of the weather, of course – as well as the occasional skirmish or massacre on a distant continent. Nothing newsworthy had happened in the USA, it seemed, except for a major snowstorm on the eastern seaboard, nothing new to Bostonians or New Yorkers.