Tidings of Comfort and Joy (5 page)
The train ride was almost as bad as the boat. The carriage was terrifically crowded. Soldiers and sailors crammed into every free inch of space. They smoked and played cards and talked. The air was so thick with tobacco fumes I could have cut it with a knife. None of the windows opened, and a few miles outside the station they fogged up so I could not see a thing. A couple of the sailors tried to chat with me, but quickly gave up. I sat crammed into the hard wooden seat, sadder than I had ever been in my life.
I shut my eyes and tried to rest. At least it eased my coughing, and kept me from being bothered by all the young men. But all the questions seemed to wait and pounce just as soon as I closed my eyes. What was I doing here? What had I gotten myself into? Worse still, what would Grant say when he saw me? I had no answers to any of them. I sat and rocked with the train, and recalled all the events that had brought me to this place.
My parents had never liked Grant Rockwell the least little bit. They thought he was fast—that was how they described a man like Grant back in those days. Fast and dangerous. I thought he was the most exciting man I had ever laid eyes on. He was a happy-go-lucky sort, carefree and full of adventure. When he had started showing special attention to me, I couldn't believe my luck.
Grant came back for New Year's Eve, 1944. It was an exciting time. Victory was in the air. Our boys were pushing hard, and they were rolling back the enemy on almost every front. We went to a party that night, and when we stepped out on the balcony for some air, Grant asked me to marry him.
I felt as if I was walking on air. Little old me, fiancee to the most dashing man any of my girlfriends had ever seen. But my parents were furious. I was still living at home, of course, that's what good girls did in those days until they were married. They went at me tooth and nail, ordering me to break it off, warning that a relationship with Grant would only end in sorrow. I refused, of course. I was quite a hardheaded young lady.
Even after the war ended in Europe that spring, things did not grow easier for me. Grant came back only four times, and despite his best efforts, he could not manage to charm my folks. They were the only people who seemed totally immune to his appeal, which I put down to the fact that they were stubborn as mules. But I managed to while away the summer, living for the times that Grant came to Philadelphia, pestering him constantly to set a date. He could see how hard it was for me at home, and I was growing desperate to get out and get married.
But Grant would not be pinned down. This only made me even more frantic. We quarreled a lot that summer, which was especially hard for Grant. He hated arguments. He loved the good times, loved to laugh, loved to be with friends and dance the night away. When I kept pressuring him about the wedding, and then got angry when he would not commit a date, his mouth turned down at the edges. His forehead scrunched into furrows, and he tried to hide his thoughts by refusing to look at me. Before my eyes, he turned into a little boy. A spoiled one.
Then in August victory was declared against Japan. Grant came home again three weeks later. He was very excited. He said he had a chance to start an airfreight company with a couple of army buddies. They would be based in the countryside north of London, and fly all over Europe. But it meant that he would not be coming back to live in America.
Oh, perhaps I knew it even then. Perhaps that was why I insisted, and refused to hear his objections. But by that time I had been living in an impossible situation at home for almost a year. I couldn't tell my folks that they had been right all along, and I had been wrong. I couldn't. So I calmly told Grant that it was no problem, I would come and live with him in England. I would simply move to that little village where he had been staying.
Grant tried his best to dissuade me. He did everything but break off the engagement. Which, of course, was what he wanted to do. But Grant was not the kind of man to face up to adversity. His way of dealing with problems was to hop in a plane and fly away from them.
He said yes to all my plans, his mouth forming the word while his eyes said no. But I heard what I wanted to hear. Of course, I later realized he hoped all along that I would not find a way over.
I did not tell my family a thing, but I had to tell my workmates, after swearing them to secrecy. I could not afford a plane ticket—back then, three Atlantic crossings by air cost as much as a new house. And there were no passenger ships operating that close to the war's end. Even the
Queen Elizabeth
and the
Queen Mary,
the finest passenger ships ever built, had been turned into troop carriers. But because my company was big in the shipping business, and because of all our military connections, my boss searched and finally found me a berth. I waited until the day before my departure to send Grant a telegram, telling him that I was coming.
