Bobby's War Page 4

  Bobby jumped down and went into the barn to grab a set of overalls to put over her uniform. This was the one thing about going home that she loved – getting her hands dirty.

  Archie continued to dig the soil. He had his suspicions about Agnes’s forays into the woods but he kept them to himself. He was painfully aware that everything that woman did interested him. He dug harder and deeper to take his mind off her. Bobby worked silently and happily alongside him until the heavy macaroni cheese had settled in her stomach.

  ‘Bobby, Bobby, are you there?’ She heard Harriet’s voice from the driveway.

  Dark-haired Harriet Marcham was a whirlwind who had breezed through Bobby’s detachment like a puppy determined to be loved. She had followed Bobby slavishly since the day her heroine had marched between two boys at the village school who were teasing Harriet, twisting their arms so that they were powerless, and therefore rescuing her. Harriet had looked through her tears in grateful surprise at her saviour and from that day on, Bobby’s strength and unerring sense of right and wrong had won Harriet’s undying loyalty. While the rest of the school shunned this strange child with auburn pigtails, who seemed to have none of the usual need of friends or approbation, Harriet had immediately appointed herself as Bobby’s defender and number one admirer.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ Harriet said, coming towards the barn. She was in the blue WAAF uniform that reflected her grey eyes and the heavy Oxford shoes that she had worn since 1940 when she joined Bomber Command. ‘Hello Archie, can you spare this farmhand for a minute?’

  Archie grinned and took Bobby’s spade off her, watching with pleasure as the two girls went off arm in arm. When they got around the corner, the small frame of Harriet flung her arms around Bobby’s waist, taking her breath away.

  ‘So, how are you, where have you been, how long are you staying, why haven’t you written?’

  When she paused for breath, Bobby broke in, laughing. ‘Fine, working . . . all over the country and only tonight. There, does that answer all your questions?’

  ‘Humph,’ Harriet replied, unimpressed. ‘Well, you still haven’t said why you haven’t written. It was only because my mother ran into Mrs Hill in the queue at the butcher’s that I even knew you were coming. So, how’s everybody? How’s the ATA? Had any time for gorgeous men?’

  ‘Whoa!’ Bobby said, putting her hand gently over her friend’s mouth. ‘Look Harriet, first, can you come back for supper? Please say yes, I can’t bear another meal where I have to put up with father’s lack of interest, mother staring into space and Aunt Agnes’s probing. Please, please . . .’

  ‘Nope, I’m due back at Coltishall in fifteen minutes, I had to bike really fast before my shift to catch you and tell you off for not writing. Oh, and I just wanted to tell you about Gus Prince.’

  The undisputed leader of the pack at the village primary school, Gus Prince had been the best at sport, the most popular boy in school and the one all the girls fell in love with. All except Bobby, that was, she was too interested in trying to beat the boys at every possible sport to be interested in playground gossip.

  ‘Oh, I had such a crush on him!’ Harriet went on. ‘We all did. Well, all except you and it was you he liked. That used to make me so mad! Do you remember those arm-wrestling contests you and Gus used to have across the desks?’ she said. ‘You were the best in the school at it, even he couldn’t beat you.’ She paused and then gave a deep sigh.

  ‘Sometimes he did win,’ Bobby said, rubbing her arm with the memory. ‘But get on with it, Harriet, what did you have to tell me?’

  ‘Oh, well, I haven’t seen him for years and then just the other week, I found out he’s a pilot. Just think, Bobby, he might turn up at Coltishall. I could be the telephone operator picking up his signal. Wouldn’t that be the perfect romantic reunion?’

  She paused dramatically and was pleased to see Bobby waiting for the next piece of information.

  ‘Anyway, I only managed to find out that he’d become a pilot because I interrogated Helen at the surgery. Her mother’s in the same Red Cross group as the cleaner at the Prince’s house. Apparently, even his mother doesn’t know where he’s based – I saw her last week in the greengrocer’s and went straight in there and asked her. She had no idea! Now isn’t that a mystery. Do you think he’s a spy?’

