Lost in the Flames (13 page)

‘It’s getting awfully smoky back here,’ Don was saying suddenly.

Then Ralph, ‘Wireless op, go see what’s happening back there.’

Then nothing for minutes, just the roar of the engines and the ringing in Jacob’s ears and the sound of his own breathing, panting like a dog, thinking of Rose all of a sudden, then pushing her away, this was no place for her, not here, not now, not this world. And then George’s voice again.

‘Done it, skip. Not such a big blaze after all, three squirts and out.’

‘You sure?’

‘Affirmative. Positively definitely out. It’s burnt the parachute stowage all to hell, though.’

‘How’s that engine now, flight engineer?’

‘Could be better.’

‘Gravy levels?’

‘Good enough. Go steady and we should be OK.’

‘Navigator, get me a new course.’

‘Yes, give me a sec, skip.’

‘And gunners,’ said Ralph. ‘All OK with you? Keeping wakey-wakey, are we?’

‘Yes, skip.’

‘And you, Jimmy boy? Eyes peeled?’

‘Sure, skip. I’ve swallowed so much Benzedrine I won’t sleep for a year.’

‘I could do with some myself,’ said Charlie. ‘Feeling a touch tired now.’

‘You always were a dozy sod,’ someone said.

‘Have you got that course for me yet, navigator?’

‘With you shortly.’

‘Good lad, make it snappy. What about you, Jacob? Are you still with us?’

‘Of course, skip. Just maintaining operational silence, like I was taught.’

‘Good point boys, cut the chat, will you? We’re not home yet.’

They flew on in silence until Charlie got a fix and Jacob watched the dark line of the Dutch coast pass beneath him, drifting away behind them now as the flak ships sent up their shells but the puffs of black smoke, grey in the moonlight, never came close and they flew on across a shimmering sea towards England. Then finally the magic words from their home tower, ‘Pancake! Pancake!’ and the plane wallowed around in line with the runway and the flare-path grew broad and welcoming and then they were down and George was humming them along the runway, then the engines winding down and the crew scrambling together across the massive main spar and down the length of the fuselage, squeezing along the cramped ribbed interior to where one of the gunners had flung the rear door open and was sorting out the ladder. They waited for the crew truck on the grass beside the plane, the dew soaking their boots, and then the truck hurtled up, Hairy Mary at the wheel, a WAAF with a shock of red hair that she failed to restrain
in an orderly fashion, and Jacob saw her red mane blowing in the pre-dawn breeze as she jumped from the cab.

‘Hello Mary,’ Don was saying. ‘Boy, am I glad to see you again!’

‘Hello Hairy, how are things?’ said Jim casually.

‘How are you, more to the point?’ said Mary.

‘Oh, you know. Pleasant little jaunt.’

‘Yes, wizard prang,’ concurred Ralph. ‘She’s a lovely bus, this one.’

Jacob and Roland were examining the holes in her fuselage now.

‘Blimey!’ said Roland. ‘You could fit your bloody head through that one.’

‘Well done, Dog,’ said Jacob, patting the scarred metal. ‘You got us home in the end.’

Then he threw up again on the grass.

‘You all right there, Jacob?’ said Roland.

‘Blasted pre-op beans, that’s all.’

‘I know, they’re murder, aren’t they? Was feeling sick myself when that fighter came in.’

‘Come on, let’s get you boys back for your breakfast,’ said Mary, and she got into the truck and revved the engine and tore away across the airfield as the men bumped about under the tarpaulin in the back. They gathered in a huddle around a trestle table outside the kit room and took their mugs of hot milky tea. The Wing Commander came across and patted Ralph on the back.

‘Well done, Andrews, the first one’s always the hardest,’ he lied.

