Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

(Which at this rate will be out in the new year. Real life has intervened. My daughter is pregnant, and it’s one of those high-risk things.)

Vennie Stoneman is on leave in Paris, late 1944, and is about to meet the love of her life…

On her second day in Paris – the City of Light! – Vennie conceded glumly that perhaps late November was not seeing Paris at it’s very best. The trees in the Bois de Boulogne, the smaller city parks, the Champ de Mars, the gardens at Versailles and all along the city avenues were bare, the famous Louvre Museum was empty of all the splendid paintings and relics that had once been there, the sky was mostly grey and dripped rain on a regular basis. Four hard years of German occupation had emptied shops, markets, cafes and ateliers of most of the goods and edibles which had made Paris the cynosure of the world when it came to fashion, food and general culture. But still – Paris!

Vennie had read about all those famous places since she was able to read words of more than a single syllable. If the trees were bare, and the shops, museums and ateliers all but empty, the monuments and buildings were still there and every bit as awe-inspiring as they had been in her imagination, even if the paintings in the Louvre were still hidden away safe in the countryside.

“Oh, Christ – another grey stone monument!” Ginger Floyd groaned. Their jeep was halted in a broad plaza in front of the magnificent – if slightly time-mutilated twin towers and façade of Note Dame de Paris, the grand and ancient cathedral of Paris. “Don’t you ever get tired of moldy old buildings, Vennie?”

“Not this one,” Vennie replied. “It’s Notre Dame the most famous church in all of Paris – and I want to see the inside, even if they haven’t put back the rose windows. They’re famous in themselves, you know.”

“Another church,” Bill Allison remarked, with a particularly dour expression. “After Sacred Heart…”

“Sacre-Coeur,” Major Ledet corrected, almost automatically.

“We’ve also been to St. Denis,” Bill Allison continued, “Where the kings of France are planted for all time until Judgement Day. And St. Chapelle, Napoleon’s Tomb, and all those blasted museums with nothing in them because they were taken away to hide from the Nazis. Just agree with me; admire the outside for five minutes, and then lets move on to another objective. I’m a Presbyterian – all this Catholic idolatry gives me hives.”

“I want to see the inside,” Vennie repeated stubbornly. “This might be the only chance in my life that I will have to see Paris and I want to make the most of it, even if there is nothing much inside.”

“Oh, very well,” Major Ledet agreed, and set the jeep in gear. “We’ll come back for you at four o-clock, right at this place. Will that suit you, Lieutenant?”

“Perfectly,” Vennie replied, and let Bill Allison hand her down from the jeep, as she and Ginger wore their formal skirt uniforms, and it was so awkward, having to be so lady-like in the middle of a war zone, scrambling up and down from jeeps and trucks and airplanes in a narrow skirt and stockings that must be kept from being snagged and laddered. Or at least doing that scrambling in what had been a war zone, not too many weeks previously.

Vennie settled the strap of her handbag on her shoulder, straightened the cap on her head at the proper angle – and yes, she knew the crude name for that narrow and easily-folded flight cap. There was but a small scattering of people in the wide paved square before the storied towers and intaglio-carved façade of Notre Dame on this drear and grey afternoon. She marched into that chill and stone-damp smelling space … and then halted, marveling at the solid weight of the stone, the regular pillars along a triple gallery which went marching along the vista of a magnificent nave, the airy vaults overhead … she went to the font just inside the entryway, and dipped her fingers into it and made the gesture of crossing herself for courtesy. This was the custom, as she knew very well. So many of the ranch workers were devout and Catholic – a good few nurses she had trained with as well – and Padre Paul was a good and responsible shepherd. There was a rack of candles nearby, most of them flaring smokily in the intermittent icy draft from the doors. She fished a few francs out of her purse, put them in the donation box and lit a fresh candle from the jar of wooden spills next to it, silently saying a brief prayer before she walked farther into the soaring interior.

