Secrets

  When the day nurses got into the dining room for their supper, they were greeted by one of the orderlies with the news that Germany had invaded Poland earlier that day. It had been on the six o’clock news, and the wireless was still on, with people discussing what this would mean to England.

  The treaty for the mutual protection of England and Poland had been drawn up after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia six months earlier in March, and a month later all young men between twenty and twenty-two were called up for active service. Neville Chamberlain would attempt now to get an undertaking from Hitler that he would withdraw his troops from Poland, but if that failed, England was duty-bound to declare war on Germany.

  That night Adele lay in bed listening to the other nurses calling goodnight to one another all down the corridor. She had one of the few single rooms. It was tiny, with no room for anything more than a narrow bed, a chest of drawers and a desk which doubled as a dressing-table, but she was grateful for the privacy it gave her.

  Back in Hastings she had always liked the noise and bustle of the nurses’ home. She had never minded girls bursting into her room to chat, borrow things or share a joke. Yet she found it hard to cope with it here. She craved isolation and complete silence. She was irritated by the pettiness of the other nurses’ rows and squabbles. Sometimes she even resented attempts to befriend her. Joan was the only other girl she had any real time for.

  Yet the noise didn’t bother her tonight. She felt soothed by the nurses’ voices in just the way she used to like hearing her grandmother raking the stove at night, or moving her chair.

  Perhaps she was recovering?

  To test herself, she put her hand up to where her engagement ring lay nestling between her breasts, and made herself think of Michael’s face the day he gave it to her. She could see him so clearly, his dark hair gleaming in the sunshine, the way the skin around his eyes crinkled a little as he smiled, and those dark blue eyes looking so intently at her.

  No tears sprang to her eyes this time. Perhaps she had now cried them all. The sadness and the yearning for what she had once had was still there. She still had stabs of shame that she’d been to bed with her brother. Yet she felt more rational about it, after all they didn’t know they were related, and she had done the right thing in going away when she found out.

  All at once she knew it was time to go home and see her grandmother again. She had three days owing to her, and tomorrow she would ask Matron when she could take them.

  ‘Walk, Towzer,’ Honour said as she switched off the wireless. It was Sunday, 3 September and she had just heard the Prime Minister’s speech. Germany had ignored the request to pull their troops out of Poland and consequently war was declared.

  Honour hadn’t expected that Germany would back down, not with that maniac Adolf Hitler at the helm. But she had hoped and prayed for a miracle.

  She had woken early this morning to see clear blue skies, and a light mist hanging low over the river. Even before she had dressed she went outside and took Misty, Adele’s rabbit, from its hutch and sat down on the bench to pet it, as she did every morning.

  A flotilla of swans were on the river, wild geese flew overhead, and the branches on the elderberry tree were sagging with the weight of ripe berries. Everywhere she looked she saw beauty, from the long waving grass beyond her fence to the clump of vivid purple and mauve asters beneath the pink rambling rose, still in flower as it had been since June. She thought it was the kind of day when miracles could happen, but when the broadcast began her heart sank. She might have known that miracles were only a myth.

  Honour could remember so clearly the day the previous war started. It was 4 August, she was thirty-five, Rose thirteen, and they were sitting in the garden shelling peas for dinner when a young boy whizzed down the lane on a bicycle and shouted the news to them. Frank got on his bicycle immediately and rode off into Rye. He reported back that there was great excitement everywhere and all the young men wanted to join up immediately.

  Frank was excited too. But Honour remembered how she had first felt cross that he was behaving like a schoolboy, and later faintly sick. Perhaps it was a premonition that disaster was on its way.

  She had the same feeling again today, so she would walk to Rye harbour with Towzer, and pick blackberries on the way.

