Our Yanks (32 page)

‘What about Jessie?'

‘One of the other guys'll look after her. There's nothing else I can do with her. Can't take her to New York.'

The Scottie was watching them from the jeep, wagging her tail. ‘We'll have her, if you want.'

‘I can't let you do that. She'd be another mouth to feed.'

‘We'll manage.'

‘You sure?'

‘Yes. Honestly. We had a Scottie once, years ago. They're lovely dogs. I know Father would like her.'

‘Well, I guess that's settled, then. Tell you what, I'll get one of the guys to bring down leftovers from the Mess hall for her – that way you won't have to worry too much about her food. And I'll come back and get her as soon as I can. Is that a deal?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘It's a deal.'

He whistled to the dog and she jumped down and trotted over on her short, stumpy legs. ‘You're in luck, Jessie. Miss here's going to take you in. You be a good girl.' Agnes bent to pat the Scottie. He watched them for a moment. ‘I can see you two are going to hit it off.'

‘She's sweet.'

‘Yeah. Ben was real fond of her. She'd always be out there, sitting waiting for him to come back from a mission.' He looked at his watch and then at her. ‘Well, I reckon I'd better get going. I've got transport all set up.'

‘Goodbye, Ed.' The bike stood between him and her and she kept it there. ‘Good luck.'

The jeep roared away down the drive. When he turned out of the gateway she caught one last glimpse of his hand raised in farewell.

Ben would have been real proud of him. Serious is prohibited. Always kiss the girls goodbye. Only he hadn't even gotten to do that with the goddam bike in the way.

Ed changed down to go under the railroad arch and swung the jeep round to the right and fast up the hill back towards the base. No more Ben lounging around up there. No more Ben at all. He'd been there with him, both of them screaming across that Luftwaffe airfield, when Ben had got caught by ground fire, wounded in the chest and Grumpy all shot up. God knows how he'd made it back. He'd flown alongside him all the way, talking to him, nagging at him to keep going somehow. Talked him down at the base, coming in right beside him, done everything he could to save him; then the guy had gone and fucked up at the last moment. Grumpy a ball of fire. End of Ben. Two other guys lost that day, too. Kind of a reminder of the odds stacked against getting through another tour.

He turned in at the airfield entrance, past the guard and his salute. Goodbye, Miss. New York here we come! He'd look up some of the girls there. Get her out of his mind. Get cured.

The piglet had grown into a large pig. It seemed to Miss Cutteridge that every day she went down to the Anderson shelter he was bigger than the day before.

‘Puts me in mind of Porky Pig,' Joe told her on one of his visits with a bucketload of cookhouse scraps.

‘Porky Pig?'

‘Gee, you never heard of him? He's in the cartoons. Wears a blue coat and a red bow tie.'

‘I'm afraid I've never seen him but then I very seldom go the cinema. I know Mickey Mouse, of course. At least, I've seen pictures of him. And Minnie Mouse. And Donald Duck.'

She looked over the wire fence at the pig, who was certainly porky. He ate anything and everything and, at that moment, was gobbling up some windfall apples with a lot of appreciative snuffling and grunting.

‘Gettin' some good meat on him,' Joe observed. ‘He'll make a nice roast for you. And a real nice side of bacon. Time to think about gettin' him slaughtered soon. You don't want to leave it much longer. Older he gets the more fat there'll be on him and he'll start to get tough. You want him porker size.'

Miss Cutteridge closed her eyes. She preferred not to think about it at all. In fact, she wasn't sure she was ever going to be able to bring herself to send him to slaughter, let alone cook and eat him. Growing vegetables was one thing – the potatoes and beans and cabbages and carrots had all been a wonderful success – but growing a pig was quite another. They were friendly creatures – or at least hers was. Whenever she went down to the Anderson he would come trotting over, grunting a hello.

