Lost in the Flames (11 page)

‘I saw some of your Australian sheep at the Royal Show in ’39,’ said Norman, as they stood by the pen in the bottom field. ‘Scrawny things, they were. Are they all like that over there, what with the poor pasture and everything?’

‘Couldn’t tell you mate,’ said Jim. ‘We’re both from Perth. City boys, you see.’

‘I see,’ said Norman, eyeing them suspiciously.

‘Yeah,’ said Don, ‘I’d hardly seen a sheep in all my life until I came to England.’

‘So you don’t know much about livestock at all then?’

‘No mate, not a sodding thing.’

‘Not even cattle?’

‘I had a dog once,’ offered Don. ‘Does that count?’

Vera called them in for tea and Don and Jim entertained Daphne with stories of the duck-billed platypus and the wombat, which Jim sketched for her on a paper napkin and left her giggling at the thought that such odd creatures really existed somewhere in the world.

Meanwhile Jacob went to see Rose and they sat in her grandmother’s front room on chairs pulled up close so their elbows touched as they talked.

‘So you’ve been posted, then?’ Rose asked. ‘Near Bury St Edmunds, Vera tells me.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘I have some news myself,’ she said. ‘I’m joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.’

‘You’re going to be a WAAF? That’s wonderful news.’

‘I wanted to tell you myself.’

‘I’m very glad you did. Maybe you’ll be stationed down my way?’

‘Well, I’m not sure I’d like it if I were.’

‘What do you mean?’

His voice was strangely hurt, as if he had been stabbed in the throat by something small but wounding.

‘It would be very hard,’ she said, quickly healing the wound.
‘Perhaps too hard, to be close to you, to see you go away and not to know …’

‘… if I’d be coming back?’

‘Yes, Jacob, I imagine that would be very hard. I’m not sure I could stand it.’

The train reached the village near the airbase in mid-afternoon and the sun beat down on the platform as the new boys stepped out, Jacob’s crew and three other little clans fresh from their Heavy Conversion Units, twenty-eight men, each alone with his thoughts. They went outside and waited for the crew bus to arrive and it took them along the road and up a slight incline and as they crested the top of the rise Jacob saw the black planes heave into sight behind the perimeter fence, parked at wide intervals around the vast airfield as the ground crews perched upon their wings or clambered around on platforms beside the engines. Tractors pulled long low trains of trolleys laden with bombs and underneath the planes men scrawled obscene messages on the explosive cargo and then struggled to lift the ordnance into the joists and up into the bomb bay.

The bus dropped the new crews in front of a large brick building with a clock above its door, an incessant consumer of time, whatever time they had left in which to squeeze out their lives. Further away Jacob could see the control tower and dotted here and there, as far as the woods at the far end of the airfield, were clusters of low buildings and Nissen huts laced together by rough intersecting paths. In the middle were the runways, broad tarmac strips sketching out a choice of routes into the air to accommodate the vagaries of wind and weather. Jacob waited in line as the crews were given their medical inspection, the Medical Officer running his cold hands across them in practised little moves he had made a thousand times, going through his well-worn routine of small wry jokes and observations and personal questions in an attempt to gain the confidence of these young men who might not pass through his hands again before they died.

While Ralph went off to his quarters in a permanent brick-built block for the officer class, Jacob and the rest of the crew, sergeants not officers, continued along to the corrugated iron huts further down the
path near the woods and they were shown into their long hollow tunnel with its twenty beds on a bare concrete floor and the sound of water dripping somewhere unseen. Around the beds were strewn the belongings of crewmen who had arrived at the station in recent weeks and were now at the briefing for the night’s operation. As the two Australians went off for a walk, Jacob and Charlie and Roland dumped their bags on their allocated beds, then went over to the large brick building with the clock above the door, past the crew room and the parachute store and the sergeants’ mess and the bar. They lingered outside the briefing room where the doors were shut and the curtains had been drawn. The phone booth too was chained shut.

‘In case news of the target slips out,’ said Jacob.

