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CHAPTER 1
1952
Isabel sat back on her heels and watched flames spring up in the grate. They were pale and there was no heat in them. She was cold, she was tired, her back ached and her eyes stung – from the smoke, of course. But at least the fire was lit. As long as she looked only at the blue and yellow flames, she could begin to feel at home. The room was so dark, even with the light on. It was crammed with furniture and it smelled of Brussels sprouts.
Philip opened the door. His arms were piled with medical textbooks, right up to his chin. His eyes searched Isabel's face as she turned to him.
'Are you warming up a bit?'
'I'm fine.'
'You're too thin, that's what it is.'
'I'm not one of your patients, Philip.'
Awkwardly, as he watched, she stood up.
'I went to the butcher and got a meat pie, just as they were closing,' said Philip proudly. 'It was off the ration.'
'You didn't!' He had braved the queue of head-scarved women, all looking sideways at him and maybe clicking their tongues at his presence. Eh, dear, what's his wife thinking of? He hadn't cared about his dignity, or the fact that although they might not yet know he was the new doctor, come to work in Dr Ingoldby's practice, they would recognise him soon enough. Isabel reached out and touched Philip's hand. 'That was very clever of you,' she said.
His lean face softened. 'You only need to put it in the oven,' he said.
'I brought the potatoes with us,' said Isabel, 'and those carrots. They're a bit old, but I cut out the worst bits.'
They had been children of wartime and all they asked of food was that it should fill them. Isabel was a poor cook. Fortunately Philip's mother was no better, and after years of national service and medical school, he was hardened. He never complained, and he was as proud as Isabel when she brought her watery stews and dense cakes to the table.
They had been married for two months. This was their first home together, after an eight-week eternity of living with Philip's parents in their narrow house where bed springs cracked like whips and the flush of the lavatory was the bellow of a caged water-dragon. His parents wanted Isabel to call them Mother and Father, as if she and Philip were still children, and siblings. But they were grown-ups. Philip had his first job. Isabel would set up home.
'I'll be working all the hours God sends,' Philip had warned her.
Footsteps crossed the floor above their heads. Slow, heavy, deliberate. All the way to the window they went, and all the way back. The landlady. Philip knew her, because he had handled the negotiations for the flat. The rent was too high, but with the housing short age it was what you had to expect. Isabel had only glimpsed Mrs Atkinson's ponderous back-view, clad in a grey working pinafore, disappearing upstairs. That was her idea of welcome, evidently. Their flat was on the ground floor, with a sitting room that looked over the road, a bedroom at the back, and off the bedroom a pokey kitchen with a wooden-lidded bath taking up most of the space. There was a cloakroom in the hall: you had to go out of the flat each time you wanted what the landlady called 'the facilities'.
'The facilities are shared,' she had told Philip grimly. 'No personal effects are to be left there.'
'I don't see why. There aren't any other tenants,' Philip told Isabel.
'She doesn't want me to hang up my knickers in there.'
The hall was dankly cold. How am I going to live here? Isabel asked herself, and her thoughts plummeted, as they sometimes did, until everything was dark. She fumbled with the lights, fumbled with the cistern chain and had to yank it down twice before it would flush. She thought of herself going in and out at bedtime, with a spongebag containing her tooth-brush and a flannel. The landlady was still walking overhead, back and forth. Isabel shivered.
I can't live here, she almost said to Philip as she came back into the flat. But he was building up the fire and he glanced up at her with such a smile, a naked smile full of hope and doubt, that she said, 'I'm going to make new covers for the chairs. I can buy material in the market. That will cheer the place up.'
Their bed was vast. They lay still between hummocks of ticking-covered mattress. The iron springs settled beneath them, and there was a faint smell – not unpleasant; just old, Isabel thought. Old polish, old furniture, old dust, and all those many, many nights that other people had slept on this bed. Who were they? Did they lie awake, entwined, whispering, laughing, or did they sleep coldly, each one irritated by the sounds the other made?
If she were at home she would have dragged the mattress out onto the lawn, slung it over chairs and then beaten it until the dust flew and the sweetness of the air got into it. She could remember her mother doing that. But home had ended when Isabel was eight and she went to live with her aunt and uncle because her parents were going out to Singapore. Her father worked for the McPhail Rubber Company. As soon as they were settled, her mother said, Isabel would be coming out to join them.
Isabel could still see her mother beating the mattress furiously, her soft face set stern. But did that ever really happen? How could she have hauled such a heavy thing all the way downstairs? Someone must have helped, but Isabel's memory had so many holes in it. She had to trust it, though, because she had nothing else.
