Sandlands (14 page)

She could still not quite accustom herself to riding a bike with two. Poppy was too small as yet for the baby seat which Rosa had fitted during a burst of energy in the early weeks of her pregnancy, so she rode with her strapped against her breast, the scarf wound tightly around them both. Bound there, Poppy almost seemed to become a part of her again, less the small independent person she was slowly and perplexingly coming to know and more the extra weight she had been for the long months in the womb, tipping her forwards disproportionately over the handlebars. Heat, too – she was aware of her as heat, that busy, concentrated infant heat, warmer than her own blood – and a heartbeat, merging with her own. This was for her, the protest, the campaigning: keeping the sun undarkened, keeping the earth alive for Poppy. As she reached the leafy fringes of Rendlesham Forest, she rose on her pedals in her buffalo sandals, pushing down harder with each stroke until her anklets jangled.

She dragged her bicycle behind some trees and leant it up with a tangle of others, then stood straight for a moment to ease the crick from her spine and adjust her weight to the vertical. The scarf shaded Poppy's closed eyes and puckered, slightly open mouth as she slept on, re-dreaming the lulling motion of her ride. Lightly, Rosa touched one finger to the downy head, as close as she ever came to prayer.

By the wire, there was quite a crowd already: Kate and Anne-Marie and Linda and most of the Aldeburgh group, some teenagers she didn't recognise, and a couple of carloads from Christian CND in Woodbridge, complete with doved and rainbowed banner. Older, most of these, and standing slightly apart, looking awkward – but Christians could always be relied upon for singing, once everything got going.

‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?' That was Rosa's favourite; it had so much more to say with its gentle, haunting lyrics than the angry chanting that Linda always liked to start. They were all going to link hands, they'd decided, around the perimeter fence, like they'd done at Greenham last year when she didn't yet know she was carrying Poppy, and thirty thousand women gathered to ‘embrace the base' – even if here, today, they were closer to thirty than thirty thousand, forming no complete, unbroken circle but only a brief and flimsy chain. They sat cross-legged on the strip of gravel beneath the wire, its stones already half reclaimed by grass and wild flowers, like the graveyards in the song. One of the teenagers had picked some and threaded them through the fence, and then they all had done the same, so that the mesh was wreathed and garlanded in green. Rosa had taken daisies and slit the juicy stalks with her fingernails, pushing in the severed ends and sliding them through to the hilt of the flower heads, stringing them together like the hand-linked chain of protestors, and had laid it around her head.

‘Uh-oh. Look out, here comes trouble.' Linda's voice held a note that was more of excited glee than warning; she was always spoiling for a fight, was Linda.

The company loosed hands and turned, some of them standing up and brushing themselves down, as the young serviceman approached. He was SP, by his uniform and beret flash – security police rather than an airman. They were always the ones sent out to deal with demonstrations.

‘Hello there, you guys' was his opening – carefully casual, unconfrontational. ‘Lovely day for it.'

Like nightclub doormen, they were always taught to keep things light. This one, though, seemed almost to mean it. He hardly looked older than nineteen or twenty, with Huck Finn freckles and a flop of dark hair in front, even though he was shaved to regulation rawness at the back. And his eyes held a genuinely friendly light. Nice eyes, thought Rosa.

‘Not thinking of making any trouble, I hope?'

‘We've every right to be here,' said Linda, although he'd given no indication that he thought otherwise. ‘A right of peaceful protest. You can't make us leave.'

‘No indeed, ma'am.' He played it deadpan, but Rosa had an inkling he might be laughing at her friend. ‘As long as you don't start making free with the wire cutters.'

Linda harrumphed, trying to look as if she just might do that. One of the Aldeburgh contingent, a man called Terry, began to make a speech, all the familiar arguments about escalation and proliferation, the risk of accidents, and destruction of the planet. Some people thought you had to try and convert them, even the military: sow seeds of change from within. But this was hardly the way; the SP's eyes had lost their warm and open look, grown guarded. It was in the hope of bringing back the gleam that Rosa unwound the chain of daisies from her hair, and held it out to him, fingers reaching out to touch his through the wire.

