Page 41 of Last Letter Home
‘I’ve started making my way through them and typing them up, but it’s slow work. They’re interesting because they give a sense of life here at the start of the war. Sarah lived in Westbury village with her mother and sister.’
‘And who was this man she was writing to?’
‘His name was Paul Hartmann. He was employed on the Westbury estate as under-gardener, but the very elderly lady we met yesterday at Westbury Hall said his mother was a distant relative of the family. The really amazing thing is that Paul’s mother lived in the cottage where I’m staying, and Paul, too. They were German. Well, Paul’s mother was English but she had lived in Germany most of her life.’
‘I don’t understand about him being German,’ Luke said. ‘Would he really have been fighting in the British Army in Italy?’
‘It wasn’t unknown,’ Briony told him, ‘but it must have been an incredibly difficult decision for people like him. I mean, even if you believed that Nazism had to be destroyed, you’d still be shooting your fellow countrymen.’
Tina was nodding, her face troubled. She was revealing herself as a very empathetic sort of person who took things to heart and Briony warmed to her even more.
‘And what did Sarah write to Paul about? Were they lovers, do you think?’
‘From Sarah’s side, which is all we have, I’d say no, just friends, but I haven’t read all the letters yet.’
‘What you need are the letters Paul wrote back to her,’ Roger said.
Briony nodded, her mouth full. ‘If only,’ she said eventually, ‘but I’m not sure where to start looking. There’s nothing in the Record Office in Norwich. I suppose I could trawl the catalogues of the war museum, for instance, but finding surviving family might be my best bet.’
‘Well, good luck,’ Roger said. ‘And with finding your grandfather.’
‘Thanks. His name was Harry Andrews.’
‘We know an Andrews, don’t we?’ Tina said to her husband.
‘Do we?’
‘It’s a very common name,’ Briony said, apologetic.
‘That man we spoke to at the wine-tasting,’ Tina continued. ‘There’s a rather nice farm shop near Westbury, Briony. It has a café and runs events.’
‘I remember now. The wine wasn’t bad, we bought a mixed case. Was it Jim or Tim Andrews?’
‘David,’ Tina said promptly. She and Roger stared triumphantly at Briony.
‘Thanks,’ she said, smiling at their eagerness. ‘I suppose there’s always the possibility that he’s a relation. I wonder how I can find him?’
Twenty-one
When Briony let herself into Westbury Lodge late that evening a thick envelope lay on the mat. It had her name written on it, Miss Briony Wood, in proper fountain pen and had been delivered by hand. She turned it over and slid her finger under the flap. From inside she drew out a printed booklet entitled Gas Masks and Greengages: Westbury at War with a postcard clipped to it of the stained glass window in the church. She flipped it over to see it was from the old man who’d shown her Barbara Hartmann’s grave.
Dear Miss Wood,
It was a great pleasure to meet you yesterday. After we said goodbye I conducted a little snoop about to see if I could find anything potentially useful to you, and the vicar drew my attention to this publication, written by one of our parishioners some years ago now. I hope that you at least find it an interesting account of the wartime era.
With kind regards,
George R. Symmonds
Briony flicked through the booklet quickly. It offered a short account of the village and its people in 1939 from the Kellings up at the Hall to the family who ran the post office. She scanned the index for mentions of any Andrews or Hartmanns, but there were none except for a reference to a Lawrence Andrews who, she read, from summer 1940, when Britain was most fearful of invasion, had headed up the local Dads’ Army, the Home Guard whose job it was to be alert for possible enemy attack and to patrol and protect vulnerable spots in the area such as the railway station and the bridge. On the opposite page was a grainy photograph and she gazed at it hard. Captain Andrews had been a broad-shouldered man in his sixties with a bulbous nose, his stern expression showing how seriously he took his responsibilities. There was no family likeness to her grandfather that she could see, except possibly in the line of the mouth. With a sigh, she turned the page and her eye fell on a reference to the Bailey family that she hadn’t noticed before. It was in a section about evacuees. A young boy named Derek Jenkins had been taken in by the Bailey women at Flint Cottage in September 1939. There was a photograph of half a dozen children who had arrived at the village school at that time. They looked miserable and confused, as well they might if they’d been separated from their parents and schoolmates to be sent among strangers. The name Derek Jenkins sparked something, but for a while she couldn’t remember what.
That evening as she was typing up one of Sarah Bailey’s letters an idea came to her and she brought up the Record Office website. Yes, there it was, a reference in the catalogue. Derek Jenkins, evacuee. It was a tape of an interview. She would make her appointment and go and listen to it.
‘You are Derek Jenkins and you were once an evacuee in Westbury, Norfolk?’ a light, well-bred female voice asked. Briony listened intently in the spacious modern building that housed the Record Office.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Derek’s was an old man’s voice, high-pitched, tremulous, and he sounded nervous at first. ‘Two days before war broke out we were told to be at school early with our luggage, and when we got there they’d laid on buses to take us down to the docks. Well, I hadn’t hardly been out of London before, so you can imagine what it was like saying goodbye to my mum. I never hardly seen her cry before, she was always the strong one. As for going on a boat, now that was exciting at first, though some of us was sick, it was a bit choppy out there, which wasn’t so nice. No, I didn’t feel too good, but my stomach was churning anyway, what with nerves. It was four or five hours round to Great Yarmouth and when we docked there it wasn’t a moment too soon so far as I was concerned. They took us off the boat and sent us to a school where we stayed for the night, then it was on to buses again. I remember passing out of the town and seeing all that lovely countryside and thinking what a great adventure it would be if only my mum was there . . .’
Twenty-two
