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The girl at the corner table was crying.
She had spent the past fifteen minutes trying not to, and now that she had finally broken down she was weeping very quietly, in a way that suggested she would prefer her tears to go unnoticed. Stood up by her date, Frank might have thought, except that she’d ordered a dinner for one without hesitation and she hadn’t been watching the door. Whatever the trouble was, it must have come in with her.
Frank was doing his best to remain tactfully oblivious, but it wasn’t easy, because apart from the two of them the hotel’s dining room was almost deserted. Except for a soft murmur of conversation from the elderly couple seated over by the fire, the occasional crackle from the coal burning in the grate, and the sound of his own chewing, there was nothing to drown out the sound of her sniffling. Frank hadn’t expected the place to be doing a booming business – the outside had looked promisingly derelict, with flaking paint and the brass ‘H’ over the portico dangling precariously from a single nail, and it was hard to imagine it could find much by way of clientele in mid-November in this rural village at the arse end of Cheshire – and he’d hoped that the hotel’s general state of neglect might be reflected in the prices. The addition of weeping maidens certainly enhanced the atmosphere of Gothic decay, but he couldn’t say it was doing much for his dining experience.
To be fair, neither was his dinner. Frank, finding himself in financial straits, had ordered the shepherd’s pie, that being the cheapest thing on the menu. From the taste of it, more Spam than lamb had gone into the mince, but while the hotel wasn’t going to be earning any Michelin stars for its culinary innovation, meat was meat, and the meal was hot and filling. After six years in the merchant navy, it took more than that to put Frank off his feed. The seasoning of female tears just might do it, though.
She wasn’t even pretty, which would have gone some way towards excusing his inordinate interest in an affair that was clearly none of his business. Thin and sallow-faced, she was clad in a drab brown utility suit that was dreary even by the standards of wartime rationing and fraying at the cuffs besides. Her dark hair was falling out of its curls to flop in lank sheets around her ears. Her sorrowful eyes seemed too large for her face, and conspired with a long, thin nose to give her the appearance of a mournful bird.
Still, there was something about her that tugged at Frank’s heart. Perhaps it was her determination to suffer in silence, or the way she was gamely trying to choke down her own unsatisfactory shepherd's pie through her tears. Perhaps it was merely that after so many years at sea, the callouses his mother’s desertion and jeering schoolmates had left around his soul had softened, so that he could no longer bear to sit by passively and watch a woman cry.
It wasn’t as if he had no troubles of his own. He’d been sent out here on a fool’s errand – trying to crack down on the black market in old-fashioned Cheshire, because the Ministry of Food had in its wisdom declared that cheese produced according to the traditional formula was too crumbly and might lead to wastage. All the Cheshire being churned out in the government factories for the official ledgers was of the new rubbery kind, with a consistency more like Cheddar. The change, like most of the changes to the British diet imposed by the Ministry’s wartime strictures, had not proven popular with the public, and an energetic black market in old-style Cheshire had sprung up to meet the demand.
The Ministry suspected dairy farmers were keeping back milk from the official distribution channels to make cheese on the sly, and no doubt they were right, but in Frank’s opinion they were tackling the problem from the wrong end. Farmers were allowed to retain as much milk as they wished for their own household consumption, and there was no way to determine whether it had all been drunk up or some of it was aging in a cellar somewhere. It didn’t take much space to make cheese, and Frank couldn’t search every outbuilding. Even when he did manage to catch someone – he’d recently made a good collar outside Winsford, on a bloke who was running a full-scale creamery in his garden shed – the Ministry generally let them off with a sternly-worded letter. The government couldn’t afford to alienate the farmers; it needed their milk too badly.
In Frank’s opinion it would have been far more effective to target the suppliers in the towns, but he couldn’t afford to alienate his bosses; he needed the job too badly. So he went where he was sent and kept his insubordinate opinions to himself, as much as he could manage it. In truth it wasn’t such a bad life, driving back and forth across the Welsh Marches searching for anyone who would sell him a bit of illicit cheese. It wasn’t the sort of job he would ever have thought to apply for, but having stumbled into it more or less by chance he meant to keep it a while longer.