  ‘Come, Towzer,’ she called, and smiled as he gambolled towards her. He was part collie, judging by his black and white curly coat, but she couldn’t imagine what the other part was, for his head was large, he had only a stump instead of a tail and his legs were very long. He had been dreadfully thin, his coat coming out in clumps and riddled with fleas, when she found him outside her door four months ago. In a way it was very much like when Adele first arrived, Honour had to coax him to eat, dose him with medicine, and for a while it seemed as if he wouldn’t survive.

  But he did, and just as Adele’s arrival had turned Honour’s life around, Towzer’s had done the same.

  Honour was bereft after Adele disappeared. The brief letter of explanation told her nothing believable. She couldn’t understand why Adele couldn’t have come home first and confided in her about what was really wrong. Each time Michael came to the cottage looking for Adele, Honour was left feeling even more confused and upset because of his obvious pain. Sometimes he was full of anger, sometimes he just cried like a child, and she was very afraid that he might take his own life for that vital spark in him that had always been so attractive had gone out.

  Then he suddenly stopped calling, and though Honour told herself that was good, for it meant he was accepting the situation, it also meant she was left with no one to share her grief and anxiety with. She began to let things slide. She hardly ate, she didn’t clear up, or tend the garden. Sometimes she would merely feed the chickens and rabbits and crawl back into bed. A small voice kept telling her she was sliding down a slippery slope towards insanity, but why should she care, no one else did.

  Then late one afternoon when it was pouring with rain, she heard the scratching at the door and curiosity got the better of her. She opened it, and there sat a dog, a pitiful, mangy-looking thing, looking up at her with pleading eyes.

  Maybe she had gone a little mad, because she felt he had come to her for a special reason. She offered him some leftover rabbit stew and when he seemed unable to eat it, she fed him by hand, a tiny piece at a time, then made a bed for him in the shed, for he was too flea-ridden to bring inside.

  He was still there the following morning, his stump of a tail trying to wag when he saw her. He ate a little more rabbit, then slumped down again as if exhausted, and her heart went out to him.

  It took a long time to make him well again. Sometimes when she brought him food he’d just look at her with his big, sad eyes as if wondering why she was bothering because he wanted to die. But each day she got him to eat a little more, and she wormed him, treated his fleas, bathed and brushed him.

  It was when she brought him into the cottage that he finally began to eat with enthusiasm. Honour thought now that they had healed each other: she fed him, he gave her adoration. They needed each other.

  If she had known a dog could be such good company, she would have got one years before. To be woken in the morning by a cold nose pressing on her face made her smile. It was good to have him bounding by her side as she collected wood. And in the evenings when she listened to the wireless he lay with his chin on her feet and sighed with contentment. Maybe if Towzer hadn’t bucked her up so much she would never have found the strength to go into Hastings and find out if the Matron at the hospital knew where Adele had gone.

  There was no one out on the marsh despite it being such a beautiful day. Honour guessed that almost everyone in England had listened to the broadcast and would spend the rest of the day discussing it with neighbours, friends and family. She trudged across the shingle bank towards the sea, throwing sticks for Towzer to retrieve as she thought about Adele.

  Now that war had come she would be right at the heart of any air r
aids as Honour guessed that Germany would target London’s dockyards. The thought of her granddaughter in danger filled her with exactly the same kind of foreboding that she’d felt when Frank went off to war. She could remember standing on the beach, looking across to France and trying to will the war to end so he could come home. Now she couldn’t even reach the sea because of the rolls of barbed wire intended to deter an invasion.

  Michael would be in the thick of the fighting, and Honour wondered how he was now, and whether he had got over Adele. Somehow she doubted it. He might go through the motions of carousing with the other young airmen, but he was a sensitive, single-minded lad, and the anguish he’d suffered after Adele disappeared would have scarred him deeply.

  ‘But why did she suddenly decide I was wrong for her?’ he’d cried to Honour. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  It did make some sense to Honour when Michael had eventually let it slip they’d spent a weekend in London together just prior to her disappearance. Honour had been so certain Adele had put that nasty incident at The Firs behind her, for she’d seemed so ecstatically happy with Michael. But maybe in an intimate moment it had all come back, and later Adele felt unable to proceed with an engagement and marriage when lovemaking revived such terrible memories.