  ‘Oh Harriet, you’re hilarious. No, of course he isn’t. He’s just a pilot like Billy Wade and Frank Abbot.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Harriet said, and then touched the side of her nose, knowingly.

  ‘You’ll see, he’s going to do something amazing. I always said he was just the cleverest, most gorgeous man and,’ she clutched her heart and raised her eyes to heaven, ‘one day, who knows, maybe we are destined to be together.

  She thought for a moment. ‘That is, if I don’t run off with one of those Americans, I’ve heard they’re quite something and could be over here soon. Oh, and then there’s Gerry, he’s an engineer and definitely “The One”, well, this week. Oh, he’s lovely.’ Harriet’s love affairs were legendary, and she fell in love on a regular basis. Bobby had trouble keeping up.

  Bobby glanced at her watch and said, ‘I thought you had to go.’

  Harriet grabbed her friend’s arm and looked fiercely at the watch on her wrist. ‘Oh hell’s bells, is that the time? I’m going to have to pedal at double speed.’ And with that, she gave Bobby a quick hug and raced off down the drive towards her bicycle that she had flung onto the verge. ‘Can you get out to the Dun Cow tonight after supper?’ she shouted back. ‘I’m off duty at eight so could meet you there, oh and Roberta Hollis, comb your hair before you come. You look a mess!’

  Bobby smiled after her, shaking her unruly hair in defiance. Harriet never gave up her attempt to make her friend into a respectable female. As far as Bobby was concerned, her job was to try to keep Harriet Marcham out of trouble but sometimes, that seemed like a full-time occupation.

  Once Harriet had left, Bobby grabbed her bike and cycled off to the nearby airfield where she had learned to fly. Strangely, it had been Harriet Marcham who had first put the idea of flying into her head years before when they had both been at Lonsdale School for Girls in Norwich.

  One Sunday afternoon, the girls had been allowed out for their usual prescribed walk and Harriet and Bobby had headed for the fields on the outskirts of the city.

  Bobby had been swirling round trying to emulate the skylark above her when she had suddenly flopped down into the grass.

  ‘What’s up?’ Harriet had asked, a little alarmed.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, I just sometimes feel this earth is too . . . too . . . I don’t know, flat for me.’

  ‘What in heaven’s name are you talking about now?’ Harriet sat down next to her.

  Bobby lay back and shielded her eyes against the late spring sun. She pointed up towards the skylark soaring above them. ‘Look at that skylark. It’s completely free, while I’m stuck down here with a family that doesn’t communicate and in a school where the only thing that matters is how much Shakespeare you can recite. It makes me long to be up there swirling around in the clouds.’

  ‘Oh well, maybe you should learn to fly like that woman pilot I’m named after, what was her name? Harriet Qu . . . erm, Quimby, that’s it!’

  Harriet lay back triumphantly but Bobby grabbed her by the shoulders and yanked her up again. ‘What pilot? You were named after a pilot? A woman pilot? Flying planes? Tell me more this instant.’ She glared at her friend but Harriet just shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know, my father heard about her and thought it was a nice name, that’s all.’

  From that moment, the idea became an obsession that occupied every moment of Bobby’s spare time and she scoured the library for books about aviation. Over the last year at school, she learned about farms in America and South Africa where they were using planes to fertilise the fields. Slowly but surely, she constructed the case to present to her father. The confrontation between them had taken
three days of an unusually reasoned argument by Bobby. On the first day she told him that it would take longer by tractor to spray the fields with pesticide, then she gave him figures that proved it would be more efficient to do it from the air, and on the final day she triumphantly revealed that there was not one man on the farm who had expressed any interest in learning to fly. Her father was a man who was only swayed by practicalities and once he realised he could find no flaws in her argument and exhausted by his relentless daughter’s determination, he finally gave in and agreed to arrange some lessons with an old friend of his at the price of twelve shillings and sixpence each.

  The first time she had sat in the pilot’s seat she had felt a shiver permeate through her body. It was as if the part of her life that had been missing was there in the controls in front of her. All she had to do was reach out to them and they would belong to her and she would belong to them. She had found home.