And it was every bit as glorious as she had imagined – monumental pillars and galleries, pale daylight sifting in between them, as if they were stone trees in a mighty and regularly coppiced forest. Vennie breathed in the scent of ancient incense, of age and history and stone. Padre Paul had visited St. Pauls’ in Rome, shortly after the day of liberation, and spoke most movingly of how the immense space dwarfed mere humans in the presence of the ineffable divine – this was how he must have felt, dwarfed by the power of belief in the savior of all mankind, a divine first made flesh and blood in Palestine two millennia ago … and then that belief memorialized by those passionate believers, making their faith manifest in stone, glass and paint.

Halfway up that grand nave, Vennie stepped into one of the ranks of pews – which were relatively scratch things, to her way of thinking. Bare, flimsy, relatively insubstantial, in comparison to the mighty forest of stone, rising all about her. There was an American soldier sitting in one of them, in the rank ahead of where she chose to sit and contemplate the divine, and appreciate the artistic labor which had built this place, centuries before. Vennie sat, moving quietly as she had learned as a nurse. This was a private moment – for her, as it was for that lone soldier. A sacred place, and a private place, all in one. She quietly drank in the peace and history; there was nothing like this in Deming, where the church of her childhood was a simple frame building – like a child building with sticks, a private den in the weeds, next to this.

She sat and thought about all of that; of her time in Madame Marsala’s house in Albania, and of Johnny the Englishman, who was really Tony the actor. Of the soldiers that she tended in those interminable flights – and of how many more there would be, once the war in Europe was done. The focus of the war would move against Japan, once Nazi Germany was ground into dust – and into dust they would be. Vennie was already certain of that. But, oh – the human cost of that, paid in the blood of soldiers, blood that puddled on the floor of hospitals like that one in Arzew, on the night that she and her handful of fellow nurses came forward to serve.

Vennie didn’t want to think of that – how much more in blood, how many more dying soldiers? She wrenched her mind from that, and standing up, looked over the shoulder of the American in the pew-row ahead. Now she noted, in mild surprise, that he had a notebook in hand propped on his knee. And he was making a sketch in charcoal pencil – a view of the apse and high altar, with the watery sunshine sifting in.

“I like that,” she said, unprompted. It was a bit presumptive of her, because he was enlisted, with a zebra-array of stripes on his sleeve and she – according to Army regs – was officer-class. But the soldier looked over his shoulder and smiled, without any constraint. He had a very nice smile, Vennie thought – straight white teeth and narrow, sensitive lips. A burly man with dark hair slightly too long for Army regs, about thirty years in age, and wearing heavy-rimmed glasses which lent him a somewhat professorial air.

“Thanks … I’m a shit artist, in comparison to the greats. But I get by. Master Sergeant Burt Vexler – and y0u, Ell- Tee?”

“Venetia Stoneman – but my friends all call me Vennie. I’m on leave with some friends from my unit. Are you also on leave, Sergeant Vexler?”

“Burt – just call me Burt,” he replied. “I’m on the job, actually. A research job. It’s one of those odd sorts of Army specialties…”

“In Notre Dame?” Vennie raised a slightly skeptical eyebrow. “Oh, don’t tell me you work for our version of the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.”

He chuckled, richly amused. “No, not one of those sneaky intelligence types. I was recruited to a special unit … we track down looted art, stolen by the Nazis, secure it safely and ensure that those items are returned to the proper owners. Those buggers had the stickiest fingers you can imagine. Nothing too hot or too heavy, as one of our English pals puts it. They boosted truckloads of art – paintings, sculpture, historic relics – anything you can imagine, and shipped it off to the Reich. They say that Hitler was a frustrated artist … you know, everyone might have been better off if he had been accepted at art school. But that’s by-the-by. Were you a nurse before the war, Vennie?”

“Yes, I was,” she came around the end of the pews and sat next to him. It was easier talking that way. “I liked it, very much. I was a private duty nurse for a very nice invalid lady. A friend of mine from nursing school joined the Army Nurse Corps, and she told me several times that a war was coming, and I ought to join as well. When my invalid lady died, I thought that my friend might be right, and I might as well. I could read the newspapers, you know. How did you come to be in the Army – the draft, I suppose.”

