Lost in the Flames (18 page)

‘What will become of us?’ she said, as Jacob dressed in the grey light of morning, but her question was overtly rhetorical and it went unanswered. She got out of bed and padded over to him.

‘It was sunny once,’ he said. ‘Do you remember that, Rose, do you remember those days?’

‘Yes, I remember them,’ she said. ‘And they’ll come back for us, Jacob. Keep the sun inside you and those days will come back.’

‘But there’s no sun inside me now,’ he said. ‘I’ve filled up with smoke,’ and the image lodged itself in her mind and she felt the little wick of flame inside her too as she clutched him to her, felt him burning.

Outside, fog still cloaked the countryside and the branches of the trees were black and dripping. Jacob left for the airfield to check on ops for the evening and he met Charlie and Jim at breakfast.

‘Ops are on,’ said Jim.

‘You’re joking,’ said Jacob, sitting down next to him. ‘They can’t send us out in this muck. We won’t be able to take off, and if we take off, we won’t land.’

‘They say it’s going to clear up later,’ said Charlie, but his night-owl eyes were disbelieving.

The fog had not lifted by the time of the briefing, but shortly after it began to disperse and the planes took off into the milky gloom. Rose stood in her WAAF uniform with the others by the runway’s end and watched the planes go, and she lay awake in her room in the pub as the candles flickered into the early hours. Finally she heard the distant hum of the first returning plane and she stood by the window as the noise intensified and the giant shape of a Lancaster bomber passed overhead, and as it roared down onto the runway another was audible away in the distance, then a few minutes later another, this time with its engines howling out of sync as it landed. Minutes passed and another came in, and she stood by the window and counted them all down, eighteen in all, and when the last was home she went back to bed and slept until morning. The next day the fog was back and ops were off and Jacob returned to the pub and found Rose beaming as he came into the room. They went into town for the afternoon and then spent the evening together again, and then the night, and then the morning came hurrying in and they stood at the bus stop, Rose with her overnight bag and Jacob with his toothbrush. The bus arrived and Jacob pulled Rose to him.

‘I’ll see you again soon, my darling,’ she said.

‘Yes, my leave is due in three weeks.’

‘I’ll arrange things so we can spend it together.’

‘Please do your best, my dear.’

‘Don’t worry, Jacob, I will …’

She kissed him and stepped up into the bus and Jacob watched her face dissolve behind the glass as the mist stole her away.

The next three weeks dragged to their conclusion in a world of half-light and night, the days shortening as autumn drew in and threw its grey squally mists across the flatlands of Suffolk. Jacob and the crew waited all day with tautening nerves, going through the wearing gears of pre-op rituals, the tightening of the stomach that refused to accept lunch, the briefings and the specialist sessions for the navigators and bomb-aimers, the pre-op meal of bacon and beans, and the donning of their flying clobber in the chaos of the crew room, men flying off the handle at the loss of a glove or the temporary misplacement of a lucky scarf, others sitting silently and fully kitted-up, dragging hard and long on a cigarette, then chucking it away half-finished and lighting up another one straight away. Strained laughter erupted somewhere over by the door, an excessive reaction to a feeble joke, then silence again, and then cursing and the furious repeated slamming of a locker door, and the sound of the trucks arriving outside, their doors banging and the incongruously cheery executioner’s voice of a WAAF calling her crews out to die. Then the bumpy ride across sodden tracks to the far-flung dispersals where the Lancasters waited like big black birds, poised for the night as real birds sang and then settled themselves down in the darkening woods nearby, and then Jacob stepped inside his big black bird and it closed its wings around him and he became part of it, its fate and his own indivisible now in the face of the night, and he waited for the off as the engines coughed then roared and the airscrews turned several revolutions and then spluttered into spinning life, the blades invisible now as they spun, and still the crew awaited the order to go, but it did not come, the operation was scrubbed, the cancellation of the trip left until the last possible moment in case the fog should lift and let them up into the sky. And so the bird let them out again into the suddenly quiet night and the truck took them back to the crew room,
exhausted by the anticipation, demoralised at having invested the day with torment and then not to add another op to their log, another step towards thirty, aware that the next day would bring the same fears and tensions and perhaps, at the end, the trip that would finish it all.

In the bar after a cancelled op, Jacob saw the imperceptible trembling of Ralph’s tea cup magnified now into a visible shaking of his pint-jug of beer, sometimes held in two hands to keep it still, then after four or five drinks the trembling subsided and the Ralph of the pre-war years peeked out into the room and Jacob remembered him as he was when they had first met mere months before, mere months that might have been a lifetime. And then the beer really took hold and Jacob and the others, still soaring on fear and adrenaline, piled the mess chairs against the walls, and up they climbed, up atop the chairs, supporting each other as each man in turn flipped himself over and planted his feet on the ceiling and took two or three footsteps across it as the others held him there, and then he fell and the others tumbled down around him, laughing and roaring and delighted at the sight of their footprints on the flat white ceiling – footprints, thought Jacob, as he lay on the floor with the rest of the crew stretched out around him, that would still be there long after the men who put them there had been blown to smithereens in the flak-hacked twinkling red-glow skies of Germany.