  At that moment, everything had slotted into place and for the first time in her life she felt she was in the right place, doing the right thing. She worked hard to achieve her licence, spending every possible moment at the airfield, either in the aircraft or in the control tower, watching the planes take off and land, noting the position of the wings, the speed and the operation of the undercarriage on landing.

  Bobby looked around at the weeds that were beginning to grow on the edges of the tarmac. The planes had been commissioned into service and the large runway felt eerily empty. Her reverie was disturbed by footsteps behind her and she turned to find Group Captain Turner approaching her from the redundant control tower.

  ‘Hello Roberta,’ he said, delightedly. This young woman had been his best pupil. From the day she arrived, swinging herself into the cockpit, eschewing with a dismissive ‘Pah’ the ladder he had provided for her, she had absorbed the lessons with enthusiasm and dedication. He remembered watching her take her first solo flight, watching from below but somehow not being as nervous as he was with his other trainees. He had been confident that here was one pupil he could trust. When she joined the ATA, he had not been surprised; it was the perfect job for her.

  ‘Hello Group Captain Turner.’ She held out her hand to give the formal handshake he expected. ‘It’s sad to see the old airfield unused.’

  ‘They’re coming with the camouflage next week, it’s going to be a dummy one,’ he told her. In many parts of the country, and East Anglia in particular, the authorities were using every ploy possible to confuse the enemy. Bobby shivered, looking over at the nearby houses. They would be increasingly at risk if the airfield on their doorstep was being used as a decoy.

  ‘I hope you’re reading those Pilot’s Notes thoroughly,’ he went on. ‘I heard of an ATA pilot being killed last month.’

  ‘Yes, don’t worry, I study them every night.’

  Archibald Turner nodded approvingly. ‘You make sure you do; I just don’t want to lose my best pupil. Now, if you’ve got a bit of time, I’d love to go over some of the aircraft you’ve been flying with you.’

  The two walked companionably to the control tower and spent a contented hour doing what Bobby loved best – talking about aeroplanes.

  On her way home from the airfield, Bobby fingered the golden wings on her ATA tunic. When war broke out in 1939, her father had been furious – at the reneging on promises that the Great War would be the last-ever conflict; that fuel shortages meant no more aerial crop spraying, and then on top of all that, his daughter, already a spinster in the making, had heard a BBC radio appeal for women pilots and was mounting a campaign to be allowed to join the Air Transport Auxiliary. Every time she raised the issue, he countered with the fact that the more useful thing she could do would be to find a husband who could take over the farm. His insistence only made her more determined to thwart him and one suitor after another was given short shrift as she refused to give in to her father’s demands, dismissing without compassion the stream of young men who attempted to take her out, scorning their limited horizons. Bobby Hollis was completely focused on her own goal, which had nothing to do with walking down the aisle and becoming someone’s wife. In 1942, in desperation, she informed her father that unless he agreed to let her join the ATA, she would never look at any man ever again.

  Chapter 5

  ‘You’re late,’ she accused Harriet, spotting her friend peering round the door at the Dun Cow.

  Harriet crept in, looking round her nervously. The bar was full of farmers, old men and some other people in uniform.

  ‘Did you really walk in here all on your own?’ she said, sidling in to join Bobby. ‘Didn’t people stare at you?’

  Bobby shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea, I didn’t notice, but I got fed up with waiting outside in the cold for you.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry, but you’ll never believe who I’ve just bumped into.’

  Bobby sat back. She knew her friend would spend the next half hour slowly revealing details about an encounter that she was determined would have an impact on Bobby and it was a waste of time to try to rush her.

  ‘OK, but first, I’m parched. Let’s get a drink,’ Bobby said. ‘I suppose I’ll have to go to the bar, will I?’

  ‘You certainly will, I’m not going,’ Harriet replied, her eyes darting around the room in embarrassment.

  Bobby sighed with resignation, refused the coppers that Harriet had pushed towards her and headed to the bar. The men parted for her, universally gratified that their wives and daughters were not brazen enough to drink in a bar without a male escort like Andrew Hollis’s wayward daughter. Others, strangers to the village, scanned Bobby’s uniform with puzzled expressions.

