A Song At Twilight (2 page)

‘Well, it was until they built the airfield,’ he grinned. ‘I think we must have made quite a difference to the rural atmosphere. Anyway, shall we have a snifter now that we’re here? We can sit outside with Hughie – they’ve got a bit of a garden with a few seats. You’re not in too much of a hurry to see the house, are you?’

‘I have to admit I’m thirsty after that long train journey,’ she said as Andrew carried out a pint of beer for himself and lemonade for herself and Hughie. There were a few other customers already there, sprawled on benches in the sunshine – pilots in flying jackets and two or three WAAFs in their soft blue-grey uniform. Alison leaned back and let her eyes travel round the old stone walls of the inn and the nearby cottages, wondering what stories they could tell.

Andrew glanced up as one of the pilots approached them. ‘Here comes Tubby Marsh to say hello. Come on, Tub, park your bottom here and try to behave yourself.’

Alison followed his glance and felt her heart move a little. The man coming towards them was about the same age as Andrew, in his late twenties, and Alison had known him ever since before the war had started. For a long time, he and Andrew had flown in the same squadron but now they were both Squadron Leaders, although still in the same Wing. He wasn’t married but he’d had a string of girlfriends, and Alison could see the attraction. Chubby he might be, but his fair, boyish face had an engaging cheekiness that came as a relief from the serious business of fighting a war. Most of the pilots, especially when going through the major battles, treated life with a flippancy that masked their real fears, but with Tubby it had always seemed natural and unforced.

The rotund pilot beamed at Alison and sat down beside her. He took a sip from his tankard and said, ‘I see you’re still going in for self-denial and punishment. Why you ever married this buffoon, when you could have had me, I’ve never been able to understand.’

Alison smiled. ‘I didn’t know you then,’ she pointed out, and he thought for a moment, then nodded.

‘That must be it, then. Knew you must have some reason. Pity, though.’ He drank again and winked at Hughie. ‘And how’s this young feller-me-lad, eh? Remember your Uncle Tubby, do you?’

‘She married me because she knew a good bet when she saw one,’ Andrew told him. ‘And because I knew the minute I set eyes on her that I wasn’t going to let anyone else have her.’

Alison looked from one to the other, then turned away, afraid that her thoughts might show. She nodded towards the inn sign, painted along the front of the long, low building. ‘That’s an unusual name – the Who’d Have Thought It. D’you know why it’s called that?’

‘Probably because the whole village is the last thing you expect to see when you come down that fearsome hill!’ Andrew said. ‘It’s pretty old. Francis Drake used to live nearby, at Buckland Abbey – remember we passed it just up the road? All the land hereabouts, and this village, would have been part of the estate. This old inn must have quite a history.’

‘It’ll get a bit more, now that the RAF’s moved in,’ Tubby observed with a grin. ‘Especially the Poles! I gather half of them are counts or princes or something, and they’re
all
a hit with the ladies. You’ll have to watch this pretty wife of yours, Andy.’ He looked at her with frank admiration. ‘That lovely frock is exactly the same shade as your eyes, and exactly the same as the sky when we’re flying above the clouds. How do you always manage to dress like a princess, when other women are cutting up old clothes?’

‘I’m cutting up old clothes too,’ she told him. ‘This was one of my deb dresses. In a year or two it will be a blouse and it’ll probably finish up as a scarf. Or even a handkerchief,’ she added ruefully, ‘if this war goes on for as long as Mr Churchill seems to think it will.’ She changed the subject. ‘Are there many wives here?’

Tubby set down his tankard. ‘Well, not many of the blokes are married. Didn’t have the sense that old Andy here had when he snapped you up. Anyway, ninety per cent of them are only about nineteen or twenty – haven’t had time to get caught yet. There are the WAAFs, though. They’re having a camp built just up the road from Buckland Monachorum – the next village. There’s a handy little footpath from there down through the fields to the Drake Manor Inn.’ He winked. ‘I dare say a few will be using that – quite a lovers’ lane, it’ll be. Probably give it a try myself, one fine evening.’

‘Tubby!’ she remonstrated. ‘Don’t you ever think of anything but girls?’

‘Not when I’m down here with my feet on the ground,’ he said. ‘Don’t give ’em a thought when I’m in the air, though.’