He’d been assistant purser on his last voyage, and when their ship came into Liverpool he’d told his superior that this time, finally released from compulsory service, he intended to stay ashore for good. The purser had taken him on a farewell tour of the pubs, where they’d run into a former shipmate of his, now an official in the Ministry of Food, who happened to mention that there was a job going as an inspector, traveling around to farms to make sure farmers weren’t hiding an extra pig in the cowshed and so on. Frank knew less than nothing about agriculture, but the purser could vouch that he could count and take accurate notes, and he knew how to drive and read a map. It seemed those were all the qualifications necessary.
“Young Frank’s pushy, observant and he don’t mind if everyone hates him,” the purser had assured his mate jovially over his sixth glass of whiskey. Frank thought the man had been trying to pay him a compliment. At at any rate, the strength of that character reference had been enough to get him the job. And it had seemed a nice enough gig when he’d started out: the loan of a car and a chance to see a bit of the country, to be his own master from day to day instead of having orders shouted at him every waking minute. Silly to have sailed around the world but never been outside London, he’d thought. Why not?
Of course, they hadn’t warned him the car was a decade-old Morris Eight that should have been sold for scrap years ago. Frank could cope with the rotted floorboards: he just had to remember never to set anything heavy down in the footwells or rest his weight there when he was climbing in or out of the car, and always to keep a piece of cardboard at the bottom to keep the mud from flying up. He could cope with the dodgy brakes: once he’d discovered the car pulled to the left every time he tried to brake, it was simply a matter of turning against it, at least until the other wheel cylinder gave out. He could cope with the fact that the bloody thing seemed to weigh as much as a Sherman tank and got the corresponding mileage per gallon: the petrol coupons were supplied by the Ministry.
But whenever the car broke down beyond Frank’s limited capacity to mend, which seemed to happen about once a month, he found himself on the hook for the repairs. The Ministry would reimburse him once he came back to the Liverpool office and submitted the receipt, but until then he had to pay out of pocket, and the nature of the work meant he was off in the countryside for weeks at a time. And there was another problem too: the Ministry of Food had a billet waiting for him if he got to where he was going, but whenever he didn’t – whenever something went calamitously wrong with the car, or he got lost on unfamiliar roads where all the signposts had been taken down to confuse German parachutists and half of them were still missing, or he got stuck in a ditch and had to wait until a helpful farmer came along with a tractor to drag him out – then finding accommodation was his problem, and likely to cost a good deal more than the six shillings a day they allotted for living expenses.
On his most recent trip down to Shropshire something under the bonnet had made an ominous bang, and then the engine had coughed and died. When Frank opened it up he found the distributor had seized, so he’d had to walk the two miles into Audlem to arrange a tow, and now he was waiting for the garage to tell him what was wrong with the car and how much it was going to set him back. Until then he was stuck in this old coaching inn, which wasn’t half as cheap as the decrepit exterior and the adulterated dinner options suggested it ought to be, wondering if he was going to spend the rest of the month skipping meals to pay for this little detour.
He was really in no position to play knight errant for woeful damsels.
But he found himself yearning to all the same, so it came almost as a relief when he heard a loud ring of glassware and a little shriek from the corner table, and glanced over to find the bird-faced girl had somehow managed to knock over her drink. Frank snatched up the clean serviettes from the next table and went to her aid.
“Here,” he said, tossing her one of his makeshift sponges, and after thirty seconds of frantic blotting they’d successfully saved the carpet, though the tablecloth was a sodden mess and her dinner was now swimming in a fizzing amber swamp.
“Thanks,” the girl said, dabbing at her eyes with a dry corner of the serviette.
“Thought you’d experiment with a new sauce, did you? The shepherd’s pie can’t be that bad, surely.”
As jokes went it wasn’t much above the pie, but she hiccuped a laugh and rewarded Frank’s feeble effort with a thin smile, which made her look even more like a bird.
“I’ve had worse. We were without meat for months during the war; we used to make it with haricot beans and swede.”
“Without meat–?”
Frank had only spent a few months of the war on English soil, but his current job had given him a painfully detailed knowledge of the various permutations of the Ministry of Food’s rationing schemes, and to the best of his knowledge civilians had always been entitled to at least a shilling’s worth of meat and a few ounces of bacon each week.
“I’m from Guernsey. We were occupied by the Germans,” the girl explained.
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Frank pulled out the other chair and sat down. “Look, miss, I don’t want to intrude, but I couldn’t help but notice that you seem… unhappy. Is there anything I can do?”
The bird-faced girl gave a bitter little laugh. “Not unless you work for the War Office.”
