Lost in the Flames (23 page)

Fly a kite for me on the hill above the farm sometimes, won’t you my darling?

Your loving husband, Jacob

That night, Rose stood by the runway to see the planes off, then spent the following hours in the control room listening out for the returning crews on the radio set, the voices of the wireless operators tired but unemotional as they called in for their landing slot, then the dark shapes drifted down in the night and when the stragglers were in and all had been counted down, Rose went back to her room and lit a candle in the Victorian holder from the mill-house and she let it burn down as she lay awake and alone in her bed in the gloom. Then she took the pack of woodbines that Jacob had given her in Cambridge.

‘For when you need them,’ he had said, and she had known what he meant but pretended not to.

‘I won’t need these,’ she had said. ‘Not now, not ever.’

‘Take them anyway, just in case you do …’

And she took one now and slipped its end between her lips, leaned her neck towards the flame and lit the tip, sucked at the light until a glowing, burning thing joined her to the flame. Then she sucked hard and the thing glowed orange like a burnt-through lump of coal when the night is nearly done, and she breathed the smoke down, choking herself, then another gasping draw, her lungs inflating, filling up with smoke, then the smoke expelled in the direction of the candle and the candle going out and the only light now was this burning little thing that glowed for her in the dark.

Vera returned to work the following week, no funeral to punctuate the grieving, just the open question of the telegram. Jingle brought her a cup of tea and they talked about the weather and the behaviour of the customers, skirting around the monster in the room, the beast upon Vera’s shoulder that whispered Jacob’s name in her ear and punctuated her conversation with silence, vacancies into which words would not come. Then Jingle went into the back-room to sort out the stock and Vera heard the jangle of his keys, the metallic rattle, and she began to transfer the sweets from jar to jar as he had asked her to, weighing them out in the scales first, their hard little bodies clattering into the metal tray like gravel, sweet gravel again on metal, and she heard the voice again in her ear and the beast bearing down upon her shoulders, and she took a fistful of sweets and flung them down and they bounced across the floor, then another, yellow ones this time, hurling them across the room, a spray of hard little sweets, bullets clattering into a fuselage, sherbet lemons, acid drops, mint imperials, yellows and reds and greens and whites, bright flares going down, little bombs, and Vera fell to her knees as a customer pushed in through the door, the hard little things digging at the flesh of her knees as she wept, then Jingle hurrying up behind her, ‘It’s all right, pet, come on now,’ and his arm around her, nudging the grumbling beast away.

Alfred stood by the dry-stone wall, running the blade of the scythe
across the edge of a stone, a steady rhythmic scraping as the pigs stood beneath the bare trees on the far side of the orchard. They knew the sound and what it meant, and as Alfred lifted himself over the wall the pigs ran to the far corner, Himmler and Goebbels trotting along at the back, Churchill, the dominant male, jamming into the others with his heavy flank as they ran. Elizabeth watched through the window in the side of the house and for the first time she understood her husband’s actions in the pig-pen, the source of his rage and the reasons for its silent expression. The scythe swept up to Goebbels’ neck and the animal squealed and struggled and then stopped and Alfred looked up and saw Elizabeth looking at him through the glass, and he knew that she felt the same sickness in the pit of her stomach, and she turned away and Alfred dragged the animal across the orchard and into the out-house where it hung from the rafter as he shovelled out its guts.

A month after B-Beauty went down, Pilot Officer Ralph Andrews walked in through the door of the crew room and sat at his place at the table by the window and lit a cigarette and listened to the voices of the men on the other side of the wall. Then the Medical Officer came in and sat next to him and they spoke. Ralph told him nearly all the details, of the night-fighters and the flames and his vague recollections of baling out, the gunners left dead in their turrets, the others last seen at the hatch or in the chaos of the cockpit, and he omitted the detail as to who had been flying the plane, not lying as such but permitting the assumption that he had stayed in his seat until the end, and the arrangements that his dead crew had made were a secret they would keep forever now.

‘There’s been no word of the others?’ he asked again, to a shake of the head, and the ash fell from his cigarette as his hand trembled again.

