The Madonna of Dunkirk

By G.F. Skipworth

An elderly British woman on the east cost of England fancies that if she sits on a specific pew in the ruins of an old church, she can speak with and guide the steps of the soldiers stranded on the beach at Dunkirk. Her alleged insanity deepens when she decides to confront the Nazi advance in the flesh, with the Queen of Heaven at her back. With a touch of Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose, a healthy dose of the supernatural is added, as the village tries to bring her to her senses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G.F. Skipworth
• Release date: Feb 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311284785

G.F. Skipworth

George Skipworth has toured much of the globe as a concert pianist, symphonic/operatic conductor, vocalist, and composer/arranger. However, on the day he sat down to write a 4th Symphony, a novel came out instead. 12 books later, and he's still going strong

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THE MADONNA OF DUNKIRK

George F. Skipworth

Copyright©2016 – George F. Skipworth, Rosslare Arts International and Rosslare Press. All rights reserved. Created in the United Sttates of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles, reports and reviews. The characters presented are entirely fictional, and any resemblance to living persons is coincidental.

Episodes

The Madonna of Dunkirk

Shiv’r McTeague

Mrs. Kutsenko

Folkestone

The Day After

Precious

Ekpré

Intermezzo

March of the Master Builders

The Strand

Launch

Maddie versus the Channel

The Star of Bethlehem?

Maddie versus Adolf

Maddie versus the Vauxhall

Maddie versus England

Enlightenment

THE MADONNA OF DUNKIRK

"Oh, dear…oh dear…Oh! My word!

What’s going on in there, Miss Hashby? Is she in there? What do you see?

Mr. Royce, Edith Hashby reported in an almost violent whisper, I can scarcely bring myself to even speak of it….it’s simply awful! Awful!

She reinserted her head into the small opening between the ancient church doors, if it could still be called a church, and craned to listen again. Outside, the gentle Mr. Royce jittered about like an expectant father, although he had certainly forgotten any sensations of that experience from more than half a century before.

Well, Miss Hashby is she in there? What’s the old witch doing?

Miss Hashby reappeared and shook her head vigorously as if being forced to watch. She’s sitting in her usual pew – and shouting.

Miss Hashby, she always does that. Anything else?

"But Mr. Royce, she’s shouting at God, and right in front of the Saviour’s mother, I tell you. The poor Mother of Heaven is standing right there and not saying a word – and the old horror acts as if someone is talking back to her. Oh, Mr. Royce, she’s giving someone a terrible thrashing, and she’s uttering some of the most horrible names! Oh dear…the most terrible names I’ve heard in all my life…and my Broderick was a sailor!"

Byron Royce shook a little more, then put all the pieces together. Best come away from there, Miss Hashby, before one or both of us is struck with a bolt of lightning. After all, that’s how it happened the first time.

Edith Hashby lost her nerve and emerged from the doorway, toddling toward her old friend, but looking as if she were already running as quickly as she could. Mr. Royce offered his arm, and they continued their turtlish escape with all the impetus they could muster.

You haven’t been here as long as I have, my dear. When Maddie Caligran and the other world get into one of their set-tos, it’s best to be elsewhere and doing something that at least appears holy. The last time the Almighty hit the church, it nearly split the whole affair down the middle. These days, we only use it to give the Altar Guild something to do, and for Maddie Caligran to bully the Hosts of Heaven and chit-chat with the Virgin. Now don’t fret Miss Ashby. I feel sure that they’ve become accustomed to it. She’s been doing it for as long as any of us can remember.

Edith bristled and quickened her step, imperceptibly. It’s enough to turn one Catholic. Lead on then, Mr. Royce. I’ll pour the tea this week, and we’ll read some tidbits from Corinthians or Galatians. That should help keep us out of harm’s way.

"I’ll tell you what, Miss Hashby. Make it Revelations, and I’ll pour the tea, unlesswe have something stronger."

****

One must never fall prey to the belief that the storms no longer rage behind a face that has grown old. This is especially true for one who lives under the prospect of war, and even more true for one who lives on an adored island.

Through the seams of life, causes may be shed along the way, but there are some convictions that ring as right today as they rang a century ago. Let the Empress of time howl as she might, but these points will not be surrendered by anyone with a mind for history and a good backbone, no matter how bent.

The marvelous oddity called England, within the larger creature that is Britain, is rarely to be found in the company of cowards. The island maintains a tacit refusal to suffer such behavior. The borders forbid the luxury of lying down to die, and even the green gauze of the dells is deceptively militant. A retreating turncoat would find no rest there.