Three other sprog crews had returned before them and they stood together in their clannish little groups discussing the night’s events with weary voices and tired eyes, foxhound puppies now, wet behind the ears but the blood of their first fox wet upon their lips as they awaited their turn with an intelligence officer eager to glean information regarding the accuracy of the bombing, the searchlight belts and fighter activity they had encountered, and any clues they could provide regarding bombers they had seen lost over the target. Jacob sat through the meticulous questioning, staring over the man’s shoulder at the pretty curve of a WAAF’s gentle face, then into his mug of tea, as if the night’s events could still be seen in these suddenly mundane but all-too-gentle precious things, and when the questioning was over the crew picked up their things and went to the mess and ate their bacon and eggs in silence punctuated with wry observations and speculation as to what tomorrow might bring. In the operations room they checked the
estimated landing times of other planes and watched as several more came in and the blank spaces on the blackboard were chalked with the hour of each crew’s return, but one of the empty spaces refused to yield a landing time.

‘He can’t have any fuel in his tanks now,’ someone said.

‘Been gone too bloody long.’

‘Not landed elsewhere?’

‘No reports of it. But you never know.’

‘We’ll know in the morning.’

‘Poor sods …’

They returned to their barracks and Jacob fell into bed and felt it pitch and yaw as dry land does beneath the feet of a sailor who has spent too long lost on a drunken sea, and then sleep, oblivion, and all too soon the new day, abrupt wakefulness, empty beds further down the room, and at breakfast the blackboard still incomplete, and the visit of the Committee of Adjustment in mid-morning, the taking away of belongings and the changing of the sheets in anticipation of more new arrivals to toss into war’s hungry gullet sometime later that day or the next. Ops were on again that night, and they went through the same routine, the test flight, the pre-op checks, the pensive lunch, the briefing and the final meal forced down into a churning gut. And then away to the planes and into the onrushing uncertainty of night.

Fifty miles away from where Jacob and the others are taking off again for Germany, Rose takes up her post for the night at her radio set in the control tower at her station, listening to the distant voices of her pilots as they sit in their planes at dispersal, their tension transmitting itself down the airwaves, the little coughs and verbal tics she has learnt to recognise so swiftly now that she can tell the men apart even when they have been at the station for less than a week and she has sent them out and shepherded them home only two or three times before their voices are lost forever.

One by one the planes depart and the voices fall quiet as distance hauls them out of reach, shoves them off the sudden cliff of night. The next that Rose hears of them are the early returns, skippers with planes that have developed a fault, an engine run down or a turret that has
seized, and their voices are calmer now but uncertain with guilt as they land early without bombing the target. Then sometime after midnight the first reconnection, almost a rebirth, an everyday miracle, a plane coming home empty of bombs, the wireless operator calling for help in finding the base in the low-lying fog, an engine alight and the petrol down low, the flight engineer’s voice over the intercom too as he adjusts the fuel settings in a desperate attempt to conserve the last drops for his plane in the fog, and the bomb-aimer’s voice coming up from the nose, ‘The flare path, I see it, skipper, I see it!’ and Rose calling out again, almost crying out to her men now down the airwaves, guiding them in, then the skipper’s voice saying something about a burnt boy at the back, ‘Get the blood wagon ready, the rear gunner’s burnt bad,’ and then a hacking cough brought on by the stink in the plane, and the engines audible, a gentle roar intensifying, a growing glow in the sky from the flames from the engine, the glow getting lower, and then they are down but the undercarriage has gone, the plane lurches sideways and tips up on a wing and cartwheels across the field and the fog is dispersed and the radio falls silent as the blast from the explosion shatters the windows and flames light up the back wall of the room where Rose sits strewn now with glass, and again she wants to cry out but she suffocates herself in calm, listens out for another who is in touch with her now from somewhere high above, strung out on Benzedrine and calling for help, appealing to her now to call them on in, and down they come, down through the fog. ‘The flare path, I see it,’ says someone again, a short-distance echo of what has just been, and Rose finds her hand clenched in a fist because the voice sounds like Jacob’s but she knows it’s not him, that he is away somewhere else being guided on down by another petrified girl whose brow will be as furrowed and wet as her own, ploughed all to hell with worry, and then the engine noise roars past as the plane touches down and she sees its shape flashing by, silhouetted by the blaze from the earlier one, and she turns back to her radio and listens out for the next. And later on the fog has gone, the sky full of stars and the voices less tense, and she is guiding one in, just seconds from home, when streaks of sudden light brighten the sky, tracer bullets now from a German intruder, and the Lancaster catches light and explodes as it hits the ground and before Rose goes to bed that night she picks the glass out of her hair and she prays.

