Lost in the Flames (15 page)

‘You know, she was the first girl Don ever kissed,’ said Jim. ‘He told me that just the night before he died.’

‘Poor old Don,’ said Charlie. ‘You can hardly blame him for taking the chance when he got it.’

They were assigned a new rear gunner, a former farmhand from Taunton. On his first night he woke the others with his shouting.

‘No, not the cows, not the cows!’ he repeated until Jacob leaned across and nudged him firmly in the ribs and he fell back into a fitful sleep. The next night was the same and he sat away from the others at breakfast.

‘What’s up with his bloody cows?’ said George. ‘A whole blooming herd of them by the sounds of it.’

The gunner was as silent in the truck on the way to the plane as he had been noisy in the night before ops. The first op they took him on was an uneventful trip to Kassel, the second a roller-coaster ride through the Ruhr’s ‘Happy Valley’. Over Essen an anti-aircraft shell burst close by his turret and a small shrapnel fragment made a small neat hole in the Perspex and a small neat hole in his head.

‘That turret’s bloody jinxed,’ said Jacob. ‘Two gunners gone in the space of three ops.’

Their mood was improved by the arrival of their next gunner. Alan Armstrong had completed a full tour already and he stood before them like a miracle now, still living, breathing and drinking beer after thirty ops.

‘And at the start of my second tour,’ he told them as he ordered them all another round, ‘the ship got hit by flak on the run-in to Essen. The fuselage took flame, the heat seized the turret door, the plane was tipping forward, you know, a death dive, the real thing, and my back was cooking up in the heat. I hammered at that ruddy turret, shoved it all about, and finally it swung round and the door flew open and out I popped, like a pea from a pod, out into space, umbrella open, plane falling away, all of them with it too, all my lads. Couldn’t get out, the buggers, spinning like fury it was, no chance of getting out of a thing
like that, is there?’

‘Then what?’ said Jacob. ‘Old Jerry and his hounds were after you, I bet?’

‘Oh yes, my boy, but your uncle Alan is a cunning little fox. Landed in a field outside the city, pitch black, stank of pigs but it put off the dogs. I hid in a sty all the next day, washed myself in a lake that night, got rid of the stink at last, then off I went, a month on country roads in the pitch black into France, got picked up by the Resistance in Strasbourg, then back to Blighty via Spain and Portugal. They told me I’d like a position as an instructor at a gunnery school. No, thank you, I says, but they sent me anyway. So I gave it a week, then started to trash the place, couldn’t live without the ops. Had got used to it, you see. And I’m a lucky type, the Jerries won’t ever get me.’

‘Well, we could do with a lucky gunner,’ said Ralph. ‘You’re in, isn’t he lads?’

‘Too bloody right he is.’

They learned the value of Alan’s cool experience on their first operation together when he saw an approaching fighter almost before it was visible to the eye, sent Ralph instantly into a corkscrew manoeuvre, and then shot the fighter down with a single burst when it persisted.

By mid-August their six-week spell was nearly up and they were due to start a week’s leave the following day. They ate breakfast hoping for a day free of ops but the call came through in mid-morning, ops were on, and the usual ratcheting up of tension started from the moment they heard the news, slipping its grip around them through the day until it reached its peak in the truck out to the plane and in the final checks before take-off. Then the Dog took them away, up over the coast and out to sea, and they slipped into their in-flight rhythm. Halfway across the North Sea, Roland reported a problem with the fuel system, then the port outer engine juddered and stopped.

‘We’ll keep going,’ said Ralph. ‘We can get there and back on three.’

Then the starboard inner went out of kilter and Roland adjusted the fuel and it started up again, then stopped completely, then coughed and banged and struggled on.

‘We’ll have to abort, get me a course back to base, navigator.’

They landed and were confronted by the Station Commander in
the crew room.

‘I take a very dim view of early returns, Andrews. A Lanc can fly on three engines, no problem at all.’

‘But we only had two and a half, sir,’ protested Ralph.

‘Oh stop binding, Andrews. You displayed a clear lack of determination to reach the target. I won’t tolerate boomerangs on this squadron. You’ll damn well go out again tomorrow.’