What would be an irrational faith in the glory of the homeland anywhere else is an unalterable fact of nature on this island. Britain is meant to be Britain, as Earth is meant to be Earth. With Europe’s wayward criss-crossings through the millennia, there has almost never been any doubt as to which tribe should own Britain, despite a handful of well-documented lunacies along the way.

Had Britain’s trees been given the blessing of bi-pedal motion, they would patrol the eastern coast, pipes in hand and caps snugged with ruddy cheeks against the French wind. Nothing would pass unchallenged. Likewise, were its people trees, they could be no more steadfast than they were in the time of the first German peril, keeping the daily details of civil defense and proper morale tidy and chipper.

And, had the ancients of Britain truly known her, they’d have bowed in tribute to the peculiar and stalwart Madeleine Margaret Caligran, the English…the British ideal.

Lest one mistakenly assume that she is a symbol of the stiff upper lip legend, let that pernicious phrase be taken to task at once. While it is true that Britain has endured much, and has learned through the centuries to do so with a graceful air, this land is not at heart a stiff upper lip culture, as is commonly supposed. It is more of a put the next foot in front of the last one culture. If you can put that next boot down where you can see it, you’re going forward. You’re still moving. You’re still winning. It doesn’t have to be pretty, as the French would have it. Sometimes, it appears to the British that the French would rather suffer defeat beautifully than attain grotesque triumphs.

To a world that understands the concept poorly, British stoicism is equated with a lack of feeling and a national detachment from reality. In the case of this extraordinary land, the underlying cause of cool distance cannot be ascribed to either.

To bear danger or grief nobly is, in itself, an emotional ritual. It is a sworn statement, the personal guarantee to one’s children, friends and nation that they will not be abandoned, no matter what the cost, no matter how horrid the view of the morning to come. Defeat lies only in the cessation of motion, by letting fall the national banner of an iron will. Never stop putting the next foot ahead of its partner. Never let the tyrant catch you standing still. Never accept any terms but your own, and march on him even in the moment in which he thinks to overwhelm you.

To say that Maddie Caligran was an old biddy should be avoided as well, bearing in mind that the real meaning of the term is entirely unrelated to age. The fact is that Maddie was an old biddy from the age of ten, generally disapproving of how almost anything was handled, and expressing her most shrewish objections in imperious half-utterances, cleverly camouflaged behind a stoical embouchure.

By the time of the second German encounter, she had reached the age of seventy eight, so one can only imagine how deeply embedded that trait had become. In an astonishing display of self-confidence, she believed that humans, properly armed with a good mind, do not march through time, but that time flows through them in its travels, bringing with it the appropriate gifts for each age. Maggie didn’t need to push a ball around a field or stand atop improvised furniture arrangements to paint a ceiling. She had actively fashioned the extra toughness that seventy-eight years of age brings, including the right to decline any request and assail any fool who opened his mouth in her presence. By this age, her mind had become a fortress, and could not be startled. Its answer to any proposal or theorem offered by a younger person than herself was usually met with, What have you got that I haven’t seen already?

Such women do not voice their complaints by singing Sempre libera or playing a foolish Ophelia to a silly foreigner’s Hamlet. Whether it’s to be a sophomoric cultural change contrived by the young, a prime minister of dubious domestic standards, the next American outrage, or an invasion from the continent of Europe, the offense is met with the same inner process and seldom results in immediate retaliation – no small amount of protestation, of course - but not mindless retaliation. First, the threat and the solution are chewed thoughtfully, rolled around and reshaped behind nervous tics on pursed lips, in the manner of those who speak incessantly to themselves in Piccadilly and other harbors for the mentally fragile. Only then is it hurled back, and usually at an angle, a velvet bear trap couched within a honeyed query.

Maddie Caligran’s Piccadilly of choice was St. Michael and All Angels Church in the village of Skillen, situated on a lonesome strand of coastline that was specified even by the mapmakers as lying somewhere to the south of Gravesend and Folkestone. In fact, it had once been a peopled village, and St. Michael and All Angels had been, at one time, a consecrated church in good standing with Canterbury.

