Shadow on the Land (16 page)

‘And I presume you have no classified parts in the store rooms?’

‘Not a thing. He could list every spare stenter hook or shuttle and no one would be a bit the wiser.’

‘Oh Alex, that is good news. What about money? Does he earn a wee bit more?’

‘No, not for that job. We couldn’t bend the
rules on that, but we found a way round, or rather Daisy did. She suggested we give him a small weekly gratuity for being on twenty-four hour standby as a First Aider.’

‘And how’s he managing that?’

‘Very well, I’m told. He’s still very slow when he bandages, but he’s good at it. And he’s so pleased with himself. That’s the nicest part.’

‘Oh that’s lovely, Alex. Isn’t it nice to have good news? I told Cathy that your man Patrick Pearse Doherty had been interned, so that’s the end of
his
bomb making career,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Oh Alex,’ she went on instantly, ‘don’t look like that. I’m not
an idiot
. I didn’t mention his name to her in a letter …’

She broke off, looked at him carefully.

‘Are you teasing me again?’

‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘Shall I go and turn off the Silent Valley while you serve up?’

‘And what news from the Home front?’ he asked, as they finished their meal and took their coffee into the sitting-room.

‘I finally managed to write to Cathy and I had a visitor. He sends his greetings and says he thinks he’ll see us for dinner every two months now and not every three.’

‘Chris? How did he get away?’

‘That’s what I asked him too, given he can never come and have a meal with us. He says it’s a kind of
inspection. He rather suspects that he’s about to be asked to take more lads and train them faster.’

‘Makes sense. But hard on Chris. It’s fairly concentrated training as it is, but then there was a time when pilots were being turned out in two weeks.’

‘Was there? But surely Johnny was nearly three months at Greencastle.’

‘Possibly that was due to lack of staff and aircraft,’ he responded. ‘As far as I remember, they weren’t building fighters over here at that time. Shorts were on Sunderlands and planes for Coastal Command, so they’d have to get planes for training from across the water. But over there during the Battle of Britain, training just got shorter and shorter.’

‘And the losses in training got higher, like poor Ritchie.’

He nodded and said nothing.

‘Chris had a problem with his little girl,’ she began, when she had collected herself and could be sure her voice was steady.

She told him about their efforts on behalf of Tilly.

‘He’s gone off with some red rose petals and he’s promised to show me his sketches when we go up to meet the next new team. And then he solved a problem for me,’ she laughed, having just remembered.

‘And what was your problem?’

‘Surplus production and inadequate transport,’ she replied crisply.

‘And how did he solve that without misappropriating scarce resources?’

She laughed.

‘The one thing I hadn’t thought of was how much a camp eats,’ she replied, shaking her head. ‘They have stewards looking for fresh food all the time, so they can take everything I can grow. They’ll come and collect it when it suits me and if I need pickers, he’ll send the most homesick boys he has and expect me to cheer them up.’

‘And he’s going to pay …?’

‘Yes, of course. We did argue a bit, because he offered me far more than the W.I. but I said no, the W.I. was the going rate. So we agreed I was to have a small bonus in coffee. I think our supply is now guaranteed. Aren’t we lucky?’

‘We are indeed,’ was Alex’s heart-felt response. ‘Long may it continue, as the saying is.’

Throughout the long weeks of June and into July, it seemed as if everything that could go well, did go well. To begin with, Alex had to work even longer hours while the machinery cannibalised from the mill in Manchester was re-installed in the most elderly and worn of the Bann Valley machines, but the results of his effort were instantaneous and tremendously encouraging. Production rose
immediately, stoppages were much less frequent and everybody in the workforce seemed happier.

As Robert Anderson said to him one morning, ‘Sure if ye go home worn out and frustrated, you don’t get much value from a bit of leisure, but life’s easier for everyone when we’re not worryin’ about breakdowns and failin’ our quota all the time. An’ this weather’s great, whether you want to dig your allotment, or try for a fish down at Corbet Lough, or just sit doin’ nothin’. It would lift your spirits.’

