The Homecoming (25 page)

“The brown one, sir?”

“You can just pull over anywhere, we’re close enough.”

“Right, sir.”

As his ride drove away, Shawn caught a rare sunset descending between the row homes of Notting Hill. He’d picked this area because of its proximity to the two places he worked, the Eighth Air Force headquarters at High Wycombe and General Eisenhower’s base in Bushy Park.

“Daddy!”

Shawn looked up as Patrick ran down the steps and jumped into his arms.

“You’re finally home.”

“I’m finally home,” Shawn repeated. He moved Patrick to one arm and reached down for his things.

“You all done at your base?” Patrick asked as they walked up the steps.

“Not all done, but it looks like I can start spending more time with you and—”

“Miss Townsend is making us spaghetti.”

“Really? Sounds delicious.” They walked inside. Wonderful smells filled the hall. The door off the hall led into a tight living area. He walked in and saw Katherine still at work in the kitchen. She wore an apron splattered with sauce and a towel over her shoulder. She really had become quite a cook. “Where’s Mrs. Cooper?” he asked.

“Major Collins, so glad you’re home,” she said, still stirring a pot. The kitchen was so small. “She’s been visiting her sister near Watford for the last few days. It’s given me a chance to cook some American meals for a change, at least something close.”

“Patrick told me we’re having spaghetti.”

“And meatballs,” she said. “Just don’t ask me what’s in them.”

“Do I have time to get changed?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll just need a couple of minutes.”

“Then I’ll start putting the food on the table. Wanna help me, Patrick?”

Shawn walked back out into the hall. He shared a room with Patrick on the first floor past the stairs, but he’d barely been in it. He had rented both floors from Mrs. Cooper to give them at least some sense of home. She occupied the rest of the downstairs. She wasn’t an adequate replacement for Mrs. Fortini or half the cook. But she was very kind in her own way, and Patrick really liked her. Katherine had a room—a locked room—at the top of the stairs.

He knew Mrs. Cooper would be upset to learn he’d come home when she wasn’t there. “Run a respectable place ’round here,” she’d reminded him several times. He put his things away and changed into casual clothes. Then joined Patrick and Miss Townsend for dinner.

“So what did you do today, Patrick?”

“Before lunch Miss Townsend took me to the park.”

“Hyde Park,” Katherine added. “We fed some ducks.”

“And she threw the ball with me.”

“Really?” Shawn asked. “Can she catch?”

“Pretty good,” Patrick said. “But she throws like a girl.”

“That’s because I am a girl.”

“Did you play with any boys?” Shawn asked.

“No, they were all playing that game, what do you call it?”

“Cricket,” said Katherine. “I don’t get it either, Patrick.”

“The bat is flat,” Patrick explained. “And they don’t swing it right. And if they get a hit they just run back and forth. They only got two bases.”

“When we get home,” Shawn said, “we’ll play baseball the right way.”

“Would you like some bread, Patrick?” Katherine asked. Patrick looked at it and said no thank you. Shawn looked at it too. It did look odd.

“I’m sorry. The bread here is so different. I toasted it to get rid of the gray tinge. The real problem happened when I fell on it.”

“You fell?” Shawn asked. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, but, really, you don’t have to eat the bread.”

Shawn picked up a piece. “It looks fine. The spaghetti is delicious. You’ve really gotten Mrs. Fortini’s sauce nailed down.”

“It was quite a project finding tomatoes.”

“Well, this beats anything I’ve had for weeks. I’m real sorry I haven’t been home very much.” Shawn couldn’t tell them why. He’d thought things would ease up shortly after D-Day, but things were still going rough for the boys in Normandy. It put the planning staff on high alert, trying to find ways to give them proper support. “The radio work?” Shawn asked, noticing it perched on a table by the front window.

“It does,” said Katherine.

“But they only got some of the shows like back home. They got a bunch I don’t know,” said Patrick. “And I can’t understand how they talk.”

“Well, after we eat, I’ll help you get ready for bed,” Shawn said, “and I’ll see if I can find something fun to listen to. I’ve been here a lot longer than you guys. I can tell you what they’re saying.”

Patrick stood up. “Daddy, I have a surprise for you.”

