Free I'll Be Seeing You by Margaret Mayhew Page A

Thursday evenings I taught watercolour painting to adult students in the art room of a nearby comprehensive school. Tuesdays was beginners, Thursdays intermediate. The standard in both varied wildly from hopeless to not bad at all and one woman in the Thursday class was a natural. I enjoyed both evenings. The students were there for pleasure as much as anything else; they took it seriously, but not too seriously.
    I gave the beginners exercises in colour-mixing, making a wheel of many different shades from only three colours – say, Indian Yellow, Cobalt Blue and Scarlet Lake. They soon learned the magic that was at their fingertips. I explained to them that learning to paint took time and practice, that their mind, eye and hand would gradually begin to work in unison, and I encouraged them to draw with the brush, instead of pencil, to experiment with different strokes, to make hard and soft edges, to understand the value of a colour – how it relates to white or black – to simplify complicated forms and not to overwork a subject. I brought along things for both classes to paint – flowers in vases, plants in pots, wooden spoons in jugs, strings of onions, bowls of fruit . . . whatever I could find that would make a good subject. At the end of the class I gave them an idea to work on during the week and at the beginning of the next we all discussed the results. Much as I appreciated my attic studio, it was a welcome change to come out of solitary confinement for a while, added to which I greatly enjoyed teaching. The students were a thoroughly nice bunch. We were on first-name terms and several had become real friends.
    After the Thursday class, I had fallen into the habit of going to a coffee bar round the corner with Monica, the star of the class. She was about my own age, the widow of a naval officer who had died suddenly in his late forties and with a grown-up architect son who had gone to live in Vancouver. As an antidote to loneliness and boredom, she had taken up painting. I thought that she was good enough to get professional work, perhaps as an illustrator like myself, and had said so, while feeling obliged to warn her of the fearsome competition and the grim reality of hard-to-please, flint-hearted art editors. But with money no problem, Monica had – probably sensibly – chosen to stay amateur and simply enjoy her painting.
    On one of our coffee-bar visits, I asked her whether her husband had belonged to any service association. She shook her head.
    â€˜John died before he got to that stage. In any case, I don’t think he’d have enjoyed reunions much. It wasn’t his sort of thing. Not like his father. He was a navigator in the war and he likes nothing better than meeting up with all his old cronies and chinwagging about the good old days.’
    â€˜Does he belong to a naval association?’
    â€˜Not naval – air force. The Bomber Command Association. He was in the RAF, navigating Lancasters in the dark to Occupied Europe and back. Heaven knows how they managed it. He says practically all they had was a stopwatch, a pencil and a ruler – nothing like today when it’s all done for them by computers.’
    â€˜Do they have a regular magazine?’
    â€˜Indeed they do. Quarterly. He reads it from cover to cover and saves them all in a great big dust-collecting pile – much to my mother-in-law’s annoyance.’
    I said, ‘Do you think he’d know anything about the American Air Force in England during the war? What associations they have for their ex-servicemen?’
    â€˜He might. I’ll ask him, if you like.’ She looked at me, mildly curious. ‘Why the interest?’
    â€˜I’d like to try and trace an old American friend of my mother’s – a bomber pilot. He was based somewhere in Suffolk.’
    â€˜Well, I’m seeing my parents-in-law this week. John was their only son and I try to visit