As the fine June weather continued, it did indeed lift spirits and pale, tired faces began to look less pale and strained. The open spaces round the mills, the lakeside and the river walks, were full of work people in the meal breaks, sitting in the sun or chatting to friends or feeding the swans. The dances laid on by local social committees were so crowded, and the summer evenings so fine, the dancers spilt out into the street pursued by the sound of Glenn Miller’s big band from wireless or gramophone.

Emily didn’t spend much time
doing nothing,
but she made sure she didn’t overdo it in the garden and that she had sitting down time every day. She used the space to write letters to friends and family, who hadn’t written to her for a while, and she read devotedly, sitting under a tree in the flower garden, or in the conservatory when the day clouded over.

The social events arranged for Chris’s boys went
well, the picnics now moving to the beaches or the lakeside. Emily and her helpers were delighted when some of the young Americans, always so willing to help them fetch and carry, came and asked them soberly if their regulation-issue book of helpful information had misinformed them about the rainfall in Ireland. Where was all this rain they’d been warned about?

One of the happiest outcomes of Emily’s letter writing was a sudden and unexpected response from her elder sister, Catherine, in Enniskillen. Catherine had never been a great letter writer, but knowing of Emily and Alex’s friendship with Hugh Sinton, now an aeronautical engineer who regularly visited Fermanagh to work at Castle Archdale, she’d kept in touch by sending Emily the local paper, the
Impartial Reporter
from time to time. Now, in response to Emily’s missive, she actually took up her pen to comment on life in an Ulster county in which, according to the newspaper itself, every fifth person was American.

Emily was delighted by her sister’s letter and by the prospect of having the Impartial Reporter every week. She had always found local papers a
fascinating source of information, often throwing quite new light on the important events reported by the BBC. What she was not expecting was such a rapid clarification of the hint Catherine had dropped regarding the biggest convoy battle of the war and the possibility that there was a local connection.

Letters from Sarah Hadleigh were rare. Either she was out of the country with her diplomat husband, Simon, or she was immersed in some project of her own, almost certainly connected with the well-being of working women.

Her letter was short and bore the signs of haste.

Suddenly and without the slightest warning, large, sixpenny-sized drops of warm rain splashed on her hands as she gathered up the withered foliage of the oldest of the rows of peas now ready to go to the compost heap. Emily threw back her head and stared in amazement at the heavy clouds overhead, now the colour of a bad bruise. She simply hadn’t noticed the light level dropping as she pulled out the pea sticks, disentangled the long strands of vegetation from their twiggy branches and bundled them in piles ready to carry to her store behind the garden shed for use again next year.

She dropped her pile of pea haulms and decided there was nothing for it but to dash under the chestnut. If she tried to get back to the kitchen, she’d be soaked to the skin long before she got there. Not that getting wet would do her one bit of harm. The August rain was warm and there were clean everyday clothes ready to pull on, but it was a nuisance.

As she sat down on the stone seat under the tree, she recognised the source of her irritation. She’d been deep in thought and didn’t want to be interrupted, by the rain or by anything else. For the moment, however, she simply couldn’t remember what she’d been thinking about.

The threshing of the rain in the canopy of the chestnut was fierce enough to send some tiny yellowed leaves flying down beyond the bone-dry circle of well-tramped earth where she sat. First to come, first to go, she reminded herself. Even in early August, a chestnut had a few yellow leaves in its crown, like a woman with grey hairs. There might not be many, but they certainly reminded you that time was passing and there would be more.

Was that what she’d been thinking about? Certainly, she’d been miles away and equally certainly she had not yet arrived back. She stared at the opaque, vertical curtain surrounding her on every side. It was so heavy it couldn’t last, but it would leave the ground wet and muddy and the residues of the peas wet and slimy. She never minded the soil being damp or sticky when she planted, but she hated wet hands when she was weeding or doing other garden jobs.

After the dryness and long hours of sunshine in the spring and early summer, she wondered if August might be wet, as it often was in this part of the world. She was always amused when Cathy
complained of the heat in London when she’d had to pull on an old sweater over her summer blouse, on that very same morning because of the brisk breeze and the threat of sudden showers like this one.