My friends at work threw a big bash for me. I had let them all believe that Grant was begging me to come, and the plans for our wedding were set. The lies I had told stuck in my throat, and my smile felt frozen to my face as I accepted their envy and best wishes and hugs. I spent the entire party gazing around the room, asking myself if I would ever see any of these people again, and wondering what on earth I had gotten myself into.
The night before I was to leave, I told my sister. We had a good old cry together. Then I wrote my parents a note. That took almost five hours. I kept crumpling up the sheets and starting over. I did not want to let any trace of my bitterness seep through. Goodness only knew when I would see them again.
THE TRANSOM CAB that took me across London was high and boxy and had two cracked windows and no heat. The driver sat out front, his seat open to the weather. He was bundled up in a greatcoat and scarf, with a battered cap pulled down over his ears. His hands were chapped as red as burning coals, and he smoked a cigarette the entire trip, puffing and snorting and hawking without ever taking the thing from his lips.
My first view of London frightened me. I felt a little light-headed in any case. My cough was not as persistent, but I could feel the flush of fever. It only made what I was seeing beyond my dirty cracked window seem even more unreal.
I thought I knew what it meant to live through the war years. Back home in America, more families than I cared to count had flown little flags from their front porches, signaling to the world that they had lost a loved one in Europe or Africa or Asia. But in that short journey across London, I learned that America had been spared more than I had ever dreamed possible.
Destruction was everywhere. One building would be completely intact, and the next would be nothing but a pile of rubble. Men and women still worked in the flat metal helmets I had seen in the Movietone News, and several times I saw real bombs that had been dug from the wreckage.
The city seemed too spent to reform itself fully for the new day. Clouds hung down heavy like a sunlit shroud. Distant buildings were gray silhouettes cut from the shadows of the past five years. Church spires rose in the mist like cardboard cutouts. The River Thames was a silent gray mirror, revealing nothing about this enigmatic land.
I had no trouble buying my ticket at Paddington, which was good, because I was beginning to feel much worse. I showed the agent the card with Grant's address, accepted the ticket, and gave him a large bill. I asked for the platform and scooped up my change. I searched, but could not find a porter. My cases were beginning to feel very heavy.
The crowded station was far too quiet. I realized the city had seemed the same way, but it was only here in the station's enclosed space that I recognized how subdued everyone was. And pale. The faces around me looked as if they had not seen the sun in years. Even the children had dark circles under their eyes. The station held the atmosphere of a giant funeral procession, people silenced by a shared sorrow. Or so it seemed to me.
By the time I reached my platform I was feeling so sweaty and weak that my thoughts flitted in and out of my head. I was definitely running a fever. Down at the far end, where the great curved steel-and-glass station opened to the elements, a heavy snow began to fall.
When we arrived at Reading, where I had to change for the local train to Arden, I was feeling very ill. Thankfully, I did not have to wait long for my train. I collapsed into my seat, and immediately fell into a very troubled sleep. I was perspiring heavily, but I did not have the strength to take off my coat.
I would have missed Arden entirely, except for the fact that the train ended there. I started to wakefulness when the conductor came through, clanging doors and shouting for all to change here. My suitcases weighed a ton. I dragged them and myself off to the platform. It was snowing so hard I could scarcely see the little brick station building. I craned and searched, and began calling Grant's name. He had to be there. I had come all this way for him, and I needed him desperately.
"Is everything all right, Miss?"
The conductor's face swam in front of me. He had a gray walrus moustache and very concerned eyes. I mumbled, "My fiancé. . . he was supposed, supposed to be here."
"You look all done in, Miss. Here, come inside the station for a tick." He picked up my cases. "You say someone was to meet you?"
"Yes, Grant, he's my fiancé. He was, he promised, he asked me to marry . . . "
"Miss? Are you all right?"
