Lost in the Flames (20 page)

Midnight came and Mr Andrews brought up a bottle of 1928 Port and one of Scotch and they all toasted the end of 1943 and the onset of ’44, the year perhaps that would end the war. Later on, when everyone else had gone to bed, the crew went out to the lake and drew in the punts on their lengths of chain and pushed themselves off into the darkness, drifting out into the centre of the lake where the water lay flat calm and the mist swirled about their heads. They pulled the punts together and lashed them into a single floating platform and they talked of what they would do if they ever made it back to civvy street, then turned to their impending separation as they went their individual ways to training units up and down the eastern counties, a six-dog mongrel litter dragged up together but sent away now to strange and separate homes.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said George. ‘I’m not sure I could stand six months in a training unit. I mean, I think I might miss ops in a way.’

‘Are you completely mad, George?’ said Jim. ‘You’re going to miss ops?’

‘Well, I’ve kind of got used to the way of life. And it’s what we’ve been trained for, isn’t it, to kill the Hun, to bomb the bloody Jerries out of the war as quickly as we can, to get the whole thing over and done with?’

‘Give it a week and you’ll be all right,’ said Jacob. ‘I think I could get used to being off ops, no problem at all.’

‘Really, though,’ George went on. ‘I’ve been thinking I might put in for a second tour straight away.’

‘They won’t let you,’ said Jacob. ‘Everyone needs a rest after thirty. Even Butch recognises that. And anyway, if you go straight back, you’ll be finished before us and we’ll have to get a sprog in to arse about with that radio of yours.’

‘Yes, we have to do this together,’ said Jim. ‘We started it together and we’ll see it through together to the end. Isn’t that right, skip?’

‘That’s exactly right,’ said Ralph, with something like a sigh. ‘We get the crew back together in six months and we do another twenty, and then we’re free. Does everyone agree?’

Jacob, Jim and Charlie nodded and grunted their drunken assent.

‘Well, all right,’ said George. ‘I guess I can wait for a mob like you boys.’

‘Roland?’ asked Ralph.

‘We’d understand, though, Roland,’ said Charlie.

‘Yes, it’s different for Roly,’ said Jacob. ‘We can’t expect you to leave the wife and the little ’un if you get the chance not to go.’

‘Yes, sometimes they let married men take on other duties after the first tour,’ said Ralph. ‘It might be for the best, you know.’

‘No boys,’ said Roland. ‘I’ll be with you, I’ll be going too. Don’t you worry about that.’

Jim slapped him on the back and the sound echoed away across the lake and back off the far-bank trees.

‘Good old Roly,’ he said. ‘Fair play to you, mate. Fair play.’

They sat in the punts for another hour, singing their Air Force songs and swigging from the bottles they had brought, and they returned to the house as high as kites and woke the household as they stumbled into the hall and banged about in the kitchen making sandwiches and playing ball with the dog, and Jacob found himself thinking of D-Dog over Germany, flying on New Year’s Eve with another crew, no doubt, dodging the flak as the moon shimmered silver on her wings, her bombs falling away like big black fish swimming down into the depths of the sea, someone else watching them go now, not him.

Hairy Mary came down first, poking her head around the kitchen door as the spaniel chased Jacob across the red tiled floor, snapping at the tennis ball that he shielded from its jaws with his feet.

‘Jacob, stop tormenting that poor dog,’ she said, her hair wilder than ever now, flung about her head by sleep, tipped up behind her by the raised collar of her dressing gown.

‘Have I ever told you, Mary, how much I love you?’ said George. ‘How beautiful you are?’

‘Shut up you daft bastard,’ she said. ‘I know you don’t love me really.’

‘I do Mary, honest I do,’ he said. ‘For taking us out and bringing us back, night after night.’

‘With your cheery smile and your questioning eyes,’ added Jacob.

‘Stop messing about, lads,’ she laughed.

