Chrissie's Children (35 page)

Helen struggled into the coat that was damp and stiff with mud. She hissed, ‘You shouldn’t have come! How will we get out? They won’t do anything to me!’

Matt was not so sure, because he had heard stories of the executions carried out by both sides. He was afraid for himself and for her. ‘Just do as I say.’ He led the way, pausing to
stoop and yank the wedge from under the door of the room, then picked up his crate again and headed for the stairs. Behind him the door swung, creaking, on a draught of air and then slammed shut.
The two sentries at the front door looked up.

Matt started his descent, crate held two-handed before him and slightly to one side so he could see the stairs, but so that it half-hid his face. He muttered to Helen, ‘Through the
courtyard to the gate on the left. The van is in the square.’ He realised he should have moved it to the side gate and left it with its engine running, but that might have aroused suspicion.
He thrust the argument from his mind as useless now and concentrated on the present.

The light was not good in the hall, with just the one bulb hanging from its flex. Helen was covered by the over-large coat from neck to ankles and the cap shadowed her face, but Matt wondered if
the disguise would pass a close inspection. The guards were watching them descend, and had to be distracted. Matt seemed to slip on the last treads and the crate clattered and skidded across the
floor of the hall with Matt shambling in pursuit, bent double as if trying to catch it, but in fact still hiding his eyes.

The guards were guffawing, one of them pointing a finger at Matt, both watching him. He seized the crate and hoisted it again, pushing his tunic under his chin, still holding the wedge in one
hand. Now was the time . . . He turned away from the guards and strode towards the rear door. Helen was ahead of him, had got off the stairs unnoticed by the guards and now she brushed the
black-out curtain aside and pushed the door open. One of the guards shouted behind Matt on a rising note of enquiry. He did not understand a word and bawled back,
‘Buenas
noches!’
Then he went through the door. As he turned he saw the guards starting towards him and lifting their rifles. He threw the crate into the passage and slammed the door, jamming the
wedge under it with a kick of his boot, and ran.

Helen was a shadow flitting across the courtyard, the skirts of the greatcoat flapping like wings. Matt galloped after her, through the gate and up the street to the square.

As she climbed in one side of the ambulance, he leaned in the other and switched on the ignition. Then he ran round to the front, seized the starting handle and whirled it furiously, his eyes on
the front door of the house. The engine fired and ran. He swung up into his seat, shoving his tunic on to the floor out of the way, and reversed the ambulance in a tight half-circle, skidding on
the mud.

That was when he saw the guards again, not at the front door but in the street by the side door. They had somehow smashed open the door to the courtyard against the restraining wedge and now ran
towards the sound of the gunned engine.

‘Get down!’ he shouted at Helen.

She slid down in her seat and shouted back, ‘You get down!’

The ambulance snaked and slid across the square, mud squirting up from under its wheels, then turned out on to the road. The rifles
crack-crack!
ed behind them and something struck the
ambulance with a
clang!
like a blacksmith’s hammer. Matt winced and shrank down in his seat still further so his knees were against the dash. Then he told himself that the back of the
seat would not stop a bullet anyway.

At last they were on the road, the village left behind them, and there was no more shooting. Slowly they eased themselves up until they were sitting upright again. After some minutes during
which their breathing returned to normal and their nerves quietened, Matt asked, ‘What happened? When I left this morning we were nearly two miles behind the line!’

Helen took off the cap and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Some guns went through the village, teams of horses pulling them, all galloping and sweating . . .’ She told how she and
the other staff were captured and rounded up. ‘Then their officer talked to Dr Zamora and he said they were going to let us carry on looking after the wounded because none of their own
medical staff had come up yet. That’s where you found us.’ Helen paused, then said, ‘Their forward troops must be ahead of us now.’

Matt nodded agreement, peering through the rain. He had slowed from the wild pace he had set escaping from the village. Speed was impossible on that road and in those conditions of darkness and
muddy, pot-holed surface. ‘We might have to leave the ambulance and try to sneak past them on foot, because they’ll be on the road.’ He remembered the group he had passed who had
appeared to be digging a trench.