Finally three more weeks ended and Jacob and his crew reached another week’s leave, the next waiting room in their operational life, another chance to disappear into the country, far away from this other life, this life of waiting for the paused hand of death.

Rose stood waiting for him beneath the clock at Cambridge station and he hurried over to her and they fell into each other’s arms as the clock struck above them. They stayed a night in Cambridge and a night in London, then travelled up to Chipping Norton, Rose at her grandmother’s and Jacob in the house across the lane, and apart from the night-time, when decorum dictated their separation, they spent each day together, alone at times, at others in the company of Norman and Vera or Alfred and Elizabeth, and they were each for the other a prism through which they could interpret this strange place again, this place they had left behind when squadron life consumed them, this place inhabited by their former selves and by loved ones to whom they could not talk of the details of service life and who would not have been able to understand it anyway. They travelled back again together
on the penultimate day of their leave and spent the night again in Cambridge so that they could leave their parting until as late as possible the following day, and when the parting came it ripped their guts from their bellies and sent them hollow and bereft towards their separate destinations.

‘Next time we see each other, my tour might well be over,’ Jacob said as he turned away. ‘Just ten more ops now.’

‘Just ten more ops,’ she said. ‘Each one might as well be a lifetime.’

By mid-November, four more ops had been and gone, four more red and black nights of terror and flame, and alongside them many more scrubbed trips that held the crew at a pitch that rubbed their nerves raw. Ralph’s nerve sometimes now held only until the end of the bombing run and the long steady pause while the photo-flash recorded the accuracy of the bombs, but after he banked the plane away from the target and they were into the cover of darkness away from the searchlights and the fiercest of the flak, he would slip grey-faced and sweating from his seat for a spell on the rest-bed behind the wireless set and Jacob would come up from his place in the nose, his bombing duties done, and take the controls and follow the course Charlie gave him and point the Dog towards home. Ralph would sometimes retake the controls for landing, and the crew said nothing afterwards, the secret stayed with them, an understanding that they would function and survive as a crew or not at all, and if this meant helping each other across the personal barriers they each might encounter, then that is what they would do.

Winter now placed its hands around the airfield and subjected it to its variable caress, clear harsh frost-hung days segueing into star-strung nights that invited out the Dog, and the moon lit up the target by the bend in a shimmering river or a black mass of suburbs stretching out into the blue-grey softness of the countryside, the blue-grey and the black then lit by the orange glow of the fires that ate away the town and touched the belly of the Dog with its colour and its heat, the twin lights of moon and fire illuminating her trawl across the sky through the fiery blooms of flak and sister planes that were disintegrating into flames. And then home again beneath the moon, the fire gone out except for
the pale glow of exhausts from her Merlin engines and the burning of exhausted men’s desire to survive another day, then a sudden re-ignition of flame two miles in front of them as a wounded bomber drops too fast, out of control in its urgency to feel the ground again, and it explodes on the runway, the crew’s delirium at touching down just an evaporation of their last explosive drop of hope. And on other days, winter brought a milky balm that hung itself across the airfield, a quiet white blanket of relief, a thick mist bringing a scrub and a delirious bus-ride into town for condemned men relieved of their duty of slaughter and suicide for at least another day. And then the Battle of Berlin, the Big City, flung far away across the German map, approached in force through 10/10ths cloud and bombed blind for nights on end, sky-marker flares over the aiming point, a red-orange suggestion in the murk the bombers’ only visual contact with the target, searchlight beams lighting up the cloud-base, a translucent shroud hanging above the burning city as teenage gunners at their ack-ack guns followed the passage of the bombers, small black insects skating across an illuminated sheet of glass. And in the air the Dog flew blind and Jacob noted the sudden glow of collisions, bombers falling to the ground in pairs, bombing accidentally their brothers who flew too close below. And on the ground beneath him the conflagration, the people in their shelters along the tortured corridors of his Benzedrine-fuelled imagination, the corridors in which he repeatedly turned out the lights as some dread hand kept turning them back on, forcing him to see them, those people down below as the cellars turned to ovens and they roasted slowly, were cooked not burnt, or asphyxiated by a fire too greedy to spare any oxygen for their lungs, found the next morning by streak-faced rescue crews, all sat in a row in their catacombs, untouched by blast, perfect little bodies but perfectly dead all the same. And Jacob could see them still at dawn as he fell at last exhausted into bed and tried in vain still to turn out the lights.

