Lost in the Flames (21 page)

‘I feel like I’ve lost you already, Jacob. Over and over, so many times.’

He kissed her, a passionate guilty kiss of love and longing, and then he caught the train back to bomber land again.

It was a cold Sunday morning, frost still on the grass in the Cotswold fields outside, the breath of the cattle forming small clouds in the sunshine down by the pond where the ruined reeds hung red-brown and limp in the mist. Vera tore a piece of grease-proof paper from the roll and wrapped it round the left-over lamb from the previous night’s dinner. Meat was hard to come by for most, but out here in the country there were ways and means. Norman worked hard and deserved the perks of the job, the occasional lame lamb dispatched early in its life to end its suffering and provide for the family table, or the pheasants snared in the woods and carried home in the lining of an ample coat.

Vera could hear Jacob talking with the others in the sitting room across the hall. They spoke in quiet clannish tones, so different to the night before when they had returned from the pub roaring drunk and high on life. Now they could feel the tug again of their other life, thoughts turning to the train back to London and the flatlands of Cambridgeshire, farming country before the war, bomber country now. Vera tied string around the bundle of lamb, kissed it, placed it inside Jacob’s suitcase in the hall, and went into the sitting room. Jacob was standing by the fire next to Norman, laughing at something Ralph had just said. Vera smiled at him as she came into the room and she went and stood by her brother. He balanced his cigarette on the stone hearth and left it there as he brushed a stray speck of ash from his RAF blue. The men all wore the Pathfinder flash now, an elite badge worn by the best and most experienced crews whose responsibility it was to locate and mark the aiming point for the main force, dropping red and green marker flares or brilliant magnesium white to light up the target area, illuminating it for the hundreds of bombers heaving up behind.

‘Vera, my dear, you make the most excellent tea in all of England,’ Ralph was saying. ‘Jacob has brought us to this little nest of serenity
several times now, and each time I look forward to the Sunday morning tea more than anything else you can possibly imagine.’

‘Everything except the beer,’ chipped in Jim.

‘Ah, yes, of course,’ said Ralph. ‘The beer. And your father’s violin, his many merry tunes.’

‘And the sentimental ones,’ said Charlie. ‘I like those ones best.’

‘I like those ones too,’ thought Jacob, and his mind went back to late the previous evening, well past midnight, when the fire had burned itself down to embers in the grate and the rest of the crew had already gone upstairs to bed and he had stayed beside the fire, talking with his old man.

‘We’ll be off to the Ruhr again, father. Tomorrow night, I expect, or the evening after that.’

‘I know, son.’

‘Will you do something for me, father? Before you go, will you play the violin for me, when I take myself upstairs to bed?’

‘Of course I will.’

‘It will help me sleep, you see. And I need all the sleep I can get.’

Alfred nodded.

‘Play all my favourite tunes for me, father.
Danny Boy
and
I’ll Be Seeing You
, and all the rest.’

And as he went up to bed he turned and wished his father goodnight, and as he pulled the covers up to his chin he heard the catches flick back and the bow running across the strings at the base of the stairs, stirring up the notes, and the tunes he loved drifted up to him and he settled back to listen but all too soon the night had stubbed them out. And now, in the sunlight of morning, he stood and took a last drag on his cigarette. He put it out and placed it on the mantelpiece.

‘But we won’t be back here much more, I’m afraid,’ Ralph was saying to Vera. ‘The war’s in its final throes, everyone can see that now.’

‘Well you can still come for tea when it’s all over, dear, don’t you worry about that. And you’ll all be able to stay as long as you want then, I’ll fill you up with cake like all your birthdays have come at once.’

‘We’ll certainly look forward to that, won’t we boys?’

‘We sure will, skip,’ said George and the others nodded and then there was a pause and someone said the words that had been on their
lips for an hour now, in the back of their minds since the minute they had arrived, ‘I think we’d best be on our way.’

