War Bonds: A Novel of World War Two, page 1
Pamela Norsworthy
A Novel of World War II
©2024 by Pamela Norsworthy
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The author grants the final approval for this literary material.
First Digital Version
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-68513-371-9
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2023948139
PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING
www.blackrosewriting.com
To Uncle Jase Norsworthy, for sending the cherished gift of six pages, single-spaced, all caps feedback at the perfect time;
And to my father, Col. Floyd Harris Mason (Ret.)
B-17 pilot and wing commander of the Bloody 100th,
Thorpe-Abbotts Airfield,
POW, hero, dad.
I miss you both.
PROLOGUE
Paris, 1954
The pianist entered from the wing to polite applause, offered a crisp nod of her head, and took her seat at the piano bench. She inhaled, shoulders lifting, releasing, a recalcitrant strand of hair escaping from her bun as she leaned in to play. She seemed familiar to him somehow, the lissome curve of her neck, the confident fluidity of her hands and fingers, the graceful way her body moved forward and back with the music. The melancholy nocturne brought him immediately back to the dangerous, hopelessly conflicted time when his life and soul were at risk. His stomach clenched; his shoulder radiated a deferred pain. No, he reminded himself. The threat is past.
It was an impetuous decision, coming to Paris for a few days, but he’d been anxious to see his son, newly hired as an aeronautical engineer at Avions Marcel Dassault. They had not met since the boy’s wedding and the father greatly wished to get to know his daughter-in-law a bit better.
The son had secured four tickets at Salle Gaveau for a program of piano music by Polish composers, performed by promising students from the Conservatoire de Paris. Many were Jewish musicians whom the faculty of the Conservatoire trained free of tuition. Gestures like this were still common across the continent, those who survived the war seeking to elevate the fortunes of those who had suffered so acutely and, perhaps, assuage their guilt for allowing the brutality to advance as far as it had. After a hurried bite in a nearby café, the group walked through the brightly lit streets to the concert hall, settling in just as the program began.
And now. This girl. This oddly familiar young woman. He looked down at his program for the name of the pianist: Ilsa Stroński, age 19, Poland. Could this be? Could it be the same family? After the concert, he would seek her out, to ask.
CHAPTER ONE
To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.
–George Washington
England—as war arrives
Colin gazed through the schoolhouse window, transfixed by the excavation of the hills, feeling a tremble in his bones as the earth gave way. He wished he were outside, charging up the growing mounds of earth where he could proclaim himself king of the hill in front of Hugo and the other boys, former strangers into whose lives he’d been suddenly thrust. In his mind’s eye, he raced ahead as the others flailed, their frantic missteps causing them to slip and roll helplessly to the bottom, the fragrant, newly overturned earth smearing their shorts and sweaters and knee socks as they tumbled. Colin, on the other hand, would be the sure-footed one, conquering the hill and earning the admiration of the men working to flatten the land, who might then let him join their labors. He could assist them, he thought, by rolling stones out of the way so their machines could push through the squelchy, soggy meadow.
Colin and his classmates had grown accustomed to the relentless rumble from the earthmovers, their eerie, oddly mechanical sound punctuated now and again by a screech as metal scraped ancient rock buried beneath. The children couldn’t know this intrusion on the quiet, pastoral hills of East Anglia was a prelude to the aggressive machines that would soon swarm and darken the impossibly blue English skies. Interspersed between the sleepy villages and the farms stood centuries-old estates, newly requisitioned for the flying men moving in. The lords of these manors did not object. But they did wince when swaths of pine trees that once anchored the countryside were felled. Whole conifer forests that had endured for generations, vanquished by the earthmovers, the trees giving their lives to the war effort as all of England knew it must do.
Colin had fallen in love with the tailored wildness of the landscape that surrounded his new home—so unlike London’s crowded streets and noisy lorries. And to think of how bereft he had felt that afternoon a year ago, when he returned from school to find his mother stuffing his clothes into his small valise, apprising him they were headed straightaway to the train station.
“But Mummy,” he’d cried, “I don’t want to live in the country! You said if something happened, I would go to Leeds with the grands.”
“Yes, well, Grandmother loves you very much, but there are no children around that huge estate, are there? Not a one.” She would not meet his eye; her voice was high and clipped, not at all how she usually sounded. “Grandmother’s afraid you’ll be lonely and we don’t want that, do we?”
“But, Mum, aren’t the talks still going on? You said the prime minister would sort things out with the Germans. There can’t be war if they’re still talking, right Mum? So, I don’t need to go just yet. I can stay here with you.” Colin folded his arms and gave a nod, hoping his argument convinced her.
“The time for talking has ended, Colin. The Germans have attacked Poland. They’ve gone and done it. The war’s begun. I’ll be working extra at the hospital and with your father gone, you’d practically be fending for yourself, my sweet boy, and I can’t have you doing that.” She knelt, holding him by his shoulders and locking her eyes on his, her “I mean business” look on her face. “So, we will finish packing your things, then you’ll be taking the train along with lots of other children for a holiday in the country. That’s it. It’s decided.”
