Free Apple Blossom Time by Kathryn Haig Page B

depressing … I’m sure Mrs Miniver would just give a sweet smile every time she felt a hot flush coming on and offer it up as part of her war effort.
    Both my girls are well and happy. There’s no bombing here. We’re eating well. The weather’s good. Tom has been on the straight and narrow for months. You see – I’m counting my blessings – always a worthwhile treatment for a fit of the glums!
    Plums – I feel I shall never be able to look a plum in the face again. Bottled. Jellied. Jammed. Pickled. Can one curry plums? Use the skins to sole shoes? Send the stones to the ack-ack battery for ammunition? And still they plop down from the trees for the wasps and blackbirds to guzzle. There just isn’t enough sugar, so the jam will probably not keep anyway, though I boiled it good and hard. It seemed to set well enough, so fingers crossed. I exchanged some eggs for sugar with Mrs Gifford, who doesn’t have a sweet tooth.
    As Mr Millport says, the Lord is bounteous – but sometimes He gets in a muddle: the gooseberries got sawfly and powdery mildew (one or the other would have been quite sufficient) and apples this year are going to be very scarce here. Our trees only seem to bear fruit every other year, which is very inconsiderate of them.
    Well, my darling, this must all sound very petty to you. You are worlds away from worries about powdery mildew and sugar rationing. You are always in my thoughts and in my prayers. We are very proud of you and the fine work you are doing. Say hello to all of your chums from us. We all send heaps of love to you.
    Mother.
    The prisoners weren’t rolling in the way they used to. Life in CSDIC was getting a bit stale for Major Prosser. So after training in the use of an encryption machine, I was moved on to coding and decoding signals. It was shift work, a painstaking and thankless task – one mistake, maybe no more than a single letter, could turn vital intelligence into gibberish – and I frequently ended my shift with a crashing headache.
    I knew everything and nothing. If I’d been put up against a wall and threatened with instant execution, I couldn’t have told the enemy anything interesting, unless you call knowing that Major Prosser liked three sugars in his tea vital information! It was like trying to work out what a 3,000-piece jigsaw represented by looking at a handful of pieces – all of them sky. A spy could have gleaned more useful information simply by watching the way different cap badges appeared and disappeared in Cairo.
    British in berets and ‘fore-and-afts’ with a sprinkling of red caps, Australians and New Zealanders in wideawake Boy Scout hats, Indians in pugrees, Free French in képis, Poles in czapkas, South Africans in solar topis – and all topped by cockades, badges and flashes of every colour – it was a spy’s delight. There was a story going round that two intelligence men wandered around Cairo dressed in German uniform, just to see who would challenge them. After two days without even being noticed, let alone arrested, they gave up the project!
    Any intelligent spy would simply prop up the Long Bar at Shepheard’s. It was said that the whole Order of Battle for the desert war could be discovered quicker there than at HQ. Joe, the Swiss barman, was widely believed to be a spy, but that didn’t stop men from being indiscreet in the chummy, all-jolly-chaps-together atmosphere.
    But something was certainly brewing. Even I could tell that. The daily flurry of paper became a blizzard. Equipment, fuel and men flooded into Alexandria and Port Said. Soon the question was not if there was to be a westward offensive, but when …
    *   *   *
    James was back in Cairo. No letter or phone call. Just a car waiting outside the gate when I finished shift. His eager smile. His shy laugh. Browner. Thinner. Quieter. Daring now to kiss me when we met, gently, respectfully.
    I’d run down to the gate and there he was. I’d surprised myself by running.