 

‘What d'you do that for?' Linda demanded, later. They had moved to a quiet spot in the shelter of the trees so that Rosa could feed Poppy. Linda was eating her sandwiches. ‘I mean – a daisy chain,' she said, through a mouthful of humous and alfalfa. ‘Like some dorky kid at primary school. ‘Bloody 'ell, Rosa' – they'll think we're all feeble-minded.'

‘Because he was cute.' Not the whole truth, perhaps, but a partial version of it that Linda might understand.
Peace offering
would have sounded trite, or even like derision, in the circumstances.

Another harrumph – a speciality of Linda's. ‘Cute or not – he's on the other side. He's what we're fighting against, for God's sake. The enemy.'

Rosa watched in entrancement the slow, methodical working of her daughter's mouth at her nipple, felt reverberate through her body the sweet, deep, primal tug, as old as the tides. Wasn't that the point, she thought – not having sides? Not having enemies?

Obliquely, she found herself saying, ‘My mother dated an airman. A British airman, that is, back in the war when Bomber Command were here. At least, I think she did.'

Linda put down her sandwich. ‘Lilian? In the war? Was she old enough?'

‘She'd have been seventeen.' Just a child.

‘But why only “think”?'

‘Oh, I don't know... She never talked about it, you see, not until after the first stroke, and by then she was confused.' The impaired blood flow had dragged her mother back in time, back to when she was young and living at home, as a child. She talked about the pigs, though the farm was broken up and sold in 1947. ‘She didn't know where she was or who she was, who any of us were. She kept calling my dad by other names, you know, towards the end. Joe, she kept saying, and even, once, Charlie. His name was Fred. Imagine that – thirty years married, and your wife doesn't know your name.'

Poor Dad. Poor all of them. Mum was still young, not yet sixty, when she died last year – too young to be felled by emphysema, and then the double strike of cerebral thrombosis. It was a close-run thing, but in the end she couldn't quite hang on long enough to see her granddaughter born.

‘But you think it was true? You think she really had this boyfriend in the RAF?'

‘Maybe. But she'd never mentioned it before, not to Dad, not to anyone. She never even told us she'd worked at the base, let alone met anyone there. And as you say, she was really just a kid.'

Just seventeen – a whole ten years before she met Dad. It was all such a very long time ago, and maybe the truth of it didn't matter, not now that Mum was gone.
Gone
to graveyards, every one
. Rosa gave an involuntary shudder, so that Poppy's pale blue eyes flung wide in consternation.
Long time passing
. Bending over her child, she was caught quite unawares by the springing dew of tears.

 

* * *

 

The boy from the museum lingered to watch as Poppy took her photographs of
Silene conica
and unrolled the fluorescent tape to cordon off the site.

‘Is that it, then?' he said as she stood back, returning her camera to the rucksack.

‘Pretty much. I'll need to log it, of course. For local and national records.'

He nodded, the tawny eyebrows gathered in a slight frown, as if he was trying to think of something suitable to say. And then he apparently abandoned the attempt. ‘So, d'you want to come and see the Cold War Museum?'

It seemed a reasonable exchange.

What detained her, however, was not the battle cabin with its airlock and decontamination shower, nor the signboards chronicling the history of the 81st Tactical Fighter Wing, but something almost incidental, a relic of an older war. A small wall cabinet in the entrance way displayed a black-and-white photograph and beneath it a card of explanatory text. It was actually the background of the photograph, blurred a little by the enlargement, which caught her attention first: something about the configuration of grass and tarmac, of Nissen huts and perimeter wire. It was surely taken where she had been just now, out there beside the runway. In the foreground were a series of disjointed, jagged shapes, which she took to be the lumped and broken pieces of an aeroplane; scored across the width of the photograph was a great dark furrow, gouged through the soft sand by the blade of a wing, like a grotesque parody of the plough.
Swords into ploughshares
, she thought.

