Letters From an Unknown Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

he might serve any useful purpose as a fighting soldier. She was up visiting from Waseminster the very day his call-up papers came, and she couldn’t quite believe it.
    ‘What would the Army want with you?’ she’d said.
    Donald had given her one of his disgruntled tomcat looks, thinking she was being sarcastic before realizing she was genuinely puzzled. ‘It’s conscription,’ he explained. ‘Everybody has to go.’
    ‘But surely they mean every able-bodied man …’
    Jokingly, Donald had rolled up his right sleeve and flexed his biceps, displaying the little white muscle that suddenly appeared there, like a boiled egg. ‘You’re forgetting I’m from Glasgae,’ he said, exaggerating his nearly lost Gorbals accent. ‘We were slaughtering Visigoths while you lot were still treading grapes with the Gauls.’
    Mrs Head suspected different periods of history were mixed up in that little put-down, but didn’t feel able to question Donald’s scholarship. He was a very bookish chap. ‘Well, it’s a long road,’ she said, ‘that leads from wallpapering the pantries of Plumstead Common to the battlefields of the Eastern Front, whenever there may be one …’ She’d been rather pleased with that retort, and afterwards she couldn’t stop giggling at the picture in her mind, of Donald running on his silly little legs to paste rolls of wallpaper over the approaching German tanks. ‘God help us,’ she half whispered to herself.
*
    He had sent regular letters but wasn’t allowed to say where he was, though they guessed, from his continual references to sand, heat, scorpions, camels and pyramids, that he was somewhere in North Africa.
    Then the letter from the Army Records Office arrived.
    Dear Sir or Madam,
  I regret to have to inform you that a report has been received from the War Office to the effect that
     
No.
(54769)
Rank
(Pte)
Name
Pace, Donald Midlothian
Was posted
“missing”
on the
(date unknown)
    The report that he is missing does not necessarily mean that he has been killed, as he may be a prisoner of war or temporarily separated from his regiment. Official reports that men are prisoners of war take some time to reach this country, and if he has been captured by the enemy it is probable that unofficial news will reach you first. In that case I am to ask you to forward any postcard or letter received at once to this office, and it will be returned to you as soon as possible.
    Should any further information be received it will be at once communicated to you.
    I am,
    Sir or Madam,
    Your obedient servant,
    H. J. Hiscock
    Officer in charge of Records
    ‘They do not take prisoners in the desert,’ had been Tory’s first remark, after she and her mother, shoulder to shoulder, had read the letter together. She had made up her mind that quickly, and hadn’t altered her position since.
    ‘It’s unpatriotic of you,’ Mrs Head now said to her daughter, ‘to suppose that your husband is dead.’
    ‘Patriotism has got nothing to do with it,’ said Tory, quietly, without looking up from her knitting.
    ‘Well, I don’t like to say this, Tory, but in my opinion you seem too ready to believe the worst where Donald is concerned. Any other wife would be clinging to the hope that he had survived as a prisoner of war, but you almost seem to want him to have been killed.’
    This made Tory look up in alarm. About to remonstrate angrily, she checked herself, then looked down again at her needles. There were tears forming, her mother was pleased to note. One or two had dropped into her wool.
    ‘It’s not that I don’t want to believe that he’s alive,’ she said.
    ‘It’s just that I don’t really think Donald is much of a survivor.’
    Donald was physically tough, in his small, wiry way, but he tended to keel over when confronted with an obstacle. She remembered a bossy, needle-nosed spinster who’d refused to pay him when he’d spent a fortnight brightening up her gloomy little parlour. After a few