‘As if we’d bloody tell anyone,’ said Roland, and he lapsed into fretful contemplation from which he only emerged when they were back in their hut and he had unpacked his suitcase and placed photos of his wife and son above the bed. Jacob swung his feet onto his mattress and chatted with Charlie. Through the window he could see the men who were on ops that night lighting cigarettes now outside the briefing room, the curtains still drawn to conceal the maps on the walls showing the routes into and out of the target. The ops men smoked incessantly in the hazy afternoon sun, chatting or just staring at the ground until they broke up into little groups and headed off to their rooms. Jacob and Charlie and Roland looked up as a group of them walked in.

‘Hello, what’s this?’ sneered one of the men. ‘New boys, eh?’

‘Another bloody sprog crew,’ said another, and they laughed and sat on adjacent beds and lit up again.

‘Want a cigarette?’ said one, chucking the pack across the room. It landed next to Jacob and he took a cigarette and passed the pack to Charlie and then on to Roland and they each took one and shared a match and the room filled with bluish smoke as the men puffed away.

‘What’s the target for tonight?’ asked Charlie, looking at the men with his wide quizzical eyes.

‘Wuppertal,’ said one. He pronounced the first syllable with an exaggerated repeated flourish, as if it were worthy of some kind of celebration. ‘Wup-Wup-Wuppertal!’

‘Nice jaunt for a summer’s night,’ said another. ‘We should be there and back in four or five hours.’

‘It’ll burn like flaming hell tonight,’ said the first, sucking hard on his cigarette. ‘The weather’s as hot there as it is here by all accounts. I don’t suppose you boys have seen a target all lit up yet, have you? You won’t believe it when you do. You won’t believe the flames.’

‘And don’t forget the flak, just a touch of the stuff,’ said the other dreamily, as if he were recounting the ingredients of a favourite dish.

‘Oh yes, and the flak. How we ever get through I’ve never understood. Just a bloody great wall of fire and searchlights and you go sailing on through and bomb nice and straight and level and hope you don’t shit yourself.’

‘How many ops have you lads done?’ asked Roland, turning away from his photos.

‘This will be our fifteenth. Only fifteen more to go,’ the man joked with a wheezing cough followed by a manic little laugh. His face was disfigured by a rash from his oxygen mask, dry scaly skin and red streaks on his cheeks like the painted grin-lines of a clown who has dipped himself in sadness and drowned.

‘Only three crews have made it to thirty ops from this squadron in the last year,’ said the other, and the clown coughed and laughed again. ‘Plenty get shot away on their very first op. Saves them worrying about the other twenty-nine.’

Roland frowned again and sucked hard on his cigarette.

‘See those beds over there, chum?’ said the clown, jerking his head towards a line of bare mattresses near the door. ‘Sprog crew just like you, arrived here four days ago, got the chop on their first trip last night, a real dicey do, Mulheim in the Ruhr – Happy bloody Valley, just one long corridor of searchlights and box barrages and fighters and flak all over the place. And their mates caught a packet too – chop, chop, chop. They had the beds you’re in now. They’re probably still warm. And that one there,’ he said, gesturing towards the bed on which Jacob sat, ‘probably stinks still of piss. He wet himself the other night, gushed right out like a garden hose, the noise could have wakened the dead, thought none of us noticed. But we notice everything – heightened perception, you see, got to have it to see the chop coming. And then you weave, you fucking weave, weave right out of its way. Let it chop the others, not you. Choppity chop chop, ha ha ha …’

Jacob shifted on the mattress and more men came in and the conversation turned away from the newcomers and the men on ops
dropped their voices, talking in subdued tones as if sharing a dirty secret until they left for their pre-op meal of bacon and eggs. Later on, Jacob watched the trucks pull up and the ops men got inside and the trucks took them away to the waiting planes and as the sun began to set and the heat of the day turned to a hazy crimson glow, the gunning of engines filled the air. Jacob and the others went out onto the tarmac and watched as the planes trundled to the end of the runway, then one by one the planes paused and shuddered and roared past and lifted off and then banked and climbed high into the darkening dome of a sky just coming to life with the first of the stars.

In the morning, the row of beds opposite Jacob was empty and the men from the Committee of Adjustment drew up in their van and put the ops men’s belongings into boxes and took them away.

‘Three planes were lost over Wuppertal last night,’ said Charlie.