Joe brought the scraps regularly and she had taken to cooking meals for him whenever he had some time off. She had never bothered much with cooking for herself but now she began searching through recipe books and reading hints in newspapers and magazines and leaflets. She'd pored over everything she could find:
Making the Most of Meat, Seven Appetizing Meals Without Using the Meat Ration, A Hundred Cheese Recipes, Thrifty Wartime Recipes, A Kitchen Goes to War, Gert and Daisy's Wartime Cookery Book
. She'd cooked him vegetable marrow with liver stuffing, national roly-poly with mince and potato and vegetables, rabbit stew with dumplings, cabbage stuffed with sausage meat, beef hash, devilled cod, savoury onions, tomato macaroni au gratin, and all manner of English puddings.

They always ate at the kitchen table off her cheap Woolworth's china because he was still afraid of breaking her best set. Afterwards, though, they sat in the sitting room with Ginger curled up companionably on the best chair. Sometimes they listened to the wireless and Joe would twiddle the tuner until he found American dance music. It wasn't all as loud and terrible as she had feared – in fact, some of it was rather pleasant. Other times they played cards or ludo or snakes and ladders, and occasionally Joe read out letters from his father about what was going on in Henryetta. She'd heard all about the Fourth of July celebrations – the flags and the picnics and the fireworks, and she'd learned a lot about baseball: about pitching and hitting and fielding; about home runs and curve balls and fast balls and screwballs and knuckleballs; about singles and doubles and triples and exactly where Jack, who had got picked up by the Brooklyn Dodgers, stood at third base. And when the football season had started she'd learned about touchdowns and conversions, about coin-flips and snaps and huddles and Frank's quarter-back position on the field at kick-off, behind the centre. ‘I've written to my dad all about you, ma'am,' Joe had said, ‘and how you've invited me into your home.' And he'd read out the bit where his father had sent his thanks.
Please say hello to Miss Cutteridge for me and let her know how much I appreciate her kindness to you. I hope she comes to Henryetta, one day, so I can repay some of her British hospitality
.

She had told Joe a little of her earlier life, growing up as an only child in the house in Oundle where she was expected to be seen but not heard. She had showed him the old sepia photographs of her parents – sombre, upright, Victorian figures, stiffly posed against a velvet curtain beside a potted palm. And she had told him about her father dying before his time and how she had taken a course in shorthand and typing and held a post in a solicitor's office for many years until she had been obliged to give it up to look after Mother until she died. That was when she had sold the Oundle house and bought Lilac Cottage. Left on her own, the idea of being part of a small village community had appealed to her.

Once, she had shown him the photograph of William – something she had never shown anyone before. She had taken it out of her bureau drawer where it was kept out of sight, partly because it saddened her too much to look at it and partly to shield it from the prying eyes of visitors. William was her private grief: an agony she had not shared with anyone – until Joe.

‘He was my fiancé,' she had explained. ‘But he was killed in the second Boer War. At Ladysmith.'

‘Gee, that must have been sad for you, ma'am. He's a fine-lookin' gentleman. Real handsome.'

‘He was. And a very fine person. And a brave soldier. I have his medals here.' She had taken them out of the same bureau drawer and Joe had held and admired them respectfully. ‘Don't know nothin' about that war, ma'am, but he sure must've been a great guy. I guess you never met anybody else you wanted to marry, after that, then?'

‘No,' she said. ‘I didn't.' William had come into the office one day and into her life and when he was gone from it she had never even wanted to meet another.

‘Never had a girl of my own,' Joe had told her. ‘Not yet, leastways. Met a few English girls since I've been over here an' they're mostly real nice, but none I've taken a real shine to, if you know what I mean.'

‘I'm sure you will, one day.'

‘Yeah, maybe when I get back home. Maybe I'll get myself married an' settle down an' raise a whole lot of kids. Maybe in Henryetta. Maybe somewhere else. It's a big country, America. Lots of places to go.'

He had become like a son to her – the son she had never had – and her heart was heavy at the realization that, like William, she would lose him. One day, when the war was over, he would return to America to live his life and, of course, she would never go there. He might write to her sometimes, perhaps even over a few years, and always send a card at Christmas, but she would never see him again.

‘You've been eating them again, Alfie.'

‘No, I haven't.'

