and goings. I took the opportunity to taste the first of the cigars I had been given by Wilhelm at the time of the truce.
It was raining that day and the knot of mothers waiting for their children outside the school was smaller than usual. The news from the war was not encouraging just then. This was the time when the Czar in Russia had dismissed his chief of staff and tried to run the army himself—catastrophically. I’d had a letter from my sister in London. She was threatening to come and see me in Stratford. “You can’t help win this war in the boondocks, you know. There can’t be many German submarines in the river Avon. Come to London … there’s room in the flat and it will be just you and four girls!!!!!” Izzy had always been fond of exclamation marks. “It’s my favorite punctuation!!!” she would say when she wrote to me at school. Underlining came a close second.
Three-thirty arrived. The children emerged, and the knot of mothers dissolved. Ten more minutes passed. I recognized one or two teachers hurrying home, a brave one on a bicycle.
Then I saw Sam. She was wearing a navy blue raincoat, not so very different from those a lot of children wear, and a navy blue sou’wester hat. She looked very young. But the blue of her outfit emphasized the blond of the hair that fell about her shoulders.
I let her go by the Lamb before I slipped out the side door. I stood under the arch at the side of the pub, out of the rain, and watched as Sam stepped into the grocery shop halfway along the Wellesbourne Road. She emerged a short time later, carrying a small parcel, but as she left the shop she turned and shouted something I didn’t catch. Although I didn’t hear clearly what was said, I sensed that Sam was upset as she hurried off, running across the road and turning right beyond the fountain where the market stalls were pitched on Tuesday mornings.
I followed at a distance. The rain was insistent rather than heavy, but there were few people about. I reached the corner and looked down Newbold Lane. There were houses on either side and at the far end the lane rose where it crossed the canal and then the railway line—the station was at the far end of the village, beyond a warehouse belonging to a local brewery.
Sam was on the bridge and disappearing over it. As soon as she was out of sight I hurried forward, not easy in the rain and given my limp, though the pain was getting easier day by day. Just as I reached the bridge a train rattled by, its smoke and steam billowing out either side of the engine, like a set of old-fashioned whiskers. The locomotive was slowing on its approach to Middle Hill station and for a moment the carriages obscured my view ahead. As they disappeared westward, however, I suddenly saw Sam again. She was standing on the far side of the canal at the door of a lockkeeper’s cottage, and she had inserted a key into the keyhole. She had turned, to watch the train, but that meant she was facing away from me and didn’t see me watching her. Then she let herself into the cottage and disappeared.
I walked on. I could have asked almost anyone in the Lamb where Sam lived—it was a small village—but I didn’t want to advertise my interest in her. Beyond the canal and railway, Newbold Lane became much more of a lane than a road, narrowing to accommodate single-file traffic only, and its surface was more primitive, too—loose gravel. The lane led, I knew, to a pig farm and very soon would become lathered in mud and worse. The rain was heavier than before but I was well wrapped up and I resolved to walk as far as the mud before turning back. I was going to knock on Sam’s door—no time like the present—but I wanted her to get home, get out of her wet clothes, and relax first, before I arrived. I didn’t want her preoccupied when I made the little speech I had planned.
My mind went back to the war. Recently the French had made a series of attacks on the Germans but had been rebuffed. One of the problems was an overall lack of strategy. General Joffre, commander in chief of the French forces, was a law unto