“Just the Ministry of Food, I’m afraid.” He held out a hand. “Frank Marker.”
She hesitated for a moment, then reached over and clasped it limply. Her fingers were cool and dry, a little rough from work.
“Agnes, Agnes Collenette,” she said.
“Would it help to talk about it, whatever it is?”
“I doubt it. Doubt you’d want to hear it,” she said, looking away and spinning her empty glass around on its edge.
“Well. I tell you what, why don’t you let me buy you another drink, and you can try me. What are you having?”
She gave the glass another whirl. “Ginger beer.”
“That’s your trouble right there! You’re never going to find a brighter future at the bottom of that glass!”
He thought maybe he’d pushed a little too hard, teasing her, considering the state she was in and the fact they hadn’t know each other two minutes, but she glanced up from the glass and gave him another of her thin smiles.
“Gin and tonic, then, if you’re buying,” she said.
The waitress had last been sighted about twenty minutes ago and showed no signs of reappearing, so Frank went across the hall to the hotel bar to order the drinks. When he returned with them, Agnes was looking a little more composed. She’d stopped sniffling and she’d pinned her hair back, which made her nose seem even longer but suggested that it might, with the help of a different coiffure and a more expensive dress, be persuaded to look elegant and French.
“I’m looking for my boyfriend,” she told Frank after she’d taken a sip of her drink. “He’s a prisoner of war.”
“Oh, I see.”
Agnes gave him a flat look that said he didn’t. “Here. I’m looking for him here. Because he’s a German.”
She glared at him, daring him to condemn her. She was clearly expecting it, but there was a brittleness beneath her defiance that made Frank worry she would burst into tears again if he did. In truth, he didn’t know what he thought.
He didn’t hate the Germans, not really. They’d certainly made a mess of London, and they’d torpedoed a ship he’d been on, which hadn’t endeared them to him. But he hadn’t wanted to kill them either. That was why he’d been serving on a merchant ship in the first place. And naval warfare was so impersonal. Frank hadn’t seen the man who fired the torpedo that sank his ship, and that man hadn’t seen him. All he’d been to that German sailor was a dot on a sonar screen. Frank met plenty of people he hated in those six years at sea, but they’d all been serving on British ships with him.
The Germans were more like the sea or the weather, a vast, deadly force against which they must struggle to survive as best they could, but there wasn’t much point in getting angry or taking it personally. The whole war had felt like that to Frank, a global cataclysm of stupidity so enormous that all he could do was let the flood sweep him off his feet and try to keep his head above water. Of course the Jerries had started it, and there was no question that Hitler was a vicious madman and the Nazis were evil through and through, but Frank dealt in particulars. He couldn’t find it in him to hate a whole country full of strangers he’d never even met. There was a knack to it he couldn’t seem to grasp.
It was one thing to love one’s enemy, and quite another to make love to him. Frank couldn’t say he approved of that. But the Channel Islands had been occupied. Agnes presumably knew the Germans far more intimately than Frank did – one German in particular, at any rate – and if she wasn’t qualified to judge whether this boyfriend of hers was worthy of a British girl’s affections, who was? Frank, who’d seen his first German soldiers marching in POW columns and enjoyed an ample supply of meat all through the war?
He couldn’t think what to say, so in the end he didn’t say anything, just raised his eyebrows in an invitation to go on. Agnes eyed him warily, but when no diatribe on fallen women prostituting themselves to the enemy emerged, she decided it was safe to continue.
“My brother’s come home, you see – demobbed. And now his wife’s having another baby, so there won’t be any room for me. They won’t come out and say it, but I know they want me out. I’m supposed to marry Tom Le Gallie – he was my sweetheart before the war.
“I liked him well enough back then, but we were just kids. Then he went to England to join the army, and I didn’t see him again for six years. I don’t know if it was the war that changed him or just growing up, but ever since he came home, he’s different. He always had a temper when he drank, but the way he gets now, it frightens me. And he generally is drunk, most nights, when the fishing’s been good and he can afford it.”
Coming home to discover his girl had been having it off with a German soldier while he was away fighting for king and country couldn’t have done wonders for Tom’s disposition either, Frank thought privately, but it wasn’t kind to say, and even if it was true it was no help to Agnes. It wasn’t like there was anything she could do about it now.
“So you don’t want to marry him anymore.”