“Not quite,” Burt grinned. He set aside his glasses, folding them carefully and fitting them into his uniform tunic pocket. Now Vennie saw that his eyes were a light blue; oddly enough, of that shade that the old folks in Deming always said denoted a stone-cold killer. “I also was talked into it by a friend – my old college advisor. I was teaching art history at this terribly refined old ivy-covered college. My eyesight is bad enough that I was rated mostly unfit for the draft … and I’d be the most ham-fisted and near-sighted infantryman that any army in history has ever seen. But my advisor was terribly persuasive, and I wanted to contribute. So here I am … enjoying yet another visit to fabled Paris, the city of light. This time at Army expense, instead of the trust fund.”

“Were you here before?” Vennie asked, frankly envious. Only the very wealthiest of the Richter and Becker cousins had traveled much beyond their home ranches, much less repeatedly to Europe. “Even before the war?”

“A good few times,” Burt coughed, almost apologetically. “Although the very first time, I was only six. My mother’s honeymoon with her fourth and final husband. She insisted on bringing me. My stepfather was a peach – he’s the one that she stuck with, finally.”

“Your holiday suppers with all the family must have been interesting,” Vennie remarked, without any malice. She was fascinated, almost in spite of herself, and Burt grinned again.

She wasn’t actually a princess, through it is the usual understanding that the sons and daughters of a ruling monarch are princes and princesses. But they did things differently in Russia; up until the Russian Revolution, the legitimate offspring of the Tsar were grand dukes or grand duchesses, born to the purple and far outranking mere princes and princesses, who seem to have been, in the Russian scheme of things, merely mid-ranked nobility.

This grand duchess was named Olga; the youngest of five children of Tsar Alexander III and his wife, the Tsarina Maria Feodorovna, originally Princess Dagmar, daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark. (Her older sister Alix was married to Albert, Prince of Wales.) Born in June, 1882, the infant Olga was not in the most robust of health. Her father as the Tsar of all Russians, and her mother being a veritable whirlwind when it came to duties social and administrative, Olga and her next-oldest brother Michael were raised day to day by governesses and tutors, as was customary for the upper classes. They had a comfortable, but rather Spartan lifestyle at Gatchina, the country palace of the Romanovs. She and her brother slept on plain cots, ate porridge for breakfast, bathed in cold water, rarely saw other children and had daily lessons – and private time for walks in the nearby woods with their formidable father. Olga excelled at painting and sketching – and in fact, for the remainder of her life, most always had a paintbrush in her hand, and as an adult earned a modest living from her watercolors. (a selection of her watercolors is here)

More »

Letter, from Peg to Vennie, dated December 27, 1941, postmarked Singapore, Federated Malay States.

Dear Peg:

As you can see from the postmark, Little Tommy and I are safe in Singapore, and staying with Ada Dawlish’s older brother Arthur Nicholl, who keeps a very comfortable home in a pleasant garden suburb of Singapore. All British women and children in Penang and Perak were evacuated at mid-month, by order of the L.D.C., because of the threat from the invading Japanese.  Ada and I traveled together by car to K.L. – a hideously uncomfortable journey. When we parted, at a bare twenty-minutes notice, he gave me all the money that he had left after paying all the estate and household workers as well as his bank book so that I could draw on his account when we reached safety in KL or Singapore. Both Tommy and Ada’s husband Reg had commanded that we should go to Singapore as soon as we could, for safety sake, which is what we did – a journey almost as nerve-wracking as the drive to there from the estate. The train was very slow, often interrupted for no reason that anyone could tell us, other that troop trains had the priority right of way. The war front is somewhere around Jitra, where there is supposed to be a great battle being fought by Indian and Gurkha troops. I have had no word of my husband since his Volunteer company was called to active duty, and he kissed me and our son, said ‘goodbye’ and sent us off with Ada in her husband’s car. He went in the other direction with his fellows in the Company, including Chandeep Singh, who is an old soldier, a veteran of quite a good many big and little wars. I hope that if anything, Chandeep Singh’s good sense and advice will keep my husband safe. There is nothing but rumors – and yet the radio and the Straits Times maintain an air of cheerful assurance about it all. There is said to have been intense fighting up-country. Singapore is full to bursting, with evacuees like myself, and military troops from India, Britain and Australia. There have been air raid alarms most nights, although with very little result that we can see. A range of shops along Raffles Place was hit by Jap bombs overnight. And it’s awful to see, in person, after seeing years of this in newsreels. A place that I knew, where Ada and I had been, the very day before … and the next morning, all blown up, burnt and wrecked. We were both more deeply shocked than we confessed to upon our return to Arthur’s house.

