Under a Wartime Sky Read online

  ‘Crikey, look at that. They really don’t want anyone in there, do they? I wonder why?’

  ‘My dad said they’d sold the place to the Air Ministry, and there’s some kind of top secret stuff going on,’ Joan said.

  ‘I hope that don’t stop us using the beach.’ The red-tinted sands bordering the river, south-facing and sheltered by the low bluff on which the Manor sat, were a favourite place for picnics. You could swim at high tide, and if you searched carefully enough you might find sharks’ teeth and other fossils left over from the Ice Age. Crossing the river by ferry was the only way to get there from Felixstowe if you wanted to avoid a twenty-mile road journey up to Ipswich and back, along the winding road from Woodbridge and out along the northern shore of the River Deben.

  Charlie Brinkley, the ferryman, was returning from the other shore, steering with casual skill against the swirl of an outgoing tide. That he managed the heavy clinker-built boat single-handed – literally, for his right hand had been replaced with a hook after a duck-shooting accident – was never commented upon, so familiar was the sight. He’d been skipper since the good old days when a steam boat ran across the river on chains carrying several cars. It was only very recently the Quilter family had stopped supporting the service, and the local council said they couldn’t afford to pay for it; so the Brinkleys had acquired two boats and run it as a foot ferry ever since.

  ‘Mornin’, girls. Orrite?’ Charlie shouted, raising his grubby old cap in a cheerful salute, a slight smile softening his weather-beaten features. He was a legend around here; he knew everyone and everything there was to know at this end of town. ‘Well, well. You’re that Motts girl, am I roight? All grown up these days. Spit of yer mother, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘Yes sir, I’m Kathleen Motts,’ she said.

  ‘Got those same red curls.’ He gave a little sigh. ‘Maggie Motts. Quite a looker in her day, believe me.’

  ‘What’s going on over there, Mr Brinkley, with that mast and all the barbed wire?’

  ‘They in’t tellin’,’ he said, using his hook to hold the boat against the post while looping the mooring rope with his hand. ‘All very hush-hush. Not for the loikes of us ord’nry folks.’

  ‘But who are they? And what are all those lorries bringing in?’

  ‘All them questions, Kathleen Motts. Curiosity killed the cat, in’t that what they say?’ He tapped his nose with a gnarled finger whitened with salt.

  Joan tugged at Kath’s sleeve. ‘I’ve got to get back for lunch, remember?’

  ‘I reckon they’s getting prepared, after the antics of that Hitler fella,’ he suddenly volunteered, as he climbed out of the boat. ‘Gearing up for war. Best not to ask too many questions, dearies. Even walls have ears, as they say.’ He paused. ‘But you could ask your Pa. He’ll have seen a few comings and goings up the station.’

  ‘I will, sir, thank you.’

  ‘Best be going along, toime for me lunchtime pint. Look after yourselves, my dears, and send my best to your Ma.’

  Later that afternoon Kath made the five-minute walk from home to Town Station. Her father had been a guard on the trains for as long as she could remember, and the family knew the railway timetable by heart. She didn’t even have to think twice which service he’d be on for his final shift of the day, when he might be persuaded to buy her a cuppa and a buttered teacake and, away from her mother’s sharp ears, she could press him about hiring the Orwell for her birthday.

  Waiting on the bench beside the cafe she recalled Charlie Brinkley’s words about ‘gearing up for war’. Surely they wouldn’t allow it, not after last time? She knew from the names on the war memorial that some families had lost two or even, in one case, three members, all much-loved fathers, husbands, brothers or sons.

  Pa had spent the last war on the trains transporting the wounded back from France, and although he’d never been in personal danger, the sights and sounds he’d witnessed had certainly left their mark. Ma said he came back changed and even now, when talk of Hitler and Chamberlain came on the wireless, he’d shake his head and mutter, ‘they must never let that happen again’. Just thinking of it gave her a sick feeling, like when you’ve eaten too much ice cream.