The Medical Officer placed a hand on his arm to quiet him, then listened as Ralph recounted his descent to the ground, the days of evasion, walking by night until he heard American voices on the far side of a river, how he swam across and was saved. Back in England, they had tried to discharge him, but he insisted he go back to the squadron, to see it through to the end.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to call it a day?’ asked the Medical
Officer as Ralph’s ash dropped away again from the tip of the cigarette he had not lifted to his lips since he lit it. ‘You’ve done your bit now, fifty-six ops is a hell of a total.’

‘No, I’m going to see it through. It’s what the others would have wanted.’

He took off two days later to bomb Cologne and he remained in his seat throughout, his voice steady but his hands shaking visibly, the flight engineer casting frequent glances across to his new skipper. The following week the Ruhr, first Essen and then the next night Dortmund again, then four more ops, the last in mid-April to Potsdam, just one plane lost out of five hundred as Germany faded from the war, and then two weeks’ leave at the house by the lake in Surrey, long days in the punt on the water drifting, head thrown back, looking at the sky where the birds wheeled above, the first hatch of insects upon the water and the dimples of small fish kissing the underside of the lake-top with their rubbery lips, sucking down the insects that skated on the glass in the sun, and long evenings in the study with Mr Andrews, talking over the events of the last two years and flicking back through the photos of childhood and adolescence, and then a request, reluctantly met now, to see his father’s photos of the burns victims again, Ralph looking into their features and wondering if this was how his crewmates had been, faces melting in the heat, was this how Jacob had looked as he spiralled away down at the controls of Ralph’s plane?

Then suddenly the German surrender and VE Day, a party falling across the nation, and Ralph found himself in the village pub where his first crew had always gone on nights when scheduled ops fell victim to snow or fog or a sudden intrusion of mercy. As he looked around at the WAAFs and the ground staff and the multitude of others who had kept the airfield churning out its planes, and at his own new crew, ten ops into their first tour, just weeks in the air but aged beyond their years, he thought of the ones he had lost, of Jacob and Charlie and Roland and Jim and George, and Don and the other tail gunners, and dear old Dog and Beauty and the holes in their skin, and he felt suddenly old and alone in the absence of friends, surrounded by new strangers who knew a part of what he had experienced but not all. He had no one now with whom to share the memories and the burden of what he had seen and what he had become in the night skies over Germany, a shell of a man, a tough strong shell but hollow inside all the same, an
emptiness that no years could fill, an empty vessel now until the grave, and he lifted his pint and toasted them all inwardly, and he drank the beer down in one long swallow and then he joined in the song of victory that the others were singing.

On 13th May 1945, Alfred Arbuckle dressed himself carefully in his Sunday best, then adjusted the tuning knob and the volume, shifting the set towards the window to receive the words more clearly, then sat down next to Elizabeth, stiff-backed together on the settee but alone with their thoughts.

In Cambridgeshire, Rose was in the mess where the aircrew sat as the radio was turned up high above the buzz of conversation and laughter, and she lit a cigarette as Winston Churchill’s resonant voice cranked into gear.

‘It was five years ago on Thursday last that His Majesty the King commissioned me to form a national government of all parties to carry on our affairs. Five years is a long time in human life, especially when there is no remission for good conduct …’

A ripple of amusement drifted across the room but Rose just sucked hard on her cigarette and watched the end glow orange, orange as a town that was dying beneath the bombs.

‘… for a while our prime enemy, our mighty enemy, Germany, overran almost all Europe. France … was beaten to the ground … The Low Countries … were subjugated. Norway was overrun. Mussolini’s Italy stabbed us in the back when we were, as he thought, at our last gasp. But for ourselves – our lot, I mean, the British Commonwealth and Empire, we were absolutely alone …’

A murmur of agreement ran across the room around Rose, and Churchill moved on to the debt owed to Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain five years before.

‘In July, August and September 1940, forty or fifty squadrons of British fighter aircraft in the Battle of Britain broke the teeth of the German air fleet at odds of seven or eight to one. May I repeat again the words I used at that momentous hour: Never in the field of human
conflict was so much owed by so many to so few … but conjoined with the Royal Air Force lay the Royal Navy, ever ready to tear to pieces the barges, gathered from the canals of Holland and Belgium, in which a German invading army could alone have been transported … With the autumn storms, the immediate danger of invasion in 1940 passed …’

As Alfred bowed his head and tightened his grip on Elizabeth’s hand, Churchill noted the resilience of the residents of Britain’s bombed-out cities.