A few of the originals who celebrated the new century were still around, and most met faithfully in the ruins of the old church every Sunday to hold Morning Prayer, ignoring the glaring absence of clergy. Of course, the gatherings were not called services, and they rarely celebrated the Eucharist to avoid giving offense to the greater church, as St. Michael had engaged no spiritual leadership for many years. For these who saw their little share of the strand come and go, it was enough. The pews were intact, more or less, and most of the roof was viable. A good two thirds of the grimy stained glass had remained unbroken, and the altar was unchanged, save the dust. The larger crucifix at the front was whole, but the small one on the right wall was badly damaged. To the right of the smaller lectern was what had been in the past century a rather remarkable wooden statue of the Virgin and Child. The paint was in need of repair, and some creature, presumably an apostate bird, had made mischief with the infant Savior’s head, but he and his mother fought bravely on right along with everyone else. All things considered, all was as it should be. The air was as musty and perfect as everyone had known it as children, and to whatever realm the church had fled, God and his mother still lived in Skillen. For the good people of the village who were trying to rob as much new century as they were able, appearing in those ruins each Sunday guaranteed that one foot continued to come down after another.

No one ever saw Maddie Caligran come to Sunday meetings. Without fail, she was already there when the others arrived. As a matter of fact, she spent most of the week sitting in the pews, sputtering under her breath about the troubles of the day, the woes of the world, and why nobody seemed to have the necessary qualities that British men and women once had so as to meet the matter straight-on.

More, from the vantage point of the third row’s farthest left seat, she believed beyond the shadow of a doubt that she could talk to anyone, here or away, alive or dead, human, celestial or even fictitious. In a slap at male influence that would have scarcely met with the blessings of Canterbury, she reserved her conversations with Jesus for the reading of daily grievances. She adored Jesus, adored the very idea of him – not only who he was and what he could sway in others, but how deeply he could envision the goal, past the public trivia and past the ongoing European hysteria. He looked beyond the raw silliness of whatever the noble human man (more often than not) craved in the moment. Here, in the person of the Saviour himself, Maddie received and arranged her perfect conceptual agenda, her holy mission – her crusade. And, to go with it all, it was from Jesus himself that she received her gift of speaking with those at a great distance (at the behest of his mother to be sure, but she would never begrudge her sweet Galilean his due), with full sight and sound, no matter how far away, and through any dimension.

****

Holy missions are glorious blueprints for effecting change on Earth, but no one knew better than Maddie Caligran that one also needs a bank clerk’s fastidious and unerring mind to put each small tile of them in place. For this, she had her father, long since passed, but of course to Maddie that was simply not an issue. He had lived as an adept seaman from Skillen, a claim few could make in any age. According to anyone who’d ever met him, he was a giant of both logic and soul.

There was another reason, however, that Maddie sat there in the dank light all week, through eerily quiet days and inclement nights, whispering into the beyond. She’d heard the same news as everyone in Britain, but from this spot on the third row, to the far left, she could actually see the battlefield if she so chose to...and each soldier down to a solitary lad out of hundreds of thousands. She saw them running. She knew their names, their faces and their cries. She could answer, and even the thickest of them heard her.

If her claim to the gift held true, many young men on the continent whose families believed that they died alone were not left comfortless in their final hour. Legions of them died in Maddie Caligran’s arms while she whispered them away to sleep from her humble spot on third row left - her mercy seat.

Any who would scorn such a notion by trumpeting modern logic should take care. Human senses might be all well and good to prevent one from falling down the stairs, but they were never intended to grasp a fraction of what surrounds us in the semi-light. Those whose beliefs run contrary to this obvious reality have become trapped into worshipping the false light of their own insignificance. Besides, if it turned out after all that this was no more than the pipe dream of an insane woman, her fantasy contained more nobility than can be found in most of our strivings, on any single day of our lives. On that account alone, it is right that Maddie Caligran should be revered. Yes, she was an old biddy, but that’s an accumulated gift of expression, and a splendid forum for the viewing of life itself. Beneath that crust, Maddie cared deeply for it all, and fought for her boys on the beach with a tortured passion. She loved these young men, perhaps as much as the Virgin herself did…and the two spoke of little else together.

Maddie’s monologues to God could go on well into the night, but sooner or later the vision would come, knocking everything else from her brick-wall mind. The one-sided conversations became a regular fixture of the evening’s agenda, but contrary to appearances, no disrespect was intended or taken. As a child, her father had encouraged her to always speak truth to the big man, which at the time was himself. It was unavoidable to transfer this quality into aggressive prayer and competitive meditation, and she knew for a fact that God preferred a spirited contributor to a sleeping half-wit.

