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“People
get terribly excited about that sort of thing nowadays but there was nothing “abusive’’ about it. Nobody was taking advantage.
Nobody was forced. I was young and desperate for it. Nothing would have
stopped me. Thought of nothing else. Woke up in the morning thinking about
it, went to bed dreaming about it. My whole life was a fruitless quest for
it, constantly wondering what it would be like and whether I could make a job
of it.
“She’d been around the house for years. Everybody knew her. Mother had known
her from childhood. Not that that says much. You know my mother was just 19
years older than me. Hardly seems any time now but one accepts that one’s
mother has always been there. Hadn’t of course, not like this old house.’’
Ginger looked round the shadowed drawing room with a mix of love and pride.
“This old place is part of the landscape, it grows out of it. The old red
bricks are made of it and those big old trees have their roots down under the
Roman road. Marvelous place. Good old house.’’
He raised his
glass in a toast to his home and said: “There seems to be some law of nature
that says the summer before a war has to be a scorcher. It’s like a last gift
to us, to remind us what we might have if we weren’t so intent on giving it
all up for such foolishness. That last summer Lady Elaine found me down at
the Hunter’s Pool. I used to go there and swim -- never bothered with a
costume of course. Grandfather kept the place closed to the public except at
the weekends when they could pay their shilling and wander round.
“And that was where I saw her, standing watching me when I came
out of the water. There was nothing strange about it. I had always known her.
There was no awkwardness. I saw her standing there amidst the trees in that
green dress, something soft and floaty like chiffon, I suppose, and it
drifted round her so it looked as if she had grown out of the woods and she
looked at me with those eyes of hers and, well, you can guess the rest. That
pool was damned cold but she got the response she was looking for.
“But it was later, back here at the house in my bedroom
overlooking the kennels. I had the window wide open and it was gasping hot
and she just came in moving so soft and quiet and we made love. She enveloped
me, such softness folding round me, taking me in, finding her completely. And
then, at the end, the old house wanted to join in too. There were timbers
groaning, windows rattling, even the slates on the roof over my room seemed to
pulse like the scales on a dragon and, when it was over, the sky darkened and
a sudden summer storm hit us, those first big drops of rain that splashed so
heavily on my windowsill and then the downpour. I got up to close the window and I looked out at the trees
dancing in the park. When I turned back, Lady Elaine was gone.
“I went down to dinner that evening and Grandfather looked
at me a little queer. I wonder if he knew. Often wondered if he knew. Of
course he knew.
“And that was it. I never saw Lady Elaine again that summer and then
it was September and the war came and I went off to do my bit. I was in
Bomber Command. Lancs. Navigator. Buried away deep inside. Sticking my head
out to get a sighting every once in a while, if the flack wasn’t too thick.’’
Ginger turned quiet then and I caught him gazing at the
little silver plane on the mantle piece. “Tough?’’ I ventured.
“Pretty tough, I suppose. But I had it lucky. Got through
the whole lot. Lots didn’t. By the end there were hundreds of us -- we were
over Germany like flies. But they kept coming. As long as they had planes,
they would fly at us and the flack was constant. That never stopped.
“And we’d see planes going down. Sometimes they just blew up, sometimes they
went down in flames, sometimes they were just knocked out of the formation
and falling out of the sky. I remember chaps still on the air -- chaps we’d been
in the Mess with at breakfast -- dropping, just dropping and screaming for
their mothers all the way down. When that happened I flicked the switch on
the radio. Nothing to be done for the poor buggers, God bless them.
“I’ll tell you this. I was bloody glad of Lady Elaine
then. Lots of those boys were blown to bits and never even kissed a girl but
I had her to look back on. I wasn’t going to die a virgin.
“Finally it was our turn. Flack right in the cockpit. It
must have torn through the plane like a rocket. She stood on her tail, tipped
right over and started to dive. We were tumbling out of the sky. Nobody left
up there to order us out but I didn't have to be told. You can't imagine how
tight it was in there. Even when the plane was on the ground there was
barely room to move but we were clawing our way down the gangway to the hatch
with everything heaving like a roller coaster. Crawling, climbing, rolling,
falling. I had no idea which way was up. I had no idea which way I was going.
I was banging off every surface like a pea in a drum and that bloody chute
was dragging along with me. So narrow.
No room.
“And then Lady Elaine was standing there in front of me,
right in the hatch, that long green dress lashing all around her, hair flying
like whips in the wind. She had her hand stretched out to me with such a look
of love and concern in her eyes and suddenly I was not afraid any more. I
was going to die. I knew it. I accepted it. You see, Lady Elaine has come for
the eldest sons of all our family for generations. She stood on the bell
tower and shrieked when my father got it three days before the Armistice, in
the middle of the night -- a scream like a wounded tigress that went on for
ten minutes. Half the portraits on the stair fell off the wall, the hounds in
the kennels joined in the howl, but I slept through it, apparently. Never even
stirred in my cradle. Mother did. She knew what it meant. Sat bolt upright in
bed and wept and Grandfather, of course, he knew.’’
continued
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