  At last the train drew in, ten minutes late due to ‘cows on the line at Walton’, the station master announced. Pa would be grumpy, she knew, having borne the brunt of passengers’ grumbles. As the guard, he was always last off the train, but she never minded. Watching the visitors as they arrived was always entertaining. She would try to judge from the look of them, what they were wearing and what kind of luggage they had which hotel or guest house they were headed for, and whether their stay was for business or pleasure.

  Sometimes invalids would arrive, frail, wan-faced individuals whose bath chairs needed to be recovered from the guard’s carriage so they could be wheeled to the Convalescent Home. Ma had a friend who worked there and said she’d be able to find Kath a job any time, but the thought of sorting soiled laundry, making beds or, worse, emptying bedpans, gave her the shivers. To be a nurse you needed to have a ‘vocation’, was what Ma’s friend said, and Kath was perfectly certain that she didn’t have one of those.

  Today was ‘change-over’ day for hotels and guest houses, and she amused herself watching the passengers from first class who were almost certainly destined for the Orwell, the Grand or perhaps some upmarket private ‘cottage’ at the northern end of town like the one, so it was rumoured, where the King came to visit his mistress. Apparently he wanted to marry her and the newspaper reports were disapproving, but Kath couldn’t understand quite why, if they were in love. Was marrying a divorcee such a sin?

  Pa’s friend who worked at the Orwell said the wealthiest guests were always the worst behaved and gave the smallest tips. But that didn’t stop Kath envying their confidence, the way they seemed to assume that they owned the world. As soon as the train drew to a stop, the men leapt out in their pin-striped suits or plaid plus-fours all ready for the golf course, barking impatiently for porters. Their wives followed, adjusting wide-brimmed hats and smoothing crumpled skirts. Some even carried frilly parasols – they’d soon learn that the sea breezes were almost always too brisk for such things to be of any practical use. Close behind came the children, jumping and shrieking with the joy of being freed at last from the confines of the carriage, then being reprimanded and brought to heel by severe-looking uniformed nannies.

  So absorbed was she in the scenes before her that Kath failed to notice the gentleman now addressing her: ‘I am so sorry to trouble you, miss, but could you advise me, please?’

  She leapt to her feet and found herself face to face with a man unlike any she’d ever encountered, so unusual that she instinctively lowered her gaze for fear he might think she was staring. He was dark-skinned and exotic-looking, like those eastern princes pictured in schoolbooks, and yet he did not sound in the slightest bit foreign and in all other respects appeared like any other young Englishman of a certain class.

  He was slim, slight and bare-headed with an untamed mop of black hair, his face framed by heavy eyebrows and a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles, the reflections from which obscured his eyes so effectively that she could not tell whether he was actually smiling or whether that expression of slight amusement was just what he’d been born with.

  This was clearly not a man who cared much about his appearance. His suit, although well cut and of quality fabric, was terribly old-fashioned and crumpled, as though he had been travelling for days. In one hand he carried a cheap cardboard suitcase, and in the other an ancient brolly fading green with age.

  Kath began to babble, apologising for her inattention. ‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry. I must have been in a dream. How can I help you?’

  ‘I would like to know the best way of getting to Bawdsey Manor,’ he said.

  2

  The look of surprise on the girl’s face – or was it shock? – scarcely registered with Vic. He was perfectly used to that kind of react
ion, and tried not to let himself get annoyed by it. He’d perfected an expression of detached amusement, calculating that if he looked friendly, people were less likely to take offence or feel threatened.

  Ever since being dispatched to a British boarding school he’d nearly always been the only brown face in the crowd – the reversal of the situation at his school in India, where he was the palest. His mother explained: ‘You are a very special boy, Vikram, because you are part Indian, part British. Some people may call you a lesser person because of it but you can tell them you are actually better, because you have the best of both worlds.’