Philip was asleep. Jealously, Isabel cleared her throat and wriggled until her legs touched his. She was icy. If the flat was like this in September, what would it be like in January? She crept closer to him, but he muttered busily, as if he were writing a prescription for one of his patients, and did not wake.
In the morning Philip left for the surgery at eight, after riddling and stoking the kitchen stove. Isabel watched him. She had to learn how to do everything. Unlike Philip, she hadn't grown up laying fires, fetching in coal and wood, earning money after school and on Saturdays. She was soft: 'nesh' he said, when he was teasing her. By ten o'clock she had made the bed, washed up and laid their clothes in the drawers of the ugly old chest. Upstairs, the landlady coughed. Too close, thought Isabel. They had divided the house into flats but they couldn't quite separate the lives within it.
Outside the windows an early mist was thinning. There would be sun. She would go shopping. Her aunt had bought her a book called Early Days: An Introduction to Housekeeping for the Young Wife. It advised that 'the young wife must make a friend of her butcher, fishmonger and greengrocer'.
Certainly, thought Isabel, she had no other friends in the town. She might as well start with a rubicund butcher whose hands dripped with the tang of blood. She picked up her handbag and snapped its clasp with a fat, important click. She was a little girl pretending to be her mother. She would sally forth with her mother's smile, to coax an extra slice of bacon or assess a piece of cod. If the fish were whole, you could tell how fresh it was from the brightness of its eyes, or so it said in the book. Isabel studied its pages as once she'd studied Milton and Molière. There were no more essays to write or exams to pass. How she missed those clear, sure channels towards the light. She'd done so well in her Higher School Cert that Miss Bellamy had wanted her to try for a university place.
You could have taught, she told herself. You could have taken the Civil Service exams. You chose to marry Philip.
The minster leaned over the end of the street like a black ship. It was beautiful, of course. The shops were in the other direction, in the warren of narrow streets where – somewhere – there was also the marketplace.
At the butcher's, there was no beef. Mutton or pork was on offer. There was tripe, and kidneys which smelled faintly of urine. The long queue of solid women looked Isabel up and down. Isabel gave over the ration books, and the butcher stamped them. Seven years after the end of the war, and you still had to bite back your protest when the butcher weighed down the scales with fat. Philip's mother had stressed that it was vital to keep in with the butcher.
She would go home, put the fatty parcel into the meat safe and then she would change into her walking shoes and go out of the town, as far as she could, where there were no shops or houses or watchful, secretive faces. She would walk until even the minster was out of sight.
The town ended suddenly, and Isabel was out on the dusty road, between hedges where the leaves were already turning. The land was flat and it spread for miles under hazy autumn sunlight. Isabel walked fast, pushing the miles away from her. The road was wide, for a country lane. Two lorries could pass easily, but the verges were growing over the tarmac, narrowing it, as if its width wasn't needed any more.
She had been walking for an hour and a half. The town was hidden by a faint swell in the landscape behind her. She must have come four miles, perhaps five. She could hear nothing but birds, tractors, and the wind soughing in the hedges. Somewhere in this vast landscape Philip was doing his rounds after morning surgery. No one on earth knew where she was.
As she rounded the next corner the road widened again. Ahead of her stretched a perimeter fence that went on as far as she could see. But it was broken down in places, and the wide gates swung open. She knew at once what it was. Isabel came from the flatlands of Suffolk, and during her wartime childhood she had woken night after night to the thunder of Lancasters overhead, as they took off from the airfield. The noise seemed to go on for hours, before the last of the aircraft throbbed beyond her hearing. Once, Isabel had been up with earache when the thunder began. Her aunt had grown still, listening: 'There they go, Isabel.' Aunt Jean had drawn back the blackout and let Isabel see the lights of the aircraft. 'There won't be any lights,' she said, 'once they're over enemy territory.' The black bombers would be hidden against the black sky. Bombers from all over the east of England would assemble somewhere over the coast, and then the bombing stream would head eastwards, over Holland and on into Germany, towards the Ruhr or the deep heartland of Berlin. Long hours later, they would return; or most of them would. Her aunt would listen for them in the hours before dawn.
Isabel and her cousin Charlie had been taken out to see the airfield when it was still under construction. There was a guardhouse, and Isabel had asked her aunt, 'What would happen if I ran past the guardhouse? Would they say, "Halt, who goes there?"
Charlie had laughed at her: 'They'd shoot you, Is.'
She hadn't known there was a bomber station so close to Kirby Minster. But of course, that would be why they had widened the road. There must have been lorries pounding over it day and night, servicing the thousands of people who lived out here in their temporary city. Air crew, ground crew, Waafs, everyone from wing commander to cleaners. Already Isabel was walking forward, past the guardhouse. Some of the fence was down. The silence of the deserted airfield folded round her.
