Lost in the Flames (17 page)

‘He used to call them all after British politicians, you know,’ Jacob went on, looking at Harry and Jim. ‘But then of course when the war started, it was the Germans’ turn, isn’t that right, father?’

Jacob grinned, suddenly boyish again, grinning at his gruff old man. Alfred smiled back at his son who had suddenly become a man himself, and he nodded.

‘That’s right, my boy. Dead right.’

‘You’ve worked your way through Goering and Goebbels and Rommel by now, I should guess?’

‘Oh yes, I’ve been through most of the generals now,’ said Alfred.

‘Would anyone like some more potatoes?’ said Elizabeth.

‘So now I’ve started on …’

‘Or carrots?’ Elizabeth asked, rather urgently.

‘So now I’ve …’

‘Alfred!’ she said tartly.

‘As I was saying,’ Alfred went on, ‘so now I’ve started on the cities. This one is Hamburg, no pun intended.’

Harry paused his fork just before his mouth and placed it back on his plate and took a sip of beer. No one spoke for a moment.

‘Don’t mind him,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He hasn’t been the same since they shelled him at Ypres,’ and Jim laughed and placed a large forkful of pork in his mouth.

‘Well whatever it’s called,’ Jim said, ‘it tastes bloody great.’

After lunch, Jacob and Harry and Jim walked into town and down to the common where the shallow lake froze up in winter, where Jacob had gone skating with Rose and William three years before. The conversation never strayed far from the war and their squadrons, and they debated the true nature of Arthur Harris, ‘Butch’ Harris, the chief of Bomber Command, a distant figure to the crews, rarely if ever seen around the aerodromes but an ever-present figure in their lives, the arbiter of who would fly, and how many, and where and how they would bomb, and when, and by extension therefore who would die, and what percentage of the bomber force could be lost on each operation without eroding its men and machinery to the point of ineffectiveness, five per cent a shade too high they had heard, though sometimes this percentage doubled or even tripled, but the crews went out night after night, whenever the weather allowed, and always a proportion did not return, multiples of six or seven at a time, crew-sized losses, and the lockers in the crew room bore scars and chips to their paintwork where they had been forced open to recover the belongings of those who had failed to return and had also failed to leave a key behind.

‘What do you reckon old Butch is really like?’ said Jim. ‘Do you think he’s really the tough old bugger he’s said to be?’

‘Can’t see how he can be anything else,’ said Jacob.

‘Well he certainly can’t be the artistic type,’ said Harry.

‘The artist of our destruction,’ said Jim.

‘Did you hear that story about him?’ said Jacob. ‘Speeding back to Bomber HQ at High Wycombe one night, stopped by a couple of
police motorcyclists and cautioned. You should be more careful says one of the policemen – you might have killed someone. My dear boy, says Harris, I kill thousands of people every night.’

They all burst out laughing

‘And then,’ continued Jacob, ‘they gave the bugger an escort home!’

They all fell about again, their laughter empty in the darkening void of night.

‘Good old Butch,’ said Jacob.

‘Bloody Butcher Harris,’ said Harry.

‘And who’s he butchering?’ said Jim. ‘Them or us?’

‘Bloody both, I should say,’ said Jacob. ‘We’re all for the chop in the end, us in the planes and them on the ground.’

‘I’m not sure which is worse,’ said Harry.

‘It’s all fire in the end,’ said Jim. ‘It’ll burn you just the same whether you’re in the air or under the bombs.’

‘Cheery lot, aren’t we?’ joked Jacob.

‘Oh yes,’ said Harry, laughing. ‘Right happy mob, we are.’

And they stood up and walked into town and spent the rest of the afternoon drinking heavily at the Fox Hotel and competing to see who could eat the most pickled onions from the jar on the bar, and who could be the last to throw up in the gents from the beer and the onions and the quiet constant fear that had really got a grip on them now.

They returned to their squadrons two days later, Jacob and Jim saying goodbye to Harry at King’s Cross and catching their train towards Cambridge as Harry headed north to Lincolnshire. Jacob and Jim reached the airfield towards dusk, the sound of Merlin engines greeting them from beyond the rise in the land where the airfield lay, and as they walked through the main gate the Lancasters were taxiing around towards the end of the runway, one after another, then the green light flashed in the signals van and a pilot released his brakes and his plane lumbered past the crowd of ground crew and WAAFs who were standing by the runway to wave the planes off, and at the very end of the runway the first plane hauled itself off the ground and climbed quickly and banked away and another was already airborne behind it,
then another, until they were all gone, a long line of planes heading for Germany.