Alison bit her lip. She had begun to relax in the banter but Tubby’s words were a sharp reminder that the war was still being fought and that he and Andrew would be fighting it. She still had nightmares about the day Andrew had crashed – the realisation that he hadn’t returned from the sortie, the anxious wait for a phone call telling her that he had landed safely somewhere else, and then the news that he was injured. Guiltily, she had hoped that he would be kept out of the air completely, but she’d known as soon as she saw him in his hospital bed that he would be flying again at the first possible moment.

‘Look at Douglas Bader,’ he’d said. ‘If he can fly with tin legs, I’m darned sure I can with real ones. A few broken bones aren’t going to beat me. Anyway, the docs say they’re stronger after a break.’

She caught Andrew’s eyes on her now and knew that he understood what she was thinking. He gave her a little nod and said, ‘Come on, darling, you must be dying to see our new home. And Hughie’s getting tired. You’ve had a long train journey. Let’s be on our way, shall we?’

‘You mean you don’t want to sit here making conversation with me,’ Tubby said mournfully. ‘Well, I don’t blame you. I know I wouldn’t want to hang about with my pals if I were old Andy here, with a lovely wife to take home.’ He picked up his tankard again. ‘Run along, children. Enjoy yourselves. Don’t worry about poor old Tubby, left here all alone to cry into his ale.’

‘If you’re here all alone it’ll be for the first time,’ Andrew told him heartlessly, tossing back the last of his own beer. ‘We’ll not be halfway up the street before you’re flirting with the barmaid. Come on, Alison, let’s leave the old phoney to drown his sorrows. You’ll be seeing plenty of him, more’s the pity.’

‘You certainly will,’ Tubby said, winking at Alison. ‘I’m expecting a permanent invitation to
chez
Knight once you’re settled in. Parties every night, that’s what Andy’s promised us.’

‘You’ll be welcome any time,’ Alison said sincerely, getting up to follow Andrew to the door. She looked down at him and their eyes met for a moment. ‘You know that.’

The village street was quiet. A couple of women stood outside the little shop across the road, holding baskets over their arms as they chatted. The sides of the valley rose towards the blue sky, the trees tinged with auburn and gold. It seemed impossible to believe that there was a war on; that not far away, in another country, people were killing and being killed; that her own husband, whose arm she was holding now, would soon be back in the thick of it, risking both his life and their happiness; and that without those risks, taken by so many young men, all such happiness and freedom, and the very peace of this tiny village, might be lost for ever.

She glanced again at Tubby, remembering the last time they had met, only a week or two ago, before he and Andrew had been moved from Manston in Kent to this newer airfield in Devonshire. Then she turned back to her husband.

‘Let’s go and look at the house,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and see where we shall be living.’

‘RAF Harrowbeer?’ John Hazelwood frowned slightly, as if trying to remember something. ‘Where’s that?’

‘It’s near Plymouth,’ Ben said. ‘On the edge of Dartmoor. They were going to build Plymouth Airport there but they hadn’t got round to it when the war started, and now they’ve put an RAF station there instead. D’you know it, Dad?’

‘I know where it is. I used to go out to Tavistock on the bus when the regiment was at Crownhill, in Plymouth. A friend of mine was vicar at the church there.’ John had been an Army chaplain before retiring to become a vicar in the Hampshire village of Ashdown. ‘Isn’t it somewhere near Yelverton?’

‘That’s right. Funny sort of place – not what you’d expect of a Dartmoor village at all. It looks more like a spa, with Georgian houses all round a big village green.’ He grinned. ‘The ones on the south side are mostly shops, and guess what they’ve done? Taken off the top storeys of every one, so that the planes won’t hit them on take-off ! They look like a collection of shacks now, while the houses on the other side are still all right.’

‘Is it an operational airfield?’ his mother asked. She already had two sons serving – Ian, who had followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the Army as a chaplain, and Peter, now a Lieutenant-Commander in the Royal Navy, while her daughter Alexandra was a VAD nurse in a naval hospital near Portsmouth. All were facing danger, either from fighting or bombing and, like so many other mothers, she lived in dread of the orange or brown envelope that would bring a telegram telling her her son was missing or dead. She caught herself up and shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, that’s a silly question. Of course it’s operational. Don’t take any notice of me. I hope you’ll have good accommodation, anyway.’