‘Including the squadron’s senior crew,’ added George. ‘On their twenty-ninth op, just one away from the end of their tour. What a waste of bloody effort.’

Later that day three new crews arrived and the beds were full again.

And then it was their turn, the day when the training stopped and the war began for them. Jacob rose early to check the ops board and Ralph’s name was on the list, P/O Andrews, next to his aircraft D-Dog, the take-off slot and an estimated time of arrival back at base to be filled in later after the briefing.

‘Ops are on, boys!’ said Jacob, when they met outside the mess after breakfast.

‘Yes,’ said George. ‘We’re off out dicing tonight at last. Anyone got the gen?’

‘Top secret, old chap, didn’t you know?’

‘We’ll find out after lunch, I expect. Main briefing’s at four.’

Jacob visited the post room and sat on the bench by the path outside and opened his mail, first a letter from Rose. She had received her posting to a bomber base in Cambridgeshire.

‘I think it’s for the best,’ she wrote. ‘This way we’re not so very far from each other but neither are we so close that it will cause us pain.
You understand what I mean by that, don’t you Jacob, my darling? Your presence here would make our nightly parting unbearable – if it were your plane I had to see off at dusk each night it would simply drive me mad, to think of you hurtling away just yards from me, then suddenly hundreds of yards, then miles, then so many miles that only the passing of many hours of worry could possibly reunite us. I would be paralysed, useless until your plane returned. And I must do my job here too, must bring the boys back down for their landing slots, I must concentrate hard for them, to bring them in, just as I hope your girls will do that for you – perhaps I’m bringing their boys in here too, the very ones, a shared responsibility. So I leave you in their hands, Jacob, I will trust them to get you down in one piece, come fog or rain or hellfire, and I will do the same for the boys here, whoever they belong to, whoever is waiting for them to get home. But please don’t think this means I don’t wish to see you, I do so much that it hurts, almost a physical pain, not in my heart where I would expect it, but this dull numb thing throughout my being, this awful black ache. I almost dare not see you in case I cannot bear to let you go again. And that just would not do, would it? Stiff upper lip and all that. But when shall we meet, Jacob? Because we must. Because I need you. I expect you’ll get leave in six weeks? Let me know the dates and I’ll see to it that my leave coincides with yours. Jacob, my love, you are so very dear to me – you do know that, don’t you? You always have been and always will.’

Jacob read the letter again. Where had it come from, this thing between him and Rose, who he remembered as a woman when he was still just a boy? She must have seen the thing before he did but she had waited, had let him traipse after her in childhood, had encouraged him in hindsight, always seemed to be around when he was, and now she was declaring the thing that had stood unspoken between them since even before Jacob had understood what that thing was. But now he could see it too, the simplest thing in the world and the most precious.

Then he opened the other letter, from Harry Pollock, stationed with a squadron further north in Lincolnshire, describing his first operation the previous week, how they had got lost on the way back and the plane had nearly run out of fuel before landing at a satellite base in Norfolk, and his relief at having got the first operation out of the way, at knowing now the task that confronted him and that perhaps he was up to it.

Jacob and Charlie and George and Roland and the two Australians ate lunch together in the sergeants’ mess while Ralph sat in the officers’ dining room across the corridor.

‘Flying tonight, lads?’ asked the waitress as she brought the men their pudding.

‘Yes, first op tonight,’ said George. ‘Just twenty-nine more and we’ll be done!’

‘Good luck then, lads,’ she said. ‘Which kite are you in?’

‘D-Dog. She looks a lovely crate.’

‘Oh yes, the erks all say the Dog’s a good one,’ she said. ‘You’ll be just fine, don’t you worry about a thing.’

‘I bet you say that to all the boys,’ said Don.

‘Yes, if you’re wrong, we’re hardly going to come back and correct you,’ said Jacob. ‘Excuse me, my dear, you do realise of course that your prediction was wildly optimistic …’

‘Very funny,’ she laughed. ‘Really, you look like a lucky crew to me.’

‘Lucky to meet you, anyway,’ said Don, smiling at her.

‘Are you being saucy with me?’

‘I might be, if you give me half a chance,’ said Don.

She turned and smiled and walked away and he watched her go as he gulped down his food.