Shadow on the Land (18 page)

His reaction expressed fear rather than aggression and she felt sorry now she’d upset him.
She thought of Sam Hamilton who always claimed that sometimes one simply spoke when the Spirit moved. But he hadn’t pointed out that, if you did, you had to take the consequences.

‘Well, I’ll explain if you want me to,’ she said soothingly. ‘No one told me. But there were three things that made it seem likely that your family had come from Germany some time back,’ she offered, sipping her coffee and giving him time to recover himself.

‘First, when we met and we talked about your home, you told me you were from Michigan,’ she began. ‘There is a very large German community there and many still speak German. Secondly, you said
sheugh
,’ she added, smiling. ‘I’ve never heard anyone
not
from Ulster pronounce that word correctly. My husband Alex can say it, but then he speaks German.’

‘He speaks German?’ he repeated blankly.

‘Yes,’ she explained. ‘He was a farm labourer in the States at a place called German Township before he came to Ireland in the hope of finding his family. He’d been sent to Canada as an orphan, though in fact he wasn’t.’

There was a moment’s silence and Emily offered Chuck another piece of cake. He looked at it for a moment, then picked it up and said Thank You, as if he’d had to make a major decision in accepting it.

‘You said there were three things, ma’am.’

‘Yes, I did. Your name. Hillman. I know a very nice young German boy called Hillman who comes from Hamlin. We haven’t met yet, but he is engaged to my daughter Jane.’

‘But how can that be, ma’am? Is she abroad somewhere?’

‘No, but Johann is a prisoner-of-war in Dungannon. They met when his aircraft crashed into the water supply at Millbrook on her birthday. She was here and went with her father to see what they could do to help him.’

‘So you don’t hate all Germans?’

Emily shook her head slowly.

‘No. We fear for ourselves and our fighting forces,’ she said honestly. ‘Hate what Hitler has done and all the suffering he has caused. But Johann, or your grandparents, or my Pennsylvanian cousins’ German cousins, why should anyone hate them?’

He nodded abruptly and looked at his watch.

‘I’m most grateful to you ma’am.’

He moved forward in his armchair with all the signs of a man poised to leave.

‘What about morale?’ she reminded him. ‘I think perhaps you were going to say that, with the reduced time available, perhaps social activities were not high priority.’

‘No, ma’am, not so. I did think that when I first came to the camp. That was why I decided to produce a questionnaire and do a survey of the
boys,’ he said, reaching his hand back into his map pocket and bringing out a notebook.

‘There were a number of questions about first impressions. I’ve copied up some of the replies for you. I think you’ll find them interesting. They were all entirely positive. It was Lieutenant-Colonel Hicks who said I might benefit by discussing the question with you,’ he added, as he handed over the black, waterproof notebook.

‘Thank you,’ she said, somewhat taken aback.

‘He was quite right, of course, about talking to you,’ he said, smiling at her for the first time, as he got to his feet and waited for her to lead the way back into the starch-smelling kitchen.

‘No wonder he got promoted,’ he added, as he pulled on his waterproof jacket and zipped it up.

He beamed at her as he raised a hand and stepped out into the pouring rain.

October ended in a blaze of autumn glory. Certainly not as dramatic as Vermont, but even Chris Hicks commented on the crisp mornings and the sunlight falling on the shoals of leaves brought down in their avenue by the first frosts. The hedgerows were bright with jewelled branches of hawthorn and the mountain ash on the eastern boundary of the flower garden was full of feasting birds.

‘Grand mornin’, Mrs Hamilton,’ said Robert Cooper, as he met her coming up from the garden
with a handful of dahlias and a few autumn-tinted ferns. ‘I’ve left your letters on the drainin’ board. A whole wee pile left waitin’ for me at the office this mornin’. Someone loves you, as the sayin’ is.’

‘Thank you, Robert, that’ll brighten up my tea-break,’ she replied, smiling.

‘Are you for the quarry?’ she called after him, noting his purposeful stride as he humped his bag more comfortably on his shoulder.

‘Aye, they’re powerful busy these days, but I’ll leave the bike in your gateway if that’s all right. Wi’ them big lorries yer safer on yer feet,’ he said sharply.

‘Of course it’s all right. Any time. We don’t get many bicycle thieves up here.’

She turned back towards the kitchen and eyed the little pile as she ran the tap and put the flowers and ferns she’d picked in a basin to drink before she arranged them in a vase. There were at least half a dozen items of varied sizes, secured with a rubber band.

