Burning Island: Absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 historical fiction Read online

  Amber and I, like so many of our generation, at least those of us who had benefited from a private education, had always felt that our lives had been mapped out for us and that with our undoubted privilege had come an obligation to those who provided it. From before the time we said our first word we were registered for nursery and had our names put down for prep schools. Later, we had private music classes, swimming lessons and extra maths tuition, then in the long summer holidays we went to junior sailing clubs in St Mawes, Bosham or the Isle of Wight. At Christmas, our hesitant voices warbled at Messiah from Scratch at the Royal Albert Hall, and we learnt to ride and play tennis. Like our contemporaries, we were educated to succeed within strict parameters, with clearly defined goals and, in the case of both of us, with traditional career paths expected of us. Amber’s family were all involved with the Law, so it was only natural that she and her siblings – all adopted as infants – should aim to be barristers too.

  I started out reading History and Economics, with the expectation that I would follow my grandfather and father into the family accountancy business. ‘We Youngs have been well respected in Chichester since well before the war,’ my father always said. ‘You can’t go wrong if you join the firm. People are always going to need good accountants and with that behind you, anything’s possible.’ So it was a bit of shock to him when I announced, halfway through my degree, that I wanted to go into advertising – and not even the suited account director side. To be fair, he’d always thought that if I didn’t join the family firm I would choose law, or maybe business, banking at worst, but he’d never imagined something as unstable and unconventional as advertising.

  I’d attended a student union debate on what is more creative, advertising or art, and from that moment I’d been hooked. Dad thought I’d never make it, but I got into a top London agency despite the hundreds of other hopefuls and I was really quite successful. I loved the buzz of pitching for new business and throwing ideas around with my creative team partner Rob – a short angry Scot who’d fought his way into the agency from art college. He fought me too, but only when I wanted food for lunch and not just pints of lager in the local pub. Because that is my other passion. Food. I’d always loved food, and now I love sourcing it, preparing it and tasting it. I badgered my parents to let me do a cordon bleu course as a reward for my excellent GCSE results; I spent my gap year as a chalet boy in Val d’Isère and I applied to do MasterChef just before I started my degree. I’m pretty sure I could have gone all the way too, but my parents put financial pressure on me to concentrate on my studies, so with great regret I let that opportunity slip past me.

  But Amber, my lovely Amber, knew all about my secret dreams, and she had her dreams too – of a life where she would never again have to work through the night and never have to travel on stifling Tube trains during the summer or shiver on freezing station platforms in winter. She dreamt of having the luxury of time to catch up on films and theatre, of evenings when we could enjoy leisurely dinners and one day having time to write. And then came that particular November, when for the second year running, winter began in earnest quite early.

  It wasn’t so bad for me – I could travel later than the majority of commuters and I only had to cope with thirty minutes of Tube trains crowded with damp winter coats, the rumbling of the carriages masking the rattle of coughs and the constant blowing of noses. I could hide behind my newspaper or book, or, being over six feet tall, hold my head above the crowd, hanging onto the rail and hoping the germs fell rather than rose in the fetid atmosphere. And whenever I had to work late on an urgent pitch, I would avoid the evening rush by staying long into the night then slumping in a taxi well after the crush had gone home.

  But Amber was always lumbered with a heavy briefcase full of documents to drag out to another case in Guildford or Chelmsford, or wherever her clerk sent her next. She left before dawn in the dark winter months and was never home before me, having returned to chambers after a long journey back into London to collect her next brief. She hardly ever complained, but I’d noticed her caramel skin turning greyer, the hollows under her eyes deepening. She’d started coughing too, a sure sign that she would be stricken with a debilitating infection for weeks.