  Honour had been compelled to suggest this to Michael and his reply had made her weep.

  ‘I’d thought of that too,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t believe it was the reason, as she seemed as happy as me that weekend, but it’s the only thing which makes any sense. I would have continued to love her just the same, though, even if she never slept with me again for the rest of our lives.’

  Honour knew that however unrealistic that was, Michael believed it. He truly loved Adele, would walk on hot coals for her. And Honour doubted that he’d ever feel that way again about any other woman.

  It was around three in the afternoon when Honour made her way back to the cottage. She’d deliberately walked herself to the point of exhaustion, for with so much on her mind she wanted to go home and sleep for hours.

  Towzer seemed to understand how troubled she was, for he had not run off chasing birds like he usually did, but stayed close to her side, every now and then looking up at her with mournful eyes.

  It was his bark that alerted her someone was coming towards them. The person was too far away for Honour to see who it was, but appeared to be waving at her.

  She stopped in her tracks, her hands shielding her eyes from the sun to see better. The person was running towards her, and suddenly she realized it had to be Adele.

  Her heart began to thump with joy. She tried to run, but could only hobble.

  ‘Granny!’ she heard over the crunch of shingle under her feet and no sound had ever been sweeter.

  She stood still and watched Adele come the last two hundred yards or so. She moved like a young deer, jumping over obstacles, hair flying out behind her on the breeze.

  Honour involuntarily opened her arms, tears of joy coursing down her face. She was right after all, it was a day for a miracle.

  Chapter Twenty

  1940

  ‘Well done, Nurse Talbot,’ Matron said as she handed Adele her SRN certificate and badge and the dark blue belt which signified she was now fully qualified. ‘And please don’t get any ideas about getting married. England needs her nurses now even more than ever.’

  Adele smiled. Maybe other nurses were falling recklessly in love because of the war, but not her. She might have learned to live without Michael, but no other man she’d met even came close to making her forget him.

  Matron moved on to Joan Marlin to give her a badge, belt and a similar warning about marriage. Later, all eight of the nurses who had passed their final exams would receive their new blue and white striped dresses and the more elaborate starched cap. They would have an increase in salary and move up to the second floor of the nurses’ home to slightly larger rooms, but best of all they were no longer student nurses. They were fully qualified.

  Adele grinned at Joan. Tonight they would go out to celebrate, a few drinks then off to a dance somewhere. It had been a long haul, but they’d made it. Adele knew now how Michael felt when he first got his flying wings.

  It was 12 May. In two months’ time Adele would be twenty-one, and so far the war had not affected civilian life very much. They called it the Phoney War. Sugar, butter and bacon had been rationed back in January, some goods were getting scarce in the shops and miles and miles of barbed wire and mines had been put along the beaches for fear of invasion. The main grouse was about the inconvenience of blackout. It annoyed everyone that they couldn’t get around easily after dark, and they resented the ARP wardens who policed the streets looking for chinks of light coming through curtains. Absurdly, half the people brought into Casualty at night had suffered falls or banged into lamp-posts in the dark. And London hospitals were much less busy, dealing only with emergencies – anyone requiring an operation was sent to a hospital out of town.

  Men and women in uniform everywhere were as much of a reminder of the real business of war as the casualty lists in the newspapers, but for most ordinary people it was still a distant danger which had not yet encroached on their lives.

  Denmark and Norway had been invaded in April, then two days ago the German army entered Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. On the same day Winston Churchill became head of the Coalition Government in place of Neville Chamberlain who had resigned a few days before.

  Yet however peaceful it was at home right now, Churchill’s stirring broadcasts on the wireless left no one in any doubt that everyone in the British Isles would be called upon very soon to face real war, in the air, the sea and on the ground. There was a sort of buzz in the air, anticipation and indeed excitement. Most people took the view that the sooner it came, the quicker it would be over.