Ben laughed and John looked at his wife with understanding and took her hand. ‘He’ll be better housed and fed than a lot of people in their own homes. The Services look after their men – if only because they’re valuable pieces of equipment!’

‘Like a plane or a lorry,’ Ben said, grinning. ‘They’re not going to let me go rusty, Mum, don’t worry.’

‘You don’t sit still long enough to go rusty,’ Olivia Hazelwood said. She looked at him with resignation. ‘I can see you don’t regret having joined the RAF, anyway.’

Neither John nor Olivia had wanted their youngest son to volunteer so quickly, but Ben had refused to wait until he was called up. He had signed on the moment he left school at eighteen, his ambition right from the start to be a pilot, and he’d passed his training with honours. Since then, he seemed to have led a charmed life, coming through unscathed where many of his friends had been killed or badly injured. He took it blithely for granted, never dreaming how many sleepless nights his mother had spent, thinking of him and her other children and wondering which she would lose first.

Her son’s eyes glowed. ‘Mum, it’s the best thing I ever did. You can’t imagine what it’s like – being up there, above the clouds, all on your own in the sky. It’s like being in another world. I can’t think of anything better, I really can’t. And to be able to do that
and
have a crack at the Germans – well, I still have to keep pinching myself to make sure it’s true. And the others are a grand bunch – all about the same age as me, nineteen or twenty. We’re all dead keen to get down to Harrowbeer.’

‘Well, make the most of the time you’ve got with us, won’t you,’ Olivia said quietly. ‘Have you told Jean where you’re going?’

‘Haven’t seen her yet. I came straight in to you. Is she around?’

‘She’s taken Hope down to the Suttons’. Why don’t you go and meet her? I expect she’ll be on her way back by now – it’s almost Hope’s teatime.’

‘Might as well.’ Ben uncoiled his long body from the armchair and loped out through the French windows. His parents watched him cross the garden and let himself out through the tall wooden gate set in the stone wall, and then looked at each other.

‘Oh, John,’ Olivia said, her voice trembling a little, ‘he’s so young. Just a child, still. And the way he’s talking about the others being young as well – doesn’t he realise, even now—?’ Her voice broke and she put her fingers to her lips as if to control their quivering. ‘Doesn’t he realise that it’s because so many have already died?’

John Hazelwood squeezed her hand. ‘I know, my love. But that’s the way the young have always been. They all think they’re invincible, even when there’s overpowering evidence that they’re not. Ben is quite confident that nothing will happen to him, and perhaps that’s his protection. After all, he’s been flying for two years now and nothing
has
happened to him. As for us – we have to put our faith in God.’

‘And how many others have done that?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Hundreds – thousands – who have done just the same and yet still been killed. You’ve been in the Army, John – you served in the Great War. You know just how much protection God gives!’

There was a brief silence. Tears slid down Olivia’s cheeks. Her husband lifted his head and met her anguished eyes.

‘John, I’m sorry. I never meant to say that …’

‘It’s all right,’ he answered quietly. ‘You’re not the only one to ask such questions. And the only answer I can give you is to remind you of the way in which His own Son died – one of the most cruel and agonising of deaths. There’s no more I can say than that.’ He paused, then added, ‘I had to remind myself many times in the trenches. Watching fine young men die in the most squalid circumstances. Trying to give them strength. Writing to their families … Many, many times.’

‘But you still kept your faith,’ she said. ‘You never lost it.’

‘Didn’t I?’ he said ruefully. ‘Well, I think I mislaid it a few times! It was certainly very hard to find. But there was nothing I could do but act as if it were still there – and one day I woke up and found it back, as strong as ever. The dying, the killing, the suffering – they’d almost destroyed it. But the courage and the cheerfulness and the stubborn, stalwart faith of some of those young men –
they
were what saved it. And saved me as well. After that, I could go on and do my job, and feel in touch with my God again.’

‘And now you never question it.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I question it. When I hear about the bombing and think of all those innocent people killed, when I think of all that terrible suffering, happening all over again, I can’t help questioning it. But it’s always happened, hasn’t it? There have always been wars. And what’s the use of a faith that falters when it doesn’t understand? I ask my questions, just as we all do, and then I remind myself again of the Cross. And somehow that helps me to go on.’