  So Vikram had spent most of his twenty-one years feeling different, always the outsider trying to fit in. The horror of being ripped away from his parents in India at the age of ten had been devastating enough, but then to find himself surrounded by posh white boys in an enormous, cheerless school surrounded by acres of flat countryside in cold, grey England sent him into a miserable self-imposed muteness for several weeks.

  After lights out he would curl up under the thin blanket, trying to imagine himself in the comfort of his mother’s arms, the tenderness of his ever-present ayah, the heat and colour of Kerala, the freedom of roaming the rolling hills of the tea estate, his friends, the animals, the call of the birds, the sunshine, tiffin on the veranda, the sunsets. He especially missed the food, and found most of the school meals bland and disgusting. But as the weeks went by the memories began to lose their intensity, and had it not been for his mother’s letters filled with news of his former life, he might have begun to believe it had existed only in his imagination.

  Slowly, with the help of a few kind masters and a friendly matron, he began to settle into the routines of boarding school life. His name was easy enough to anglicise to Vic, and at school he was only ever referred to as Mackensie – Mac for short. The boys seemed blessedly oblivious to the colour of his skin.

  Of course, he would never be part of the popular crowd. Although he could catch a cricket ball without flinching, his legs were too short to be any good at running or football, and he was far too slight for rugger. Whoever invented that terrible, brutal game, he wondered, as he froze on the sidelines with the other weedy boys, trying to work out when to cheer and when not to. The rules were unfathomable and seemed to consist of trying to kill your opponents by crashing into them as violently as possible.

  By the third term he discovered that music lessons took place at the same time as games, and persuaded his parents to pay for him to learn the piano. He practised hard, delighting his teacher with his interest in what she called ‘theory’ but he saw as ‘patterns’: chords, scales, intervals and harmonics. On a wind-up gramophone she played scratched recordings of Chopin and Mozart, as well as tracks by Americans with fantastical names – Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton. He loved the classics but he loved jazz more, and before long was starting to improvise and compose his own pieces.

  He breezed through science and mathematics, having discovered that the logic of numbers could be beautiful, spending hours learning tables and formulae so that he could apply them instantly to solving a problem. He reached the end of the book before the rest of the class was only part way through, and the teacher gave him the advanced version being used by the form above. Classmates would come to him for help with their ‘prep’, which is what they called homework. In this way he began to find his place.

  It was only when his best friend Kenny invited him home for half term that he began to understand how different he appeared to some people, especially adults. As they clambered off the train at Beaconsfield Station, he registered the expressions on the faces of Kenny’s mother and father: surprise tinged with a touch of alarm. They all shook hands in the polite English way, and he and Kenny bundled into the rear seat of a comfy leather-smelling Humber for the short journey to their home.

  ‘Where do you hail from, Victor?’ Kenny’s mother asked.

  ‘My father is Scottish,’ he said, to the back of their heads. ‘He and my mother live in India because he grows tea, but they’ve sent me over here to have an English education.’

  ‘How very interesting. You must tell us all about it over supper. I imagine you find it rather cold here, dear? We’ll bank up the fires when we get home. Do you eat normal food?’

  He felt like saying Just because I’m brown doesn’t mean I come from another planet – and by the way, my name is Vikram, not Victor; but what he actually said was, ‘Thank you, Mrs Johnson. I am not a fussy eater.’

  Although his mother never ate meat, Vic’s father was a true carnivore and had insisted his son should eat everything on his plate. Even so, he’d always preferred the Hindu diet of spicy lentils, vegetables and rice, and had never really got used to the texture of meat. At school he’d found it even more disgusting, always swamped with glutinous gravy and so stringy that it was sometimes impossible to swallow. But, as with all things, he had grown used to it. There really was no alternative.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to imply . . .’ she shrilled. ‘I only meant . . .’

  ‘It will be fine,’ Mr Johnson said, squeezing his wife’s knee as he navigated a sharp corner. Vic wished he would use both hands on the wheel, and anyway his parents would never have contemplated such a public show of intimacy. ‘Stop fussing about the boy, my dear, and let’s get on with enjoying ourselves. I suppose you like football, Victor? We could invite some friends round for a game.’