Ten minutes later, she was sitting with a cup of tea in the conservatory, her family letters by her side, a seed catalogue, the electric bill and a circular abandoned on the kitchen table.

Emily smiled as she tucked the short letter back in its envelope. Such a cheering picture of Cathy and Brian and their life together had emerged in the last weeks. Cathy had never been very forthcoming as a girl and although Emily knew that she loved Brian very much and couldn’t bear their being apart, she’d never before been allowed such an intimate glimpse into their life. The thought of them laughing over her letter was a real joy.

A further delight was a missive from Johnny. She opened it to find a single sheet with a mere two sentences in his generous hand, but inside the folded sheet were three photographs. With flare on the edges and burnt out sky and sea, they were not exactly works of art, but she was grateful to the owner of the Box Brownie who had taken Johnny with his arms round two other airmen, Johnny in uniform and Johnny in swimming trunks, looking brown and flourishing, his blonde hair so bleached by the sun so that it looked almost white.

She studied the photographs carefully. Alex and Chris were probably right that he was somewhere in North Africa. Possibly in the desert, as that comment about the girls would suggest. But then, she argued with herself, it was
all
guesswork. That he was well and happy was the one thing she could be sure of from the note and photos.

The third letter was an American Airmail, the handwriting and the return address now familiar and most welcome. Jane Ross wrote regularly and she and Emily were busy sharing the detail of their own lives as well as speculating about the remaining puzzles over what had happened to Alex and Jane as children.

As Emily opened her letter carefully so as not to damage the stamps which she saved for young Jimmy Cook, she noticed it was a good deal thinner than usual. She pulled out the closely written airmail sheet and began to read quickly.

Emily wiped her eyes and read the letter through again in case she had missed anything, but she hadn’t. It was one of the commonest stories of the war, the enemy position that no one had identified. Hank and one of Chris’s groups, boys who had played games and given chewing gum to children and smiled and carried her baskets and boxes.

She thought of the morning he had said goodbye to her, when he told her his mother’s name was Jane and she had guessed that Alex had found his sister. She had kissed him and said the kiss was from his mother, to wish him luck.

He was probably lucky to be alive, but at this moment all she could think of was what he had lost. She went into the sitting-room, took out her writing materials and sat down where she was in the dim, cold room and wrote to Jane.

It was only when she came back into the kitchen and propped up the letter by the bread bin to give to Danny, whose day it was to call, that she saw the other items from the post, still lying where she had left them. She picked them up, opened the seed catalogue and leafed through it briefly, glanced down and saw that it had covered a small, dull orange envelope. In plain capitals above their
address it said
POST OFFICE TELEGRAM
. Down one side, in red lettering, block capitals spelt out the one word,
PRIORITY
.

Suddenly anxious and barely able to control the shake in her hands, she ripped open the envelope and drew out the single flimsy sheet. Under the time and place of dispatch and the address of the Air Ministry in Oxford Street, London W1, it deeply regretted to inform them that F/O John Hamilton was reported missing while on operations in the Mediterranean and that any further information would be
immediately communicated to you pending receipt of official notification
.

She rang Millbrook and Alex came at once. He strode into the kitchen and put his arms round her, then stared down in bleak incomprehension at the creased sheet of paper still lying on the kitchen table.

‘Do
you
think he’s dead, Emily? Do you?’

‘No, I can’t believe he’s dead,’ she replied, ‘but isn’t that how people always react when they hear this news? Isn’t it just a defence?’

‘No, not always. Some people have a sense of life going on. I have,’ he said quietly.

‘Have you really, Alex?’ she asked, tears coming unbidden. ‘I though it was just because I had seen the photos. Look, here they are. He is so very alive, isn’t he?’

He picked up the photographs and studied them intently.

‘Sometimes that matters,’ he said, almost as if he were talking to himself.

It was then they telephoned Chris. He came immediately.

‘That’s not such bad news,’ he said, reading and re-reading the short message. ‘Missing
does
mean missing. Lots of men go missing. What it means is that they are not where someone expects them to be. Until you get this letter they’ve promised you, you’re entitled to think the best.’

The days passed and still the promised letter failed to appear. The waiting was unbearable. Try as she would Emily could think of nothing else but Johnny though she forced herself to keep busy and do all the things she would normally do.

They told no one apart from Chris, not even Jane and Cathy. They agreed there was no point whatever in adding to their burdens until the question was resolved one way or another. Chris himself made some enquiries and when the waiting extended into the second week he rang and said he’d leave Hillman in charge and take an hour to come and see them.

His expression was set in a grim line as he came into the warm kitchen where they were still sitting over their coffee after supper.