Suddenly they approached their twenty-ninth op, the mythical twenty-ninth, the penultimate one that they knew had claimed so many crews before, but they were confident now in their machine and each other, men fused to metal in a common cause, men fused to each other,
moulded by experience and necessity and a bond of love that would last them a lifetime, however short or long that lifetime might be. So they helped each other, Charlie prodding George at his radio with his long ruler to keep him from dozing off on the long run home, Jim and Alan twin gunners, four drug-widened eyes scouring the night for fighters, Roland lightening the mood with his gallows humour as he adjusted the fuel settings, Jacob helping Charlie with map-reading and ground identification through the glass eye of the nose-cone, Ralph hauling himself across the barrier of his fear to step into the cockpit once more and grip the control column so hard, in an attempt to control the shaking of his hands, that in the morning after a long trip he woke with cramp in his fingers and when he stepped from the plane his mouth was red with blood and when he looked in the mirror he saw that he had bitten his bottom lip black and blue. And when Ralph had overcome the mounting dread of the outbound flight and the flat-steady terror of the bombing run and finally turned the Dog for home, slipping now into a paralysis of silent gibber and fear, Roland took him to the rest-bed by the main spar and laid the blanket over him, patting his hand and telling him his work was done, and Jacob took the controls and flew the Dog home, rejoicing in the fulfilment of his dream, the thing he had promised the woman in the haberdashery store when he was eleven years old, though she had refused to believe him, that he would be a pilot one day and would fly around the world and back again. He brought them home from their twenty-ninth op, and at the debriefing the crew kept their silence as they always did about the fusing of roles that had taken place in the air.

The thirtieth trip was delayed by heavy early-December falls of snow, and the crew drew in closer to each other, a hermetically sealed unit that lived and socialised almost exclusively together now, Ralph joining his sergeants in their sub-standard accommodation, the corrugated hoop of a Nissen hut, devoid of insulation and warmed by a coke burner in the middle of the room for which they were provided with insufficient fuel. On flightless days they took walks into the trees at the far end of the airfield and brought back firewood to feed the flames, and when the flames demanded more, or when a night on the beer had stoked their imaginations, they took to dismantling old chairs and shelves and fed these to the fire instead, huddling around the glow of the flames as the damp and the cold in turn huddled up around the
backs of the men, shivering in the greatcoats they would still be wearing when they crawled into bed. They spoke of their last operation, the thirtieth one, where it would be and how it would go and what they would do thereafter. Six months away from operations was the prize, half a year, a hundred and eighty days of life, an almost uncountable number of hours and minutes into which they would squeeze the realisation of a lifetime’s ambitions, perhaps a marriage, even the promise of a child, the re-establishing of family ties and a reconnection with the places from which they had come, a chance to reassess their hopes for their post-war lives, should such a thing be feasible after all, six months bringing duties no more threatening than a posting to a training unit, squeezing other young crews through the sausage-machine so that they could be grilled by fire, consumed by the greedy night. But all that must wait. First must come the thirtieth, and then, God willing, the birthday party that Ralph’s parents had been planning for their prematurely aged son and his mates, a long weekend together in their beautiful house by a lake in the Surrey countryside to celebrate the completion of his twenty-second year, a privileged existence now ravaged by time and fear and guilt. The birthday approached, Ralph a Christmas baby born between the Nativity and the cusp of the New Year, but the weather would not oblige and it kept the door to the six-month spell of life locked behind a chain of snowstorms that swept in across the North Sea and the flatlands of East Anglia and Suffolk, and before they could conclude their tour Christmas Eve dawned with a slight lifting of the cloud and the ground staff were set upon the runways with their shovels and their spades. They dug away the snowdrifts in search of the black road beneath, and the sound of shovels scraping across tarmac carried across to the mess where the airmen sat and ate their breakfast on long benches, sitting shoulder to shoulder as the sound of the shovels grated on their nerves, like the shovels of grave-diggers scraping at stony ground that was about to become a tomb, the dark womb of the earth into which they would be returned from high up in the sky by gravity’s clutching hand.

‘They can’t possibly send us up tonight,’ said Ralph, his hand jiggering his fork about in erratic pursuit of the last beans upon his plate. ‘It’s Christmas Eve. We can’t bomb on Christmas Eve, for Christ’s sake.’

‘They didn’t bomb last Christmas,’ said Charlie.

‘Old Butch must have been feeling soft,’ said Jim.

‘Yes, all sentimental,’ added Jacob. ‘But they’ll send us this year, just wait and see.’

Roland stirred his tea vigorously and shrugged. ‘Can’t do much about it anyway, can we?’