The following day ops were on again, and Jacob went out with Ralph and Roland to check on the Dog as the fuel load went on.

‘Looks like a maximum,’ said Roland, as the fuel line spewed its contents into the tanks in the wings.

‘The full eight hours,’ said Ralph. ‘Nice one to have first op back after leave. Best get popping the bloody Benzedrine.’

Jacob passed by the post room and collected a letter from Rose, smiling at the news that she had secured three days’ leave in a month’s time and would come down to stay in a room at the pub as she had promised. But such things would have to wait, and Jacob joined the rest of the crew for the main briefing at four.

‘Hello, chaps,’ said the intelligence officer, surveying the rows of skulls in front of him again now. ‘Tonight it’s a big one, the Big City,’ and Jacob saw the curtain fall away from the map of Europe that covered the front wall of the briefing room, the lengths of red wool stretching out their route from the east of England, dog-legging at the turning points, then on to Berlin through bright red clusters indicating the flak that he knew so well now, the slow rise and sudden acceleration of the tracer shells as they passed him on their way into the infinity of the sky. Then the pre-flight meal, bacon and beans bringing back the sick taste of ops, shoving that feeling right back down his throat, and he swallowed it down and felt it hollowing away at his guts. The crew gathered in the crew room later to wait for the off and they sat and smoked and Jacob and George started an aimless game of billiards, caring little whether the balls hit the pockets, the money that they wagered meaningless currency until the morning came and they had earned another day in which to spend their winnings or regret what they had lost. George won anyway, as he usually did.

‘Here you go,’ said Jacob, tossing the notes towards him across the baize. ‘Don’t spend it all at once, will you?’

‘Want to win it back?’ said George, taking a pack of cards from the side-table on which he had let his cigarette burn itself to a stub, and they found a couple of empty chairs and sat down to see which way the money would travel this time. Jacob’s gaze flicked back and forth from the cards to the other members of his crew who sat around on the chairs and sofas that were strewn about the room. He watched over
them now, feeling their mood, little tell-tale signs he had come to know. Ralph’s eyes glazed half-heartedly across a newspaper, but he was clearly only pretending to read, his thoughts wandering elsewhere as the edges of the paper quivered. Charlie sat with eyes closed, affecting indifference, but his face was drawn and grey and his lips moved just a touch, the hint of a prayer. Roland sat in silence and twitched. Jim just looked around the room under a blue-grey pall, one cigarette after another, an incessant consumption of smoke. Next to Jim was a gunner from another crew, coughing and yawning to excess, getting up frequently to visit the loo, then blowing his nose as if something had got itself inside of him and he had to get it out.

‘He’s for the chop,’ Jacob thought. He had seen the ‘chop look’ before, and he knew it when he saw it. Those who had it knew they had it too, which only made it worse. But that was how it worked, a spell cast upon them, some sort of sign that tonight fate would turn its back, perhaps a gathering of rooks in a tree as the man took an afternoon walk, or the barracks cat choosing his bed upon which to leave a dead mouse or a carefully placed turd, or just a feeling, a sixth sense that this was the night that had chosen to claim them, the date upon which their names would be written, on which wives and families would ponder their end, and Jacob found himself thinking how Rose and the others would wonder at what exactly had befallen him, was it a fighter or a flak-burst or the weather or a failing in the Dog that had brought him down, and what had he felt when it came, was it a drawn out thing, with time to contemplate the end as the plane took flame and burned away slowly to the ground, the kind of demise he had seen attach itself so often to other planes and their men beside him in the sky, or was it a vertical spinning descent that pinned him inside too far from the hatch, or would it all come suddenly with no time for terror, just a single 88mm shell striking the open bomb bay on the bombing run, turning the thirty-ton Dog to vapour in the bright white blink of a burning eye? Then he noticed a man looking at him from the other side of the room, studying him, that curious knowing look, keening in, like a vulture around a thing that it thinks is going to die.