  When Bobby had picked up the two halves of cider, the two factions of men closed ranks and a low whispering began. She ignored it and went to the corner table where Harriet was sitting forward, fidgeting with excitement.

  ‘So . . . I was coming round the corner,’ Harriet said conspiratorially, ‘by the school, you know where the old tree was cut down last year, the one we used to climb and Pauline nearly fell . . .’ she paused, seeing Bobby’s look of impatience, anyway, who do you think was coming in the other direction?’

  Bobby gave an appropriately quizzical look.

  ‘It was . . . Marie McGill!’ Harriet finally said with triumph.

  ‘Marie, as in “you must pronounce my name with a French accent”, Marie?’

  ‘Yes!’ Harriet exclaimed. ‘She looked as if she was in such a hurry heading for the bus stop. She only had a small bag with her and I have to say, was wearing the dowdiest brown coat I’ve ever seen. She always used to be so fashion conscious and smartly turned-out. Do you remember how awful she was to you about your hair, your clothes . . . actually, just about everything about you? She really was horrid. Anyway, she shuffled past as if she didn’t want anyone to recognise her.’

  ‘Did you speak to her?’

  ‘No, she didn’t give me the chance.’ Harriet thought for a moment. ‘In fact, she almost veered into a bicycle to avoid me, I think. She always hated us both, well, you mostly. I think she felt threatened by you because you didn’t treat her like she was the queen of the castle like everyone else did. It drove me mad how she used to constantly jabber on in French just because she had a French grandmother. She thought she was the bee’s knees. She used to spend every summer over there, didn’t she? Somewhere in Normandy I think. Oh, I loved that day when you talked back to her in French. Do you remember?’ Harriet raced on, not pausing for breath – or an answer. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t believe it! You were almost as fluent as she was. She was so shocked. Mind you, we all were.’

  Bobby took a sip of her drink.

  Andrew Hollis’s announcement that he would teach his daughter French had come as a surprise to everyone. Generally, he took scant interest in the female members of his family, but when she told him a girl at school was fluent, he seemed to be galvanised into action with a competitiveness that was equalled by his headstrong daughter. The lessons took on a reg
imented routine that helped Bobby progress rapidly in the French language. During those lessons, she started to suspect how much her father had fallen in love with France where he was based as a soldier, and for the first time, she had glimpsed a different man beneath the uncompromising veneer she had come to expect.

  Harriet finally ran out of breath, at which stage Bobby reached out and put her hand on her friend’s hand and said, ‘She never bothered me, you know. All that bullying went to waste to be honest. I didn’t like her, so it didn’t matter what she said.’

  Harriet looked with undisguised admiration at Bobby. She really had never been sure whether she totally understood Roberta Hollis. It flummoxed Harriet that Bobby did not need anyone’s approval.

  ‘So, tell me the news,’ Bobby finally said to Harriet, a request that unleashed an hour and a half of titbits of interest about the long stream of men that Harriet had been out with, the exhausting shift patterns of a WAAF, the deprivations of the NAAFI, where the food was definitely getting worse, with everything tasting of carrots or cabbage and the depressing belief that the war was going to go on until they were both old maids.

  Bobby started to giggle and Harriet’s face lit up. ‘Oh, it is good to see you behaving like a normal person!’

  ‘I am a normal person,’ Bobby protested.

  ‘No, you’re not; you’re Bobby Hollis, but you’re wonderful, and I love you to pieces.’

  ‘Do you know, Harriet, it wasn’t until we were at Lonsdale that Marie nearly succeeded in her bullying campaign?’ Bobby suddenly confided, leaning forward. Harriet reared up in surprise.

  ‘I thought you were always impervious to her nastiness.’

  ‘Yes, I was. All those comments about my hair, my freckles and so on just went over my head, but then we all started the “curse”, do you remember? For the first time, I felt out of control, my hormones were all over the place and nothing made sense. It was then that Marie’s jibes finally got through and I would go to bed in tears.’