‘That’s right, Mary,’ said Charlie. ‘With your cheery smile and your questioning eyes. That’s what Don always said about you.’

‘And your scary hair,’ added George, taking another swig from the whisky bottle. ‘Your scary hair and your wary stare.’

‘Scary wary hairy Mary,’ said Jacob, and Charlie giggled and George put an arm around her and then another, and pulled her in gently and hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. ‘See, Mary, I love you dearly.’

‘Poor old Don,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Jacob. ‘Poor Don. One kiss from the chop girl, and that was that.’

George began to sing softly under his breath, ‘Don’t kiss that pretty girly, Don, you’ll be a long time gone … don’t kiss that pretty girly, Don, even if she’s top … don’t kiss that lovely girly, Don, kiss away the chop …’

And Jacob and Jim drummed a lilting rhythm upon the kitchen top with their fingers, and George hummed the tune again and Jim went silent and sat in the chair by the door and put his head in his hands.

‘Fucking hell,’ he said, in a voice the others could barely hear, and Mary went over to him and he felt her blood-red hair fall across him as her arms closed around his narrow shoulders and he wept for the friend who had entered his turret whole that night and left it as pulp and fragments.

Rose and Sally had come down now and they all left the kitchen and went to the drawing room where the fire still glowed and Charlie took a newspaper from the rack and wafted air upon the fire and stoked the flames and Ralph took Jacob into Mr Andrews’ study just across the hall to show him his father’s collection of Victorian oils, pastoral scenes thick with sheep and shepherds and wild windswept hills. But when they turned to the surgeon’s desk they saw a different set of pictures laid out upon the leather top, a series of black and white photographs of young men in RAF uniforms, wings still upon their breasts, their strange passive haunted eyes staring from faces shorn of eyelids and lips and brows, their noses stubs of flesh, their skin pulled
taut and scarred across the place where their cheeks had been and up across the bare dome of their scalp, their mouths frozen in lipless joyless smiles. Burns victims, men of air who had become men of flame, their absent faces partially reconstructed by the skilled hands of Mr Andrews. And others too, civilians, women and children with the same strange ageless staring eyes and melted features, victims of the Blitz, burnt by phosphorous and petroleum jelly and plain old raging fire.

‘These shouldn’t be here,’ said Ralph.

‘Yes, it’s not even Burns Night …’

‘Very funny, Jacob.’

‘It doesn’t make any difference, seeing these,’ said Jacob. ‘It’s not as if we didn’t know what this was all about already.’

‘He never wanted me to go,’ said Ralph.

‘That seems fair enough. No one can really have wanted all this shit for their son.’

Later on Ralph heard the front door close and saw two figures pass in front of the window. Jacob and Rose walked down the path towards the rose bower and they sat beneath the rough old boughs and Rose touched Jacob’s face with gentle fingers, then with gentle lips, and her eyes spoke to him silent words beyond the reach of mere linguistic constructs. She saw the tears in his eyes and she squeezed his hands in hers and lifted them to her face and placed her lips upon them, once, twice, three times, then held his palms against her cheeks and pressed her face into them.

‘Don’t cry Jacob, my darling,’ she said. ‘There’s no need.’

But the tears rolled down his cheeks and inaudible sobs lifted his throat up and down.

‘These hands have killed thousands, Rose,’ he whispered. ‘Bloody thousands …’

And he attempted to withdraw his hands from her grasp, but she held them tight and kissed them again and again and then she held him to her and felt his body lift and fall as he wept, something dying in her arms.

New Year’s Day came in bright and clear and Jacob woke with his head still spinning from the night before. He looked across to where Charlie sat propped up on pillows, reading one of the copies of The Lancet that Mrs Andrews left dotted around the house when they overflowed from Mr Andrews’ study.

‘Morning, Jacob,’ said Charlie. ‘Interesting article, this, all about the causes of renal dysfunction.’

‘Liver failure might be more appropriate after what we drank last night.’