“You do? What is it?”

“It’s not finished yet, but almost. I’ll go get it.” He ran back to his room. “Here,” he said, holding out two sticks in the palm of his hand, one slightly longer than the other.

Shawn instantly knew they were some kind of carving project but couldn’t imagine what it was. “What are they?” he asked.

“It’s a cross I’m making for you.”

“Really?”

“Grandpa taught me how before we left. First, he wanted to teach me something else. He thought I wanted to make it with Jesus still on it, but that would be too hard. I told him we could make it after Jesus got off, and so he showed me what to do.”

Shawn smiled. “That’s great, Patrick. How do you stick the pieces together?”

“Grandpa showed me how to make a special notch. That’s the part I haven’t finished yet.”

“I’m sure he’d be real proud of you if he could see it. You still being very careful?”

“I am, ’cause I don’t ever wanna get cut.”

Shawn looked at Katherine; she was shaking her head and smiling. “Well, better put that away, Patrick,” she said. “So you can eat the spaghetti before it gets cold.”

Thirty minutes later, they were all sitting in the tiny living room, listening to a replay of a Bob Hope show. Katherine had the kitchen all cleaned up. Patrick was sitting on his lap.

They were almost like a regular . . .

Shawn sighed.

It felt like the middle of the night. Something was wrong. Shawn sat up in his bed. He heard the distinct sound of antiaircraft fire off in the distance, sounded like it came from the southeast. Lots of it.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?”

Then he heard an air-raid siren. It, too, was far away, on the other side of London.

“What is that?” Patrick asked. He jumped out of his little bed and into Shawn’s. Shawn held him close. “It’s okay, Patrick. It’s far away.”

“But what is it?”

He heard a thumping on the stairs. Katherine must be coming down. “It sounds like the British soldiers are shooting at something,” he said. He picked Patrick up and turned on a light in the hall. Katherine rounded the stairway toward them.

“What’s going on, Major?”

“I don’t know. I don’t hear any planes. And the racket is way east of us.” They walked outside and found many of the neighbors doing the same. They all looked to the sky in the direction of the sounds.

“What you make of that, Major?” asked an elderly man. Shawn had forgotten his name. “Thought we was through with all this.”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Just then they all heard a loud boom, definitely a bomb of some kind.

“Not again,” a woman said across the street. “Please, God, not again.”

Patrick buried his face in Shawn’s shoulder. Katherine moved very close; Shawn could tell she wanted him to hold her. Instead he offered words, said with far more assurance than he felt inside. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t hear any more explosions. I don’t think it’s another raid. Might just be a stray plane that got past our defenses.”

They waited a while longer. Soon the guns went silent, then the air raid sirens.

“See, we’re okay. Let’s go back to bed,” Shawn said. He led them back inside, totally puzzled by what they’d just experienced.

He and his neighbors in Notting Hill didn’t realize they had just witnessed the beginning of a totally new campaign of terror Hitler had unleashed on London.

The boom they’d just heard . . . six Londoners had just died.

Thousands more would follow.

Thirty-five

Life in London soon became nightmarish and tense again.

For the first time in history, a pilot-less aircraft, actually a rocket, had flown across the English Channel and plummeted to earth. After the first rocket attack, there had been a four-day lull. The radio and newspapers had reported the incident as a lone German bomber quickly shot down by anti-aircraft gunners. But mysterious rumors began to spread from the locals nearby the crash site . . . no German bodies had been pulled from the wreckage.

Two weeks later, the truth was clear to all.

After that initial four-day pause, Hitler unleashed dozens of these unmanned rockets on London every day. Officially, they were being called V-1 rockets. Folks around London nicknamed them “doodlebugs” or “buzzbombs” because of their odd sound. Their introduction into the war created a massive increase in Shawn’s workload. The mission-planning staff had turned all their attention toward hunting down and destroying the rocket bases, somewhere in northern France. So far they’d been unsuccessful.

Even with this added work, Shawn came home every night, trying to offset Patrick’s and Katherine’s fears. But it seemed with each passing day, his own increased. So far, all the attacks had taken place south and east of them. But you could hear each rocket and sometimes see them. This went on day after day, night after night, in good weather or bad. Shawn knew a few more gallons of fuel and these rockets could easily close the distance to Notting Hill. It had reached the point where he had no choice—he would have to send Patrick and Katherine home. He picked up the telephone to call Katherine.