‘He thinks I’m for the bloody chop,’ Jacob thought, as he flung back the look. ‘Snap out of it, you clot,’ he told himself. ‘Get rid of those thoughts.’

Then he realised that George had won another hand undisturbed.

‘Bloody hell, George, you’re cleaning me out tonight!’ but his complaint was half-hearted, anaesthetised, another feeling numbed.

‘Come on, Jacob, just one more hand. One for the road! We’ve got a few minutes left and I’m on a roll.’

‘I’d rather not. My mind’s not on it,’ said Jacob. ‘Don’t want to leave the loved ones with no inheritance, do I?’

And his thoughts turned again now to the night to come and to how much he longed to stand up and walk out of this room and out of the camp, to take the first available bus to Rose, his Rose, she had told him so, the reason he had to get through this war.

But nothing could be done, ops were on and he had to go. The call came and he went to the crewing-up room and left his belongings in his locker, stuffed a few valuables and keys and last letters into the pouches that were provided, and when he had finished he watched other men doing the same and he knew that some of these belongings would be found the next morning by the men from the Committee of Adjustment who would come to force open the lockers of those who had failed to return, perhaps those unlucky lockers known to be so by the experienced crews, lockers that turned over their occupants with unusual frequency, impatient to be unburdened and empty again. But these lockers would be full again the following night when the sprog crews arrived and went out through the same door, not to come back.

Then Jacob went to the plane and bombed Berlin and was back before dawn. The new day crept in dim with a late-September fog that clouded the fields and the Lancasters stood barely visible at their dispersals and as Jacob crawled to breakfast with hopes of a day off ops he passed by the operations room to take a look at the board with the take-off and landing times of the squadron’s planes on the previous night’s raid. Dread letters were chalked next to two of the crews, FTR – failed to return – and he was suddenly aware that the brutal impact of the letters had gone. They had undermined themselves, had brutalised him past the point at which he might retain the capacity for feelings of loss, and he no longer dwelt on the barely-remembered faces of those who had gone, nor wondered at their demise. He simply offered them a mental shrug, wiped them from his memory, seven fewer names to have to remember.

He went off to breakfast to see if there were any eggs.

Then a letter came from Lincolnshire, from Harry, written to Jacob at the start of their tours, to be sent to Jacob in the event of ‘something untoward’, as Harry had always referred to it. And so Jacob heard directly from his friend, after the event, that he had been lost and that their short friendship had meant a great deal to him and that he hoped Jacob and he could both have made it to the end of their tours and remained friends after the war, but that this would not now be possible, and that he hoped Jacob would make it to thirty ops and would remember for many years his good friend Harry.

The next trip was to Turin and when the target was announced a cheer went up across the briefing room.

‘Pleasant little trip there and back,’ said Ralph. ‘Nice view of the Alps on the way.’

‘Yes, off to see the ice-creamers,’ said Jacob. ‘Light flak, static searchlights, we’ll be dropping the bombs at our leisure.’

‘None of them are easy,’ whispered Charlie.

‘I was only joking, Charlie mate,’ said Jacob.

‘It’ll be easier than bloody Germany, that’s for sure,’ said Ralph.

‘Best not tempt fate though, lads,’ said Charlie. ‘We wouldn’t want to get …’

‘Shut up, will you, Charlie?’ said Jacob. ‘We’re trying to follow the briefing.’

The trip to Turin was as uneventful as Jacob and Ralph had predicted. Next came a ‘gardening’ job to the Baltic, the bomb-load replaced by ‘vegetables’, floating mines to hamper the German Navy as it emerged from its ports. Then three bad trips to Germany – Hannover, Mannheim, and Bochum – the Dog returning from the last of these minus a wing-tip that had been shot away by flak, but Jacob entered the debriefing room in high spirits. Rose was arriving the following day.

They met at the gate at lunchtime and spent the day walking through the fields and woods nearby, the calls of the pheasants echoing through the fog from somewhere among the trees, and then they returned to the pub and ate a modest dinner and went to the room that Rose had taken. She had brought the candles they had found in the abandoned mill-house near Cambridge and she lit them and placed them in the window and turned off the lights and the candles burned
down to nothing during the night.