Everything was still, but for the wind sifting across concrete. Thistles, dock and willowherb sprouted from cracks. Bramble snaked out of the long grass, and coiled up the fence. Isabel heard her aunt's voice in her head. They were standing close together, the three of them, watching the mud churn as the flat farmland became an airfield.
'That's going to be the control tower. They direct the aircraft from there.'
'Where will the aircraft go?' It was Charlie's voice now.
'They'll be dispersed all around the perimeter,' said her aunt authoritatively. 'They have to do that, in case of German attack. If the aircraft were in one place, they could be destroyed by a single enemy raid. The bomb store is camouflaged, too.'
'What are all those buildings?'
'Admin. Barracks. They have everything they need here.'
Isabel tested the words in her mouth. Admin. It sounded mysterious, powerful. 'Do they have houses to sleep in?' she asked babyishly. Charlie grinned and lightly kicked her leg.
Aunt Jean frowned. 'They sleep in Nissen huts,' she said briefly.
Aunt Jean knew everything, because she was on the parish council. She wrestled every bit of knowledge to herself, and gave it out sparingly, to those who deserved it.
Soon the village was full of airmen, as if her aunt's predictions had made them spring into being. There was only one pub, and everybody went there, shouting and singing and spilling out into the summer darkness with beer mugs in their hands. Isabel and Charlie would hang about the green on their bikes, doing endless circuits, watching, listening. Some people in the village grumbled about the invasion, but not Aunt Jean. Strict as she usually was, she had endless tolerance for these young men, and would take to task those who complained about heavy drinking, shadowy couples enlaced by the walls of the village hall, or a young flight lieutenant tearing through the village on his motorbike. On Sundays Aunt Jean invited air crew to tea, to give them a taste of home, she said. Isabel couldn't help knowing that there was nothing very homely about Aunt Jean, or the stiff way in which she set out the best tea things on little tables in the sitting room, instead of comfort ably around the kitchen table. Isabel and Charlie were always warned to say that they didn't want any cake. 'It's the least we can do for them,' Aunt Jean said.
On still nights they could hear the aircraft starting up, taxiing, waiting for take-off. Isabel thought of the flight sergeant who had caught her watching hungrily as he took another piece of apple sponge. He had laughed and said, 'On second thoughts ...' and put it onto her plate. Aunt Jean hadn't been pleased, but Isabel ate it up quickly, before she could be stopped, and all the men laughed.
Isabel was twelve now, Charlie thirteen. They were old enough to understand what was happening, Aunt Jean said, and she let them listen to the radio reports of the bombing raids. They knew what it meant when Alvar Lidell intoned that 'one of our aircraft failed to return'. When the men were on operations, the pub was almost empty.
We used to talk about 'the airfield', as if it were the only one in the country, thought Isabel. But there were dozens, all over Suffolk and Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and East Yorkshire. She looked around her, at the silent, sleeping landscape at peace in the autumn sunlight. There's probably a village near here, too, she thought, with a pub that used to be packed with men in uniform. Now there are only farm-workers again.
Isabel shaded her eyes and scanned the wreck of the airfield. She could pick out the control tower, hangars, admin buildings, roads, Nissen huts. The main runway disappeared into the distance. They hadn't demolished the buildings; they hadn't bothered. They had just left everything to the weather.
A cloud of birds was pecking at something on the ground. They lifted for a second and she saw that it was a dead rabbit, and then they went back to it again, businesslike, working methodically at the soft parts.
Isabel glanced quickly behind her. Of course there was nothing there. It was the atmosphere of the place, that was all.
You're being absurd, she said to herself. She was in the habit of giving herself a good talking-to from time to time. Charlie used to call her a scaredy-cat when she wouldn't follow him on his wilder expeditions. 'You're just a little scaredy-cat,' she said aloud.
The more she looked, the more the immediate impression of a place fit for use faded. Doors were hanging off. There was broken glass that caught the light. Maybe boys from the village came up here and smashed things, now that they could. Or courting couples — No. No one would come here for love. It wasn't that sort of place. It would run down a little more and then it would be returned to farmland, like other 'hostilities-only' bomber stations. They would plough up the runways, the dispersal aprons and the perimeter tracks. The shadow of them would be all that remained, like the shadow of an Iron Age fort in photographs taken from the air.
No one in the world knows where I am, thought Isabel again, and this time she shivered a little, because the wind had turned cold now that the autumn afternoon was slipping away. Briskly, as if someone were watching her, she turned and walked away at a steady pace, not looking back. She passed through the gates and was back in the lane. When she reached a curve and the airfield was hidden behind her she walked faster, with the breath of fear on her back, until she was only just not running.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Greatcoat"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Helen Dunmore.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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