I opened my mouth to say I wanted to see Grant, but my legs chose that moment to give way. I would have dropped to the snow-covered concrete, except the conductor moved swiftly to catch me. The last thing I knew, he was shouting for someone to get out right smart and give him a hand.
The next few days passed in a blur. Waking and sleeping melted together. I dreamed that Grant had come to rescue me, and then he disappeared, and when I woke up and wanted to go look for him, hands pressed me back into the bed. I cried his name and wept, because I was afraid if I didn't go after him, he would be gone forever.
I awoke one morning, and knew the worst was over. I was so weak I could not sit up without help. My cough sounded like a cement truck. But I could feel that the fever had finally eased. I looked around me, seeing things clearly for the very first time. I was in a long room with maybe a dozen beds, all of them full. My bed was hard and the sheets stiff with starch, and the room smelled of disinfectant and medicine. At the room's far end, a tiny Christmas tree stood on a table draped with a sheet. I stared at it for the longest time, and knew two things with utter certainty. How I knew was not important. There was simply no room for questioning. I had missed Christmas, and Grant was gone.
"You're awake then, are you? Excellent." A matron in a uniform so stiff it rustled as she walked came over to stand beside my bed. "You were beginning to worry us."
Her no-nonsense manner helped me to focus. "Where am I?"
"Arden Clinic. The women's ward."
"What day is it?"
"The twenty-seventh of December. You've been here for five days." She inserted a thermometer into my mouth, grasped my wrist in strong fingers, lifted the watch pinned to her lapel, and took my pulse. She inspected the thermometer, made a notation in the metal file by my bed, and announced, "We've finally managed to get your temperature down. Doctor will be pleased. Now you've just enough time to have a bite of breakfast before Doctor makes his rounds."
"I'm not hungry." Hearing the date made me certain the other fact was also true. Grant was gone. A tear trickled down my face. It was all the crying I had the strength for.
"Don't be silly." She took my refusal to eat as a personal affront. "You've hardly had a bite for days."
She waved an orderly over, and together they lifted me up to a sitting position. She sent him for a tray, and rolled a little table in front of me. "Now I expect you to eat everything, do you hear me?"
I did as I was told, though I didn't taste a thing. I had scarcely finished when the doctor arrived. He was a young man, but he had the face of one who had seen far too much suffering, and his hair was already changing from gray to white. He listened to my chest, had me cough a few times, then settled the stethoscope around his neck. "Your name is Emily Robbins, is that correct?"
"Yes."
"We had to go through your personal effects, I'm afraid. Couldn't be helped. We noticed from your passport that you've just arrived here in this country. We found a card with the name Grant Rockwell and an address here in Arden."
I started to say that he was my fiance, but something stopped me. Instead, another tear escaped to trickle down my cheek.
My show of emotion made the doctor uncomfortable. He cleared his throat, inspected the chart in his lap, and said, "We've had the police stop by that address several times. No one was home, I'm afraid. Were you expected?"
I decided it would be best to shake my head. But I could not stop another tear from sliding down my cheek.
Again the doctor cleared his throat. "You've been suffering from pneumonia. We've given you rather a large dose of penicillin intravenously, and seem to have brought it under control. But you are still quite weak, and will need to be kept here and observed for a few days more. In the meantime, is there anyone we can contact to inform them where you are?"
I whispered, "No."
He gave me an odd look. "Surely someone must be wondering where you were over Christmas. If you'll just—"
"No. There isn't anyone."
"Well." Exasperated, the doctor rose to his feet. "I don't have time to bother with this. If you change your mind, feel free to speak with the Sister."
I spent the rest of that day and the next dozing, waking to eat and take little halting trips down the ward. The women in the other beds watched my progress in silence, but I could hear them whispering when I had passed. I was the mystery woman, an American who had just dropped off the boat and landed in this village clinic.
Visiting hours were the worst. For three hours each afternoon the ward was filled with strangers. After they had stopped by the beds, they would peer openly at me. I had become the ward's favorite topic of conversation.