‘So you still haven’t heard?’ he asked, as he accepted a cup.

‘Not a word,’ Alex replied.

‘Now this just won’t do,’ he began. ‘I’ve asked around a bit and the word is that informing relatives
about a loss is top priority. You should have heard something by now, even if it’s only that they haven’t any more to tell you.’

‘I’ve been thinking. Now I know how
we
proceed when something is not right, but your way is sure to be different. Have you any official contacts, Alex, like say, someone in Whitehall or the Air Ministry itself?’

There was a pause in which Emily thought painfully of Lizzie. She was most certainly in the Air Ministry, but where they did not know. Nor had they any means of contacting her. How official she was by now they had no means of knowing either.

She looked at Alex and saw his face brighten.

‘There’s Sarah,’ said Alex abruptly.

Chris raised an eyebrow.

‘Sarah’s our cousin, she’s married to a diplomat. He has contacts all over Whitehall,’ he explained.

‘Just what you need,’ Chris exclaimed. ‘The God damned English never tell you anything they can avoid telling you, but if you have an inside man, he’ll know how to get to the right person. As far as I know Squadron Leaders are obliged to reveal their reports if they are requested by someone senior enough. But they don’t tell anybody that.’

He had to leave them then for he had to be available in camp during the hours of darkness. He shook hands with Alex and hugged him. Then he hugged Emily and then kissed her on both cheeks.

‘While there’s life there’s hope,’ he said firmly. ‘Dead is a four letter word, but Missing is different. Here’s something to help you sleep,’ he continued, putting a hand in his greatcoat pocket. ‘I’m not a praying man but I’ll get as near as I can. Keep me posted.’

He parked a bottle of Jack Daniels on the table and hurried back to his jeep.

Three long days later a telegram came from Simon Hadleigh’s office in Whitehall. It had not been censored. It was so lengthy Emily could hardly believe it was actually a telegram.

The pilots of F/O John Hamilton’s squadron had been sent to Tunisia in order to fly out to bases in recently liberated Sicily, the Mosquitos despatched in crates to North Africa and assembled there. The squadron had taken off in excellent weather conditions, but on arrival one of the pilots to the rear of the formation reported he had observed a plane lagging and then rapidly loosing height. He had logged its approximate position. This pilot had written himself to Flying Officer Hamilton’s family, but the censor had impounded the letter, as it contained information valuable to the enemy. Efforts would now be made to trace the letter and to communicate the contents directly to them. A further communication would follow as soon as there was reliable information to report.

Chris was much cheered when he was shown the telegram, but Sarah was not pleased. It was one thing if Johnny or anybody else was shot down. War was war and it was tough. But he’d only been ferrying a plane from one base to another in an area where the Allies had complete air superiority. If he’d simply had engine trouble, why did no one circle back and see what was happening?

Three days later, the letter from Johnny’s friend duly appeared, the Italian stamp almost obliterated, but the enclosed message bore no trace of the censor’s blue pencil.

Emily and Alex agreed there was no point in upsetting everyone unless the worst had happened, so although they now wrote to Sam and told Cathy and Jane what they now knew, they did not tell their friends or neighbours. They both tried to get on with life as normally as possible. Emily even managed a Halloween party with witches on broomsticks and candles in turnip heads on a foggy Friday afternoon, though she did weaken and confess how hard it was to her old school friend Dolly, when they found themselves alone together in the cloakroom at Millbrook.

As no one beyond Chris, Dolly and her immediate family knew what had been going on, what happened next morning came as a complete surprise.

The phone rang a few minutes after nine o’clock and Emily hurried to pick it up, thinking perhaps it might be another call from Sarah or her sister Hannah, but the voice was male and sounded almost familiar.

‘Mrs Hamilton, you don’t know me, but I’m Robert Anderson’s older brother,’ it said, the tone warm and comforting. ‘I’m Postmaster here in Banbridge and I know you’ve had a hard time over
your Johnny. He was at school with my son. Now, I think I have good news for you. There’s a telegram here for you and your husband. It’s from Johnny himself. Would you like me to read it to you?’

She had to get him to read it three times. Then, when he asked her if she’d like him to have it delivered to Rathdrum, or taken to whichever mill her husband was at that morning, she found her voice had gone, an ache at the back of her throat which completely prevented her from speaking.

But he was in no hurry. He waited till she’d coughed and blown her nose as if he had all the time in the world. Then he made a little joke about the way telegrams so often got garbled in transmission, particularly when they were from abroad.