Vera broke the news of her intentions to Norman as he sat slumped in his armchair in the sitting room, drinking his bedtime milk. The windows were open to the meadow at the back, the lights off, the blackout curtains pulled back. Bright moonlight lit up the field and Vera could see his profile silhouetted against the bluish glow as he raised the mug to his lips. A warm breeze shifted the curtains. He did not respond to her news, took another sip of his milk, then put the mug down on the side-table.

‘What do you mean you’re thinking of going out to work?’ he said at last. ‘What about the little one?’

‘She’s nearly seven now, Norman. She’s at school during the day, and all I do is stay at home and bake and cook and clean and go up to mum and dad’s. I can’t even go and see Rose any more now that she’s gone away.’

He looked at her for a moment, then turned his gaze towards the window again.

‘And we agreed, didn’t we?’ she continued. ‘We talked about it years ago, that perhaps one day it would be for the best. And the extra money would come in handy.’

‘I earn enough for the family, Vera, that’s my role, not yours. Your place is here.’

‘But I’m lonely, Norman. Rattling around in here all day on my own. And there’s a war on, you know – I’ve got to do something useful, do my bit.’

‘You’re useful at home, Vera. I don’t want my wife going out to work. It’s demeaning, I won’t bloody have it.’

‘You won’t have any choice soon enough. When Daphne’s seven, I’ll have to get a job, it’s the law. They’ll send me to a munitions works.’

‘They won’t.’

‘Of course they will. And you won’t be able to stop them.’

‘I’m not having it, I tell you. I provide for this family and I want my wife and child at home.’

He drained his mug and closed the window and went to bed. As Vera trod up the stairs later on, she heard his snoring from the bedroom and she undressed and put on her nightclothes and lay in bed beside him and finally she fell asleep as the summer dawn lit the edge of the curtains. He rose early and she woke to the sound of the news on the radio in the kitchen and Norman filling the kettle. She went downstairs and helped him with his breakfast.

‘I’m serious,’ she said finally. ‘I’m going to find a job before they send me to one of those dirty armaments factories.’

‘You’re not.’

‘Yes I am! I must!’

‘No you’re bloody well not. Vera, you knew you were marrying a farmer, I told you I was a simple man.’

He pulled on his boots and slammed the door on his way out. He returned at lunchtime and did not speak a word and when he came home in the evening he spoke kindly to Daphne but ignored his wife and ate his dinner alone and then washed and went to bed.

Vera fretted for hours before she raised the issue again the following week.

‘Norman, I have something to tell you. I’ve found a job.’

Silence.

‘I said I’ve found a job. I’m going out to work.’

‘I heard you.’

‘Well then?’

‘What sort of job?’

‘In a sweet shop.’

‘That’s really going to help the war effort.’

‘Life has to go on, you know.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Woodstock. You know it, the one we went to the day after our wedding.’

‘That old place.’

‘I start next week. I’ll be home by the time Daphne finishes school.’

‘I never dreamt I’d see the day my wife had to go out to work.’

‘Norman, it’s for the best.’

‘I wouldn’t say so.’

He pulled on his boots and closed the door and went to his animals in the fields, and he did the same the following week as Vera was readying Daphne for school before her first day at work. Vera left Daphne at the school gate where the headmistress stood on sentry duty and counted the children in. Daphne let go of Vera’s hand and ran towards the school-room door, then turned and waved and dashed inside. Vera walked to the stop and waited for the Oxford bus. She fidgeted with her watch strap and adjusted her scarf and checked the contents of her bag and thought of Norman stalking about the fields in his silent brooding rage. His mood had worsened as the day approached and he had not slept a wink the night before, sitting up again until dawn in the armchair by the sitting room window and leaving the house without a word when the cattle began to stir. Then she thought of Mr Bell, the shop owner, with his bristling moustache the colour of red squirrels, darting little eyes with the air of a fox and a smile to go with them. He was in early middle-age but looked rather older and she had seen him take on a military bearing that day at her interview when the delivery van turned up and people queued in a squabbling line with their ration coupons ready, eyes wide as gobstoppers and mouths like acid drops as they jostled about in the queue.