‘But sir, we’re due to go on leave.’

‘Frankly, you can damn your leave until you’ve all done another op,’ and he stormed off.

They returned to their barracks and struggled to sleep as unspent adrenaline and disappointment hurtled through their veins. Jacob lay in bed and thought of Rose and the appointment they had made for the following day at the guest-house by the river in the countryside outside Cambridge, and he cursed the unavailability of the telephone, its booth chained shut until operations were over for the night. He lifted himself out of bed early to call her but she had already left her base and he slammed down the receiver and phoned the guest-house and left a message for her to expect him the next day instead, hoping, as he hung up, that he was not tempting fate with his promise. Three precious days they had planned together, and now one had already been lost and the other two might never arrive. He pushed the thought from his mind but it nagged at him throughout the morning and at lunch he dared not even glance in the direction of Millie lest she jinx him with a look alone, and at tea he noticed again the ripples in Ralph’s trembling cup and he looked at Alan and his strange air of calm and the faraway unconcerned look in his eyes, and he was glad that one of their number had already overcome the insuperable barrier of thirty operations, living breathing proof that a miracle was an achievable goal, that survival beyond a single tour was possible, and survival beyond the duration of the war might then too be a prospect, just possibly, just a faint flicker on the distant horizon of the future, a glimmer of hope for a normal life no longer defined by fire and smoke and mayhem and long days of tension and waiting for the long black tunnel of night to swallow them up and perhaps, if luck was with them, spit them out again the other side of midnight. But a sense of unease, greater than usual, formed in Jacob’s mind throughout the day and he noticed small signs, indications in what people said, that this would be his last flight,
that this time he would not be coming back, that it would be his locker forced open by the Committee of Adjustment the following day and his possessions taken out and sent in a brown parcel to his family, preceded by the ambiguously worded telegram that promised nothing of certainty either way but bringing with it an expectation of the worst, and he thought of the letters he had received from Rose being sent back home with his belongings, where they would be read in the house opposite the place she had lived, beside the orchard filled with pigs with German names, and he thought of her again waiting for him near Cambridge, out of reach now that the telephone was off limits, the aerodrome now a cage of lost and hopeless souls living the final stretch of their lives in an agony of waiting-room hours. And then the waiting ended, and the truck arrived, and Mary’s red hair seemed more vivid and beautiful than ever, and Jacob remembered what she had said to him as the bus sped back from the dance, ‘You’re all right, you are,’ and he thought ‘You’re all right yourself, Mary dear, with your red hair and your hawksbill nose and your wonderful post-op smile as you wait for us by your truck to take us back for our mugs of tea.’ And then he joined the others in the truck and Mary started it up and took them away to where the Dog was waiting. They got on board and took up their stations and the sound of Ralph running everyone through the pre-flight checks switched back and forth across the intercom, and the acceptance form arrived for Ralph to struggle to sign with his trembling hand and the door was slammed shut and the Dog’s engines howled and they waited for the order to move off towards the runway, but the minutes passed and the order did not come and then a voice came over the intercom, ‘It’s a scrub! Ops are scrubbed,’ and there was a cry of joy from somewhere in the plane and the order was confirmed and the engines were switched off and Mary was waiting for them again by her truck and within an hour as many crews as would fit inside the bus into town were on their way to a more pleasurable form of oblivion than the one they had been contemplating for most of the day. Jacob found himself next to Alan as the bus sped into town.

‘I had the strangest feeling all day, Alan. I was sure, absolutely certain, that we wouldn’t be coming back tonight.’

‘Don’t worry, son,’ said Alan. ‘I get that feeling every trip I’m on, and it’s never happened yet.’

From the pub, Jacob phoned the guest-house and finally heard
Rose’s voice somewhere distant down the line.

‘Tomorrow, my darling,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you here tomorrow. Hurry now, Jacob, hurry now, please.’

‘I’ll be on the first bus out in the morning. Goodnight, Rose dear, goodnight. And God bless you.’

