Chapter 13 Lilias
Lilias
Spring had come at last. Out in the garden, Lilias tended her vegetable garden while David played with paper planes he’d constructed with Symonds’s help.
“Don’t forget to collect those up when you’ve finished, David,” she called over to him. “We mustn’t leave any paper in the garden for the Luftwaffe to see after dark.”
“I won’t, Auntie Lilias,” he called back, and she returned contentedly to her digging, thinking how wonderful it was to leave the harsh memories of winter behind and to be in the midst of all this lush, burgeoning growth. It went a little way to distracting her from worries about the war.
Food was scarcer now that rationing had been introduced, but even the necessity to be creative with the contents of the pantry was a challenge Lilias enjoyed.
And she was still proud they had managed to come through the winter without having to go grovelling to Percy Cook for firewood.
Between them, she and Ruth had dismantled an old pig barn, sawing the planks of wood up and getting blisters on their hands in the process.
Ruth was still lamenting her ruined hands and almost always wore gloves these days.
But to Lilias, her blisters were a badge of pride—proof she and her sister had done something for themselves, without succumbing to a bully or compromising their principles.
She hoped others had managed to do what they had done, and Cook’s old-boat timber was still piled up behind his house, rotting into uselessness.
Now spring was here, life at Marsh House was about vegetables and the perfect paper plane, and sometimes Lilias felt guilty because she was so happy with her lot.
When the army wasn’t shooting at decoys over the marshes as part of their antiaircraft gun training, it was sometimes possible to forget they were at war.
But the country was at war, and Lilias knew she really ought not to feel quite so content, especially as it was some time since they had received a letter from their aunt Sabine in France.
As she listened to the BBC broadcasts on the radio, Lilias could only imagine how bad life was in Paris, and how very much worse it was about to become.
If only her aunt had accepted her invitation for the family to come and live at Marsh House for the duration of the war.
Lilias had written the previous year to invite her, as soon as war seemed inevitable, but Sabine was a strong, stubborn woman, and her fierce nationalistic pride had not allowed her to leave her country.
But Lilias wondered whether Sabine was regretting it now, as day by day, a German invasion seemed increasingly inevitable.
By the time June came around, the Luftwaffe was bombing Paris, and it seemed certain France would soon fall.
Around the same time many thousands of British and French troops had been evacuated from the beaches in Dunkirk, having been trapped there by German troops.
Listening grimly to the reports on the wireless after David had gone to bed, Ruth sighed.
“I think this is the first time I’ve been glad Mama is dead,” she said.
“She would have been utterly distraught about this.”
“She would,” Lilias agreed. “I do hope Aunt Sabine and her family are going to be all right.” Sabine was a widow, and her son, Etienne, was a prisoner of war, having been captured early on in the war.
Her daughter-in-law had fled to the countryside with their children, but Sabine had insisted on remaining in Paris.
Ruth patted her hand. “I’m sure they are. If anyone’s going to survive this, it will be Aunt Sabine. She’s just as much of a fighter as Mama was.” She smiled. “I can hear Mama now, saying something like, they may think they have conquered us, but we will never be defeated. Never!”
Lilias smiled, too, feeling sad. Their mother’s death had been protracted and painful, and, at fifty-two, she had died far too young.
“She would have said that, yes. And she would have been right. The French will never roll over and die the way the Germans expect them to. I only hope Aunt Sabine finds a way to contact us. I shall be sick with worry for them all until we hear something.”
But June wasn’t all bad, because there were baby house martins in the nests in the eaves, much to David’s delight, and he liked nothing better than watching the birds swoop in and out with insects for their clamorous broods.
Lilias drew picture after picture in charcoal of boy and birds, doing her best to capture David’s expression of wonder.
And then one night there was a huge storm with high winds and driving rain lashing the house for hours on end, and the next morning, when David went out as soon as he got up to look at the nests, he quickly ran inside again in floods of tears.
“Auntie Lilias, all the birds’ nests have gone! ” he cried.
“Oh, dear,” she replied, pushing the bread she was just spreading beef dripping onto into the centre of the table, away from Compass’s reach, so she could go out to take a look.
Outside she was greeted by a scene of carnage in the form of destroyed nests, smashed eggs, and dead baby birds.
The whole paved area was awash with mud and moss from the roof, as if the icing of an artisan cake had fallen down onto it, with the pathetic bird corpses as a gruesome decoration.
It was no wonder David was so distressed.
Lilias watched the parent birds flying about in confused bewilderment and wished they had never built their nests in the eaves in the first place.
“The poor things,” she said, laying a comforting hand on David’s shoulder. “Come along, come away and have your breakfast. I’ll clear all this up in a moment.”
She drew him inside, away from the scene of devastation, and let him sit on her lap to eat his bread and dripping.
Not that he had much appetite. Lilias knew the feeling well; when you tried to perform the ordinary activity of chewing and swallowing, but the food was like an indigestible lump of clay in your mouth because you were so utterly miserable.
“Do you know?” she told him, stroking his hair, “I think the mummy and daddy birds will start all over again. They won’t give up.” And she spoke to him about Dunkirk, and all the little boats that had gone out across the English Channel to rescue the British troops stranded on the beach.
“If the people with those little boats had given up, we wouldn’t have had an army left to fight the Germans, would we?
But they didn’t give up. No, I’m quite sure the parent birds will make new nests.
If not here at Marsh House, then somewhere else.