‘Come on now, boys and girls,’ he had said. ‘Calm down, calm down, you’ll all be served eventually.’ And he tossed a mint imperial casually in the air and his mouth closed around it and the red squirrel moustache twitched as he sucked on the hard little sweet.

Vera waited for half an hour and finally she heard the bus’s squealing brakes and she hopped aboard and took a seat by a window near the front. She watched as the bus trundled along the top road through Enstone, up and down the slopes and round the bends that ran through wheat fields yellow in the sun. As the bus drew up the hill past the Blenheim estate grounds and the long dry-stone wall where fat pheasants sat in winter, she rang the bell and jumped off the bus and hurried across the road to the sweet shop, the bell rattling a harsh welcome as she rushed in. The place was empty but she could hear footsteps in the back-room and Mr Bell calling out, ‘I’m coming,’ then the sound of his big bunch of keys jangling upon his belt as he walked.

‘Oh, hello Vera,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘Been having a problem, have we?’

‘I’m so sorry, Mr Bell, I really am. You see, I …’

‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ he interrupted. ‘Don’t worry, I understand. Whatever it is, I understand. Now come into the back-room and I’ll get you kitted out.’

He passed her a pink cotton apron and introduced her to the scales and went round indicating the sweets arranged in large glass jars upon rows of shelves and explained to her the rules about the ration books and the little tricks that people would try in order to sneak another ounce of cough candy or sherbet lemons. When the first customer arrived he slipped into the back-room and listened as Vera served and he smiled at her attentive repetition of the customer’s request and the sound of her feet shuffling one way and another across the floor as she searched for an elusive jar.

‘No, over there, dear, over there,’ said the customer, Mrs Davis, a pug-faced widow who always wore crocodile-skin shoes she had bought in Paris in the 1920s and carried her purse in an ostrich-skin bag.

‘You’re the new girl, I expect?’ said Mrs Davis, lowering her voice as Vera tipped the sweets into the scales. ‘Just tip a few more in there, will you?’

They heard a sharp cough from the back-room.

‘Well, perhaps not,’ said Mrs Davis. ‘I don’t want to get fat, do I?’

Then she leaned forward and whispered, ‘He’s all right really, old Jingle. A good sort.’

‘Jingle?’ whispered Vera.

‘Jingle Bell. Haven’t you noticed his keys, jangling away on his belt all the time? You’ll always know when he’s around, that’s for sure.’

Vera stifled a laugh and finished serving Mrs Davis and when she had gone Vera heard the jangle of keys as Mr Bell emerged from the back-room.

‘Well done, Vera, well done. She’s a bit of a sort, that Mrs Davis. We call her Tarzan round here, all that animal skin. Those crocodile shoes gave me a nasty nip once.’

He chuckled and took a sweet for himself and gave one to Vera and put the jar carefully back on the shelf and swept a trace of dust from the counter with an efficient flick of his finger. In mid-afternoon Vera served her last customer of the day and left Mr Bell jingling away behind the counter and rushed to catch the bus and cursed under her
breath each passenger who lingered talking to the driver, delaying her onward journey, taking the bus closer to school closing time, and by the time three-thirty came the bus had not even reached Enstone and she imagined Daphne standing by the school gate waiting for her to come, and when she finally hurried up the hill it was quarter to four and by the gate stood the figures of a little girl with a satchel and the tall angular headmistress whose disapproving look put the cap on Vera’s day.

As they ate their evening meal the ice thawed slightly and Norman asked about Vera’s day and she slipped a small white paper bag onto the table and he looked inside and put one of the toffees in his mouth and smiled.

‘I’m sorry, Vera,’ he said. ‘Forgive me.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, and that was that.

The following day she left the house a little earlier and caught the bus without rushing and Norman walked Daphne to school and collected her later and he ignored the headmistress’s haughty look and spent the walk home telling Daphne what the chickens had been up to and how one of the land girls had fallen in the pond.

That weekend, Rose arrived for three days’ leave and she walked with Vera to the tea shop in town and they ordered tea and toast and squeezed onto a window seat.

‘Have you heard from Jacob recently?’ Rose asked as the sun streamed in and lit up her face.