  Yes, I remember exactly how it happened. It was that November, at the end of 2005. I was chopping carrots and celery for a bolognese sauce and sipping Merlot when she returned that particular evening. Slicing and stirring are soothing after a day of arguing and that day had been particularly fractious following the rejection of a campaign for a mayonnaise brand. Rob and I had been handed the brief at the last minute, and after two solid days of working into the night, we’d thought we’d cracked it. So had our creative director, but the client had been stony-faced when we presented that morning and Rob had not returned from the pub at lunchtime. I joined him for a couple of drinks, but getting home early and cooking was my best therapy. I went to the Italian deli near the office in Soho for more of their peppery olive oil and treated myself to some of their fat green nocellara olives, slick with oil and sweet as butter.

  So I was in a good mood that night, despite the disappointment of the working day, waiting for my lovely wife to come home. I’d opened the wine to breathe, set the table with candles, sliced fresh ciabatta bread and poured some of my favourite oil into a little bowl for dipping. Then, while I cooked, I hummed and listened for the distant sounds of Amber’s arrival.

  Our flat was on the top floor of a tall Edwardian house in West Hampstead. We’d cursed the long flights of stairs when we moved in, hauling IKEA flat packs and boxes of books up to our eyrie, but our compensation was the sunset over the surrounding rooftops and sunbathing on summer weekends, lying on the flat roof of this attic conversion. On hot sun-baked days, we both lay there naked, burning in the heat. Amber’s burnished limbs deepened from light mocha to caramel, while I obstinately sweltered my way from buttermilk to strawberry milkshake, never even getting close to a dark shade of bronze.

  Amber would kiss the sweat away from my forehead, but she refused to make love on the roof in daylight, however much I tried to persuade her. ‘No one can possibly see,’ I would say, yet she insisted she felt watched and that would be her cue to leave the baking roof and return with cold water or ice cubes to throw at my roasted skin. But there was one memorable summer’s night, when the flat roof held its heat, the air was soft and warm, and we made love under a velvet sky of stars.

  And now it was no longer summer and I could tell, when I heard the flat door slammed and Amber began dragging herself up the stairs, that she was exhausted from her day. There was a series of thumps as she dropped her heavy briefcase and kicked off her boots. Halfway up the stairs, she called out, ‘I can cope with rain, but not snow. It’s too early. I can’t take another freezing winter with cars in drifts and trains on ice.’

  Her black curls were sparkling with melted snowflakes. Her cheeks were bitten with the cold, not rosy with health. ‘It took me forever to get back to chambers. I thought I was going to be stranded in Guildford all night long.’

  I handed her a glass of wine, which she usually gulped straight away, but as she took it she drooped against the doorframe, groaning with tiredness. ‘Train after train was cancelled and then it started snowing. I can’t bear it.’

  I gave her hummus with crudités and pistachios and she began shelling the nuts and dipping carrots, while I sliced tomatoes and onions to make a salad. As I tore basil leaves and poured olive oil, I said, ‘I’ve spiced up the sauce, but you can have carbonara if you’d rather.’

  ‘No, it’s fine…’ She was dabbing at the dip with a carrot stick. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘you know how we’ve often talked about not doing this for ever…’

  I stopped stirring and looked at her. ‘One day, yes, but you’re only just getting started. You’ve worked so hard to get this far.’

  She looked up at me. Me, standing there with a wooden spoon in my hand, her little flower-sprigged apron over my jeans.
‘I really don’t think I want to do it anymore,’ she said. ‘I can’t face another wet, cold winter of early starts, cancelled trains and long journeys. We’ve talked about it before, haven’t we, so maybe now’s the time?’

  It was true. We had talked, often. We called it our ‘master plan’ and in drunken moments we talked about where we would go, what we would see and how we would live a simple life that didn’t involve London, commuting or long tiring hours, dark mornings and cold late nights. We envied friends who had continued travelling after gap years almost as much as we admired others who’d bought sensible little houses in the suburbs to breed babies and grow vegetables.