Taking a train—alone! That put a new light on it. The prospect of such an adventure intrigued him. But with his usually even-keeled mother rattled, her eyes watery and red, Colin kept this to himself. Instead, he’d thrust out his lower lip and set his face in a way he hoped would assure her he’d miss her, that he was sad to go, but he would do his duty.
Colin’s sixty-mile trip from Kings Cross had taken hours longer than expected because of all the children collected along the way and the many other trains crowding the tracks on a similar mission. The elaborate and detailed plan to remove children from England’s cities had been developed over many months, just one element of war preparations that had run quietly in the background throughout the prime minister’s futile peace negotiations with the German chancellor. Once England declared war, the children’s evacuation was immediate. At each stop on Colin’s journey, volunteers with too-bright smiles boarded, bearing trays of cheese sandwiches and non-specific compliments.
”Such sturdy children,” one exclaimed.
“Brave indeed, all of you!” said another.
“And you’re headed to lovely families—truly lovely—where all this will be sorted out and you’ll be safe and make loads of new friends! You’ll see.”
Their stilted pronouncements did little to soothe the sniffles and bewilderment of the youngest refugees, those traveling without a shepherding sibling or older family friend, who felt the exodus not as a grand adventure but a jarring dislocation. The eyes of the volunteers glittered as they swept over the assemblage in the train car. “Child refugees,” Colin heard one breathe to another, shaking her head. “English refugee children,” another clarified. “With gas masks and ration books. Peace in our time, my arse. God save us all.”
Colin’s stomach heaved.
After the third stop and the third variation of the grand adventure, morale-building pep talk from a third round of volunteers, the children from London lost interest in both the message and the limited menu, one stage-whispering that “a shortbread biscuit would hit the spot right about now, but do you ‘spose we’ll see a tray of those? Not hardly.” That round of sandwich-bearing volunteers slinked away with full trays to await the next train, their own spirits sagging.
The train resumed its journey and with the coach more crowded, many children grew more chatty—whether from nerves or uncertainty, or from the opposite, that they’d begun to relax a bit. In the company of strangers, they had identities to invent. Who might they be, out from under mother’s constant tutelage on proper deportment, or daddy’s impervious rules? They tried out stories and spun tales for their seat mates of their lives in the city, where neighborhood chums were headed, and who among their families remained in London.
The littler ones boasted about how fast they could run, the high trees they had successfully climbed, their mastery of complex puzzles and chapter books. The older boys—barely in their teens and protected from conscription for the next number of years—were all bluster and bravado, describing wit h certainty how the Wehrmacht would be stopped in France because of this older brother or that uncle who was brave and fierce and could single-handedly push ‘em back to the Rhine. In the manner gifted only to boys their age, they punctuated their stories with the sounds of machine gun fire, then bombs dropping slowly, inexorably, from great heights, a foretelling of the massive explosions the Allies would cause behind German lines. Their inspired table reading of the prosecution of the war left the littlest riders mesmerized, wide-eyed, impressed. For Colin, it filled in details of the current reality that his parents had kept out of his hearing. Once an architect, his father was a soldier now, training somewhere secret. He wasn’t supposed to say where, he whispered to his travel companions. In truth, he didn’t even know.
As the older boys continued their competitive storytelling, tales growing taller and the telling more animated, a dark shadow of worry settled into Colin’s awareness, carving out a neat, defined space. Try as he might to push it out of his mind, the worry migrated to the center of his thoughts, expanding as the train’s steady progress bore him farther away from all he knew. And so it stayed, rarely receding—an axis, so to speak—around which Colin’s every thought turned.
The train slowed, reaching its destination at last. A quiet rolled through the car. The youngest children, who’d begun the day anticipating the excitement of a train journey without their parents’ fussy supervision, grew quiet as if suddenly realizing the train ride was not the point, an immured adventure that would conclude with their return to the familiar. A sense of displacement settled over their faces and in their chests, and even the most rambunctious grew pensive, straining to see out the windows to get a look at their new home.
They could see the village, yes, but also endless acres of meadow beyond that, where cows and sheep grazed under the watchful eye of a quick-moving sheltie, who circled and barked to ensure her charges didn’t nibble too far afield. Horse carts ambled over rutted, muddy roads that wound through acre upon acre of farmland, past half-timbered homes constructed of white-washed stone, ancient wooden barns, and lean-to sheds that had seen better days. This was not London or even Birmingham or Manchester: this place was remote and rural and quiet. The train hadn’t just taken them north: it had taken them back in time. They saw no city workers bustling to their office buildings or shoppers musing over the wares of street vendors. No rhythmic whoosh as the Tube approached a corner stop. Just a quiet, green and golden landscape they would soon learn smelled mightily of livestock and earth and rain. Elsworth.
Their minders—schoolteachers and nurses, mostly, who had chaperoned the trip—directed them to exit the train and line up along the wall of Elsworth Station.