My dear Vennie – it all seems quite surreal. On the surface, everything seems most desperately normal. The tenor of our days, a leisurely breakfast on the shady verandah of Arthurs’s house, looking into the shady garden, a round of shopping, playing with little Tommy, a rest in the afternoon and the usual social round – all very much the life that I have enjoyed since coming to Malaya. Arthur has been the most considerate host. He was employed for many years by the Shell Oil company. He is very much older than Ada, and his house is almost a museum of Oriental objects d’ arte. He is quite the collector in his semi-retirement, so his house is full of beautiful things, as well as having been constructed on the most pleasing and comfortable lines. Quite honestly, I wish that our house on the plantation had been so sensibly designed, instead of built out in every hap-hazard direction as necessity commanded. Ada and I occupy ourselves with much of the same amusements as we did, formerly … but there is a desperate shadow hanging over us, more marked because no one admits it. There is almost a feverish intensity in the air, a wish to behave as if everything were absolutely normal. Ada meets with old friends and goes dancing at the Raffles and playing tennis at the Tanglin. (She says that everyone went out dancing during evenings in the London Blitz in defiance of Mr. Hitler’s bombs and who am I to argue about that?) Arthur has old friends for tiffin in the late afternoon, and I join them, and then rest, and try and pretend for little Tommy that this is all either an exciting adventure – when the air raid siren sounds and the guns go ‘boom’ – or otherwise a perfectly normal visit to friends in Singapore. The amah, Miss Hui, is wonderful in this, behaving as if all is perfectly normal. It reassures little Tommy, but I wonder for how much longer. Little Tommy is such a willful little boy, I don’t know quite how I would manage him, if it were not for Miss Hui.

One of Arthur’s young Shell Oil employee friends is American – and from Houston! Peter Gregory. He says that he spent summers now and again with friends in Galveston. I wonder if you and he ever met there. I do assure you that I am not flirting with him – but oh, Vinnie – how comforting to hear an American accent again, and to speak with someone dearly familiar with Texas, while I wait word from Tommy!

Dearest Vennie, how are you getting along, now that war has begun and we both are a part of it, willy-nilly? Your nurse friend Helen who joined the Army Nurse Corps and was sent to Manila – is there any word of her? I hope for your sake that she is safe – although from the news reports, I fear not; Manila is as much under siege from the beastly Japs as Malaya is. I saw a bevy of Australian Army nurses today and was reminded of you and your friend, who must go where you are needed the most, no matter what the danger.

Singapore is packed full of soldiers, anti-aircraft guns, naval ships and simply awesome land artillery. Everyone says that we can endure a siege, if the worst comes to worst. I wish I could be assured of my husband’s safety – then I could sleep peacefully at night. I have had no word from him since departing from Ipoh. If it were not my own determination to remain close to where he might be, I would be on the next boat to return to Texas and the Becker ranch.

Please write to me soon.

Love, Peg (and Little Tommy.)    

(For which I am accepting suggestions for a title. The basic premise is the WWII experience of two women – cousins and descendants from the Adelsverein Trilogy characters: one is married to an English planter in Malaya, and the other a nurse in the US Army.)