She shook her head. “It’s Heinz I want, if he still wants me. Heinrich Teschler – that’s who I’m trying to find. I’ve got to know, because if he’ll have me I’ll wait as long as I have to, until they let him out or they send him back to Germany, and then I’ll go there with him or maybe they’d let him come to Guernsey or we could just stay here in England, I don’t know.” Her eyes were brimming over again, and she swiped her palm angrily across her cheeks to dash the tears away. “If I knew for sure he was going to marry me I could stand up to them. I could stand up to anything, I think, if only I knew. But I’ve got to talk to him, I’ve got to be sure.” Her shoulders slumped. “And if he won’t I guess I’ll go home and marry Tom.”
“But why? You clearly hate the idea.”
She shrugged. “I have to marry someone.”
“You don’t, you know.”
“On Guernsey you do, if you’re a woman. It’s not like here. Here I suppose a girl can go where she likes and do as she likes and there’s nobody to stop her, but on Guernsey everyone knows everyone else’s business, and they all give you hell if you don’t do exactly what’s expected of you. It was bad enough just seeing Heinz, but that was during the war – everyone was breaking the rules one way or another. You had to, if you wanted to survive. But now it’s like they all want to forget so they’re pretending that everything is just the way it was, and if you’re the one who spoils their make-believe they come down on you twice as hard.” She sniffed and pressed her palms against her eyes to push back a fresh flood of tears.
“Why not stay here then, get a job? You don’t have to go back to Guernsey.”
Agnes shook her head. “Oh, I couldn’t. I don’t know anyone, I haven’t anywhere to live. I couldn’t. I’ve got to find Heinz, that’s all.”
“And the War Office won’t tell you where he is?”
“No. We wrote and wrote to them, all us Guernsey girls with German boyfriends, but we never had any reply. When I came here to England I went to their big office in London to ask them direct, but even then they wouldn’t say. They looked at me like I was dirt, practically threw me out.”
“So you didn’t have an address, you couldn’t write to him?”
She shook her head. “Some of the girls wrote their boyfriends letters care of the War Office, but you can bet your life none of those ever got through. Me, I figured Heinz had my address all right, so I’d just wait for him to write me and then write him back. Only he never did.”
Frank had a sudden ominous foreboding of where this was going. “Have you heard from him at all since the war ended?”
“No, not since they took all the POWs off Guernsey and shipped them away to England.”
“Well, you know, sometimes in wars men make promises they don’t really intend to keep,” Frank hedged, trying to gently reintroduce her to reality.
“That’s what I thought at first, too.” She flashed him her thin smile. “I’m not a complete idiot, Mr. Marker.”
“But something changed your mind?”
“Yeah. This.” She pulled a battered envelope from her handbag and set it down on the driest patch of tablecloth.
“So you did get a letter!”
“Not me. My friend Elsie. She swore up and down her Hans would never abandon her and if he hadn’t written it must have been because the Post Office was stopping the letters, and it turned out she was right.”
Agnes took an aggressive swig of her gin and tonic and gave Frank that brittle, defiant look again.
“See, some of us were just messing about because all the Guernsey boys had gone – joined up or evacuated. Five years is an awfully long time when there’s nothing to do but wait for a war to be over, especially when there’s no fire at home and nothing to eat but dry bread and potatoes. We didn’t know who would win – we might have been occupied forever! You’ve got to have your fun sometime. And the Germans had coal and sausages and schnapps… If you went with them you could feel normal for a little while, like you weren’t a prisoner. That’s all. That’s how it was with me and Heinz at first, before the war ended and we realized we’d never see each other again and we couldn’t bear it. That’s when we found out we were in love for real.”
She eyed Frank to see how he was taking this. Perhaps he ought to judge her for selling her affections for coal and sausage, but if those were meant to be bad reasons for sleeping with an enemy soldier he couldn’t think what the good ones might be. He’d come home too often to a cold house and bare cupboards as a boy to discount the value of a full belly and a warm bed. He tried to project an attitude of benevolent interest, and she went on.
“But Elsie and Hans, they weren’t like that. They were serious from the start. They got married, even – it was against the law, but this Quaker lady told Elsie all you got to do is stand before an altar and tell God that you love each other and you want to be man and wife, so that’s what they did. They couldn’t afford a real ring so Hans gave her a curtain ring; she showed me. And then she had a baby. Hans would sneak out of the POW camp on Guernsey at night to see them – he might have been shot! That’s how much they meant to each other.”
