Elizabeth Elgin - Where Bluebells Chime

‘Ready in about ten minutes.’ She took up her fork again. ‘Heard the early news, did you?’ Everyone listened to news broadcasts and read the newspapers from cover to cover; not because they wanted to but because it was their patriotic duty and anyway, people had to know the exact time blackout began each evening and when, in the morning, it ended. Since war came, newspapers were no longer allowed to print weather forecasts, nor were they read out at the end of news bulletins. It wouldn’t do to let the enemy know when conditions would be best suited for their planes to come dropping bombs and incendiaries. Because mark his words, Mr Catchpole had said, there were those living amongst us pretending to be ordinary, normal English folk, who looked just the same as we did and spoke and acted as we did. But they were really spies and loyal to the Fatherland and had nasty, devious ways of getting weather forecasts back to Germany, and hanging would be too good for them when they were caught!

‘News?’ Jack Catchpole paused to lean on his fork. ‘Makes you fair sickened. They’re still bombing our fighter stations down south and we all know what for, don’t we?’

‘But we shot down sixty-seven of theirs.’

‘And lost thirty-three of our own.’ Never mind the Spitfires and Hurricanes. It was really thirty-three pilots we had lost, Catchpole considered angrily.

‘The Air Ministry has confirmed that sixty-seven enemy aircraft were destroyed,’ droned the newsreader, ‘and thirty-three of our fighters failed to return …’

Thirty-three telegrams there’d be this morning. Regretting. And how many more telegrams before Europe came to its senses?

He drove his fork angrily into the earth, breaking down the clods with unnecessary force. Gracie noticed it at once but knew better than to ask what was bothering him.

‘Think the kettle’ll be just about on the boil,’ she said, and headed for the potting shed. He was sitting on his upturned apple crate when she returned with two mugs, determined to cheer him up. ‘Did you hear about Mussolini, Mr C.?’

‘What’s he been up to now?’ Catchpole scowled.

‘We-e-ll, you know he said that all British ports on the Mediterranean would be blockaded by Italian warships …?’

‘You mean the Eyetie Navy might actually put to sea?’

‘Not exactly. They didn’t get the chance. “Blockade us, will you?” said the Royal Navy, and sailed out there and then and sunk an Italian depot ship, a destroyer and one of their submarines!’

‘And serve them right!’ Mussolini was a strutting fool. No one took much notice of him. Talk had it that the Italian people hadn’t wanted to go to war; that Mussolini only landed them in it to get on the right side of Hitler. But Hitler was a different kettle of fish. There was something unwholesome about him; the same wildness in his eyes you saw in the eyes of a mad dog before you had it put down. The evil in that face made Catchpole’s flesh creep. ‘But there’ll be a nasty shock waiting for them Nazis if they try invading Yorkshire.’

‘There will, Mr Catchpole?’

‘Oh my word, yes! Now not a word to a soul about this, mind.’ He tapped his nose with his forefinger and gave her one of his knowing nods. ‘Us have been making ’em all week at the Home Guard. Petrol bombs!’

‘But I thought petrol was on the ration, for cars.’

‘So it is.’ He’d thought much the same thing when two five-gallon cans had been delivered to their headquarters, petrol bombs for the use of. He had even gone so far as to wonder what those ten gallons would bring on the black market, but such thoughts were dismissed from his mind as he had seen himself hurling petrol bombs at a ruthless enemy, giving them a bit of their own back. ‘So it is, lass, but it makes grand bombs, an’ all. You get a bottle and half fill it with petrol. Then you stuffs rag down the bottleneck.’ So simple, he wondered why they had never been used in the last war. ‘Then you wait till you see ’em coming, you light the rag and when it’s burning you throw your bottle – and duck!’

Nor would there be a problem in the delivery of such missiles. Yorkshiremen were born cricketers, could throw anything from a ball to a bottle further than most!

‘And it explodes, Mr C.?’

‘It doesn’t half!’ And not only with a bang but with blazing petrol to add to the confusion. Would stop a tank, some said, but he had his doubts on that score. You would, he had worked out, have to lob one down the tank’s turret to do any real harm and to do that would take a lot of luck. Still, petrol bombs would do very nicely until the long-promised hand grenades arrived.

‘But are you sure they’ll work?’

‘Oh, they work all right! We had a dummy run up on Holdenby Pike.’ They had thrown three, and so startling had been the effect that the entire platoon had wanted to throw one and the Reverend had been forced to point out that three was more than enough or where would they be when the time came with all the bombs used up? ‘But not a word, mind.’

His good humour restored, Mr Catchpole blew hard on his tea then took a slurping swallow. Strange, he thought, that the Reverend was of the opinion there wouldn’t be an invasion, though why he thought it he couldn’t rightly explain. And no one wanted to be overrun like the French had been and especially himself, who would take badly to Germans goose-stepping all over his garden or even – and just to think of it made him shudder – throwing her ladyship out of Rowangarth. There had been a Sutton at Rowangarth for more’n four hundred years and a Catchpole had been head gardener here since Queen Victoria was a lass; four generations of them.

On the other hand, no one could blame him for wanting to throw a petrol bomb. Just one. Slap bang into the turret of a Nazi tank. He set down his mug and returned to his digging. And to his dreams of glory.

Tatiana heard the long, low whistle then ran towards it, arms wide.

‘Tim! You’re all right!’ She always waited now in the shelter of the trees beside the crossroads, hoping he would come because it wasn’t always possible for him to phone her after he had been flying nor dare she, sometimes, pick up the phone when he did.

‘I’m fine,’ he said when they had kissed, and kissed again.

‘Were you on ops. last night? It wasn’t Berlin?’

There was a tacit agreement that open cities were not to be bombed by either side, yet this morning’s newsreader announced that 120 bombers had raided Berlin in retaliation for the bombs dropped two days ago on London.

‘It was.’ He pulled her close and they began to walk, arms tightly linked, thighs touching, towards Holdenby Pike. ‘And for an open city, there was a heck of a lot of searchlights and flack.’

Open cities, Tatiana frowned, were supposed not to be of military importance and left unmolested; beautiful old places like Dresden, or York perhaps.

‘They said it was a mistake – them bombing London, I mean. They’d been trying to bomb a fighter station, and got it wrong.’

‘In broad daylight, henny? The RAF can fly in total darkness and get it right! No, they meant to do it. You can’t mistake London for a fighter station.’

‘It’s getting worse for us, isn’t it, Tim?’

‘Hush your blethering.’ He kissed her fiercely and she clung to him, eyes closed, lips parted, silently begging for more. She had loved Tim Thomson since first they met, but now she was in love with him and naked need flamed from him to her each time they touched.

Grandmother Petrovska had been wrong. It was a woman’s duty to give her husband children, and a man, she said, liked making children. It was his nature. A woman, on the other hand, did her duty in the privacy of the bedroom, reminding herself that it was a small price to pay for a household of her own and the respect society gave to a married woman.