In A Dry Season

you’re bound to end up with enough musicians for a band.

Already the place was crowded with airmen and local girls, mostly from Harkside. The dance floor was busy and a knot of people stood laughing and drinking by the bar. Others sat at the rickety tables smoking and chatting. I had expected the large Nissen hut to be cold, but there was a peculiar-looking squat thing giving out heat in one corner, which I later discovered was called a “potbellied stove” (a very apt description, I thought). Apparently, the air force had brought it all the way from America, having heard English winters were cold and wet, and so were the summers.

They hardly needed it tonight, though, as the press of bodies and the motion of dancing exuded all the heat we needed. The men had already covered the walls with photographs taken from magazines: landscapes of vast, snowcapped mountain ranges; long flat plains and prairie wheatfields; deserts dotted with huge, twisted cacti; and city streets that looked like scenes from Hollywood films. Little bits of America brought over to make them feel less far away from home. A Christmas tree stood in one corner, covered with tinsel and fairy lights, and paper trimmings hung around the ceiling.

“Take your coats, ladies?”

“Why, thank you,” said Gloria.

It was Gloria who had turned the heads, of course. Even with Dorothy Lamour and Marlene Dietrich for competition, she still stood way ahead of the field.

We handed our coats to the young airman, who was tall, slim and dark in complexion. He spoke with a lazy drawl and moved with agile, unhurried grace. He had brown eyes, short black hair and the whitest teeth I had even seen.

“Over here.” He led us to the far wall, beside the bar, where everyone’s coats hung. “They’ll be safe here, now don’t you ladies worry.” When he turned his back, Gloria looked at me and raised an eyebrow in approval.

We followed him and held on to our handbags. It was always awkward not knowing what to do with your handbag when you danced. Usually, you left it under the table, but Cynthia once had hers stolen at a dance in Harkside.

“And now, ma’am,” he said, turning straightaway to Gloria, “if I may have the pleasure of the first dance?”

Gloria inclined her head slightly, passed her handbag to me, took his hand and went off. It didn’t take long before someone snapped up Cynthia, too, and I was holding three handbags. But, if I say so myself, a rather handsome young navigator from Hackensack, New Jersey, called Bernard – which he pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable – asked me to dance even before his friend asked Alice. I passed the three handbags to her and left her standing there gawping in a way that Marlene Dietrich never gawped.

“First, you have to answer a question for me,” I said, before I let him lead, just to show I could be quite brave when I wanted to, though I was secretly scared to death of all these brash and handsome young men all around me.

Bernard scratched his head. “What’s that, ma’am?”

“What’s an ‘A’ train?”

“Huh?”

“The music that was playing when we came in. ‘Take the “A” Train.’ What’s an ‘A’ train? I’ve always wondered. Is it better than a ‘B’ train, for example?”

He grinned. “Well, no, ma’am. I mean, it’s just a subway train.”

“Subway? You mean the underground?”

“Yes, ma’am. In New York City. The ‘A’ train’s the subway that’s the fastest way to Harlem.”

“Ah,” I said, the light finally dawning. “Well, I never. Okay, then, let’s dance.”

After “Kalamazoo,” “Stardust” and “April in Paris,” we gathered at the bar and the tall airman who had taken our coats bought us all bourbon, which we took to the table. His name was Billy Joe Farrell. He hailed from Tennessee and worked on the ground crew. He introduced us to his friend, Edgar Konig, whom everyone called PX because on American bases PX meant the quartermaster’s stores, which was exactly what he ran.

PX was a gangly young Iowan with a baby face and his fair hair shaved almost to his skull. He was tall, with Nordic cheekbones, pouting lips and the longest eyelashes over his cornflower-blue eyes. He was also very shy, far too shy to dance with any of us. He never quite made full eye contact with anyone. He was the sort of person who is always around but never really gets noticed, and I think the reason he was so generous to us all was simply that it made him feel needed.

When I look back on that evening now, over twenty-five years ago, especially considering all that has happened since, it seemed to go around in a whirl of dancing and talking and drinking, and it finished before it really began. I still remember the strange accents and the unfamiliar place names and phrases we heard; the young faces; the surprisingly soft feel of a uniform under my palm; the biting, yet sweet, taste of bourbon; the kisses; whispered plans to meet again.

As the four of us walked tipsily back through the woods, arms linked with our gallant escorts, little did we know how, before long, we’d be using words like “lousy,” “bum” and “creep” in our daily conversation, not to mention chewing gum and smoking Luckies. As we walked we sang “Shenandoah” and after good-night kisses agreed to meet them again in Harkside the following week.

It was the first time Banks had been to the Queen’s Arms for lunch in some months. He had been trying to avoid boozing too much during the day, partly because it was sometimes hard to stop, and partly because it seemed too much a part of his old life.

It wasn’t so much that he used to go there with Sandra frequently – though they often dropped in for a quick jar if they’d been in town together to see a film or a play – just that the Queen’s Arms brought back memories of the days when his life and work were in harmony: the days before Jimmy Riddle; the days when he had enjoyed long brain-storming sessions with Gristhorpe, Hatchley, Phil Richmond and Susan Gay over a steak-and-kidney pud and a pint of Theakston’s bitter; the days when Sandra had been happy with their marriage and with her work at the gallery.

Or so he had believed.

Like many things he had believed, it had all been an illusion, only true because he had been gullible enough to believe in it. In reality, it had all been as flimsy and fleeting as an optical illusion; it depended entirely on your point of view. In calendar time, perhaps, those days weren’t so long ago, but in his memory they sometimes seemed as if they had been dreamed by another person in another century.

Even before he bought the cottage, in those days when he had been out on the booze in Eastvale nearly every night, he had avoided the Queen’s Arms. Instead, he had sought out modern, anonymous pubs tucked away on the estates, places where the regulars enjoyed their quiz trivia nights and their karaoke and paid no attention to the sad figure in the corner who bumped against the table a little harder each time he went for a piss.

He got into a fight only once, with a paunchy loudmouth who thought Banks was eyeballing his girlfriend, a pasty-faced scrubber with bad hair. It didn’t matter that Banks didn’t think she was worth fighting over, her boyfriend was ready to rock and roll. Luckily, Banks was never so pissed that he forgot the rules of barroom brawling: get in first and get in nasty. While the boyfriend was still building up steam verbally, Banks punched him in the stomach and brought up his knee to connect with his nose. Blood, snot and vomit spattered his trousers. Everyone went quiet, and no one tried to stop him leaving.

Banks had always had a violent streak; he knew that even when he used to talk about love and peace with Jem. That was one reason he could never fully give himself to the sixties scene in the first place, only hang around the fringes. The music was fine, the pot was okay, the girls were willing, but the turn-the-other-cheek philosophy sucked.

Today, he felt like indulging himself at the Queen’s Arms. Cyril, the landlord, welcomed him back like a long-lost friend, not remarking on his absence, and Glenys, Cyril’s wife, gave him her usual shy smile. He bought a pint and ordered a Yorkie filled with roast beef and onion gravy. The pub was busy with its usual lunchtime mix of tourists, local office workers and shopkeepers on their lunch breaks, but Banks managed to snag a small copper-topped table in the far corner, between the fireplace and the diamond-shaped amber and green windowpanes.

He had brought with him the folder DS Hatchley had just dropped on his desk: information gleaned from the central registry of births, marriages and deaths. With any luck, it would answer a number of his questions. Already that morning, he had phoned army records and asked about Matthew Shackleton’s service history. They said they would verify his identity and call him back. He knew from experience that the military didn’t like people snooping