In the kitchen they joined the others and drank copious amounts of milky tea, and then they went for a walk across fields full of sheep, the animals scattering away up the hill at their approach. Everyone went their separate ways at the railway station, promising to keep in touch and to see each other again in six months’ time if not before. Jacob and Rose went to Cambridge, then out to the village where they had stayed the previous summer, along the riverside path to the guest-house with the willows outside and the flowerless climbing rose above the door. They stayed two days and went again to the mill-house where the candlesticks had been and they sat in the window-seat of a ruined room and watched the stream flowing under the arch and out across the fields and back into the river thirty yards away.

‘What will this year bring for us, Jacob?’ Rose suddenly asked, as they looked across the bare winter fields.

‘Who knows – who can say what even the next month will bring?’

‘But can we live our lives regardless? Shall we make our plans despite the war?’

‘I think that might be for the best.’

‘So let’s make our plans. You know what I want, don’t you Jacob?’

‘Of course, my dear. Of course I know.’

‘And you want the same?’

‘More than I dare to admit.’

‘So let’s do it, darling.’

‘When?’

‘As soon as we can.’

There was an urgency in her voice.

‘Spring would be nice.’

‘Can you wait that long?’

‘We’ll both have leave in February.’

‘February, then,’ she said.

‘Yes, Rose dear, February. I’ll start arranging things as soon as I get back to Chipping Norton tomorrow.’

They parted again at the station, Rose heading back to her airfield and Jacob to Chipping Norton for the remaining week of his leave.

They married in late-February in St Mary’s Church in Chipping Norton, Jacob in his new officer’s uniform for which he had been commissioned the previous week, travelling down to London to be fitted out in his Burberry coat and Van Heusen shirts. He stood near the altar as Rose entered the church in a simple white dress, Daphne just behind with a posy of snowdrops, and the little girl stood next to her godmother and her only remaining uncle as they took their vows and kissed in the light of the stained glass window, beneath the gaze of the loved ones at their backs and the members of the crew who had managed to get away for the occasion. Then they paused for photos by the church door and walked up the hill into town to the Fox Hotel where they ate and drank and danced away the war.

When Jacob returned with Rose from their short honeymoon in the West Country, a telegram from Ralph was waiting for him. The Dog had been lost the previous week over Germany.

‘Poor old Dog,’ said Jacob. ‘Poor bloody Dog.’

And he felt the tears coming, the loss of a machine welling him up now for the first time in months in a way that the loss of men could no longer do.

‘Still, we wouldn’t have got her back anyway, would we? She was someone else’s now.’

The next day Jacob and Rose left for London, then on to Cambridgeshire where Jacob had been posted as a bombing instructor at an OTU not far from Rose’s airfield. They slipped back into their old
lives of separation and longing, waiting for a forty-eight-hour pass so they could meet in a room somewhere above a village pub and remember that they were man and wife again.

Months later in the bar at the OTU, Jacob and another instructor drank too much and got talking to a group of Australian recruits who were finishing their training before being posted on ops.

‘So what’s it really like, sir?’ one of the recruits finally asked. ‘On ops, I mean.’

‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ said Jacob. ‘And then you’ll know.’

‘But is it as bad as they say?’ asked another.

‘No, it’s not all that bad. Just keep your wits about you and you’ll be OK. Now do you boys play cricket?’

‘Sure do, sir.’

‘Well wait there, then.’

Jacob winked at the other instructor and came back with a bat and a ball.

‘Right, get that fire extinguisher over there as a wicket,’ he said. ‘And you lot over there, where are you boys from?’

‘Lancashire, sir.’

‘And you?’

‘Kent.’

‘Right then,’ said Jacob. ‘England against Australia.’

‘No thank you, sir,’ said one of the English lads. ‘We’re just having a quiet pint. We’ll be off in a minute.’

Jacob marched over to the men.

‘What?’ he bellowed. ‘When your country calls, you bloody jump! Now get out there on that wicket and wait for the toss.’