Somewhere they think it’s safer. Now, drink up your tea, and I’d better go out and make a start on clearing the mess up. ”
Still downcast, David nodded and obediently drank his tea, and Lilias allowed him to leave the rest of his bread and dripping instead of reminding him food was in short supply as she would normally have done.
But when she ventured outside again, Compass at her side, the little dog made a beeline for an overturned plant pot, his waving rear end quickly setting off alarm bells in Lilias’s head.
“Compass!” she called to him sharply, hurrying over when he ignored her, and there, huddled amongst the foliage of the shrub, was a baby house martin.
“Leave it, Compass!” She pushed the dog out of the way and bent down to take the tiny ball of fluffy feathers into her hands.
David had come out to see what all the excitement was about. “Is it alive, Auntie Lilias? Let me see!” With David dancing around her, Lilias stood up, the baby bird making weak contact with her hands as it attempted to get free.
Lilias looked around for the bird’s parents, but there were no house martins in sight any longer, distressed or otherwise. Their hearts broken, they had obviously left the scene of tragedy, accidentally abandoning the only survivor.
“Can we keep him?” David asked, still dancing around, and Lilias sighed.
“I think we’ll have to try,” she said, making for the house with her charge. “Although goodness knows how we’re going to care for it.”
“We’re like one of the boats at Dunkirk,” David declared as they took the baby bird indoors. “Coming to the rescue.”
“Yes, I suppose we are,” Lilias agreed doubtfully. “Close the door, will you, David? We need to think how we’re going to care for this little chap.”
As David rushed away on his errand, Lilias opened her hands slightly to look doubtfully down at the bedraggled creature.
Perhaps it would have been better to leave the poor thing where it was instead of raising young David’s hopes?
Only how could she have done that, knowing the poor creature was still alive?
In the Great War, they had rescued everyone, even if there was no ultimate hope for them.
It was a basic human instinct. At least, it was for her.
She sighed, speaking to the bird and its tiny spark of life. “We’ll do our very best for you, but you have to help us, do you hear? You have to fight.”
In the end, Ruth donated one of her old cloche hats for a makeshift nest, and they filled it with fallen roof moss, which they dried out in the stove.
David christened the bird Frank, and they spent what seemed like every waking minute searching for flies to feed him, enlisting Symonds and his wife and half the neighbourhood to their cause.
“Do you know,” Lilias said dryly to Ruth one morning over breakfast, “I rather think I’d even go cap in hand to Cook for flies if he was selling them, that bird means so much to David.” And Ruth laughed.
“Put the idea in the horrid man’s head, and he’s likely to start doing just that,” she said. “I tell you what, I’ll set my mind to finding something else he’ll eat. Starting with some of this leftover egg.”
Eggs, unlike many other things, were not in short supply at Marsh House, but Ruth had recently declared herself sick to death of them, and had not made much inroads into the plate of scrambled egg Lilias had cooked for her that morning.
Scooping some up with her fingers, Ruth went over to the cloche-hat nest and offered some to Frank’s gaping beak.
When the bird gulped it down greedily, Ruth turned to Lilias, laughing.
“There you are!” she said. “Problem solved. He can have all my eggs; I don’t care if I never eat one of the dratted things ever again.”
“You might not be saying that if things get in even shorter supply,” Lilias remarked dryly, but secretly she was glad of the solution. And it would only be for a few weeks, should the bird survive.
Against all the odds, it did survive, becoming more and more lively and vociferous in his nest with each passing day.
David adored it, and Lilias knew he was going to be mightily disappointed when Frank was ready to fledge.
But for herself, Lilias couldn’t wait for the difficult hunt for food for that gaping beak to come to an end.
As luck would have it, Frank timed his first use of his wings for when David was out for the day, helping Symonds with some work up at the worker’s cottage that was a part of the estate.
Lilias had sent them both off in the horse and cart not more than an hour earlier, with David calling to her that he was sure there would be a supply of flies up at the cottage and he would catch them in a matchbox to bring home.
With Ruth in Norwich for the day, Lilias had the house to herself for the first time in a very long while, and, presented with a free day to do with what she wished, she quickly completed some necessary domestic tasks before heading to her studio.
As soon as she opened the studio door, she heard the unmistakable sound of a fly buzzing about.
By the sound of it, it was a large, juicy bluebottle, and Lilias was excited.
Foolish insect, making its way in here! Snatching up a tin, Lilias emptied its contents onto her painting table and crept towards the fly the minute it came to rest on the window pane.
When they’d first started to care for the baby martin, it had taken Lilias an age to catch flies, but by now she was an expert, and soon the fly was captive in the tin, the sound of its buzzing amplified by the metal as it knocked around the inside of its prison.
Gleefully, Lilias left the studio to head back to the house, only stopping to stare in horror when she saw the wide-open kitchen door. “Oh, no!” Feverishly she looked around the room, but there was no sign of the bird.
The door was often left open in good weather to allow Compass to come and go as he pleased, but for the past two weeks, she—and Ruth, David, Mrs. Symonds, and everyone else who had come to the house—had been religiously careful about keeping it closed so that Frank wouldn’t escape.
And now, on the very first day Lilias had been left alone in the house, she had undone all that good work.
She’d left the door open, and the bird had gone.
How was she going to look David in the face when he got home?
“Frank?” Putting the tin containing the buzzing fly down on the kitchen table, Lilias went to close the kitchen door, uncertain if this was the right thing to do or not.
For what if Frank had flown out of the door but tried to return only to find it closed?
Still uncertain, Lilias ran feverishly around the rest of the house, checking every room and calling to the bird.
But there was no sign of it.