As for the vision, she’d learned to see it coming, or at least to sense it in some way from far off. Her intellect came to understand its part of the process - surrender to the phenomenon and don’t come out again until you’re called. Maddie had made no recent efforts to explain any of it, and she received whomever and whatever with great attentiveness.

However, as to the question of whence, Maddie was a bulldog. She relentlessly hounded the deity as to the soundness of the specter’s credentials. Whatever it was that brought her the gift of sight and permission to intervene at a distance, they always came to her on this specific spot - third row left. Someday, she’d get to the bottom of it, and attain a firm grasp on their identities as well as a means toward gaining the upper hand in the pecking order. However, each time the vision came, she found herself as helpless as before, and devoted all her powers to communing with some wretched young soul on the French coast, or one trying to get there.

****

Charles Treacher had no more business serving as a soldier than he did serving as the King of Monte Carlo. He was a scientist, and not just a budding one - a real one, since the age of four. A reclusive young man with weak eyes, he couldn’t shoot at anything or anybody, and for all the sharpshooter drills that His Majesty put him through, the targets might just as well have been set up in Malaysia. For Charles, they simply weren’t there, not even a blur. A blur was what he saw when people passed directly before him.

The British Army stood first in line among those organizations that over-relied on the method book for the shaping of men. There will always be a few boys who cannot be found among those pages, and who will not now or ever conform to the military’s ideal. Nothing within those chapters will change in the slightest the singular mind of this type, or instill any wish within him to emulate what its authors describe as the perfect fighting man.

For Charles, a man who fights is grossly imperfect, and the promised reward of female admiration never bowled him over in the way it was supposed to. Women were so frightening as a concept already that anyone who would sigh, moon or whistle over him as he walked by in uniform (as the book suggested they would if he’d only shape up) might as well have snakes for hair and sing Katisha and the Faerie Queen in local Gilbert & Sullivan musicales.

As is usual in such cases, the son had a difficult time passing muster with the father, but not because the elder Mr. Treacher, Bernard, was so handsome, athletic, or even outgoing himself. Worse, he was insufferably precise, and cared nothing for what might be – only for what would function properly and at once under his fingertips. Such a view of life endeared him to the numerous London companies for which he worked, as he kept their books spotless and above reproach. He was the ultimate antidote to the tax man. Through the years, his bulbous nose and great sea turtle eyes created a look shared between father and son, but exceedingly pronounced in the elder. At the tender age of thirty-eight, he had already taken on the hybrid appearance of two species, and since he rarely spoke, moving his mouth only to the music of figures swimming beneath his pencil, his semi-aquatic demeanor was unsettling.

Winifred Treacher, on the other hand, had really been someone to write home about, and still could have been if she only had the good sense to escape. Half the Christian world, at least those in their little corner of Britain, marveled at the fact that the two had ever come together.

Honestly, how had she stood at the altar knowing full well what awaited her for the next fifty years? Winnie’s eclectic passions embraced poetry, music, athletics…and science. She was, in fact, the perfect mother for a laboratory wunderkind, and intended to lavish that fire for living and exploration upon a son well-disposed to it, until that thing standing next to her at the front of the church nipped it all in the bud, every bit of it. Within the year, Winnie sat at home, hands not knowing what to do. Nothing that deviated from the regimen was seemly in her husband’s eyes. The merest hint of color or anything similarly gauche was strictly forbidden. Poetry, art and music were not allowed in the house, and Winnie’s pianoforte remained covered in a dusty room along with her other silly objects. She never lost her luster, but it had nowhere to go. And so, she sat like a well-coiffed China doll on the nursery shelf, thinking great thoughts, but doing nothing.

Bernard was happy to have his son enter military service, if for no other reason than to get him out from underfoot. With Charles wandering around Europe and keeping up family appearances, Bernard could finally get some work done. At times, he wished Winnie would enlist as well, and she’d thought of it more than once. Her frog-prince husband, who failed to transform after the vows, had no particular moral view toward war. It only happened, after all, when one of his counterparts in a neighboring country failed to keep clean books, and allowed his nation to slip into fiscal imbalance. This, he believed, was in every case, the root of a dictator’s rise to power, an unscrupulous or sloppy bookkeeper. Perfect the art of accounting in all places, and the entire globe would become a social and political Eden. Don’t send the generals, he was fond of saying. Send a brigade of auditors. That will put it all back in order.

