Chapter One

“I’m sorry, Mela old girl, but it’s no use. I’ve got to come clean and tell you that I care for someone else.”

I just stood and stared at Tim. I had been longing to see him, waiting impatiently – and it seemed to me for years – until he could get leave. Actually, he had only been in Winnipeg for three months, and the only things to cheer me up were his letters, but when they had begun to get fewer and fewer I told myself it was because he was working and had no time to write. After all, they keep them pretty hard at it in the Air Training Units.

Of course I was stupid – I suppose any girl is when she is in love. If I had read Tim’s letters unblinded by my own feelings, I might have guessed sooner. Instead of which I just went on loving and loving him. I was mad about him. I still am. It’s no use people telling me that ‘love dies in a night’ or burbling about ‘Time, the Great Healer’, or any of that sort of nonsense. Love doesn’t die because of what people do. One loves them because one just can’t help it.

I adore Tim. I adored him even when he said goodbye for the last time and walked out of the door, rather pink about the face with the little muscle at the side of his jaw twitching as it always does when he’s nervous. I knew he was worried and unhappy at having to tell me the truth but it made me love him even more, if possible, because he minded.

Anyway, I suppose it was some satisfaction to know he cared enough to be upset. But no – nothing was really any consolation. Nothing could lessen the blow or make me feel better about it. It was just the end of everything. The bottom had dropped out of my world.

At first it was hardly painful at all. Rather like being struck down and feeling numb.

“I met her when I first got to Winnipeg, Mela,” Tim was saying, “and when I saw her – I can’t explain – but an electric current seemed to flash between us and I knew without doubt she was the one girl for me. I’d always thought you the finest person in the world. We’ve been such pals, haven’t we, Mela?”

He waited for an answer but I couldn’t speak.

“But this was different,” he went on, “it sort of knocked me out – but Jeeze! it’s hell having to come here and tell you!”

I stood looking at him and all I could think about was that there was a tiny spot of blood on his collar and that his uniform wasn’t really blue. It isn’t a good colour for the Air Force at all, I thought. Too much grey in the mixture. And my mind ran on, thinking of the most idiotic things and all the time my heart was telling me,

‘This is the end! It’s over, Pamela MacDonald. Tim doesn’t love you anymore.’

I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to put my arms round his neck, pull his dear face down to mine and kiss him – one of those long, exciting kisses which used to make me feel breathless, shaken, and somehow a little shy. But I couldn’t do that now. The Tim who was talking to me wasn’t the same Tim I’d loved and who had loved me. This was another man – a man who loved a girl called Audrey Herman who lived in Winnipeg.

When Tim had gone, I stood for a long time looking out of the window. Our house in Montreal is high up on the hill and on the horizon the mountains were covered with snow, and I thought how last year Tim and I had gone skiing in the Laurentians. What fun it had been! The sunshine and the snow, and Tim laughing and teasing me, saying that my cheeks felt and looked like frozen apples. But they hadn’t been frozen when we’d sat in front of the blazing fire in the little log cabin which Tim’s parents had built in the forest. After the others had gone to bed, we used to sit up and talk. We made plans about all the things we’d do when Tim had made enough money for us to get married.

We were awfully sensible about it and decided to wait until we could be really comfortable. We weren’t going to rush into anything. Not like some of my friends, struggling along without any luxuries and without a car. Of course, things would have been better if it hadn’t been for the war.

Daddy had been hit and so had Tim’s father, so there wasn’t the nice, fat allowance that we might have looked forward to in ordinary times – but still, Tim was doing well. His father’s business is one of the oldest firms on the Stock Exchange, so even in the worst slumps he has always managed to keep his head above water.

And then, quite suddenly, Tim decided that he must join in. We talked it over very carefully when the war started and had come to the conclusion there was no reason why he should enlist. Tim has always been rather more pro-American than pro-British. I didn’t mind, although I was supposed to be opposite, having an English mother who loves her own country. Not that after twenty-five years in Canada she’s any reason to love England except sentimentally.

