Come the Hour (16 page)

‘Keep watch and report; no careless talk.’

Nora turned to the sink and began to peel the potatoes. Amy could see the tension in her shoulders. ‘They won’t get here, Nora,’ she said. ‘The RAF and the Navy won’t let them.’

‘My husband and your son,’ Nora said.

‘Quite right,’ Amy said. ‘How’s Sara getting on at school?’

‘Very well.’ Nora paused. ‘If anyone touched her I’d kill them with my bare hands.’

‘Me too,’ Amy said. ‘We’d make a good team.’

Tim and Tessa walked along the Backs beside the river. ‘I’m sorry about the May Ball,’ he said. ‘We were a bit busy.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really want to go anyway. We’re going down in a couple of days. I’ll be glad to get home.’

They walked on. ‘What’s it like,’ she said. ‘Is it awful?’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘You’re too busy to think about it at the time, and then it’s all over.’

‘Everybody all right?’ she said.

He laughed. ‘If you mean Charlie, he’s fine. Shot down a Junkers all on his own. We thought we’d lost one pilot, but he turned up. Got shot down and bailed out. Came down in some posh garden and they gave him a brandy and a cigar and he came back in a chauffeur-driven Rolls.’

She laughed. ‘Quite right too.’

He took her hand. There were one or two punts out on the river, but not many people about. ‘I want to kiss you,’ he said.

She turned to him and put her arms around his neck. ‘Yes please.’ He kissed her very thoroughly. ‘We’d better stop,’ she said. ‘Someone might see and I’m supposed to be very respectable.’

‘You are very respectable, dammit,’ he said, ‘and so am I, I suppose.’

She laughed. ‘No hanky-panky with the WAAFS?’

‘No hanky panky with anyone. I’m a one-girl man.’

He kissed her again and they walked on, hand in hand.

After he’d gone she got out her books to study – the anatomy of the brain. Where is it, she thought? Where’s the bit that makes you love someone? She’d been so adamant that she didn’t want to get involved; her career was all she wanted. And now she wanted Tim too, and the fact that he was in mortal danger every day made it stronger and deeper. There was no time – no time to dance and dream through a couple of May Balls, idle together on the river, think about the future. Since they’d danced together at the Café de Paris they’d managed to see each other now and again, usually in Cambridge, where they couldn’t be alone for very long. They hadn’t used the word ‘love’ yet, much less ‘for ever’, but it was there. They both knew it was there. It seemed too frightening to say the words. Too much like tempting Providence.

Sara marched down to the school cellar. They had an air-raid practice every week. ‘Orderly rows,’ the teachers said. ‘No running or pushing, even if we’re being bombed. If the soldiers at Dunkirk can do it, you can.’ Some of the girls groaned but Sara didn’t care. She was so glad to be back she’d put up with anything.

The girls sat in rows on the benches, whispering and giggling, the prefects trying to look serious. Sara glanced at the teachers. They didn’t seem to be concerned.

It wasn’t real, was it? It was like fire drill; it wasn’t going to happen. All those soldiers had come back from Dunkirk. Everybody seemed to be cheerful, and things weren’t much different really, apart from her dad being away and Mum getting a job. The job was nice, and they were all doctors. Tessa was nice; she’d shown her some of her textbooks from Cambridge. Charlie was a pilot and they all worried about him, she could see that. He was nice too. He made her feel a bit shy, though.

‘Gas-masks on.’

Sara put the mask over her head. It smelt horrible and was hot and sweaty. How would we get out, she thought, if the school came down above them? She supposed someone would come and dig them out –
her mum, for one. She occupied her mind with a little mental arithmetic. If a falling object accelerates at thirty-two feet per second per second, how long would it take a bomb…?

‘Look at these,’ Nora said. ‘One of my neighbours brought them up from Plymouth. The Germans must have dropped them in the night.’ She put a few leaflets on the table.

Tessa picked one up and began to laugh. ‘Listen to this, “A last appeal to reason by Adolph Hitler. The Führer sees no reason why the war should continue. He means Britain no harm.”’ She handed the leaflet to Amy. ‘I could give him a few reasons – the Jews, Holland, Belgium, France.’

Nora giggled. ‘My neighbour says they’re using them for toilet paper down there.’

‘It’s a dirty trick,’ Tessa said, ‘trying to get us off guard. Well, I’m still going to do firewatching at the hospital.’