Barely two months after Charles shipped out, his father did his family the greatest courtesy imaginable – he looked up from his soup for the first time since his wedding day, and fell back into it, dead as Cromwell. The details are unknown, but Winnie sat at the opposite end of the table, having silently insulted him with a colorless comparison to an amphibian mud dweller, or some such creature, only a few moments before. She did, however, freely admit to questioning him on the matter of his death in the moment, and thanking him profusely once it was confirmed. Now, if her son would only come home safely, she’d show him the life he was intended to have, and perhaps set a little aside for herself.

****

Charles’ closest friend from school days, Edward Rose, wasn’t very much better off. The two were as inseparable as they were identical, and as one might expect, mutually incompetent outside the confines of a research laboratory.

Edward was the shorter, more bashful member of the pair. Sandy-haired and passably handsome, he was nevertheless cursed with an overriding facial expression that perpetuated the impression that he was smiling at all times. Sergeants were not fond of this, and Edward was unpopular in marching drills or inspection lines. He received a regular dressing-down from the higher ranks in his vicinity, but could do nothing but smile and nod nervously, as if he were agreeing in every way with the higher-ups’ dire assessment of him. Such a habit probably had its origins with father-to-son talks in childhood. Unlike Charles, he was athletic, and could outrun most of his peers. He attributed this talent to early years with his father as well. In later years, Mr. Rose was inebriated a good deal of the time, so the foot race lost its thrill, but the army kept him in good practice.

Edward’s mother had long since disappeared, and most of the neighbor women forgave her on the spot. Her husband was a louse, and little more was to be said on that point. The difficulty, however, was that when the beautiful Serafina Rose ran away with a watch maker, she ran away with a German one. That could not be forgiven, even though it came long before the war. German and British citizens of the past two centuries have been, in almost every case, elementally unsuited for one another. Some unseen reality within the very building blocks of creation resist such a union. Serafina and her watch maker were seen nonetheless on the North African continent…Tunisia, perhaps, and no one paid them much mind after that from Edward’s side of the tree.

Through the years, the boys took turns winning every academic prize that the city offered, and it wasn’t all theoretical nonsense that would never be seen in an actual, useable object. Everything had a real purpose. Collaborating whenever possible, they came up with more than one advance that was of immediate use for civilians and the military as well. Interesting, that the military was the only entity in England that did not take the time to examine their work, which included a carburetor modification to the Spitfire that would preserve its performance capabilities in a stall, and an impenetrable type of armor for warships, relative to what was available. That’s heady stuff for a couple of English schoolboys, but a boy is a boy no matter what he’s invented, and the army had shoes to fill. In fact, no one at all from His Majesty’s government ever thought to inspect the designs at all.

True to form, the best that the British armed forces could do was to throw them into the same infantry unit where they could be mutually useless. Wherever British soldiers went on the continent, these two misfits went, never more than an elbow’s length apart. In terms of survival odds, Edward held the advantage, being able to see and run, but his fine-tuned calculator of a friend brought important gifts to the dilemma as well.

It wasn’t difficult to see why they lost track of each other at last. The ground all looks the same in that area of the French coast. There was an awful lot of smoke about, and the pursuers behind them seemed all the more awful because they were almost on top of them, and yet unseen. The boys had run for the longest time. They’d run through the woodlands and pastures many miles back, through idle vineyards and farm, and along the sandy flats to the sea. In fact, nothing they were taught about fighting had been used in recent memory at all. It was all running...and a pity, too, with running ranked at the bottom of Charles’ non-talents, and Edward tiring of it. Charles had never found a proper pair of eyeglasses, and would likely run into a tree on any given assignment. Despite Edward’s assets as a sprinter, one leg was more powerful than the other, causing him to run off-course if the field wasn’t visible, or if he wasn’t paying attention...which he seldom was. In fact, he liked to run with his eyes closed. He thought it brought him closer to God, the bringer of all his scientific inspirations, and the ensuing accidents almost accomplished a face-to-face meeting once or twice. Edward fancied that if he concentrated hard enough, he could find his way in the dark, across a whole continent, if need be. So profound was his belief in this gift that he twice left his unit at a full gallop, running with great self-assurance into the enemy lines. His commanding officer ordered him shot if he did it again. Of course, he was joking, but Rosie’s comrades took the edict seriously, and suffered no small amount of ethical anxiety over the possibility of having to shoot such a plucky brother-in-arms.

So, there was poor