The road to the south, to Kuala Lumpur was crowded, automobiles full of English families crawling slowly along in the afternoon heat. When they passed through a kampong, the pungent smell of garbage on the heavy air; that smoke and stagnant water in the ditches, privies and ponds surrounding the attap houses on stilts made Peg want to vomit. Ada Dawlish drove expertly, her hands clamped onto the wheel of the Dawlish’s Austin sedan, her eyes fixed on the road, and the dusty bumper of the car just ahead, while the sun burned in a pitiless blue sky.  

“Where are we to stay, once we get to KL?” Now that Peg was fully awake, she could think of practical things.

From the front seat, Ada Dawlish answered steely and determined, “I think we should go on to Singapore, just as Reg and Tommy said. We can go to my brother’s place. He’s certain to have room enough. He has a house in the Dalvey Road, near to the Tanglin Club – and if he can’t put us up, he’ll know of a place for you to stay. And when Tommy and Reg get to Singapore, they’ll know where to find us.” The steely resolve cracked, just a bit. “Thank god the girls are in England! Safe enough from all this. I’d have stayed with them there, if we had the slightest hint that something like this would happen! Why can’t we stop those yellow bastards! Isn’t the British Army and Navy good for anything?”

In Miss Hui’s arms, little Tommy stirred from sleep, and murmured something – good heavens, was it in Chinese? Whatever it was, Miss Hui produced a bottle of water from her own bundle of possessions. Little Tommy drank from it, thirstily, and Miss Hui met Peg’s gaze.

“He thirsty, Mem,” was all that she said, and Peg thought guiltily that she should have thought of all that. At the very least, considered that they all should have brought along something cool to drink for the long slow drive to KL. It was a nerve-wracking journey and seemed to take two or three times as long as normal, this slow, dust-clogged journey. More than once, Peg was horrified at the sight of airplanes swooping low over the road, the blood-red ball clear and plain on their wings. She remembered the newsreels, of refugee-clogged roads in France, machine-gunned by German Stuka dive-bombers. The very first time that it happened, Ada saw them coming, a line like the dark wings of gulls in the cloudless sky to the south. Fortune had it that they were at a point in the winding road towards KL where Ada had space to pull the Austin off on the side of the road, a roadside thickly grown with tall trees and rustling stands of cane. Ada set the brake and snapped,

“Everyone out!” Ada flung herself out of the driver side door, and Peg, half-asleep from the heat, tumbled out from the passenger door, Miss Hui and little Tommy on her heels. They crouched among the stands of cane, as the roar of engines overhead blotted out all sound. There a moment, and in another gone, lifting up into the hot blue afternoon sky to the north. Peg picked herself up, comforted her son, who was fractious and frightened. They resumed their seats in the Dawlish’s Austin, seats now hot and sticky from the enervating heat, and continued on.

Sometime in early evening, well after sunset and black-out time (which would have made the roads nearly as perilous as an overt air raid), they finally arrived in the forecourt of the splendors of KL’s enormous and sprawling main station, with the Mughal-style pavilions perched atop the grand staircase columns. Ada Dawlish parked the Austin as close as she could and looked at the keys in her hand.

“I don’t know what I am supposed to do with the car,” she said. “Although – I wish that I could blow it up, to keep the Japs from using it. From what Tommy said, they might be here in a couple of days, maybe as much as a week.”

“Those bastards,” Peg replied, with feeling. “How could this all be happening so fast, Ada? Barely two weeks ago, everything was peaceful … well, not everywhere, but here in Malaya. But everything was calm, ordinary … we had meals on the veranda, went for walks in the garden, played tennis and had stengahs with our friends at the Club … and between one week and the next …”

“I’ll carry your suitcase,” Ada replied, grimly, as if she had not heard a single word. “You shouldn’t be lifting anything heavy in your condition, and damn if I can see any porters around.” She took out the two suitcases, already having her handbag slung like a satchel over her shoulder. “We’re on the run, and running thin, as little as we like facing that reality, Peg. Ever since they sank the Repulse and the Prince of Wales… we’ve been at a disadvantage. Hate to say admit it but we are, and nothing broadcast over the wireless or published in the Straits Times will convince me otherwise. And nothing good will come from giving up Penang and running like cowards. We underestimated the Japs, and now we’re paying the price for arrogance. But Singapore will hold out. It’s a fortress, like Gibraltar, you know. Our chaps will be able to hold – we’re being reinforced from India and Australia. And I wouldn’t count out the Volunteers, no, not by any chalk.”

