The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir. Jennifer Ryan
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Quail began the opening, and I entered with the wonderful tune. It was perfect for showing off my top notes. When I finished, Prim gave me a little nod, as if to say Well done, and I felt a surge of delight. At long last my skills have been noticed!
I glanced over and caught Henry’s eyes, and it was as if the world slowed down as our gaze met across the crowded room. He smiled, his whole face lit with joy and love, until Venetia nudged him with some remark or other. Trust her to interfere.
In the next song, Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General’, Mrs Quail started playing faster to trip me up on purpose. It was hilarious.
‘You should be on stage as a comedian, not a singer, Kitty,’ Hattie joked. Her colour is lilac, pretty and uplifting, and I have no idea why she’s such good friends with vile Venetia and awful Angela Quail. Perhaps she’s trying to rescue them from utter loathsomeness.
The pregnancy is making her tired – I could tell from her big brown eyes sagging with the weight of the evening – and yet she’s always so lively, perking us up with her jokes and smiles. It must be difficult for her with Victor stuck on a ship in the Atlantic. I still can’t get used to them being married. They were friends for years and then, as if someone turned on a giant light, war was about to break out and they fell in love and got married within the week. It’s happening everywhere, apparently. Obviously, it’s all about death. How strange that love and death suddenly become so tightly knit in a time of war.
Why everyone’s getting married in a hurry
If you’re in love, why wait for a tomorrow that never comes?
People are being moved around, so if you want to stay with someone, you’d better marry them
Do you want to have children before it’s all too late?
Do you want to be notified when your someone special is killed?
Do you want to get some money if they’re killed in action?
Do you want someone special to pray for, live for? Who will be left at the end, after all?
As we left, I gave David a peck on the cheek. ‘Don’t let Venetia get you down,’ I whispered, feeling the need to give him a word or two of support. ‘You need to forget about her, find someone who’ll treat you right.’
He frowned at me. ‘What are you saying, Kitty?’ he said, a cocky smirk coming over his mouth. ‘Just because you’re labouring after a lost cause, don’t think we all are.’
I was shocked. The old David – the David before training – would never have said something like that. I wasn’t entirely sure I understood what he meant. Who exactly is the lost cause around here?
Henry was leaving, so I had to forget about all that and rush off to steal a last moment with him. He was in the hall fetching his jacket – the special bomber pilot’s one with leather and fur lining.
‘When will I see you again?’ I asked, standing in front of him on my toes, my eyes level with his lips, soft and beckoning beneath his neat moustache.
‘You’ll see me, young lady, when we’ve fought off those Nazis,’ he said, taking my chin between his fingers. I tilted my face upward, closing my eyes, waiting for our lips to meet—
But then Mama came through and said we had to go, so we were forced apart. There was a smile on his face as I pushed my arms through the sleeves of my coat and followed Mama and Silvie out into the cold blackness outside. But as I turned to take one last look at him, he gave me a wink, and my heart exploded with joy, knowing only one truth. He loves me, and soon we will be together.
Wednesday, 24th April, 1940
Today my son left for war, and I have adopted a brittle façade, a limp smile that wavers in and out like a broken tune on a worn-out wireless. I keep trembling as I remember the last war, all those soldiers who never returned, the neighbour’s lad gone only a month before the telegram arrived.
They say this war is different, but a horror overcomes me if I dare to think of David out there, trying to stay sane through the gore. They say we have bombers and tanks and there won’t be trenches like last time. But when I close my eyes, all I hear is the unbearable yells of men in pain, crushed by the colossal theatre of war.
You see, I saw them come home after the last war, the cripples, the amputees, the ones so disturbed they’d never sleep soundly again, haunted by their dead friends, guilt-stricken that they were somehow allowed to live. They were never the same again.
This morning was filled with much running up and down the stairs, the fresh scents of shampoo, hair cream, and clean laundry cutting the fraught air. I watched out of the hall window for the van, as slow, grey clouds mottled the outside world. Ralph Gibbs from the shop was leaving too, and Mrs Gibbs was driving them both to Litchfield in her grocery van.
‘Look at you,’ I said as David came downstairs for the last time. He was wearing his uniform and looking all tidy and grown up. I straightened his already straight collar; I just wanted to touch him, to feel his mass under my fingertips. He looked down at me and grinned in his cheery way.
‘Well, best be off then, Mum,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll be in trouble before I’ve even started.’ He laughed a little, and I clenched my mouth into a tight smile so that I didn’t cry.
As he opened the front door, the clouds broke apart, and the sun came out, making the wet trees and grass glisten silently for a brief moment. Then a fine rain began, sprinkling the air with a dewy sparkle that made it feel almost unreal, like a slip in time.
We said goodbye at the gate in the ethereal drizzle. With a glance back at the house, his home for all these years, he put his arms around me.
I gripped him tight.
‘You know you don’t have to go,’ I whimpered, praying for one insane moment that he’d change his mind.
He smiled and wiped away a tear. ‘Chin up, Mum! Someone’s got to teach those Jerries a lesson, eh?’
Pulling away, he ambled off to the van, and I studied his broad back, his lazy lilting walk, his state of being that would no longer be mine to watch, mine to grasp. A vision came back to me of him as a boy, scampering down this very path, late for school, turning and grinning, lopsided by his heavy satchel.
And just as I remembered, he turned back to me then with that same look, as if the world were a great adventure for him to behold and relish, and I felt the rain washing the tears down my face for all our precious years together.
He got into the van and opened the window to wave, and then, as it revved up and pulled away, his lips touched the palm of his hand and he blew me a kiss, something he hasn’t done since he was a child. It was as if on the edge of manhood he too remembered everything we had shared, that he was the man who was still, in his heart, my little boy, late for school.
And then he was gone.
I went into the house and moped around the kitchen, my head throbbing as it does so readily these days. I looked out of the window into the rain that still fell, the grass that still grew, the birds that still sung.
But now I was alone.
After a few dreadful minutes, I got up, unable to help creeping into his small, sparse room, still warm from his presence. Running my hand down his soft blue bedcover, I remembered how many times I’d pulled it over his small frame at bedtime, and kneeling down next to the bed, I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with