‘… then began the Blitz, when Hitler said he would rub out our cities. That’s what he said, rub out our cities …’

And Rose heard the shouts go up from the men around her, indistinct voices raised in protest, then a solitary voice above the din, ‘We rubbed you out instead, Adolf!’ and then raucous laughter and someone shouting ‘Shut the fuck up, I’m trying to listen’.

‘… blitz was borne without a word of complaint or the slightest sign of flinching, while a very large number of people – honour to them all – proved that London could take it …’

And the Merchant Navy’s role was praised, and the listening men of Bomber Command nodded in appreciation, but Rose sensed some of them shift in their seats at Churchill’s sudden switch from the air to the sea.

‘… my friends, when our minds turn to the North-Western approaches, we will not forget the devotion of our merchant seamen, and our minesweepers out every night, and so rarely mentioned in the headlines …’

Next it was the turn of those at home, the factory workers and the Home Guard, still no mention of Bomber Command, and Rose reached for the fresh pack of cigarettes she had bought that morning and she struggled, in her agitation, to spark up a match.

‘… in our munitions works, which were becoming very powerful, men and women had worked at their machines till they dropped senseless from fatigue …’

And Churchill moved on to the Army and its land campaigns overseas, and Rose whispered under her breath, ‘What about Jacob? What about him?’ and at Elm Tree Farm, Norman stood up and said to Vera, ‘I’ve heard enough of this, he’s not even going to bloody mention them,’ and he walked out of the kitchen and closed down another part of his heart.

‘… we have played our part in all this process by which the evildoers have been overthrown … we marched many miles and never knew defeat … last year on June 6th … poured millions in from this Island … the Somme and the Rhine all fell … France was liberated … Germany lay open …’

And then Churchill shifted his attention from these shores and considered the alliance with the Americans and its role in the future.

‘… and it may also be said that never have the forces of two nations fought side by side and intermingled in the lines of battle with so much unity, comradeship and brotherhood as in the great Anglo-American Armies …’

‘To hell with all that,’ Rose said to the man next to her, and he nodded.

‘Sod the bloody Yanks!’ roared Alfred a hundred miles away in Chipping Norton. ‘What about my boy?!’

And as Churchill’s speech drew towards its close, Alfred stood up with a face like thunder and the men in the bomber stations looked around the room at each other or down at their feet or out of the window with their mouths set hard and their eyes on the sky, and Churchill concluded with the end of the conflict and the future of the post-war world.

‘… I told you hard things at the beginning of these last five years; you did not shrink, and I should be unworthy of your confidence and generosity if I did not still cry: Forward, unflinching, unswerving, indomitable, till the whole task is done and the whole world is safe and clean.’

In Chipping Norton, Elizabeth filled the kettle and fired up the flame on the hob as high as it would go, and Alfred went outside in his Sunday suit and best brown brogues and swung the scythe into Churchill this time, tears streaming down his face as his prize pig fell at his feet and its blood poured into the ground.

And Rose lit another cigarette and left the sergeants’ mess where she had been sitting, saying goodbye to a flight-sergeant she had coaxed through the last month with tea and kindness and quiet companionship, and she walked out through the gate of the airfield and across a field of flowers and never went back.

Ralph flew a Lancaster for the last time three weeks later, on a ‘Cook’s tour’, a flight over German territory for ground crew and WAAFs and others who had worked throughout the war at the airfields without ever seeing the enemy or the effect their work was having on his cities. Now they saw it clearly in daylight from a steady run at 5,000 feet, an ideal height for a panoramic view, and in the daylight now Ralph looked out on the endless expanse of burned-out buildings, street after street of empty shells, barely a roof anywhere, walls half-standing or gone, chimney stacks burned black, hardly a living soul in the streets, just the occasional black-clad figure pushing a cart or a pram beside a bend in a grey river, then out again over the suburbs, flattened too, houses and factories gone, and the countryside pocked with craters, then out across green fields to another town where the scene repeated itself.