‘Yes, you have. I can tell by your face. If you go on eating them we'll never get enough.' Alfie's mouth was stained purple and the level in the wicker basket had gone down, not up. Tom moved the basket to where he could keep an eye on it while he picked. It was a good patch of brambles he'd found along the hedge, full of juicy big blackberries, but a lot of them were high up, out of reach, and Alfie ate more than he picked. ‘We've got to fill the basket up before we take it to the Yanks.'

‘How much'll they pay us?'

‘Dunno yet. Get on with it, Alfie, and mind your Sunday best. We've got to get some money for Mum.'

They'd gone off straight after church. He couldn't pinch eggs any more, not since he'd got caught. He still shuddered to think of the dog with its teeth sunk in the sleeve of his coat, snarling like a wild beast as it dragged him to the ground, and of Mr Hobbs jerking him up again. Mum had burst into tears when he'd been marched home with the police constable, then Nell had started up and so had Alfie. There'd been a real to-do. All of them upset. Then all of a sudden he'd been let off the hook with a warning: next time he was caught nicking anything he'd be up before the magistrate. So, now he had to think of something else. The hedges and woods were full of good things: elderberries and wild crab apples, rose-hips, haws and sloes, but they were no good to the Yanks. Blackberries was all he could think of.

He went on picking and, of course, Alfie went on eating though he swore he wasn't. When the basket was full at last they set out for the airfield. Tom didn't see why Alfie should come too but he couldn't be bothered to argue about it. Shaking him off was like getting rid of a burr. The sun was quite warm, even though it was almost October, and the grass full of silvery spiders' webs. Alfie was kicking his boots through them and lagging behind because he kept stopping to pick and eat more blackberries along the hedgerows. ‘Come
on
. I'm not waiting for you.'

He plunged on downhill to the stream at the bottom and crossed by the two stepping stones, balancing himself and the basket carefully to jump. Sure enough, there was a loud splash behind him as Alfie missed one of the stones again but he took no notice. He toiled on up the hill towards the airfield. A Mustang was taking off and he watched it climb and circle.

‘What's it doing, Tom?'

He didn't know but Alfie would expect him to. ‘Test flight.'

‘Whose is it?'

He shielded his eyes. ‘Can't see from here.'

A whole lot of new pilots had come and he hadn't learned their letters yet. It wasn't as much fun as it had been with Ed and before Ben had been killed. Some of the new Yanks brought their washing down for Mum to do and they gave her washing powder and soap and sugar and things, just like the others had done, but it wasn't really the same. He missed Ed a lot. So did Mum. Alfie kept saying he did, too, but that was probably only for the candy and the chewing gum.

‘When's Ed going to come back, Tom?'

‘He may not ever. Not if they send him somewhere else.'

‘I hope he does. I liked Ed.'

They walked in by the main gate, ducking under the pole. ‘What're you eating now, Alfie?'

‘A crab apple.'

‘It'll give you a bellyache, stupid. You're supposed to cook them. Throw it away.'

They went round to the radio shack. His Yanks were still there: Mitch and Wally and Russ and Dan . . . all of them sitting at the workbenches in their overalls and their flipped-up caps.

‘Hi there, kids! What've you brought us?' They crowded round the basket.

‘Blackberries,' he told them. ‘I thought you might like to buy some.'

They each tried one and pretended to be poisoned, clutching their throats and rolling their eyes up and falling about. Alfie roared with laughter but somehow Tom couldn't. Mitch clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Just kiddin', Tom. They're real good. How much do you want for the lot?'

He wasn't sure what to ask. It'd been a lot of work picking the blackberries but they weren't as valuable as fresh eggs. A shilling seemed too little but two shillings seemed too much. ‘One and six,' he said in the end.

‘OK. Pay up, you guys.'

He put the money away in his shorts pocket and they passed the basket round between them, taking handfuls of the berries. Somehow Alfie got his hand in too as it went by.

‘How's that little sister of yours, Tom? She growed up any? How old's she now?'

‘She's two.'

They all grinned. ‘Tell her to hurry up else the war'll be over ‘fore any of us can take her out.'

‘What's that Sally of yours done to our Chester?' Mitch said. ‘He's been goin' round with a face long as a fiddle. She gone and dumped him?'