“Quickly now, here we go then!” one enthused, with an overly spirited clap.
So much cheer, Colin thought, knowing that when the grown-ups overdo it like this, it means they are worried about something they aren’t willing to talk about. He straightened the name tag pinned to his coat and gathered his things—the valise containing his clothes, ration book, identity card, a photo of his parents, and a jar of plum marmalade—and the gas mask that fit his thin face so poorly. He strode purposefully off the train car, winding around children who had slowed to consider if perhaps they just sat back down in the carriage they would magically return to their parents.
Already arrayed, facing the station wall, dozens of families gathered in clusters awaiting the evacuees’ arrival. Families missing men, or if there were men, they were grandfathers or lame on one side or nearly blind. It was mostly women and their children who began quickly appraising the goods—the children they’d agreed to shelter for who knew how long. They assessed what they could, scanning the tired faces to see whether a child seemed happy or withdrawn, anxious or easygoing. They considered the quality of the children’s jackets, their hats, their shoes, how recently they’d had their hair cut, their ages, and which chores they’d be suited for.
A man with a bullhorn welcomed the children to Elsworth. Reverend Haywood Dowd, the parish vicar. Kind and clear eyes peeked out under wildly bushy eyebrows that hung like awnings on his rumpled face. Providing a measure of symmetry was the elaborate mutton chop beard he’d worn for forty-five years, an emblem of another era, an earlier war. His meticulous attention to it, the daily trimming and sculpting and tweezing, his vain and loving devotion to it proved reassuring to his parishioners, proof that this tireless worker for Christ was in fact fallible and human, one who could understand their own vanities and doubts, their petty grievances and larger heartbreaks. But those eyebrows, clucked some in his flock. How is it Mrs. Dowd doesn’t tell him the brows could use some tending, too?
“A delight, truly, that you’re here, children,” he bellowed.
More cheerfulness, Colin worried, can’t be a good sign.
“These families you see before you are ready to welcome you into their homes for however long that may be. This isn’t London, is it?” he tittered, eyes wide with the outsized understatement. “Not a bit. But we quite know you’ll like it here, children. We do. And to you, Elsworth families, the entirety of the British Empire is indebted to you for the generosity you are showing these dear children.”
After a quick prayer beseeching God to be in and among them all, he announced it was time to begin.
A woman stepped forward immediately, her face determined, her eyes narrowing as she called out, “I’ll take that one.” She pointed to one of the oldest boys, a sturdy redheaded 13-year-old named Wilbert, who blushed furiously as he realized she meant him. His eyes darted in the vicar’s direction. The older man nodded vigorously and began a series of complex, fairly incomprehensible gestures—lifting, pointing, sweeping—which Wilbert interpreted to mean that he should now gather his things and depart with his new family. One family after another echoed the cry, “I’ll take that one,” and moved in to claim their choice. The chaperones trailed behind, making notes of who went where, securing names and addresses and a telephone number if there was one. Slowly the line of children thinned, many walking off with exaggerated slowness, woodenly, casting glances over their shoulders at their former train-mates—friends they’d made only hours before but who seemed so much more familiar than these villagers who were taking them off to who knew where.
A woman with a boy about Colin’s size approached. “We’re the Hughes,” she said quietly, placing a hand under Colin’s elbow and drawing him towards her. “I’m Ivy and this is Hugo. He’s nine years old. You’ll be staying with us.”
She was small and blonde and moved with slow and gentle purpose in response to Colin’s shy reluctance. Her eyes crinkled at the corners as she smiled. In that moment, Colin surrendered to the reality of his current situation. He nodded, a lump building in his throat, tears gathering in his eyes, because while this pretty lady seemed friendly and nice, she was still a stranger and so unlike his own mother.
“Pleased to meet you,” he managed, extending his hand as his father had taught him to do. “Thank you kindly, ma’am. I’ve some marmalade for you from me mum.”
“Marvelous. We’ll have it for breakfast then, won’t we? And your name, young man?”
“It’s Colin Clarke, ma’am. I’m ten,” he choked out, humiliated that his voice betrayed his sudden sadness and rush of homesickness.
Hugo eyed him with obvious disappointment, shoulders slumping, arms crossed, nose wrinkled like he smelled bad fish. “We’ve a weeper, Mum,” he sighed. “Let’s switch ‘im.”
“Hugo Milton Hughes! Is that a way to welcome a newcomer? One who’s had a long journey? Who doesn’t know you or me from Adam’s house cat?” Ivy glared, leaning in and over her young son, blue eyes intense and fixed. “I’ve a mind to leave you right here, then. Let you find a new family for yourself. Is that what you’d like?” She turned to Colin. “Sincere apologies, Colin, for Hugo’s lack of hospitality. He is working on cultivating a kinder temperament. It’s clear there is still work to do.” This she said with clenched teeth, eyebrows raised unnaturally high. Clearly, this conversation was well-worn territory between them. “Seems we’ll be needing to talk to the vicar again, Hugo.”