  On the rare evenings we were both at home and didn’t have early morning starts, we curled around each other on our sofa, drinking wine and dreamt of careers that would suit country towns. I’d be a private chef cooking for weekenders and filling hampers for opera lovers, Amber would offer legal advice or work part-time for a local solicitor. We’d have time for a garden, maybe a dog to accompany us on walks in the woods and eventually, there would be children. We’d be a proper married couple at last, not like flatmates who passed each other on the stairs now and then and slept in the same bed.

  ‘I absolutely hated today,’ Amber sighed. ‘My feet froze waiting at the station this evening. Then when the train came, it was hot, it was crowded and just about everyone on it was coughing or sneezing. I was squashed into the middle seat between two enormous men. I could hardly breathe.’

  ‘Just as well,’ I joked. ‘You’d have been breathing in all manner of germs if you had.’

  ‘It’s not funny.’

  I looked at her. She’d put her head in her hands and I couldn’t see her expression.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ I switched off the ring simmering the sauce and bent down to put my arms around her. Then I realised she was crying. ‘Amber, darling, what’s wrong? No one made any nasty remarks today, did they?’ She usually shrugged off the casual racism she frequently encountered, but sometimes when she was particularly tired and couldn’t get a seat on the train, she said it was a burden she shouldn’t have to bear and came home feeling bruised by sullen looks and harsh remarks.

  Her reply was muffled by her sobs, but eventually I heard her. ‘No, they didn’t. Not this time. Anyway, it’s not that. I’m just tired. I’m so tired. I can’t live like this anymore. I just want it all to stop and leave me alone.’

  ‘See how you feel in the morning,’ I said, thinking as I did so that I sounded just like my own mother, then went on to sound even more like her. ‘A good meal and a good night’s sleep and you’ll feel much better.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ she sniffed. Then she pushed me away and sat up straight, wiping her eyes and nose with the back of her hand. She rummaged in her pocket for a tissue and blew her nose, then walked across the kitchen to the sink. She splashed her face with cold water, dried it on a tea towel, then turned towards me. Her eyes were still red and her mouth was trembling, but she was trying to smile. ‘Is there any garlic bread?’

  I laughed. ‘I can make garlic bread, just for you.’ And then I hugged her.

  Chapter Four

  7 June 1944

  It’s not fair, Rebekka thinks. Mama knows I always like to tell my little sisters a story at bedtime. I wanted to do it tonight as well. And they like me to sing to them.

  Mama’s firm words still rankle with her. ‘Do as I say. Go to your room. We are all going to bed early tonight. There is much to be done tomorrow.’ As soon as Papa returned from his visit to Dr Batas, she was impatient, rushing the last of their supper, hurrying the children upstairs to their bedrooms.

  Rebekka lies in her bed, trying to sleep, listening to Mama crooning to Matilde and Anna in the room next door. Mama’s voice grows softer and softer until there is finally silence, and then she hears footsteps on the stairs.

  Rebekka sits up in bed. They must be asleep now, she thinks. But I didn’t give them a goodnight kiss. She waits until she hears sounds in the kitchen below her bedroom. Dishes are being stacked, water splashes and her parents talk in hushed voices. Rebekka creeps from her bed to the door. She listens for a moment, then tiptoes out of her room and opens the door to where her sisters are sleeping.

  They are lying side by side in the one bed, their curly dark hair fanned on the white pillows. They look so still, their breathing so faint it barely shows. A cup stands on the bedside cabinet. Mama must have given them one last drink before she sang them to sleep.

  Rebekka leans forward to kiss each child on the cheek and as her lips touch their pale skin, she thinks how much they look like the expensive china dolls in the only toy shop in Corfu Town. She has gazed at the richly dressed dolls with longing since she was as young as Matilde, knowing that she could never possess such a fine mannequin with real blonde hair and a painted porcelain face. But she has had two little sisters instead. Matilde, now five, and Anna, only three.