Moving closer, she read the short, close-typed notice. An Avro Lancaster bomber of No. 64 Squadron, returning from the Ruhr, had attempted a landing in heavy fog on just two of her four engines, and crashed beside the main runway on 19th December 1944, killing her captain, Pilot Officer Joseph Woodhall, and all six crew.

It must have been the crash site they'd been excavating, in the place where the sand catchfly had appeared: the plane whose debris they were digging for.

Seven young men, and all of them somebody's loved one. Seven young men and an early grave.

 

* * *

 

A year on, and the war was over. Those who were coming home were back now, or would very soon be on their way. Lilian took one flower stalk from the handful she had gathered and threaded it carefully through the mesh of the wire; then she did the same with another, and another. She had found them growing back there, there where it had happened, six months ago today. It wasn't a flower she remembered ever noticing before, not one of the ones that Joe had picked for her, his cranesbills and his chamomiles, and the others whose names were fading already from her memory. She was attracted by its starry pink flowers, and the funny striped seedpods like the domes of a sultan's palace.

Those who were coming home were back, but Joe's body had been laid to rest in the cemetery at Market Drayton by a family she'd never meet, while C for Charlie was buried where it fell, in the sand beside the runway.

Lilian turned away. As she walked back to the gate where her bike was propped, a slight breeze rose, thrumming the wires of the perimeter fence and vibrating the seed heads of the sand catchfly, splitting open one fat, ripe pod and sending puffs of gossamer seeds to trace their dance steps on the sunlit air.

Dr Theodore Whybrow stepped out through the college gate, tightened his scarf, set his sights on the tower of the University Library and contemplated his failings.

Cathedral of the
fens
. It was various East Anglian parish churches which usually laid claim to this contested title: the church of Walpole St Peter in Norfolk; St Mary Magdalene church at Gedney, Lincs; not to mention the ‘cathedral of the marshes' at Blythburgh in his own native Suffolk. Yet somehow the phrase always connected itself in Dr Whybrow's mind with the imperious outline of the University Library. Awareness of the true, prosaic purpose of that tower – for it was in reality no more than a vast bookstack, a repository of copyrighted materials of infrequent interest, encased in a column of brick – did nothing to lessen its power to cow. Perhaps, indeed, the thought of all that weight of learning was part of its oppressive moral authority. ‘Who are you, little man?' it seemed to be saying to him.
Little
man: as insignificant beside those great scholars whose works were housed about its feet as any medieval worshipper before the company of saints and angels. What were the spires and pinnacles of churches and cathedrals, after all? Symbols of the hand of man, reaching towards the heavens for grace? Or, in reality, watchtowers, set over a weak and wayward population – visible reminders of their frailties to the frail.

Twenty-two years ago, fresh from a brilliant PhD, he had been the outstanding young academic in his particular field of literary biography, the emergent expert on his man: William Colstone, the Regency soldier-poet, essayist and dreamer. From his doctoral thesis had sprung a flurry of articles, published in the leading periodicals to universal acclaim, winning him his Fellowship, a university teaching post and national recognition. The next step, naturally, had to be the book. The Whybrow biography was to break the mould, to reset the ground rules for Colstone scholarship; for him personally, it was to be the magnum opus, the masterwork to secure his Chair and a permanent place in the canon.

That was then. Now, he carefully fixed his eyes and mind upon the immediate foreground. The library tower reared up above the line of trees which divided Queens' Road from the green of the Backs. It split opinion, that tower. Whybrow himself, however, had a sneaking admiration for the style he thought of as ‘monumental fascist' when encountered in Milan, and as ‘red-brick God' at Guildford. There was a sense of something cleansing about a spot of unabashed modernism, especially in this city so absorbed by its own past, a place so smugly not red-brick. But the sense was, he feared, illusory. The University Library could intimidate its congregation as effectively as far more ancient hallowed halls. It was a pure conceit, of course, to imbue a building with the animus of its past users, but one with a persistent hold on the popular imagination and to which Whybrow was not immune. And if the vaulted spaces of a church could murmur with the prayerfulness of generations – or their disapproving judgment – then why not also a library?