‘Yes, a letter came only a few days ago. He’d just been on his first op, I don’t know where. I guess they’re not allowed to say.’

‘It could have been anywhere, there are raids nearly every day. Hundreds of planes.’

‘How is it, Rose? On an airbase, I mean.’

Rose spread a meagre smear of jam on another slice of toast.

‘Pretty awful really,’ she said, and saw Vera’s crestfallen look. ‘I’m sorry, Vera. You know I’ve always been an honest sort.’

‘I know, Rose, that’s why you’re my friend.’

‘I don’t know how they keep going, night after night, seeing all those other crews not coming back. But they go, so bloody scared but won’t show it – press on regardless, they say, the chop will never get us.’

‘But some make it through …’

‘Yes, Vera, some of them do. Some of them make it to thirty ops. And some volunteer straight off for another tour, the bloody fools.’

‘If Jacob volunteered for another tour I’d kill him,’ said Vera, and they both smiled at the absurdity of what she had said.

‘Will you see him when he gets leave?’ asked Vera.

‘Oh I do hope so. He’s going to write as soon as he knows his dates. He said he’d take me somewhere he knows near Cambridge, a little place by the river.’

There was a pause.

‘It’s the real thing, isn’t it, Rose? Between you and Jacob?’

‘Of course it is, Vera, couldn’t you tell? It’s been there for ages and it’s like nothing I’ve ever known.’

A hundred miles away in Suffolk, the Dog was bombed up and ready to go when Jacob took his place between Ralph and Charlie in the briefing room that afternoon. As the intelligence officer strode to the front to address the skulls, the blinds fell across the windows and the officer said in a loud decisive voice, ‘The target for tonight, gentlemen, is Hamburg. And tonight, believe me, is a big one.’

Something between a cheer and a groan rippled across the room and the projector hummed its beam upon the screen and the intelligence officer outlined the night’s work. Later that evening, Hairy Mary set the truck in gear and it pulled away across the airfield. Jacob sat in the back with Ralph and the others and another crew that had arrived the previous day and whose names he knew it would be a waste of time to learn just now, best wait and see if they were still there in the morning. Jacob watched the new men as they sat in the dark and he recalled the numb thoughts he had had in the moments before his first trip, thoughts he knew would be numbing them now. The weather had been hot and oppressive for days, the air growing heavy, building towards an almighty storm, and he sat sweating in his flying kit, knowing that when they reached cruising height the sweat would have chilled and his oxygen mask would be cool to the touch and still smelling of sick as he strapped it back on.

Approaching the German coast, Jacob crouched beside his flare chute, hemmed in by bales of aluminium strips, and he chucked them
out in bundles at regular intervals, and as bombers across the stream did likewise the sky became a swirling mass of foil strips, throwing a protective sea of blips across the sky, shielding the bombers from the German radar operators and the night-fighters. A new navigational aid, H2S, showed the German coast in rough outline on a small screen in Charlie’s navigator’s compartment and Jacob sensed a confidence in Charlie’s tone as he rolled instructions down the intercom to Ralph and in the nose of the plane, lying on his belly, Jacob watched the outline of the coast slip by as Ralph turned the bomber down the mouth of the Elbe towards the port city of Hamburg. The target was already erupting when they arrived and Jacob let the bombs go and watched pricks of light, orange and white and red, bubble up as high-explosive bombs blew the walls apart and he knew the incendiaries were showering down too onto the roofless, windowless buildings, bursting magnesium and phosphorous and petroleum jelly and burning rubber around the vicinity of their impact, facilitating the dispersal of fire and flame, and Don reported later that he could still see the city burning a hundred miles behind them as they sped home through the short summer night.

The following day, Jacob and the others sat in exhausted silence as the intelligence officer announced that the target for the night was Hamburg once more, and when they reached what was left of the city all they saw was the flicker of flames still burning beneath the drifting banks of smoke.

Jacob wearily let the bombs go and the Dog flew them home.

After two consecutive nights with every available crew in the air, operations were off the following day. Jacob and the others ate in the sergeants’ mess, Ralph foregoing the more elevated air of the officers’ facilities to be with his men.