Frank supposed it was romantic, if you went in for that sort of thing. It sounded to him more like a bloody stupid way to get yourself killed and leave a child fatherless, but then, there was a reason he’d never gone for a solider, even apart form the killing.
“Well, I guess Hans was just cleverer than the rest of them,” Agnes said, “or maybe when they didn’t receive any mail the others all thought we didn’t care for them anymore and gave up on us, I don’t know. Hans was the only one who got a letter through. He must’ve known Elsie would try to write and the only thing on earth that could stop her was the censors. Anyway, he realized it was no good sending things through the camp mail, so he bought regular British stamps and mailed his letter from Audlem.” She tapped a finger on the letter. “See, that’s the postmark there.”
“That’s why you came here.”
She nodded. “He said he was at a place called Adderley Hall. It’s in the little village just down the road. I thought Heinz might be there too, and some of the others. They all got took off Guernsey at the same time; it stands to reason. But it wasn’t any good just knowing that – we still didn’t have an address where we could write to them, because if we sent our letters to the camp or the post office here in Audlem they’d just be taken again. So I said I’d come to England and find them, and bring all the letters. I’ve got dozens in my suitcase.”
Frank was impressed by her initiative. She was such a drab little slip of a girl, he’d taken her for a helpless waif. It was those big sad eyes of hers. But he couldn’t think how a girl resourceful enough to come three hundred miles with a suitcase full of contraband in order to evade postal censorship came to be crying her eyes out in a hotel restaurant. Maybe the shepherd’s pie had been the final straw.
“Did you find the camp?”
“That part was easy. But when I asked the guard at the gate he just said fraternization was illegal and turned me away. He wouldn’t tell me a thing, the old sod. On Guernsey they used to look the other way sometimes. I bet if a girl came all the way from England they’d have carried a message for her at least.”
“So what did you do?”
“Went round the back.” She smiled. This one almost qualified as a smirk. “I figured if the guard wasn’t going to help, I’d just go and talk to the prisoners myself and ask one of them to fetch Heinz for me.”
“But he wasn’t there?”
“No one was.” The spark of mischief in her eyes was abruptly quenched by a fresh upwelling of tears. “On Guernsey you could go right up to the wire, even pass things through when the guards weren’t looking. But there’s two fences here, yards apart, and the huts are a long way from the inner fence. I would have had to shout to get their attention. I didn’t dare; I think that awful guard would have arrested me if I’d tried. So I just waited for someone to come out. I must have waited there a hour, but I didn’t see a soul.”
“They must all have been out working,” said Frank.
“Honestly, the whole place looked deserted. If it weren’t for the guard I’d have thought they’d all gone. Then it started to get dark, so I thought I’d better go and find somewhere to stay. There’s nothing in Adderley, not even a pub, so I came here. And now I don’t know what to do. I can’t just hang around the wire waiting for them to turn up; the guards will spot me for certain. And I don’t have enough money to stay here long. I’m going to go back tomorrow morning, early, and see if there’s anyone around, but if I can’t find them then I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Well,” said Frank, “I never told you what I was doing in Audlem, but here’s the answer: my car broke down and I’m stuck here until it’s fixed. Could be tomorrow, could be next week – you know what garages are like. Or maybe you’re lucky and you don’t. While I’m waiting, why don’t I have a go at finding this boyfriend of yours, see what I can turn up?”
“Would you?” Agnes gave him a watery smile. “But you must have better things to do.”
“You’d be doing me a favor! I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to explore the village yet, but there’s not much to see. I was bored out of me mind until you came along.”
Specifically, the sights consisted of the parish church, which had almost fallen down in an earthquake two hundred years earlier and was dubiously propped up with iron bars, a ramshackle pavilion in the town square where they used to hold a butter market before Frank’s bosses at the Ministry of Food made that sort of thing illegal, and a large rock with an iron ring where they chained bears for bear-baiting during the Middle Ages. Apparently there was also a long string of locks on the Shropshire Union Canal, but the only thing Frank could imagine more dull than looking at one lock was looking at fifteen of them. He had exhausted his appetite for tourism earlier that afternoon in the space of about twenty minutes.
“Well, if you’re really sure,” she said, wavering.
“It would be a pleasure,” Frank told her firmly. It wasn’t even chivalry. Tracking down a prisoner of war sounded a lot more interesting than tracking down illegal cheese.