Her English relations, with the exception of Uncle Edward, have treated her pretty badly. I’ve often planned how, when eventually I meet my grandfather, I’ll tell him what I think of him. I’d like to show him my father and say,

“There’s a fine man for you. There’s a man who’s worked, who has been successful and kept his wife happy into the bargain. Now aren’t you ashamed of yourself for forbidding your daughter to marry ‘a common Colonial’?”

Yes, that’s what he called my father when my mother wanted to marry him, and then he chucked him off the estate and told him to go back to Canada as quick as he could. He went all right – but my mother went with him. How I would have loved to have seen my grandfather’s face when he woke up in the morning to find her gone and only a note left behind to tell him what had happened!

I expect the butler took it in to him on the silver salver, and his porridge couldn’t have tasted so good that morning when he realised that – perhaps for the first time in his life – he had been outwitted. I suppose really it was Scot meeting Scot, for my father was Scottish, although his family had been in Canada for two generations. They had emigrated with only a pound or so in their pockets and they worked like beavers to make good.

Well, they succeeded. Daddy had a decent education and I suppose he’s one of the greatest experts on forestry in the country. Yet when he went over to England they talked about him as though he was a lumberjack. Of course, he was young in those days, but even so you’d have thought the English would have seen some difference between him and the men who just fell the trees. But they didn’t.

Mummy crossed the Atlantic and when they got to Canada they were married, and from that day to this, Uncle Edward is the only one of her relations who has ever spoken to her. He is different, of course. He was considered the black sheep of the family for years – which is funny now when you think that he is the one member of the family who has got a position in the British Government – and a pretty important one too. But even England has woken up to the fact that stuffy old people don’t get her anywhere and that if they are going to win this war they will want go-ahead men who can forget tradition and class distinctions.

Uncle Edward’s go-ahead all right – he’s done strange and exciting things all his life. He’s been in a gold rush, and in the Relief of Ladysmith, and he was torpedoed in a minesweeper in 1917 – and that’s only a few of the adventures he’s had.

I’d rather listen to Uncle Edward telling me stories than read any thriller that you can buy on a bookstall. However, one swallow doesn’t make a summer and one Uncle Edward doesn’t make all English people seem marvellous to me. In spite of all that Mummy’s said – and she’s always been a little bit homesick for her own country – I’ve hated a lot of the English people I’ve met and a good deal that I’ve heard about England.

So frankly I didn’t care a jot when Tim decided that he wasn’t going to chuck up his whole career to rush off and fight simply because England said we ought to. After all, England was a long way away, and there’s certainly something to be said for those who argue that Great Britain pays precious little attention to us until she wants something. But, of course, Mummy gets absolutely livid when I talk like that.

“England’s not only our Motherland, Mela,” she has said to me frequently, “she’s the greatest power for good in the world today.”

I can’t argue with Mummy when she talks in that strain. She feels it all so deeply. Besides, if she thinks like that – let her. But I don’t agree. I get sick of being told that “this must be best because it’s English” – “buy British for value” and all that sort of sales talk.

It’s always seemed to me a lot of nonsense that Home, Sweet Home should make Canadians, who haven’t seen the shores of England for forty years – if at all – sob ostentatiously into their handkerchiefs. I think Canada’s fine. It suits me, and all I ask for is a cosy little apartment in Montreal and Tim coming home after work, hooting his horn as he turns the corner of the street so that I shall be ready to run down and meet him as he arrives. But that’s a dream that can never come true now and I wonder what’s going to happen to me?

I suppose really my dreams began to fall to bits the day that Tim told me he was going to join the Air Force. He had been a bit restless all the month. The papers had been full of the Battle of Britain.

The radio said, “775 Nazi planes ... 185 German planes destroyed ... London in flames ... bombs raining death ... women and children buried alive…”

People like Mummy walked about with white...