They gathered in the hall and said their thanks to Vera and Norman and put on their coats and stepped out into the icy air, Jacob with his suitcase full of meat, the lion and the lamb. The gravel crunched under their feet as they walked down the path past the patch where the strawberries grew in June, then across the yard and out of the gate and along the lane that led towards the railway bridge where Jacob would always stop and turn and wave at the figures, Vera and Norman and Daphne, and they would always stand by the porch and wave back as Jacob turned away out of sight beneath the bridge, but on this morning, for some reason, or perhaps for no reason at all, as they looked on in the sunshine and the frost, Jacob did not stop and turn around, he did not wave, and life swept him away again beneath the question-mark arch of the bridge.

Vera went to the sitting room and her eyes fell on the cigarette stub that Jacob had left on the mantelpiece. She tucked it into her apron pocket, poked the fire, placed a fresh log on the glowing coals, and began sweeping up the ash that had escaped from the grate.

‘Daphne, go and get me some more logs, will you?’

Her voice was unintentionally harsh.

She heard the girl’s footsteps tracking down the path, towards the log-pile that was propped against the wall of an outbuilding and covered by a rough corrugated metal sheet. She saw Daphne rummaging among the logs, then taking a handful of stones from the gravel path and chucking them down onto the metal roof, and she heard their hard staccato rattle, the sound that Jacob had used to convey the impact of flak fragments against the fuselage of a Lancaster on the bombing run.

That night, before she went to bed, Vera placed Jacob’s cigarette stub in a silver case, already bluish with age, and tucked it under her pillow as Norman snored beside her. She lay awake as the bed reverberated in the dark and she imagined Jacob already away over Germany in a throbbing, roaring, hurtling plane, coned in the searchlights and pitted with flak and cannon shells, and she wondered when the war might permit her to see her little brother again.

Vera heard from Jacob again a fortnight later, his letter arriving on a
wet Monday morning, dropped through the door by a postman soaked to the skin in the rain. She took it into the sitting room and read it standing by the window looking out over the sodden grey-green fields where Norman walked head bowed behind his animals in the murk. The gutter above the window had sagged with the weight of the water and a steady stream cascaded onto the gravel outside as Vera read the letter.

Dear Vera and Norman and Daphne

Well here I am back to work again after a very enjoyable leave. I was so very pleased to see you again recently at the farm and was also very pleased to see that you are all doing fine. How is work at the shop going down, Vera? You should be quite an expert by now. And Norman, backing the winners still at the bookies? I’m sure I’ve told you this before, but I am so pleased that he has got along so well with his job since he took over the farm before the war, and I hope you will have many, many more happy years together – but I guess it is fruitless just hoping when you know for sure already that everything will be OK. I guess I’ll tell you something now you never knew before, Vera – you remember just before you were married when I was only about 11 years old and Norman and you used to get me to bed at night. Well I used to wish that when I got to be a man I would be just like Norman, and I am still wishing the same – but I guess there’s not much chance of that now. I reckon you are the luckiest, Vera – you got the best fellow in the world and that includes everybody.

I am not so content here as I was on my previous tours but I think I’ll be able to stand it. I have quite a decent billet but the food is the biggest complaint. Still, there’s no one getting really good food these days but we hope it won’t be long now. The weather has been awful ever since I came here – it has done nothing else but rain. I must say I am getting heartily sick of it all, the whole damn thing, but I am so busy with my work that there isn’t much time to dwell on all that, and really I can’t complain as I am keeping quite well considering it all.

Well, I think I’ve talked plenty about myself and I shall close now. Hoping to hear from you again soon. Hoping this letter finds you all in good health. I will write again shortly.

Your loving brother, Jacob

Jacob and the others were the last crew to enter the briefing room. They had been lingering in the mess after lunch, contemplating a cold February night off ops, when the Wing Commander came in flapping.

‘Right then chaps, we need another crew for tonight. Barnes has had to drop out, broke his bloody ankle falling off a bicycle playing silly buggers. If I hadn’t seen the x-rays I’d have sent him away LMF.’

‘We’ll go, won’t we boys?’ said Ralph.

The others murmured their approval.

‘Good show, chaps,’ said the Wing Commander. ‘Main briefing’s at three. Bombing leaders and navigators meet at two.’

‘What’s the gen?’ asked Jim. ‘Anyone see the gravy going on?’

‘Just a squirt,’ said Roland.

‘A short hop, then.’

‘The Ruhr, no doubt.’