She swallowed hard, found her voice again and thanked him. She told him she would probably remember this particular telegram to the end of her days.

It said:

If Emily and Alex thought they had kept their bad news to themselves, they were left in no doubt at all that their good news had spread like fire through corn stubble. It roared through the mills and from them raced on unchecked to all the surrounding villages.
Notes and letters arrived every day, some from people they hardly knew. Even more arrived after a paragraph in
The Leader
obviously written by someone who had known Johnny at Banbridge Academy.

Overwhelmed by relief and joy, Emily tried to keep a hold of her ordinary domestic routine and failed completely. She would find herself wandering round the kitchen trying to remember what she’d been doing before she’d answered the phone or the ring at the door.

Alex managed better, but most of his wellwishers were at work and could not linger as could many of Emily’s visitors.

Four days later, Johnny’s promised letter arrived. To their amazement, it had come from Norfolk and had not been censored.

Emily made sure that Alex was home promptly and they waited together for the phone to ring. It was almost a year since they’d heard his voice, the last time being when he’d been allowed to phone home from Greencastle after Ritchie was killed.

‘All’s well that ends well,’ said Emily, shivering, as Alex put the phone down at the end of their shared call.

‘Come on, back in to the fire,’ he said, putting an arm round her shoulders. ‘This hall would freeze you tonight and there is just no paraffin to be had this week.’

‘Do you think he’s all right?’ she asked, as they pulled their chairs up to the comforting flames, ‘He did
sound
all right, but I thought his letter was rather strange.’

‘Yes, he’s all right,’ Alex said reassuringly. ‘He’s grown up a lot. I think the style of the letter was a clever way to avoid the censor. But I think he was also trying to reassure us he wasn’t unduly upset by what had happened, though he told me he was afloat on the plane for two days. Did he say that to you?’

‘No, but he admitted he banged his head when he landed and came to thinking of the little red bits we’d put on the dessert for Jane’s birthday last year.’

She paused, thinking through what they’d said before the pips went and she’d handed the phone to Alex.

‘Surely landing like that and staying afloat must have been difficult?’

‘Yes, it must have been,’ he agreed. ‘But his friend Charlie told us how good a pilot he was. Maybe it was all those nights he spent in the cockpit of that plane they were building down at Walkers,’ he continued, putting another log on the fire. ‘He knew how that plane was made and put together. The Mosquitos are made of light wood too, probably not all that different. That’s why they can ship them out to North Africa in packing cases and put them together there. He knew if he got her down level, she’d float.’

‘So why do you think he’s been brought back? Was it because of what happened?’

Alex looked across at her pale face and saw she was rubbing her hands together. He paused, applied the poker to the fire and coaxed the log to burn up and produce flames. Probably the only way to warm her would be to make her a hot whiskey.

‘Yes, I think perhaps what’s happened has been hard enough on us but it has had a good side to it,’ he said sitting back in his armchair, the flames lighting up his face. ‘What does getting the plane down and staying afloat for two days say about a pilot? It shows skill
and
judgement. And nerve. Who better to instruct?’

Emily nodded and held out her hands to the leaping flames.

He was back in England. He was safe and well. Really that was all that mattered. So far, Johnny was one of the lucky ones, but she would never be able to forget the size, shape and colour of that envelope, or the words on the telegram it contained.

The enormous relief over Johnny’s safety came not a moment too soon for Alex. He’d been just on the point of confessing to Emily how difficult the situation was at three of the four mills when he’d had her phone call. Now, nearly a fortnight later, the problem was worse rather than better and he was no nearer to finding a solution.

‘Thanks, Margaret,’ he said, as one of the Millbrook office staff placed a time sheet on his desk.

He knew by the amount of blank paper at the bottom of the long scroll there were more absentees even before he studied the names.

November was always a bad time for illness, but this year it had started earlier and was more severe. James Wilson, their Health and Safety Director, had warned Alex back in early October that fatigue was now so high that people had less and less resistance to infection. Even with nourishing canteen food and the co-operative store where food prices were kept as low as possible, he said he was sure some women were not getting enough to eat.

James was almost certainly right. Alex knew perfectly well that, in a similar situation where the children might go short, Emily would have done just the same and passed over most of her own share. But there was a price to pay. These women were working all day, then trying to keep a home clean and bright with inadequate food and not enough fuel to warm it. It was one thing coping in summer with sunshine and fresh vegetables to help, but now the temperature was dropping fast and the influenza that usually struck in January was already active. As staff absences grew daily machines were having to be shut down to comply with safety regulations.