Chapter 27: Friday 28 September 1941

WHILE I waited for Mary’s train to come into Paddington Station the events of the last seven months played through my head. The judicial system in England and Wales is a behemoth, tortuously slow and justice takes a long time. There are sound reasons for this, it allows better evidence to show up, more witnesses to come forward, better consideration of the facts and hopefully better judgements. And the accused too have longer to examine their consciences and reflect on the scales of justice.

During wartime, though, especially when the state is in peril and could collapse shortly after the next tide, the system is swift and vengeful.

McLean, Bellows and Rawlings, plus seventeen other guilty parties unknown to me, were hanged for treason before Easter, while Cummings and Finlay got twenty years’ imprisonment and most of the others involved received anything between five and thirty years. Lord Carlos was stripped of his peerage and gaoled for twenty years.

Morely Makepeace was promoted to Police Commissioner and knighted for heading up the investigation leading to the eradication of the Nazi cell that threatened to bring down the Coalition Government, but no news of that ever reached the newspapers.

I was reinstated at New Scotland Yard as detective chief superintendent, and I gathered together a new team to investigate black market activities within the Metropolitan area. I asked for and had Jock assigned as my permanent driver, although I had Mary’s little Ford to use that my brother-in-law Jack had collected and stored for us.

Bradford Gold was buried at home in Burbank with full military honours, having died during service with the Federal Government in a war zone. He was also posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by HM The King for bringing his damaged Wellington back from Germany and saving the lives of most of the crew.

I visited Gunter Petersen a couple of times in Mortlake and was pleased to see that he was much chirpier and making good progress with training in using his new false leg. His knowledge of Dutch, Danish, German and Norwegian fishing ports was extensive and I put out feelers with the few contacts I’d made in the intelligence service with Gold’s case. When I last saw him, Gunter couldn’t give me any details but he was involved in discussions with intelligence officers about helping contacting Danish trawlers at sea by submarines or fast torpedo boats, gaining intelligence and establishing a means of supplying radios and arms to resistance groups and provide channels for getting escaped or shot down aircrews out via the sea and get them back home.

Old Bert the caretaker was never charged with any offence.

Curiously no one ever asked what happened to Rawlings’ police car, so my sister Hettie and brother-in-law Jack were never questioned about its disappearance. The little Ford motor car that Mary bought is stored in the yard at the flat in Denmark Hill and I use it occasionally when off-duty, although the petrol allowance only gives me about half to three-quarters of an hour’s driving a week, and there are rumours that the petrol allowance for private cars will stop completely in a few months’ time. Jack has offered to mothball it in one of his lock-ups until peacetime.

Pattie is getting on very well at her art school and she stayed with me in Denmark Hill at Easter and again during the long summer holiday. Her mother Martha was not a widow as I had supposed, but an unmarried mother, who inherited the tenancy on her lodging house from her mother’s sister. Unfortunately, Martha was bombed out in March and, just before Pattie was due home from school at Easter, Martha rang me at the Yard and asked if I could put the girl up for the two weeks she was “home”; Martha had been rehoused in an old Underground tunnel, where she was sleeping in bunk beds in old disused tunnels, often 500 to 800 bunks per tunnel and she didn’t want to subject Pattie to that environment where she didn’t even feel comfortable herself. Apparently, a form of biting midge has adapted to the hot, humid and stuffy condition and the inmates were being bitten unmercilessly.

I agreed of course and suggested that Martha could move into the second or third bedroom at the flat while Pattie stayed with me. I called Jenny Mac while I was considering the arrangement and in my next letter let Mary know that Jenny had approved it pro tem until Mary could make her feelings known. Mary wrote back approving the temporary arrangement.

Martha stayed on as housekeeper after Pattie returned to art school, and saw to my meals, and kept the place tidy while I was at work. She was used to looking after more than just one lodger, but soon she got to know everyone in the local community around 77 Denmark Hill, and began taking tea and biscuits or cakes down to Gus in his hairdressing shop. She also took on extra work by cleaning the pub in the mornings after preparing my breakfast. It seemed that Gus became so friendly with Martha that he proposed to her in April and they were married in May.

Now they come to work on the bus together in the morning, after I’ve left for work. Martha makes my bed, looks after my laundry and tidies up after me, as well as clean the pub and generally keeps company with Gus during the rest of the day, making sure he never forgets his gas mask.

I promised Mary that I would write a letter to her regularly and I do send her one or two letters every week and, every week, I get one or two letters in reply from Mary.

Because of the war, sometimes there’s up to two or three weeks go by with none received then I get several letters turn up together. Mary tells me it is the same at her end. Pattie told me she gets a letter a month from Mary and my sister Hettie also gets the occasional letter.

Mary is always upbeat and lively in her letters and I try to match her bright mood in my letters, making light of the poor cold, wet and dull weather we have had from when she left in February until the beginning of June, when the weather changed to hot and dry for a couple of months. August was wet but so far the first week of September has been good. I also make light in my letters of the bombing and the lack of progress on the war fronts but couldn’t help but be pleased that Germany’s unprovoked attack on Russia in June actually reduced the threat of German invasion from France across the Channel.

Mary wrote from her ranch about how well her horses and cattle were doing, and from her recent location how Milly and she were coping with flies in the desert and the continual waiting around for the weather to change or the light to be just right for the next scene she had to shoot. She used a lot of that waiting time to write her letters, once she was confident in learning her lines.

To say I missed her deeply is an understatement, but we both keep our personal statements to be light. Although she always started her letters “My Dearest Ed”, I regarded this more as though I was just the most highly regarded of all the single “Ed’s” she knew on a casual basis.

I always started my letters with “Dear Mary” just as I would a formal letter. When I got to the end of my first letter, written the evening of the very day we waved each other goodbye, I discovered that I was completely unaccustomed to write anything other than formal letters. The last letters written to someone I was in love with was during the First World War, when I happily addressed the letters to Mildred as “My Sweetheart” and the salutation along the lines of “Truly yours”, “With all my love/devotion”, etc, because we had an acknowledged romantic relationship, Mildred and I were engaged to be married. But what salutation should I use with Mary?

I looked closely at her card again. She was affectionate and had called me her “dearest” in the address, “darling” in the body of her inscription and “all my love” and “yours forever” at the end, with three added kisses. But then she had told me at the outset that she was a harmless flirt.

I opted to finish with “from your most devoted servant, Edgar”, and hoped that would suffice.

Her next two letters when they arrived continued to address me as “Dearest” and end “all my love” and “yours forever” at the end, with three kisses.

That reminded me that I hadn’t put any kisses at the end of my first or second letters, sent before I received her first, so this time I closed out the letter with a brief paragraph of how I still remembered her in my dreams, particularly the taste and tingle of that one solitary kiss that shocked me on our departure. I signed out that letter with, “All my kisses are yours, Mary, but I send you just the one until we meet again, even if such is but in my dreams, Edgar X”.

It was two or three letters later, as letters crossed in between, that she opened with “My darling Ed” and remarked on our last kiss through the carriage window and looked forward to a repetition, signing off, “your loving Mary, storing up all your X’s until we meet again”.

Then we settled into a series of notes where neither of us referred to any relationship between us in the body of the letters but always used brief endearments at the top and foot of our letters. I thought perhaps she had cooled somewhat and believed that now she was back in her normal life that our brief acquaintanceship was just that, brief and of little consequence.