Ralph was discharged in June and returned to Surrey and the house by the lake from where he made journeys across the country on his motorbike to visit the families of the crew he had lost, long hours on the road dissolving some of the clutter from a mind burdened with memories, contemplating an unexpected future, an unscheduled desert of time ahead of him now, a stark contrast to the last two years in which his life had dissolved itself away one day at a time and the short-term nature of things had augmented their intensity, the song of a thrush heard on emerging from a bomber at dawn, the soft lips of a girl, the brush of her breath upon his face, the hoppy taste of watery beer and the saltiness of the bacon at the pre-op meal, the wet nose of the squadron dog and the sound of its whimper as the crews left for the trucks, these temporary treasures stitched like stars upon the curtain of night. Now his uncertainty was different, a question mark not over whether the future would come, but what it could possibly contain and what could be done to fill these unexpected years.

In Chipping Norton, Alfred and Elizabeth heard the motorbike coming down the hill and they invited Ralph in and talked about Jacob and the night that it had happened, and the months beforehand, the operations they had been on and the nights they had spent together in the Dog and the mess and the pub, and the others in the crew, and how they had really been brothers. Then Alfred took him across the road, past his orchard, empty now of pigs, young apples forming on the trees, and he left Ralph at the gate to Rose’s house. Rose had only ever
seen him in his RAF uniform and in the company of Jacob, and to see Ralph now in cords and a jacket and a polka-dot tie disconcerted her, like meeting a stranger.

‘Let’s go and see Vera,’ Rose said suddenly. ‘Jacob’s sister. You remember her, of course?’

‘I certainly do. The best tea in England.’

‘I’m sure she’ll want to hear all the things Jacob wasn’t able to tell her during the war.’

Ralph got on the motorbike and Rose sat sideways on the pillion seat and they roared up the hill and down the lane to Elm Tree Farm, then walked side by side up the path where strawberries were growing again, and Rose knocked on the front door and smiled at Ralph as they waited.

‘How many operations did Jacob fly in the end?’ asked Vera as they sat in the room overlooking the fields at the back.

‘Nearly sixty,’ said Ralph.

‘That’s plenty, isn’t it? Far more than he had to, I mean.’

‘Yes, more than was it was fair to expect.’

‘He knew he wasn’t going to make it,’ she sighed. ‘You could tell that in the end – the way he talked, it was obvious.’

‘None of us thought we would survive, not if we ever really thought about it.’

‘But you survived,’ said Daphne airily, sitting at the end of the sofa nearest the door.

‘Yes, indeed I did.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Andrews,’ said Vera. ‘Please excuse her.’

‘That’s perfectly all right,’ said Ralph. ‘Well, I think I’d better be on my way. It’s a long way back to Surrey.’

‘Will you give me a lift?’ said Rose. ‘Just up the lane?’

‘Of course, it would be my pleasure.’

‘You’ve left the Services, haven’t you?’ she asked when they had gone outside.

He nodded.

‘Me too,’ she said. ‘It was the hypocrisy.’

‘Churchill’s victory speech?’

‘It makes me so damned mad. People are starting to talk you down already and the war in Europe’s barely over.’

‘I don’t really care,’ he said. ‘My job was to beat Hitler down.
That’s been done.’

‘But, you do care. I can see that you do. How could you not?’

‘Bad memories, that’s all.’

‘Do you want to see the airfield at Moreton-in-Marsh?’ she asked, with sudden forced brightness. ‘It’s not far, and it’s a nice day for a ride.’

Ralph gunned the engine and they sped up the lane and out along the Worcester Road, the warm air rushing past as the motorbike sped along, and Rose clasped her arms tight around Ralph’s chest so as not to fall off as they flew over the bumps together and for a moment she had the sensation, just for an instant, that the man to whom she was clinging was Jacob. But then the moment passed and Jacob was gone and Rose almost let go as she saw again that it was Ralph to whom she was clinging now.

Ralph went for a job interview at an insurance firm the following week but they turned him down. As he was leaving, the receptionist, a lady in her fifties in horn-rimmed glasses, called him over quietly.

‘You were in Bomber Command, weren’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes, I was.’

‘So was my son. A word of advice,’ she said, ‘and I do wish you well. Take Bomber Command off your CV. Not everyone agrees with what was done over Germany, there are a lot of agendas, people don’t understand.’

‘Thank you,’ Ralph said. ‘I appreciate your concern.’

‘It is well intended, I can assure you,’ she smiled.

‘I’m sure it is,’ he said quietly. ‘But I was in Bomber Command, and it’s bloody well staying on my CV whether people like it or not.’