Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [48]
Before I could apologize, the woman spoke to me. “My husband courted me with a bottle of that perfume,” she said, calling to her side a man standing nearby. “Harry, do come and have a look at this, won’t you?”
“Right-o,” the man said, putting down a brochure he was reading. As he drew near, she pointed to the Evening in Paris perfume bottle. The man—I judged him to be in his mid-seventies—glanced at his wife and smiled. He was tall, tall enough to have acquired a permanent forward tilt of the head that brought to mind a gooseneck lamp. That’s what years of making eye contact with shorter people does to you, I thought.
“It brings back memories, doesn’t it?” the woman said to the man. Then she turned to me. “Are you a Yank, then?” She laughed when she said it, a pleasant laugh that made me think she had reasons to like “Yanks.”
“Yes, but how did you know?” I asked, a little confused, since I’d not yet spoken.
“We were at the entry when you came in and heard you asking about the exhibition.” Actually I’d noticed them, too: the tall man wearing a V-neck sweater, shirt, and tie under a tweed jacket, and the short, ruddy-faced woman dressed in a bright red jacket, white shirtwaist, and dark pleated skirt. “It’s quite touching, isn’t it?” she said. “All these heartbreaking letters. But in those days we all lost someone in the war.”
I wondered whom she had lost. Obviously not Harry. A brother, perhaps. An uncle. Maybe even her father. World War II, after all, was not a war fought exclusively by the young.
The three of us moved through the rest of the exhibition at the same pace; not exactly together but close enough to remark occasionally on this letter or that diary.
“I remember starting a diary when the buzz bombs began coming over Kent in 1944,” the woman said. “I remember we’d go down into the bomb shelter and a lot of the girls would knit or darn socks. But not me. I’d be writing words from the songs my husband and I used to dance to.” She put up her arms and pretended to dance, her purse jiggling from her hand. Seeing this, Harry smiled.
After staying another half-hour or so we left the exhibition and walked together through the main hall. Suddenly Harry stopped in the middle of the room and pointed to a small plane hanging from the ceiling. It was a very basic-looking plane, except for the torpedo-shaped appendage above its tail. “That’s a buzz bomb,” he said. “But everybody called them ‘doodlebugs.’ ”
I was surprised; the buzz bomb looked completely different from the way I’d imagined it. “I’ve always pictured it as looking like a rocket,” I told Harry. “Like that one,” I said, pointing to the huge V-2 rocket rising ominously out of the floor like an evil stalagmite.
Harry, who hadn’t talked much before, warmed to the subject, explaining the differences between the two rockets in power and speed. But it was the distinct sound of an approaching doodlebug that had left the most indelible impression on him. “It was not like anything I’d ever heard. First off, we’d hear this sputtering engine noise—putt, putt, putt—like a plane in trouble. Then the noise just stopped and there was this frightful silence for a few seconds. Then, an explosion.”
“Yes,” said the woman, “its a noise one never forgets.” She told me about hearing it one night and knowing there wasn’t time to get to the bomb shelter. “So we snatched up the baby and ran out into the fields.” Later she was told it had exploded in an open space, not too far from where they crouched.
I wanted to hear more and invited them to join me for a cup of tea in the museum’s café.
“What do you think, Harry? Shall we nip in for some tea?”
“Right-o. I could do with a cup of tea,” he replied. “And a bit of cake, as well.”
For the next hour or so the three of us sat at a corner table and talked. Or, rather, they talked and I listened. Listening, I had learned in my job as a reporter, was just as much of a skill as asking the right questions.