  Kenny saved him. ‘Can we go out on the bikes instead? He can have my old one, ’cos it’s too small for me anyway.’

  Next morning Kenny was keen to show off his tree house, but Vic blanched when he saw the ladder reaching high into the branches of an enormous oak. He’d been frightened of heights ever since he’d broken his arm falling off an elephant – a ride organised as a treat for his sixth birthday.

  ‘Looks great, Kenny. But I thought we were going to try out the bikes,’ he said, to distract his friend. ‘To get sweets.’ Mrs Johnson had pressed sixpences into their hands after breakfast, crooning, ‘Buy yourselves a treat, boys.’

  ‘Oh, okay then. Sweets it is.’

  They parked the bikes outside a shop with a mouth-watering window display of jars: sherbet lemons, fruit jellies and liquorice allsorts. Inside it smelled deliciously of sugar and vanilla, but after a moment the shopkeeper whispered something to Kenny, and Vic found himself being dragged out of the shop.

  ‘But you said we could buy gobstoppers,’ he protested. ‘There were some right in front of us.’

  ‘There’s a better place down the road.’

  Only much later, when they were in bed – Mrs Johnson had made up a mattress on the floor for Vic in Kenny’s room – did he find the courage to ask, ‘What did that man say to you?’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘You know who I’m talking about. In the first sweetshop we went to. Where they had the gobstoppers.’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘It wasn’t nothing,’ Vic persevered. ‘’Cos you dragged me out right away. Was it about my . . .’ He swallowed, hesitating. It was hard to say out loud. ‘My skin?’

  There was a long pause. Eventually Kenny whispered, ‘He said you were dirty.’

  This was so plainly absurd that Vic felt like laughing. ‘Like I’d fallen in the mud or something? Did he really think that was why my skin is brown? What an idiot.’

  ‘S’pose so,’ Kenny mumbled. ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re not going back there. Let’s go to sleep.’

  Next day, as they stood on the river bank aiming stones at a log in the water, Kenny said: ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Mind what?’

  ‘People calling you dirty?’

  The question took Vic aback. Of course he minded. It made him angry and uncomfortable, as though it was his fault or made him a lesser kind of human being, somehow. But his mother and father had explained it was only ignorance that made people rude, and he should take no notice of them. He busied himself searching for another
stone.

  ‘Nah,’ he said at last, picking up a small rock. ‘It doesn’t make any difference to what you feel inside. It’s only stupid people who don’t know that.’

  He lobbed the rock and it crashed into the log square on, temporarily submerging it. ‘Yeah, direct hit!’ he crowed. ‘I win.’

  After that, Vic decided he would try to ignore any stares or insults directed at him. He spent some hours in front of the mirror perfecting an expression of mild amusement, of looking perfectly friendly while completely detached. The thick spectacles he’d worn since he was twelve certainly helped to complete the impression, he felt, of someone whose mind was on higher matters. He grew his hair as long as the school would allow, in tribute to his hero, Albert Einstein.

  When Vic turned sixteen the physics master told him that he would be putting his name down for the Cambridge entrance exams. ‘You are easily the brightest boy I’ve had in my class for many a year, and if you don’t pass it with flying colours I’ll eat my hat,’ he said.

  ‘But sir, if you don’t mind me saying, I’ve never seen you wearing a hat.’

  ‘You’re a cheeky sod, Mackensie. Now push off and do your prep,’ the man said, giving him a gentle cuff.

  Before the end of his final year, Vic’s future seemed assured: he would study physics at King’s College, starting the coming October. His father made a special journey from India to attend the final school speech day, glowing with pride as Vic was awarded no fewer than three tinny silver-plated cups: best scientist, best attendance record and the joke one for ‘greatest sissy at games’, earned for his habit of dropping the rugger ball and running away before anyone could tackle him.