Peg took Little Tommy’s small hand; Miss Hui had his other hand. Miss Hui had her shapeless rucksack slung over her shoulder. She found Ada’s comment rather bracing; brutal but realistic. At a time like this, brutally realistic had it all over unrealistic hopes, and soothing announcements on the radio. Meanwhile, Ada put the keys to the Austin under the driver seat, and left the door unlocked, saying, “If Reg comes for it, he’ll know where to find them. And if he doesn’t – it means nothing. Let’s go get our tickets, Peg – or if not, get a room at the station hotel or at the Majestic until morning.” She sent a searching look over her shoulder at Peg. “You look exhausted, Peg. You ought to get a good rest, if there isn’t a train tonight. If you lose the sprog to a miscarriage, Tommy will never forgive us.”

“I’m fine,” Peg insisted, for she didn’t feel nearly as frail as everyone insisted that a visibly pregnant woman ought to be. She had bursts of energy, where she honestly felt that she could climb mountains – albeit rather small mountains. They walked into the station together, into the chaos in the main hall. The main hall was filled with women and children, British mostly, or Australian and loudly querulous. The few station staff present looked baffled and defensive. The roar of voices in the railway hall, amplified by the space, was nearly as overwhelming as the racket from the Jap airplanes, buzzing the road from Ipoh.

“Dear God,” Ada breathed. “It’s been the usual cock-up on all sides, Peg. It looks like no one in KL had the faintest clue about an organized evacuation. About typical for this bloody war, I’d say.”

“Shouldn’t we do something?” Peg suggested, hesitantly, but Ada shook her head, and since her hands were full of suitcases, merely jerked her head in the direction of a cluster of women. Two of them at the center of it seemed to be making lists and directing the rest of them here and there.

“I’d say that lot have got it sorted, but I’ll check and see if they need anything else,” Ada set down the suitcases close to the nearest bench, and went to speak to the other women, all of whom appeared as rattled and exhausted as Peg felt. Only Miss Hui seemed impervious to the enervating heat, the sense of subdued panic in the air, and the sheer unpredictability of it all. For this, Peg was grateful; Miss Hui’s calm kept little Tommy on an even keel. She couldn’t think how she would have managed a frightened, tantrum-prone toddler on this horrific day. Now Miss Hui made a seat for herself on the suitcases, with little Tommy half-asleep in her lap. Peg sank onto the bench, her handbag in her lap, a handbag bulging with all the unaccustomed items crammed into it at the last minute.

So many things, all left behind in that frantic few minutes. Nearly three years of her life – her married life with Tommy, all the little bits and pieces of a settled, happy existence, the easy routine of things in the sprawling bungalow – all swept away, but for a few bits in her suitcase. She had been half-asleep, and harried; she would have made a better and more sensible choice of things to take with her, had she been fully awake and thinking more rationally.

The baby turned over and kicked within her. Peg gasped, at once startled and relieved. No hurt taken to what Ada called ‘the sprog’ on this awful, draining day. Now it was Ada returning, with a somewhat lightened expression on her perfect English Rose of a face.

“Not to worry, Peg – they are all mining people, from up-country. Their husbands all work for Anglo-Oriental, and they’re being taken care of – parceled out to the houses of Anglo-Oriental employees here in KL for the term of evacuation. I think we should get a room – I could murder a stengah, or two, and you and the sprog ought to have something to eat, and a good meal. Then,” and Ada’s expression hardened. “I think we should go on to Singapore in the morning. As soon as we can.”

The Kindle version is available here – and the print version will be up by the first of September. And when the third Luna City Compendium is released, around Christmas time, books 7,8 and 9 will be in it. But all good things come to whose who wait, patiently!