The men looked at him. ‘Sir, but …’

‘Move it! Now you, you marsupial chaps, forget the toss, you can bat first. England will bowl. And you there, Shorty, you can be Don.’

‘But I’m a bowler, sir.’

‘I don’t give a fuck, I said you can be Don. Bradman, that is. Now get over there while I bowl you some bloody bodyline. And here, don’t forget the willow.’

He chucked him the bat and the other instructor laughed and
lobbed the ball to Jacob and he came in off a long run and hurled the ball into the floor and it reared up and passed the man at head height and cannoned off the wall at the back, knocking a picture to the ground, shattering the glass. The batsman paused, then steadied himself and waited for the next delivery. It hurtled up and struck him full in the chest, doubling him up.

‘Strewth, are you all right?’ asked one of his mates.

‘Of course he’s all right,’ said Jacob. ‘Just a glancing blow, isn’t that right? Isn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said the man, but the next ball struck him full on the head and knocked him cold.

‘Come on, sport!’ said another. ‘That’s not bloody fair.’

‘Not fair?’ said Jacob. ‘Not bloody fair? You’ll have to be tougher than that when you get in a fucking Lanc!’

The Australians gathered around their friend and one poured a pint of beer over his head and he came round and they laughed weakly as Jacob and the other instructor attempted to cajole them into continuing the game. When they refused, Jacob grabbed the bat and took a series of blows as his mate fizzed the ball at him down the length of the room and the recruits muttered to each other under their breath. They did not know that later that night Jacob would retire to his room and lie in his bed with his knees pulled up to his chest and feel the hot slick of tears as they burned their way across his face in the silence of the night. Nor did they realise that this instructor who guided them through their training was a worn-out ops man who had somehow cheated the odds and reached the golden milestone of thirty operations and the unimaginable expanse of time and continued existence that six months away from front-line service promised. After months spent crouched on the knife-edge of readiness – months when each take-off would likely be his last, when he saw each night planes beside him disintegrate into huge balls of sudden black and orange, or sprout wicks of flame from a flak-struck engine that became a long tongue of fire as the plane gradually tipped into a dive, and other planes were caught like metallic little moths in the searchlight cones up which the ack-ack poured in bright tracer streams until the moth puffed white and was gone – after months spent living this strange half-life, in which sixty per cent of his comrades were already retrospectively statistically dead, this life more intense than anything he had ever or would ever know, a parallel existence lived against hopeless
odds while his peace-time self waited in vain in the triage room of the future for his own return, after all this, he bore a peculiar kind of madness, a heightened something that demanded more from the world than an ordinary life can provide, and so he behaved like an animal that has been brought up tame and then exposed to the wilderness, a knife held to his throat too long, and now he missed the knife, could not breathe without its edge, and he still feared but also craved the hurtling rush of the take-off and the bright white terror of the searchlights and the utter companionship and loyalty that only other ops men and his own clannish crew could provide. Released at last from the torment and tension of the operational squadron, he now could not wait to rush back to it, to step again into the dirty cramped innards of his whale, to set off together full tilt down the runway at dusk, to climb up and out over the cold grey North Sea and into the waiting arms of the enemy.

The six-month spell at the OTU came to an end and Jacob had two weeks’ leave. He spent two days at home, Alfred silent in his acceptance of his son’s return to operations, Elizabeth doubly proud now that he had achieved the rank of Flying Officer, and Vera delighted to spend time with her brother before he went to his new squadron. They walked into town and passed the haberdashery where Vera had bought the wool for Norman’s gloves in the winter of ’34.

‘Did you see her?’ Vera asked Jacob after they had passed. ‘Looking at you like that through the window. She looked so down about it, seeing you’re a pilot now, just like you told her you’d be.’

‘I’m not a pilot, Vera. I’m a bomb-aimer.’

‘But you are, Jacob. Near enough, you are. She looked so glum I nearly laughed, so glum to see you hadn’t failed.’