Life was so varied, so different for individuals, she often wondered how they managed to get on with each other at all. It was always a lovely joke between her and ‘her boyfriends,’ as Alex called them, when one of them used an American phrase and his friends promptly corrected him, because
she
might not understand.

After all these months, she knew most of the alternatives, but she was always touched by their concern, their awareness of the different ways of speaking they’d already met in their time here, and by their efforts to meet their hosts more than halfway.

Words were one thing, but what about ideas? Some of the boys had such a bitter hatred of the Germans, she wondered what their experiences had been before they came to County Down. It certainly wasn’t Chris Hicks who had taught them to hate.

Chris accepted there was a job to do. Whether it was building bridges or fixing tanks, his boys would often be working under attack. They had to be able to defend themselves just as effectively as fighting troops. If they were responsible for clearing an obstacle or crossing a river, they would sometimes have to attack as well, so the art of killing was a normal part of their training.

She wondered if you could kill without hating and thought of the last newsreel she’d seen.

When they’d gone to see
Mrs Miniver
, the Newsreel had shown shots of a rain of bombs so dense it had filled the screen. How did pilots feel about dropping death from the clouds? She’d read later that the raid on Hamburg they’d watched from their comfortable seats in the cinema in Banbridge had been so heavy it had caused a firestorm. The estimated casualty figure was so large, she’d had to read it twice to grasp its magnitude.

Bombing the oilfields in Romania to deprive Hitler of petrol was one thing, but incinerating ordinary human beings, most of them civilians like themselves, seemed to her something very different. Or was it that, now, everyone was part of the war effort and became a legitimate target?

Just as suddenly as it had started, the rain stopped. The throbbing roar all around her was replaced by quiet, the curtain of rain by a shower of drips and the dimness, by brilliant shafts of light that caught the wet foliage and struck gleams of brightness from hanging drops of moisture.

At the edge of her circle of dry, tramped earth, the rain had left little pock marks like the trace of ricocheting bullets in a cowboy movie, or a spray of machine gun fire from advancing troops in a newsreel.

She remembered now what she’d been thinking
about while she was pulling out the pea sticks. Johnny, probably in the Mediterranean, flying Mosquitoes on his nineteenth birthday. She’d been remembering that day in 1924, when after the most awful time she’d ever had with a baby, he had finally emerged, red and cross, his tiny fists waving in the air as old Biddy McBride held him close to her, so she could see for herself that he really was all right.

What a different world that had been. Quiet and poor. No one had any spare money, even those in work. Without Alex’s skilled job and the low rent for their home at Ballydown Rose had insisted on, they too would have had difficulty keeping four children fed and clothed.

In those days, every person you met was a friend, or an acquaintance. A stranger was such a rare occurrence that you could be sure he or she would be the topic of conversation until every fragment of available information about them had been chewed and digested. You could also rely on a certain degree of invention about the newcomer if facts were hard to come by.

It was not that no one died nineteen years ago, but mostly funerals were for old people who had lived ‘to a right good age,’ as the local saying was. Accidents happened and many people, particularly children, still got tuberculosis, even though much more was then known about the disease than when her own mother had succumbed to it in 1910.

The great loss in that quiet world was a remembered loss. No one would ever forget the First World War and the Battle of the Somme and those endless casualty lists in
The Leader
and every other local papers across the north.

Now it was all happening again and her daughters were just as much at risk as her son. Just like those young men who smiled from the old photographs, marching down the main street to the railway station waving their handkerchiefs to the cheering crowds. They were still smiling as the train got up steam and carried them away to the waiting troop ships to be transported overseas and mown down by the thousand.

Emily was right about August. It rained at some point almost every day. Fortunately, there was plenty of sun between the showers and a good drying breeze with it, so she was able to keep up her work on the garden. In the first two weeks, however, the drier days were at the end of the week and that was a problem as those were the ones she needed to prepare for a picnic or dance.

By the third week of the month, she’d found the best solution was to start her baking on Monday morning while the garden was still damp, stop as soon as it was dry enough to work outside. If it didn’t rain as much as expected in the next three days, she’d simply catch up on her baking on
Thursday evening before one of Chris’s young men arrived late on Friday morning to collect her and her cake tins for delivery to the day’s event.

