Douglas Reeman - In Danger's Hour

The postman was old for the job, but had come back to work to help fill the gaps left by the younger men who had gone to war. He had his own special signal as he wheeled his red bicycle up the twisting driveway if he saw Eve waiting for him.

A wave if there was a letter from him. A thumbs-up if there was not. Meaning that there would be soon.

That morning he had given a wave.

He handed over a great pile of mail for Codrington House, all the usual replies to appeals, applications for jobs, offers of homes for the bombed-out and dispossessed. It never stopped. He had given her the letter in its familiar buff envelope.

‘I reckon he’s telling you he still loves you in this ’un, Miss Eve.’ He pulled her leg quite mercilessly. His defence was that he was old enough to be her grandfather.

It was a lovely letter. They all were. She could hear his voice, see his grey eyes, touch his hand in every line.

He had telephoned as well. Another awful connection, but he had been lucky to get through at all.

He was coming south. To her.

Her fingers slipped on the comb as she completed setting her mother’s hair, and their eyes met suddenly in the dressing-table mirror.

‘What is it, dear?’

Eve smiled although it touched her deeply to see her mother like this. They had always been so close. She had been as much a friend and companion as mother.

‘I had a letter this morning.’ She watched for some hint of curiosity. ‘From Ian.’

‘Who, dear?’

Eve picked up a brush and touched up the sides of her mother’s hair. She had always had such fine hair. How had they met, she wondered?

‘Ian Ransome.’

She paused with her brush in mid-air. It was like a curtain being lifted, a light illuminating a darkened room. Her mother’s eyes were as they were before. Clear, questioning, amused.

‘You really love him, don’t you, Eve?’

Eve nodded, almost afraid to move.

‘Then take him, my darling. While you can. Love him. I can see that he worships the ground you walk on.’

Somewhere a loose shutter banged against the wall; the noise, or the interruption, broke the contact.

Eve whispered, ‘I do love him so much. I want him to be safe!’

But the eyes in the mirror did not reply.

Then her mother said indifferently, ‘Fetch my glasses, will you, dear? I left them in the study.’ As Eve went to the door she heard her murmur, ‘Or was it in—’

The study was much as it had always been since the great house was built, she thought. Shelves from floor to ceiling, now mostly filled with her father’s ledgers and personal books. The rest lay empty, a reminder of the house’s better days.

She heard the wireless from the outer hall, the night porter’s prop for staying awake.

Her heart turned to ice. As it always did.

‘The Secretary of the Admiralty regrets to announce the loss of HM Submarine Skilful, and of…’

And of.. . and of… and of.. .

‘Next of kin have been informed.’

She clutched her hands across her breast and waited for her breathing to steady. It was always the same now. The real meaning of that flat announcement. The sense of gratitude, then of shame, sympathy for the men who had died somewhere, in what conditions she could only guess at.

She looked around the shadowed study. Ian was coming back. Then she remembered what her mother had sent her for. But there was no sign of her reading-glasses. Her mother had often come here to work on her various charities before suffering the shock of the bombing.

Eve smiled. She had probably left them in the desk drawer. It would not be the first time.

It was strange that she felt guilty at opening her father’s desk. She wanted to laugh, to cry out that she had shared her love with her mother. She pulled out the drawer, careless of the sound. Her father was in the city.

Then she froze. At the back of the drawer was a big envelope, marked with the newspaper’s crest and the bold sticker, photograph – do not fold. It was addressed to her. The posting date she did not even need to examine.

With great care she slit open the envelope and removed the stiff cardboard protection.

For several minutes she studied the photograph, to which was pinned the newspaper’s compliment slip.

So clear. So vivid. Ian on his bridge, pointing at the sky, his beloved face so tense, so strong.

With the picture clutched to her breast she mounted the stairs and looked into her mother’s bedroom. She was wearing her reading-glasses and studying an album of holiday postcards which she had once collected.

Had she forgotten that she had kept her reading-glasses near her? Or was it her way of reaching her daughter, to tell her that her father had intercepted the picture of the man she loved and had tried to keep it from her?

Eve ran to her room and threw herself down.

How could be?

Then after a time she left the bed and rested the photograph against her bedside clock, while she took out the white nightdress from her drawer.

Spring seemed to have come late to the West Country this year. It was true that the skies were often blue and cloudless, and the hedgerows and cottage gardens bright with colour. But the Channel which remained unimpressed and restless along the Cornish coasts often crashed amongst the jagged rocks as if it were reluctant to leave winter behind.

Ransome walked up from the tiny ferry and paused to stare across at the boatyard. Like the rest of the Fowey Estuary it was almost hidden by landing-craft and small warships of every class and use, some of which had probably begun life under old Jack Weese’s supervision. You could feel it along this coast, Ransome thought. Everywhere you went, in the narrow streets and in crowded harbours, it was more of a sensation than anything spoken. Like the murmur of far-off drums. Something which was stirring, and yet filled with menace.

The war had moved closer again. Perhaps that was it. Along these shores they had seen enough of it, but never before had they been so involved in what was now inevitable.

Here in Polruan, directly opposite the place which even in memory had become his only home, Ransome could sense it. It was no longer the free-and-easy village it had been even during the darkest days of the war. There were troops and armoured vehicles all around, just as the vessels which would soon carry them into battle on the other side of the English Channel filled every creek and river, until invasion seemed to become a secret quite impossible to keep.

In other parts of the world the conflict raged on. In the Pacific and on the Russian front, where millions were said to have perished in that last bitter winter. In Burma, the forgotten Fourteenth Army was no longer in retreat, and even if the Allies in Italy were making only slow progress there were other benefits. The Italians, at least those lucky enough to be on the right side of the lines, had surrendered to the Allies, their fleet secured under the guns of Malta, a great achievement which had once seemed like a pipe-dream.

But the here and the now were more relevant. The sandbagged gun emplacements, the depressing barriers of barbed wire on tiny Cornish beaches where children had once explored and played. Many of them would now be in uniform, waiting for D-Day.

Ransome wondered what his parents really thought about the cottage in Polruan. Local people would know about it soon enough, but the events to come might put it into perspective.

He had mentioned this again to Eve when he had telephoned her to say that he was free at last to come to her.

She had replied, ‘Just come. I’ll be waiting. It has to be there, Ian. Don’t you see? I want it to be clean, decent. To be able to face anyone and say, This is how it was. No matter what.’