  Since they were tiny, she has helped Mama bathe them and dress them in clean clothes. As they grew and no longer fed at Mama’s breast, she helped to prepare their meals and feed them soft rice, eggs and mashed fava beans. She has laughed at their clumsy antics and held their tiny hands as they learnt to walk with tottering steps. She has taught them words in songs and stories. These children have been her playthings, her dolls, and she loves them very much, certainly more than the grand but stiff dolls her father might have bought for her had they been a wealthy family.

  She strokes their hair, then turns to the door to slip back to her bed. ‘What are you doing there?’ Mama hisses from the stairs. ‘Get back to your room and stay there.’

  Rebekka runs to her room, but stands against the door, listening. She hears Mama creeping around her sisters’ room, and then the door closes. Mama rarely tells her off, and she was doing nothing wrong. She was only delivering forgotten kisses.

  Chapter Five

  November 2005

  Amber

  How quickly and easily we made that decision, that momentous, life-changing decision to leave our demanding but well-paid careers, sell our first home and escape from London. And not just London, but icy, grey, snowy England, where we had once thought we would live forever.

  If it hadn’t been for Ben, I don’t think it would ever have happened so soon. I’d have blown my nose a few times and told myself to get a grip, resigned myself to taking regular doses of cough mixture and wearing thermal socks inside my boots, but then he came to stay with us, just for a night, only days after I’d had my tearful outburst. Ben Dawson is James’s best friend from school; they’d shared detention for smoking at the far end of the playing fields, stood by each other at the school disco when neither of them had the nerve to speak to the girls from neighbouring St Hilda’s; and Ben had also helped James recover from a broken heart long before I came on the scene, by downing shots and having all-night viewing sessions of box sets in the flat the two of them were sharing at the time. He performed the role of best man at our wedding with both humour and humility. Dependable, conscientious Ben, who, after behaving exactly as his parents had planned throughout school, university and as an intern with one of the biggest management consultancies in London, had sacrificed his promising and lucrative career to run off to Corfu and marry his childhood sweetheart.

  No, that’s not quite right – he’d been to the island many times on family holidays and had returned for what he thought might be one last summer with his parents. While there, he realised that the chubby, mischievous daughter from their favourite taverna, who’d beaten him in swimming and diving competitions every year when they were children, was now the lithe and silken-haired Eleni. ‘She glowered at me at first, when she recognised the arrogant kid who’d always teased her,’ Ben said, laughing when he described how they met again. ‘Then, when she realised I was melting before her very eyes, she gave me this smouldering look and soon I was totally smitten and head over heels and so was she. Since then, I’ve never looked back.’ It was such a ro
mantic story, and it was obvious how much Ben loved Eleni and his life when he talked with a glow in his eyes.

  Ben never returned to his job in London; he married Eleni and learnt everything there was to learn about her family’s tavernas and property rentals. As Eleni’s ageing parents were looking to take a back seat, he had put his business acumen to good use by expanding the enterprise – hiring out boats, renovating the rundown family villas into profitable apartments and acquiring a long list of mostly British-owned holiday homes that he managed and rented through an impressive website. James and I had looked through it a couple of times in idle moments on wet, bored weekends, picking out our dream holiday villa, complete with infinity pool and a view of the calm, blue sea.

  Ben was only staying with us for one night. He was meant to be visiting his parents and Eleni had refused to leave the island as she was pregnant for the second time. James and I had debated where we should take Ben for dinner that evening. When James suggested going for Greek food in Camden Town, I thought that was the last thing Ben would enjoy. ‘He won’t want that, he needs a change,’ I said. So we decided he should meet us at the flat and we’d start the evening in The Black Lion, our local pub, then go to Chang’s Lodge, our nearest Chinese, where the pre-cooked buffet dishes were displayed at a bacteria-cultivating temperature for hours and were best avoided, but the freshly prepared crispy duck with pancakes and plum sauce was the best we’d ever had.

  ‘Why don’t you stay another night with us,’ I said when Ben was bemoaning the lack of variety in Corfu’s restaurants. ‘We’d love it and we could go to the Bengal Lounge tomorrow and give you the best curry in London.’