They had no chance to abandon the ambulance. The group of soldiers showed suddenly as one man standing in the middle of the road, hand raised, with others at the side. Matt pressed his foot to
the floor and held on. The old ambulance responded, though sluggishly, and the man on the road jumped aside. Then he and the others were no more than thin yells fading in the night. Matt and Helen
slumped with relief. They covered another half-mile and then the engine hammered madly and died. Matt threw out the clutch and the ambulance coasted to a halt.

Helen asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

Matt said wearily, ‘Old age at bottom, but it’s just seized up, I think. Anyhow, we can’t stop here. God knows who might come along. We’d better walk on.’

He shrugged into his tunic. Helen stood small in the flapping greatcoat under the rain, her wet face turned up to him. He said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry? Oh, Matt!’ She reached up to pull his head down and kissed him. After a while they set off, walking hand in hand. They walked all through the night. Sometimes they talked but
mostly they just trudged along happily. After two hours they caught up with the last and slowest of the stragglers on the retreat. An hour after that they passed the point where the Republicans
were trying to establish another defensive line. They went through among the stragglers in the night and no one took any notice. Matt said reluctantly, ‘We’ll have to find another
medical unit and report to them.’

Helen answered without enthusiasm, ‘There must be one somewhere.’ They did not find it but did not care greatly.

As the sun rose they came to a small town. They had been walking for eight hours, and that after a long day, but they were laughing as they entered the town. They found a pension down a narrow
side street and Helen bargained with the old woman, pausing to say, ‘I haven’t any money, Matt. How much have you got?’ When he had counted his pesetas Helen went back to her
haggling. The bargain was struck and the old woman fed them bread and sausage and thin, black coffee. Then she showed them to a small room with a double bed that almost filled the floor, and closed
the door behind them.

Matt asked, ‘Whose is this?’

Helen avoided his eyes. ‘Ours. Look, Matt, the money you have will just pay for one room and our board for a couple of days. If we had a room each we’d be out of here tomorrow. I
told her we were married.’ She held up her hand to show the ring. It had been her mother’s, worn on the index finger of her left hand. It was now on the third. ‘I changed it over
behind my back.’

Matt took her in his arms.

It was morning of the next day when the soldiers came for them.

November 1938

‘Tell him they weren’t
hiding
!’ Chrissie Ballantyne ran long fingers through her dark hair and pleaded with Jefferies, the young man who had come with
her from the British Consulate in Barcelona, but her eyes were on the Spanish officer behind the desk. ‘They’d got away when their unit was overrun and just found a place to
rest!’ She waited while Jefferies rattled away in his fluent Catalan.

It was two weeks since she had left home, two weeks of travelling and waiting for permits. She had lived out of her small suitcase and slept where she happened to be, in a wooden seated railway
carriage or on a station bench, in a pension or a hut abandoned by some peasant. Chrissie had taken it all with a shrug because she had lived in spartan conditions in her youth, but she was weary
now.

She had spent the whole of one long day trudging the narrow streets of this little town, seeking out one officer after another. One after the other they all told her that Matt and Helen had been
reported missing and then found hiding in a backstreet pension. They had with them the cap and greatcoat of an enemy soldier, which could mean that they were spies. The punishment for either spying
or desertion was execution by firing squad. Jefferies had told her unhappily, ‘I’m afraid there have been a lot of executions.’

Chrissie shivered. Matt was her baby, her firstborn, and Helen was a girl she had taken to her heart. The town was in chaos, close to the front line now, the streets full of weary men coming
back from the line or going up to it, guns pulled by skinny horses, small tanks clanking and grinding over the cobbles. This office was in some sort of headquarters, with officers, clerks and
signallers crammed into every room, messengers continually entering and leaving. Night had fallen and the windows were shuttered and blacked out. The rooms were hot and smelt of sweat and leather,
cigarette smoke and cordite. Even in the bustle of this place she could hear the rumble of the guns.

Now this last officer was shaking his head. Chrissie felt the tears coming, but then . . . He was nodding, slowly.

Chrissie did not take her eyes from him, but asked Jefferies, ‘What did he say?’

