Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

“Yes, Ellen,” he said, his voice suddenly husky. “I will drink it.”

They drove on for another hour. Then the trees seemed to grow more luxuriant, more spacious, and the verges of the road were tended. They were coming to a demesne.

Marek had been right about the light. The sun was beginning to drop behind the trees, to send rays across the trunks, illumining the willow herb and foxglove in the grass. The time of day that means home-coming, the end of labour, the welcoming hearth.

She leant out, filling her lungs with the scents of the forest: resin, mushrooms, the peppery scent of the birches-and something else.

“A bonfire?”’ she said. “Or are they burning stubble?”’

She did not realise anything was wrong till she saw Marek’s face and then, suddenly, she was terribly afraid. And at the same time, the smell grew stronger and there was a sound like the wind which grew louder, became a roar. Even then she thought only of forest fires. That anything else could be burning was out of her power to imagine.

Marek had put his foot down on the accelerator. The little car lurched forward, rounded a bend… and she found that she had whimpered like a stricken animal.

It was the house that was burning. Flames licked the ochre walls; tongues of fire shot through the blackened window frames… had reached the roof — and all the time, worse than the smoke, the heat, was that terrifying, monstrous roar.

She should have stopped him. In her nightmares, for the rest of her life, she struggled with him, but he was too quick. He didn’t open the car door; he vaulted over it, and ran.

At the gates the men, pathetic firemen in toy helmets with buckets, tried to hold him back, but he pushed them away as if they were flies and raced towards the house and vanished.

“No!” they shouted after him. “No! Come back!”

She followed. Knowing it was madness, she ran after him, but the men were ready for her. They pinned her down as she struggled; held her fast. “No,” they repeated in Czech. “No,”-hurting her in their grasp, forcing her on to the ground.

As she gasped for breath, lying pinioned, she saw high above the burning house, the storks circling and flapping for a last time above their ravaged nests. Then they became black streaks in the polluted, hellish sky, and were gone.

Kendrick Frobisher’s house, in the summer of 1940, was not wet.

It was a heavenly summer, the summer in which France fell and the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk. Leaves were never such an intense and iridescent green; sunlight glinted on flower-studded meadows as the Germans encircled the Maginot Line and overran not only France but Belgium and Holland. Birdsong filled the air in the lull between bursts of gunfire and accompanied the fleeing refugees who blocked the roads. It was as though the weather was preparing a glorious requiem for the death of Europe.

In London, where Ellen was making sandwiches in the basement of the National Gallery, the barrage balloons swayed and glinted in the milky skies; nurses and air-raid wardens and office workers lay in the grass in their snatched lunch hours. Anxious relatives, scouring the bulletin boards to see who was safely returned across the Channel, found it easier to hope because of the warmth.

There are a lot of sandwiches to be made in a war. Ellen made them in the National Gallery at lunch time, where the exhausted Londoners could hear the best music in the land for a shilling. She made them in a canteen for soldiers on leave in Shaftesbury Avenue, and she made them, along with basic meals of mince and mashed turnips, in one of the British restaurants set up by the government to help with the rations. She also went fire watching twice a week on the roof of the Methodist Chapel near Gowan Terrace because she liked, even now, three years after she had last seen Marek, to go to bed extremely tired, and acted as model for the St John’s Ambulance classes on Thursday afternoons, being bandaged by zealous housewives and carried about on gates.

She would have done rather more than that-would have joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, in fact — if it hadn’t been for a visit she paid, in late June, to Kendrick’s house in Cumberland.

As Patricia Frobisher had expected, Kendrick had been declared unfit for military service. He had been directed into the offices of the Ministry of Food, where he had been instrumental in issuing the first ration books and writing the edict forbidding the use of icing sugar in wedding cakes.

Ellen had seen him occasionally but it was not till he came to a lunchtime concert in a state of great distress that she allowed him to resume anything like their former friendship.

Kendrick’s eyes were rimmed with red and he had come to take his leave of her. For the thing that Patricia had dreaded most of all had come to pass. Kendrick’s brother William had been killed in a flying accident at the beginning of the war and now it turned out that Roland, his elder brother, had been lost during the retreat from France.

“I’m so sorry,” said Ellen, trying to comfort him-but it seemed that Kendrick’s grief was not for his brothers, who had behaved to him with unrelenting cruelty, but for his mother.

“If only it had been me,” Kendrick said, “I’m no use to anyone-but it had to be Roland.”

This had annoyed Ellen very much-to the point where she had agreed to come and visit Kendrick, who had been perfectly happy in the Ministry of Food and was now the sole owner of Crowthorpe: the house, the farm, the derelict quarry and two thousand acres of woodland.

Ellen had gone with her raincoat and sou’wester, her wellington boots and three sweaters, prepared for the glowering house beneath its grey scree of fells and rock.

But something had gone wrong. She got out at the station to find a landscape of brilliant sun and dramatic purple cloud shadows; of luminous cushions of moss and laundered lambs. The air was full of the scent of may blossom; walking up the drive she came on clumps of brilliant pink and golden azaleas. Crowthorpe itself was certainly an unattractive house: mottled brick, mock Tudor arches, narrow ecclesiastical windows, but there was a kitchen garden whose greenhouses, untended since the call-up of the gardener, still produced tomatoes and cucumbers, and nothing could stop the roses climbing up the liver-coloured walls.

If only it had rained, she thought afterwards… but all that weekend the Lake District preened itself, the air was as soft as wine, a silken sheen lay on the waters of Crowthorpe Tarn and when she climbed the hill where the hikers had perished she saw a view to make her catch her breath. In Kendrick’s woods the bluebells lay like a lake; there were kingfishers in the stream…

If only Patricia Frobisher had been there to lay her dead, authoritarian hand over the house and spoil Ellen’s image of Crowthorpe as a kind of jolie laide which could be brought back to life… But Patricia had overestimated her own strength: stricken by her double loss, appalled at the thought of Kendrick as sole owner of her home, she had allowed her brothers to take her away with them to Kenya.

Perhaps it was the blond Jersey calf, the youngest in the herd, which the farm manager made her feed from a bucket… Or the two old servants, the only ones who had not left to do war work, who invited her into the kitchen and fed her on shortcake… Or the sight of the sunshine streaming into a small summer house where her Aunt Annie, facing a gall bladder operation, could so suitably recuperate. But most probably it was the sight of three small, pale faces-Elsie and Joanie and Doris-the Cockney evacuees banished by Mrs Frobisher before her departure to the gun room on account of ringworm, who threw themselves on Ellen and said they wanted their Mam.