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mother, who had made a little fortune out of the refined and genteel business of ladies’ hairdressing and lived in a trim little house with its own garage in some trim little suburb where all the houses are like that, thought themselves a cut above the people who work with their hands and flatly refused to allow their daughter to marry a farmer’s boy. George, who was not exactly a Lochinvar, knew only too well the inadequacy of his ninety shillings a week and the discomforts of a labourer’s cottage; his gratuity, moreover, was quite insufficient to buy even a minimum of furniture. In these circumstances he could not bring himself to take the obvious course of marrying Susan against her parents’ wishes. He had been told that he was not good enough for her, and he was foolish enough to believe it. So although the couple walked out religiously every Sunday afternoon, and went to the village hop every Saturday night where they danced every dance together except the Paul Jones; although they took their lovers’ stroll down the twilight lanes in such close conjunction that they reminded one of Siamese twins orcompetitors in a three-legged race; and although the final hug with which they said goodnight in the shadow of the hostel wall went on so long that they seemed to take root there and to be a natural feature of the landscape – nevertheless a cloud hung over their love, and we in the village, hearing the sad story
ad nauseam
from Margie, Lisbeth, Betsy, Wistaria and Ive, grew almost as impatient as the unhappy couple and became partners in their frustration.
    We all loved Susan, and we all liked George, who in his modest and unassuming way had quietly won a Military Medal at Arnhem. His gallantry on that occasion made a curious contrast with his behaviour when he first met Susan. On sick-leave from Normandy after receiving a flesh-wound, he had taken a walk up Brensham Hill on a very hot Sunday and by accident had stumbled upon the Frolick Virgins, all six of them, sunbathing in a woodland clearing, where they must have looked, I imagine, rather like the Dryads themselves. George, who had little fear of the German SS soldiers, nevertheless turned tail and fled from this classical spectacle; and in his headlong flight he knocked off his claret-coloured beret against a branch and, being taken with a kind of nympholepsy, failed to notice the mishap until it was too late, when he dared not go back to retrieve it. Susan returned it to him at the village dance on the following Saturday and, his leave ending, a long correspondence ensued, of which the village knew by hearsay because everybody was informed of it by Margie, Lisbeth, Betsy, Wistaria and Ive.
Letter from a Liberator
    Goodness knows how George kept it up; because he did me the honour, soon after the invasion, of writing one longish letter to me, in which the smudged indelible and the frequentcrossings-out bore witness to the pain he had in writing it. I imagine he must have sucked his pencil for a long time between the words. ‘The country,’ he began – he was writing from the
bocage
district before Caen – ‘is rather like ours. The people are very good farmers. They drink cider. If they didn’t speak Frog they’d be just like us. It makes you think.’
    Because I was there too, though at a different stage of the battle, I could just imagine George sitting and sucking his pencil beside that road between the orchards which was so optimistically signposted to Paris. Leafless poplars, although it was July, and greyish-yellow dust covering the poplar trunks and the thick hedges and the hedgerow flowers and George’s face, hair and hands; a notice on a gate, ‘MINEN!’ with a skull and crossbones underneath it, and a field behind the gate sown with poppies, corn and death; a cart-horse, to which the notice had meant nothing, lying shattered just inside the gate . . .
    Not much like Brensham; but George saw