‘Happy bloody Valley again,’ said Jacob, and he lit another cigarette. ‘Oh well, at least we know our way there and back by now.’

They took their seats at the briefing, the less experienced crews watching them as they sat down in the seats everyone knew to leave free for them at the back, the senior crew in the squadron, nearly sixty ops behind them, a cheating of the odds several times over, their Lancaster, B-Beauty, outstripping even the crew in her luck and resilience, sixty-two white bombs painted like tears on her cheek below the pilot’s window, ‘Black Beauty’ daubed beside them, the night-horse that always took them out and back again, standing in the field by day, nose in the air, then headlong into the night.

The curtains were drawn across the windows, the screen tugged away from the map at the front.

‘The target tonight, gentlemen, is Dortmund. The Hansa benzol facility, north-west of the city. Some of you chaps may have been there before.’

‘A military target, then,’ whispered Jacob to George. ‘Thank goodness for that.’

‘Same net effect on the war,’ said George.

‘Still, good not to be bombing the civvies.’

‘None of them are fucking civvies, Jacob. They’re all in it together, so to hell with the lot of them.’

The route out took them over the Dutch coast and then suddenly they were on the run-in to the target, the master bomber overhead, guiding them in, Jacob in the nose, fussing over the bomb-sight and the selector switches, the target looming beneath him, edging itself inside him now, eating him away, the way it always did. Then Charlie breathing out adjustments to the course, his voice down the intercom like a ghost, Ralph responding in word and action, adjusting B-Beauty’s path, setting his fear aside until the bombing run was over, Roland hurling out bundles of foil strips to scramble the German radar, searchlights lamping up the sky, light flak tracing slow-motion streams of red and green, accelerating as it passed. Then a plane struck away off to starboard, a little lick of flame along the fuselage becoming a stream then a deluge, the flares inside the belly of the pathfinder igniting, dripping bright gobs of light, the plane dipping away, bleeding red and green fluorescence from its guts, spinning down like a Catherine wheel, and Jacob in the front of Beauty, concentrating now, the target coming near, then the aiming point in his sights and he is suddenly cold, and his flares are going down, Christmas trees of cascading light, and the bombs drop away and the plane lifts then settles, freed at last of its bombs. Ralph banks them away as a torrent of flares from other pathfinders goes down, then the intense white light of fighter flares bursting apart the night with their glare, and Beauty is fleeing headlong now, racing towards the darkness, Ralph’s hands shaking violently upon the control wheel, flak bursting beneath, then Jacob coming up from the nose and taking the controls as Ralph goes back to the rest-bed, looking back as he goes, guilty and wrong but forgiven all the same, and Jacob is guiding Beauty now, loving her, taking her away from the target, that thing he never wants to see, slipping away beneath him now, another bad glow in the memory and he is leaving it behind.

But then a judder, a ripping sound, like gravel, gravel on a corrugated metal roof, explosive shells raking along the underside, the rear gunner shot to pieces, a leg ripped off at the knee, wind raging around his shattered guns, and Jim silent too in the other turret, slumped in his harness, all but dead, his heart spraying his life away, wasting it all over the ribs of the fuselage, blood hissing on the searing metal of the burning plane as a torrent of flame is sucked down its steel tunnel to where the other gunner sits already burnt black. And then another shrieking pass by the Ju-88, incendiary shells ripping through
the mid-section, the wireless set bursting into flames, George bursting apart at the seams as the cannon shells tear through the fuselage, in and out of him, up again into the night through the shattered metal above his head, his blood soaking Charlie’s desk, turning the maps and charts blood-black in the light of the flames, the angle-poise lamp throwing its bulb now towards the roof, Charlie on the floor with his oxygen tube around his neck, struggling to throw it off, and Ralph rising from the rest-bed and crawling through slime towards the cockpit where Jacob and Roland struggle to hold Beauty level as she tosses her head and throws her reins and demands to be allowed to let herself fall, tired of the whip, tired of fighting through the fire and the night just to go out again the next day, trailing her mane of fire behind her, shuddering now, shaking again as more shells rip into her guts and another fighter homes in on the blaze and pumps more death inside her, strips of Window cascading up through the cabin in the rush of air that pours in through her wounds as she fills up with smoke.