It’s extraordinary, Amy thought, how attitudes have changed in the country, now that we are alone. Everyone is much more cheerful. We can see our task more clearly. The British fight best with their backs to the wall. ‘One of my little patients told me a joke,’ she said. ‘What did Hitler say as he fell through the bed?’ Nora and Tessa shook their heads. ‘At last I’m in Po-land.’

They all laughed. There’s laughter again Amy thought. She looked at Tessa’s young, glowing face. And love again, perhaps. They had been seeing a good deal of Tim lately. Perhaps love.

The summer wore on, one glorious day after another. There were raids on the coastal towns and on the convoys of shipping in the Channel. The squadron flew every day, in battle nearly every day, taking off, heart in mouth, a few frantic minutes of hurling their Spits around the skies, perhaps an enemy destroyed. Then home again, survival, and an evening in the pub.

Charlie was woken at four o’clock with a cup of tea. After breakfast they climbed into the trucks to be driven to the dispersal hut. They climbed out of the truck and sat about on the collection of rather broken-down old chairs in and around the hut. Charlie and Tim sat
outside in the growing light, watching the stars fading. Dawn came, slowly. The scent of the mown grass and the country flowers drifted around them. High in the sky a lark began to sing.

‘I had a letter from Tessa,’ Tim said. ‘She sent you her love.’

‘You two seem to be getting along very well,’ Charlie said. ‘Is there anything in it?’

‘I hope so,’ Tim said. ‘You know how I feel about her.’

Charlie grinned. ‘So I won’t have to shoot you down.’ Tim didn’t reply. The NAAFI van arrived with the tea.

‘Time you had a girlfriend, Charlie,’ Tim said, laughing. ‘Give you something else to think about.’

Charlie shrugged. ‘Haven’t met one I fancied yet.’

They waited. Charlie felt the usual stirring in his bowels. This was the worst bit – the waiting; waiting for the telephone to ring and the shouting voice – scramble, scramble. Then the run to the aircraft and his bowels would settle as he was strapped in.

‘I expect it’ll be another bloody marvellous day,’ Tim said. ‘Why can’t we have fog and drizzle and spend the day in bed?’

‘What day is it?’ Charlie asked.

‘Tuesday,’ Tim said. ‘August the thirteenth. Not that it makes any difference, does it?’

They waited. ‘I think you might have your wish,’ Charlie said. ‘It looks a bit murky.’

‘Not murky enough. Not enough to stop the bastards.’ Tim went off for another cup of tea.

They waited. At half past six the telephone rang. Scramble! Scramble! The squadron took off, and the fear left him. He glanced at the aircraft around him. There was nothing more beautiful, he thought, than a squadron of Spitfires in the early light.

The mass of the Luftwaffe approached from the south-west. ‘Good God,’ their leader called, ‘there’s hundreds of them.’ Charlie stared ahead of him – Junkers, Dorniers, Me 109s. In the next few shuddering, screaming minutes he threw himself around the sky in a mad mêlée of aircraft, of tracer bullets streaming past, of aircraft falling, parachutes unfolding. Then, suddenly, he found himself alone again, and turned for home.

The airfield was almost unrecognizable; bomb craters, huts burning, people running about. He managed to get down and was set on by the fitters. He was refuelled, rearmed and returned to the skies, to a second wave of enemy bombers.

Every day, every day, they came. Every day, several times a day, they were in battle. ‘You must admit they are gentlemen, the Luftwaffe,’ Tim said. ‘At least they go home nicely in time for us to get to the pub.’

The days became a blur: days of hurtling through the skies, trying not to be killed, and evenings in the King’s Head or the mess, beer in hand, playing the fool; toasting, and then forgetting, the pilots who didn’t make it.

Charlie began to feel as if nothing was quite real. He fell asleep one night over his dinner, his head on the table. He was given a
twenty-four
-hour pass, he borrowed Tim’s Morgan and went home.

Amy was shocked when she saw him, but she hid it under smiles and hugs. ‘Take your things upstairs, darling,’ she said, ‘and then come down and have some tea.’ Ten minutes later she went up to his room. He was lying on his back on his bed, fast asleep. She slipped off his shoes and he didn’t wake. She stroked the hair back from his brow and kissed him gently. Asleep, he looked like a boy again. My boy, she thought. My merry little boy. The ache in her heart was almost unbearable.

She went downstairs to Dan. ‘He’s exhausted,’ she said. ‘They must all be exhausted. How long can this go on?’

‘As long as it takes, my darling. For all of us.’