“Hi, Katherine, it’s Shawn.”

“Major Collins, hello.”

“They won’t let me out of here right now,” he said, “but I’m sending a car to get you both. You’re leaving Notting Hill this afternoon.”

“Really? I’m so glad. I just heard another one explode five minutes ago. It sounded closer than before. I actually heard the engine die. Thirty seconds later, a loud boom. Our windows actually rattled. That never happened before.”

This wasn’t good, Shawn thought. By now all of London was talking about these dreaded silent moments. As long as you heard the droning engine sound, you were fine. The danger came when the engine cut out. From that moment, you had maybe thirty to forty seconds before it crashed, setting off the one-ton warhead.
Hearing
the silence could mean only one thing—you were in the dead zone.

“Pack up everything,” Shawn said. “I mean everything. You won’t be coming back.”

“Where are we going?”

“Back to the States in a couple of days. Until then, I found a place for you both in a little town nearby. We’re far out of range up here.” Shawn heard her sigh with relief.

“You’ll get no complaints from me,” she said. “How much time till the driver gets here?”

“How much time do you need?”

“Two hours tops.”

“Two hours then.”

Three hours later, Katherine and Patrick pulled up to the guard gate at High Wycombe, the Eighth Air Force headquarters where Shawn worked. An army MP came up to the window of the cab and bent down.

“I ain’t ’ere for meself,” the cabbie said. “Got a missus and ’er little boy in the back.”

Katherine leaned forward. “I’m Katherine Townsend, here with Major Collins’s son, Patrick. He said he would leave word about us at the gate.”

“Hi, Miss Townsend. Spoke with the major not ten minutes ago. Came to see if you’d arrived. Sir,” he said to the cabbie, “you can drop her off right by that door over there, then pull back around. Miss Townsend, there’s a receptionist and a waiting room just inside on the right. Just tell her who you are, and she’ll call Major Collins.”

“Right-o,” the cabbie said, then drove through as the gate raised.

Katherine was so relieved to be out of London. She had never been more afraid in her life. She looked out the window as they pulled up to Wycombe Abbey; before the war it had been a girls’ school. Like so many buildings she’d seen in England, it looked to be a place with a thousand tales, more like a castle than a school. They pulled up to the curb, and Katherine helped Patrick out.

“I’ll get your bags from the boot, miss,” the cabbie said.

“I’ll help you,” she said. “Patrick, you can stand just inside the door there. I’ll be right in.” They carried the bags up the steps. “How much do I owe you for the ride?”

“Not a bit, miss. The major paid me plenty ’fore he sent me after you.”

“Oh no,” Patrick said. “I forgot it.” He ran back to the cab and looked in the back window. “It’s not there.” Instantly his eyes filled with tears.

“What’s the matter? What did you forget?”

He walked to the first step and plopped down, then buried his head in his lap. “My grandfather’s pouch and the cross I’m making for Daddy. I forgot them in my room. My grandpa will be so mad. He made me promise I wouldn’t lose his bag. He’s had it for his whole life.”

Katherine knew Patrick wasn’t exaggerating; she’d heard the conversation with Patrick and the elder Collins before they’d left. And Patrick had worked so hard on his father’s cross. It was just a thirty-minute drive. She could hurry back, grab those two things, and turn right around. “Do you remember where you left them?”

“They’re right under my bed. We were rushing around and I forgot all about it.”

“Sir,” she said to the cabbie, “could I pay you the same thing Major Collins did for a quick trip there and back?”

“Your money’s as good as ’is,” he said. “Got no other fares at the moment.”

“Then let’s go. Let me just get Patrick situated inside.”

“Really?” Patrick asked. “You’ll go back and get it?”

She walked him up the steps. “I have to. You were almost done carving that cross, right? We can’t just leave it back there in London. Your dad said we weren’t coming back.”

She walked him inside and explained the situation to the receptionist and asked her to contact Shawn, let him know what had happened. “Is it okay if I leave him here with you until I get back? Shouldn’t be more than an hour.”