He wiped his sweating face with his handkerchief. ‘I’ve threatened him with all the power of the British Empire and he says that he will release your son as he is a British subject,
but he is to leave the country at once. The woman he says is Spanish and so must face the consequences of her actions. He cannot do more.’

‘He must! Helen Diaz is the daughter of a Spaniard but of an English mother and she was born in England!’ Chrissie’s weariness and fear conspired together and now the tears
came. ‘I have known her since she was a child!’ She held out her hand at thigh level. ‘She is a schoolfriend of my daughter, she lives in my house, she and my son are
lovers!’ She broke off there, surprised at those last words but accepting that they were probably true. Why else was Matt there?

Jefferies had translated the outburst as she spoke and finished with her now. The officer behind the desk – it was no more than a trestle table covered with a blanket – stared as the
tears ran down her face then looked down at the file in front of him. Then he said something in a low voice and Jefferies matched his quiet tone so Chrissie barely heard the words. ‘He says
there has been enough killing. Take your children and go.’

The officer was scribbling on a sheet of paper. He signed it with a flourish, banged a rubber stamp on its foot and stood to hand it to Jefferies. He passed it to Chrissie. ‘An order for
their release.’ As she took it the officer bellowed and a soldier entered, listened to the orders barked at him by the officer and saluted, then held the door open.

Chrissie said, ‘Thank you.’ The officer gave a stiff little bow and she walked out followed by Jefferies. Fifteen minutes later she held Matt and Helen in her arms.

It was on a Wednesday that Sophie, now in Brighton, received a telegram from her father saying:
MOTHER MATT AND HELEN DUE HOME FRIDAY
. She travelled
north that night by sleeper, arriving on Thursday morning. She decided to visit her father in the yard before going home, but as she walked down Church Street, blonde hair blowing in the wind, she
turned aside to look in on Margaret Hackett, Peter’s mother. The house was quiet as she walked along the passage and she concluded the upstairs neighbours were at work. She tapped at the
kitchen door, then called, ‘Mrs Hackett?’ She received no reply. Suddenly uneasy, she turned the handle, pushed the door open and paused again to call, ‘Mrs Hackett?’ Then
she was still, hardly breathing.

A small fire, burned down to ash and embers, glowed in the black- leaded grate and reflected from the brass fender and the fire irons on the hearth. Peter’s mother sat near it in her
armchair. Her hands, holding her knitting, lay in her lap and her head bent forward as if she dozed. She was very small, seemed to have shrunk in on herself, and she was very still. Sophie held
tight to the door for a full minute in the silence of the empty house. She could hear, distantly, the hammer and clangour from Ballantyne’s yard where the men were at work again.

Finally she moved slowly to kneel by the old woman and touch her hand, feeling for a pulse and looking up into her face. The hand was cold and the eyes stared at her unseeing. When the doctor
came he said she had been dead for several hours.

Chrissie and Helen whiled away the journey home with plans for a wedding. When they stepped down from the train they were met by Jack – and Sophie, in black. By her side
was a short and sturdy boy of nine or ten in a new suit of navy blue jacket and shorts. There was a joyful reunion and later, in the house, Sophie took her mother aside and explained, ‘The
little lad is Billy Hackett, Peter’s half-brother. I found his mother dead.’

Chrissie said softly, ‘Oh, Sophie!’ She knew this was her daughter’s first experience of death. She listened to Sophie’s account of her doings, how she had contacted some
distant relatives in Yorkshire by telegram. ‘They replied saying they left it to me. “We parted for good when she married again!” I suppose that was when she married Billy’s
father. Well, I’ve organised the funeral, but then there’s Billy. Peter will look after him when he gets home but that won’t be for a week or more.’

Chrissie said, ‘Peter can’t care for him while he is at sea. That won’t do . . .’

After the funeral Sophie paid the rent on Peter’s home for two weeks ahead. Billy went to live with Chrissie and the pair of them saw Sophie off at the station, on her way back to Brighton
on a day of storm. Chrissie asked Sophie as the guard’s whistle shrilled, ‘Where is Peter now?’