The Code of Love by Andro Linklater
Author:Andro Linklater [Linklater, Andro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48092-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2000-04-05T04:00:00+00:00
8
A Nightingale Sang
Gardenia perfume lingering on a pillow,
Wild strawberries, only seven francs a kilo,
And still my heart has wings,
These foolish things remind me of you.
—ERIC MASCHWITZ,
“THESE FOOLISH THINGS”
Writing to him had been an act of faith. Months had passed since the news of the colony's surrender, and Pamela still had no indication whether Donald was alive or dead. Although a Red Cross representative had been allowed into the camp in July 1942, no authoritative list of prisoners had been issued. Yet every week she continued to write into the silence.
The letters had become a kind of confessional, in which she told him the things that meant most to her: how much she missed him, how slowly the time passed, and how she felt the horrible sense that her life was slipping away. “An eternity” was how she described the waiting She had been twenty-three when she last saw him. In war, life speeded up to keep pace with death's acceleration, and in the years since she had said goodbye, her friends had seen their men off to war and welcomed them back, had fallen in love and out again, had got married and given birth, had boasted of their babies' accomplishments; some were pregnant again. In February 1943 she would be twenty-seven, and for her nothing had changed. All she had was the certainty that three years earlier she had been touched by a happiness that seemed un-matchable with any other man. So she continued to tell him what she could not properly tell anyone else, that she loved him as she had loved no one else, but that the waiting was a sacrifice. It was her choice, but a sacrifice all the same.
What made her constancy more extraordinary still was that everything else seemed to have been transformed since she had last heard from him. The relentless advance of German and Japanese forces had been halted, and after Allied successes at Midway in the Pacific and then at El Alamein and Stalingrad, the pendulum was swinging back. As eventual victory began to seem possible, the mood of the country altered dramatically from dogged duty to an aggressive optimism. The bombers still passed over Kent, but now more of them were heading in the opposite direction, toward Germany. The Courier allowed itself a congratulatory editorial on what the world owed to its readership: “Kent, Sussex and Surrey stood between the enemy and his objective. It was a solid bulwark of wonderful endurance, of courage and fortitude, of thrilling deeds, of daring which will never be surpassed.” Even in Tunbridge Wells, where it had always seemed rather implausible that the foreigners might actually win, there was relief that the threat of invasion should have passed into history
Surveying the town on one of his returns from military service, Richard Cobb noted that the only scars it bore were some bomb damage to a few prosperous houses in Lansdowne Road, but he acknowledged that “it would have been hard not to have hit a middle-class target in a town such as the Royal Borough.
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