He reached Cambridge in mid-morning and caught a bus to the village and walked the last half mile to the guest-house, the path beside the river hung over with long stems of grass that brushed his legs as he passed, sending butterflies red, yellow and white up into the air. He saw the house as he rounded a sharp bend in the river. A willow tree hung itself in the water and a cuckoo cast its voice across the meadow where red-brown cattle nosed through the nettles and Jacob looked up as he neared the house, with its roses fragrant in their beds at the front and the mauve clusters of wisteria hanging above the door, the open door with the flagstone floor beyond. He saw her in the doorway, Rose, wild Rose, beneath the canopy of flowers with the sun on her face and a smile that wiped away all his terror and uncertainty, and he stood before her and looked at her properly for the first time ever now, not the casual gaze of his childhood or the shy shifting indifference of his teens, but boldly, openly, seeing her as she really was, the woman who had grown up before him, who had waited for him until he joined her in adulthood, an adulthood of age beyond their years, of understanding born of extremes of experience and the clarity of urgency, of a need to notice all the details in case they should soon be there no longer, the flecks in her eyes, the dark summer specks and freckles that the sun lifted up on her cheeks, the scent of the soap on her skin, lavender and violet, and the honey-blossom wisps of her hair on his face, and the taste of her lips, her tongue, the sweet remnants of the strawberry she had eaten moments before, its little seeds in the soft secret recesses of her mouth, the hopeful thoughts she kept in quiet corners of herself, and the radiance of her love for him, a light that had built across the years, illuminating him now as they embraced beneath the flowers in the shadow of the cuckoo’s call, in the sunlit beauty of summer, in the golden glow of peace, love and survival, the miracle of love’s survival against the black hell of the burning night.

She took his hand and led him up the stairs to the landing, the elm boards uneven beneath their feet, the air fresh and cool after the heat of the garden, the light soft, hung with silence, just the sound of her breathing and the landlord’s footsteps across the gravel outside. Rose paused by the door of the room at the end of the landing as a shaft of light lit the lace in the window.

‘This is our room,’ she said, smiling. ‘I hope you won’t think less of me …’

She saw his puzzled look.

‘… that you won’t think less of me for not taking a separate room. I didn’t really see any point in it, you see.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think any less of you. I never will.’

They spent the day walking far along the river bank, out into the countryside where the labourers and the land girls were making up hayricks in the fields. A small flight of planes droned distantly overhead, on a training flight out towards the west. By the river they found an old mill abandoned years before and they climbed in through a broken window and explored the dusty rooms, finding small forgotten objects and items of furniture where the departing owners had left them fifty or a hundred years before, an old tweed jacket with a grubby sheen hanging on a peg on the back of a door, walnut shells gone grey in the fireplace, a spoon on the brick floor that clattered as Jacob’s foot sent it spinning into the air, a scrap of paper torn across its middle, a half-formed footnote to the lives that had been lived here. Rose picked up the note and squinted at the faded words in the cool dim light.

‘Dearest Joan,’ she read. ‘There is something I must tell you prior to my departure, something that I have always …’

And there the words ran out of paper and the rest of the note remained unsaid. They found a pair of candle-holders on the window-seat in the top room, their candle stubs, snuffed out on some long-forgotten night, now thick with dust turned sticky with the wax.

‘Shall we take them?’ said Rose. ‘I think they’re Victorian. No one’s going to miss them, are they?’

They ate at the guest-house and spent the evening in the garden as the light turned milky and the moon replaced the sun, and when they could no longer see they went to their room at the top of the stairs and Jacob lit the long-dead candles and the twin flames burned bright in the still air.

‘Come here, Jacob, dear,’ she said, as he turned to her and blew out the match. ‘Come to me.’

And he went to her and she removed his shirt and let her dress fall away and then they were beside each other on the bed, the air warm upon their skin.

‘It’s been so long in coming, hasn’t it, Jacob? This moment, I mean. I was afraid it might never arrive.’

‘I was afraid of that too,’ he said, and he kissed her gently. ‘How long has it been, Rose, the waiting?’

He kissed her again.

‘Oh Jacob, where do I start?’

‘Let’s start here, then, Rose, in the here and now. It’s the only place for us now.’