Amy opened her post over breakfast. Most of it was from the ministry about GP medical care – diphtheria vaccine, orange juice, free milk for the children. One was to remind them about turning off the gas at the mains at night in case of a raid, another was about how to deal with incendiary bombs. The last one was a shock.

‘Dan,’ she said, ‘this one’s about Kurt. He’s in England, in hospital. He’s been badly hurt. He’s asking if he can see us.’

‘How injured?’ Dan said. ‘What’s happened to him?’

Amy handed over the letter. ‘Burns,’ she said. ‘He’s a pilot, apparently. It sounds pretty terrible.’

‘I can’t go,’ Dan said. ‘I’m sorry about him, of course, but I can’t get away.’

‘I don’t think I can either,’ Amy said. ‘Perhaps the children …’

‘It’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’ Dan said. ‘Visiting the enemy? And would they let anyone see him?’

‘Apparently so. They think he’s going to die, Dan.’

‘Oh. Ask the children then. I don’t know how they’ll feel about it.’

Children, Amy thought. We must stop calling them the children: Charlie, a man among men, Tessa, spending nights on a hospital roof, firewatching, looking for killers. Would they want to go? Kurt was an enemy in an enemy country, but he was dying, and dying alone. What if it were Charlie? Would they want Kurt to visit him?

Charlie came home on a forty-eight-hour pass and Tessa found him in the garden. She sat down beside him.

‘Vegetables doing well,’ he said. ‘Nice tomatoes.’

‘Charlie,’ she said, ‘we’ve had a letter about Kurt. He’s in England.’

‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘A POW then. Where is he? One of the camps? I don’t suppose we’d be able to see him.’

‘He’s in hospital,’ she said. ‘He’s been injured.’

‘Badly?’

‘Yes.’ She hesitated. It wasn’t a subject she wanted to bring up. She knew what gave the pilots their worst horrors. ‘He’s been badly burned,’ she said. ‘He was flying – fighters. They think he’s dying.’ She watched him, ready for the wince that crossed his face.

Charlie sat still. He could feel his shoulders tensing and his jaw clenching. This was the nightmare: not death itself, not a bullet in the brain or the heart – not even drowning. The nightmare was burning, trapped and burning. A quick death was far preferable.

‘Mum called the hospital,’ Tessa said. ‘They said we can go to see him if we want, but we’d have to be quick. There isn’t much time.’

Charlie said nothing. He didn’t know that he could face it: going to see someone who had suffered the worst fate there was. The thought of it terrified them all. They had to block it out of their minds. He didn’t want to see it – to look at it. Every part of him shrank away from it. Perhaps that image would never leave him, damage him, haunt him every time he stepped into a cockpit. ‘I don’t know, Tess,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if I can.’

‘He particularly wants to see you,’ she said. Charlie had broken out
into a light sweat, beading on his forehead. She took his hand. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to go. I can go on my own.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.

He got his bike out, rode to Kensington Gardens and walked about the pathways. The flower-beds had been dug over and filled with vegetables, cabbages mainly. Several men were weeding the plots; they were Italians, he realized as he passed by and heard them talking. There was a camp for Italian prisoners of war, if any arrived, and internees, somewhere in the park. They didn’t seem to be supervised at all. Perhaps the Italians weren’t considered to be too much of a threat.

He had brought Kurt here on one of the half terms from school. He had shown him the fairy tree and Peter Pan.

‘Oh, you English,’ Kurt had said. ‘You are so sentimental.’

There had been rumours that boys from the Hitler Youth had been spying while they were holidaying in England before the war. He couldn’t believe that Kurt had been up to no good.

The week he had spent in Berlin came back to him vividly – the grim faces under the steel helmets, the brutality of it all. And he remembered Kurt’s last words about the oracle at Delphi. If he’d been talking about Britain, he’d got it badly wrong. Or maybe he meant Germany. Weren’t they all just the same, all caught up in this dreadful web of killing? Kurt was just another man. He shouldn’t die alone.

He went back home. ‘I’ll come,’ he said to Tessa.

They travelled to the hospital on the train and the bus. A staff nurse took them to Kurt. ‘He’s in a side room,’ she said. ‘He’s very ill.’

‘I’m a medical student,’ Tessa said. ‘Can you tell me what’s happening?’

‘He’s on M and B and saline compresses,’ the nurse said, ’but it isn’t helping much. He’s on morphine every few hours. He’s very drowsy. The doctors don’t think he’ll last the night.’