She had just put a couple of sponges to cool on a wire rack on the third Tuesday of the month when she remembered she wanted to look up Messina. When she’d heard on the B.B.C. news at 8 a. m. that American troops had taken the town and the allies were now in control of Sicily, she’d not been able to remember where exactly it was.

With Johnny
somewhere
in the Mediterranean area, she felt she needed to know where he
might
be, so that she could think of him properly.

It was Lizzie’s old school atlas that had remained on the bookshelf in the sitting-room, Cathy having asked for both the others because of the shortage of books in her Cheshire school. Emily thought of Lizzie as she turned the pages, looking for the map of Italy. No under linings or notes in the margins. No scribbles or dog-eared pages, just Elizabeth Hamilton in a small, very legible hand on the flyleaf.

Standing at the sitting-room table, her finger poised over the names of Italian cities now more familiar than they’d ever been when she was at school, she paused as she heard the rattle of the letter box and the plop of letters on the mat.

She smiled to herself. Tom must be behind schedule or have a delivery to the hut that served as an office at the quarry. Usually, he came to the back
door, put her letters on the draining board, sat down for five minutes to recover from the hill, or even tramped into the garden to sit under the chestnut if she was outside.

She gathered up the letters shuffling them like a hand of cards. There were four of them. A fat one from her sister Catherine, full of newspaper cuttings no doubt, an Airmail from her new-found sister-in-law, Jane Ross in Boston, a note from Brendan McGinley and a Basildon Bond envelope postmarked Belfast from the boxed writing set which had been her own Christmas present to Jane.

Emily sat down and wrote to Jane right away. She said she couldn’t think of anything to say either, but sometimes, when someone was very unhappy all you could do was sit beside them, literally or metaphorically. It was knowing someone cared about them that sometimes helped in the first sharpness of grief. She sent Johann her love and said to remind him, when she felt the moment was right, that one day he would have a new family. She and Alex were looking forward to the day when they were free to welcome him to Rathdrum and take him to meet all their friends and cousins.

She put the note in an envelope and propped it up beside the breadbin, so she wouldn’t forget to ask Danny to post it for her when he got back into Banbridge. It would get to Jane more quickly than if she posted it herself in the box near the foot of the hill.

Either the note from Dublin had taken a long time to come or had been mis-delivered somewhere on the way. It was a very lively missive from Brendan to say he’d be delivering books to a private collector in Belfast next Tuesday afternoon and then heading back south. He would like to call to see her. If he didn’t hear from her in the meantime, he’d be like the beggar man and arrive when he knew the kettle was on and the household could not drink their tea without offering him a cup.

She smiled at the thought, then looked at the date
again. She registered with a shock that Tuesday the 17th was
today
. She didn’t mind that the remains of her lunch were still on the kitchen table, but there were dead flowers in the sitting room and she hadn’t combed her hair since breakfast. If it
was
going to rain again, which looked more likely with each passing moment, then a bit of a fire would be nice and the ash from the last one was still in the grate.

‘My goodness Emily, that fire looks good. Apart from chopping up my bookshelves, I’ve no hope at all of a fire these days,’ he said, settling himself comfortably in front of the blaze.

‘I saw a cartoon in a magazine last week with a butler bringing in coal to Her Ladyship,’ he began. ‘He had it on a silver salver and the punch line was: ‘One lump or two, my Lady?’

Emily laughed, partly at the joke, but even more at the way Brendan was eyeing the tea tray. Dublin was still a long way away, so she’d made him some egg sandwiches and there was even a choice of cake because she’d baked on both Monday and Tuesday mornings.

‘We can’t get much coal either,’ she agreed, ‘but it looks as if all the dead wood that lay around the local forests for years is now in great demand. Amazing the things that suddenly have currency. According to the
Impartial
Reporter
there are firms down in Fermanagh advertising for rabbits in tens of thousands.’

‘You’re very well informed, Emily, and not just on matters literary, for which I have particular cause to be grateful. If it’s not a rude question, how do you keep tabs on Fermanagh?’