  ‘Cor! This is a bit of all right,’ Joan said gleefully as she and Adele claimed their new room on the second floor after coming off duty. Adele had long since moved out of her single room and into a double with Joan, but it had been very cramped. This new one was at the back of the nurses’ home, and though there was only a view of dismal rooftops and a few scrubby trees it was much quieter. It was also much larger, with its own washbasin and even room for two easy-chairs.

  ‘The beds are just as hard,’ Adele said, giving hers a test by bouncing on it. ‘But it’s super to have some space at last. And you’ve got to be tidier. I’m sick of picking up your stuff.’

  The two friends had begun sharing a room just after war was declared, following Adele’s first trip home to see her grandmother. Going home again had been cathartic. While she was bombarded with poignant memories of Michael, the routine chores of stock-piling wood, feeding the chickens and rabbits, cooking and cleaning, helped to pull her together. She saw that she was strong, both physically and mentally, she had developed character and determination, and it was almost certainly the harshness of her early life that had made her such a good nurse. She resolved then to stop moping, to make new friends, to see new places. Giving up her single room was the first step when she returned to Whitechapel, and with noisy, fun-loving Joan as a room-mate she soon found she didn’t get much time to brood on the past.

  ‘I s’pose you think you’re perfect,’ Joan retorted. ‘What about all the times you’ve woken me up with yer bleedin’ nightmares?’

  Adele blushed. In her waking hours she was fine, but she couldn’t stop Michael invading her sleep. She told Joan she couldn’t remember what the nightmares were about, but in fact it was always the same one, and so vivid she couldn’t forget it.

  In her dream she was walking out on the marshes, and she’d look up to see a plane overhead. She knew it was Michael as he’d tip his wing the way her grandmother had described. Round and round he’d go over her head, almost like a circus act, and she’d be laughing and waving her hands to him. Then suddenly there would be a bang, and his plane would go into a spiral. Flames would shoot out and she’d hear his voice above it
screaming for help.

  She’d had plenty of nightmares ever since she ran off from Hastings, but this one had started a few days after war was declared. She thought it was probably because she’d read in the papers that a young trainee pilot had been killed at Biggin Hill on taking a Spitfire up for the first time. Since then she’d heard of many more pilots being killed, both through enemy fire over France and accidents while still training. She used to scan the newspaper desperately every morning, her heart in her mouth. But she’d made herself stop it now for she knew very well that it wasn’t healthy to be so obsessed.

  ‘I expect I get nightmares because I’m sharing a room with you,’ she shot back at her friend.

  Joan laughed, and not for the first time Adele thought how lucky she was to have her as a friend. Cockney Joan was like sunshine, brightening even the dullest day. Her pretty, freckled face, her mop of unruly red hair and dancing green eyes, coupled with the ability to laugh at herself, made her popular with all the other nurses and patients. But what Adele valued most of all about her was her steadfast and uncomplicated personality. Once she’d decided someone was her friend, she accepted them entirely, warts and all. Time and again she’d got into Adele’s bed with her after these nightmares and just held her tightly – she didn’t pry, analyse or preach.

  Adele knew very well that if she was to tell Joan about Michael, she would never tell another living soul. But she hadn’t told her, that was one secret she intended to keep to the grave.

  ‘So what we gonna wear tonight?’ Joan asked, as always moving right on to what she saw as the really important things in life. ‘Do you reckon I could get away with wearing the emerald-green frock again? Or will everyone think I’ve only got the one?’

  ‘Well, I’ll have to wear my striped one for the hundredth time as it’s the only half-decent thing I’ve got,’ Adele said. ‘So you might as well wear yours too.’

  They had no money for new clothes. Joan gave part of her salary to her mother, and Adele sent money home to her grandmother.