‘But in a way I have …’

Airmen of more junior rank saluted Jacob as they passed and when the next group approached, he tugged Vera’s arm and they ducked in under the arch by the Cooperative store.

‘What’s wrong Jacob?’ she asked. ‘What’s got into you?’

‘I don’t want them saluting me, that’s all. It’s just a uniform. There’s nothing special about me just because I’ve got this bloody uniform.’

They watched the men pass, and then went to the Church Army Forces Club where they ate spam rolls and talked to the soldiers and airmen there about the ‘big show’ that everyone knew must be coming, and the freight trains that rumbled ceaselessly through Sarsden Halt, heading for the south coast loaded with tanks, and the transport planes that passed overhead, Dakotas with black and white D-Day stripes upon their wings.

And then back to Elm Tree Farm and suddenly it was time to go, Jacob turning to wave as always beneath the arch of the bridge that sat across the road at the bottom of the hill.

He spent the remaining week of his leave in a guest-house near the airfield where Rose was based and they caught brief moments together and one single uninterrupted day and night when they spoke again about the future, approaching the subject at oblique angles, then veering away from it as the present intruded and they sought refuge again in their intimacy, and then it was over and they went back to their life of six months before, separated by fifty miles by day and what might as well have been a lifetime of flying by night.

The knife was at Jacob’s throat again as he sat with his old crew – Ralph, Charlie, George, Jim and Roland – in the mess on their first evening back at their new squadron. Alan Armstrong had completed his second tour in their absence so they were allocated a new rear gunner, the son of a miner from Ashington, at eighteen the youngest member of the squadron. Their first raid back was a daylight op over Normandy, easing the way for Montgomery’s British Second Army in the beach-head along the northern coast of France. July and August brought more daylight raids in support of the invading Allied armies, but as summer turned to autumn the emphasis shifted back to the cities and the strategy of bombing Germany out of the war.

Jacob watched the USAAF Flying Fortresses leaving vapour trails across the daylight hours as they flew out in their defensive box formations, little fish flashing silver flanks in the distant sky, their fighter escorts high above, and then at dusk he got inside the crew’s new Lancaster and set off again into the German night to finish the work the Americans had started in the day. Targets came and went,
Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Moenchengladbach, Dortmund, Kaiserslauten, Bochum, Bremen, Duisburg, Brunswick, Essen, Düsseldorf, Gelsenkirchen, Freiburg, Karlsruhe … on and on they went and suddenly it was winter and the bombs continued to fall and the planes fell out of the sky and the carousel of empty beds on the morning after ops continued to spin, rotating men in and out of the squadron at random, luck overriding skill, and Ralph’s nerves went again, and Jacob again sometimes fulfilled the role of home-leg pilot and the crew’s operations mounted and at last they flew their fiftieth, the twentieth of their second tour, the end of their obligation, finally they were free, permanently so, free to leave the war behind and resume their lives away from the front-line – but something held them, would not let them go, and in the pub on the night after their second tour expired they drank too much and agreed that the job was not yet done and that they would carry on until it was, and so they left for a month’s leave having agreed they would be back again thereafter and they would finish the war as they had begun it, flying together, dying together if necessary.

‘Rose is going to fucking kill me,’ said Jacob, as they left the pub, but he knew he had no choice, it could be no other way.

‘Stay with me, Jacob,’ Rose said, when he told her he would be going back. ‘Let the others go if you must, but stay with me now. You don’t have to go, you’ve done your bit, more than that, more than anyone could expect. Stay with your wife now, build a proper life with me, not this life of waiting and worry.’

‘But Rose, I have to go, don’t you see?’

‘No, Jacob, you don’t. Who do you love more, them or me?’

‘Please, Rose, please don’t think of it like that. They’ll think I’m yellow if I drop out. The war’s nearly over, I’ll make it through, don’t you worry about that. I’ll make it back to you, I promise you I will.’