Lost in the Flames (7 page)

That autumn, the Durham Light Infantry arrived, billeted near the town prior to their departure for France. Jacob loved hearing them talk as he passed them in the street, like living in a town with a thousand men like Norman, and Norman became accustomed to hearing again the voices of his native north-east, uninvited ghosts from the locked room of his past, brightening the dead embers of a mother who had left him for Newcastle and a father who had left him temporarily at birth and again several years later under the wheels of a bus.

The snow came early and by Christmas the fields were silent and white and a canopy of cloud kept the world at bay. Occasionally a plane passed overhead in the murk, droning away unseen into the distance until the hum of silence overcame the receding burr of the engines. The Bampton children were due in London for Christmas but the snow put paid to that, and instead they woke on Christmas morning still waiting for events in Europe to justify their semi-orphaned status. Norman and Vera set off for the Arbuckles’ with Billy and Bobby, and Daphne wrapped up in a bundle in Vera’s arms. The weather was too severe for the ageing Trojan, so Norman prepared the pony and trap and the cartwheels cut deep furrows in the snow as the horse pulled them away up the hill. At Mill View Cottage, Alfred fed the pigs and set the fireplace ablaze. The Edwardian glasses etched with leaves were taken down and as they all gathered before lunch a modest collection of presents was passed around in the half-light of the sitting room. By one o’clock the dining room table lay surrounded by the hungry horde, the fat turkey awaiting its fate behind the defensive ranks of potatoes and sprouts and a moat of gravy. Rose had been invited too and she sat opposite Jacob and he saw her peering into him as he looked over the rim of his glass. She looked slowly away, then quickly back again.

Helen was saying something about Jacob’s pigeons.

‘… always preening themselves, you know,’ she was saying. ‘Like this …’ and she rubbed her chin against her shoulder and looked at Jacob and giggled and he smiled and then he looked at Rose. She was watching him still, testing his reaction to Helen’s display.

‘Cleanest of all the birds in England,’ Helen was saying now, and
she smiled knowingly and Billy turned and made a vomiting gesture at his brother.

‘Of course they’re not, don’t be so ridiculous,’ said Rose.

Her sudden interjection caused Helen to let a tower of peas tumble from her fork and they scattered across the tablecloth, leaving embarrassing slicks of gravy in their wake.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Helen, looking up suddenly from the little pulses of chaos she had caused.

‘I said don’t be ridiculous. Pigeons are certainly not the cleanest of birds. Who on earth told you that utter nonsense?’

‘Jacob did,’ said Helen smugly, sensing the wound.

‘Well he was pulling your leg, dear girl. And you fell for it hook, line and sinker. Still, it’s hardly your fault, is it? If you were never properly educated, I mean.’

Helen looked away, and saw again the mess she had made around her plate and Jacob looked at her and noticed that she looked as if she might cry. Then he looked at Rose and she smiled at him and winked. She had done it again, he thought, and he knew she always would.

When the hungry horde were done, the turkey sat bare-boned and dismembered on its platter and Norman chucked the scraps outside for the dogs, and everyone turned their attention to the pudding that Elizabeth brought in on a plate lit with flame.

‘I guess France will be next,’ said Alfred to Norman, as he tipped a generous helping of brandy sauce onto his plate and transferred a towering spoonful of pudding to his mouth. He chewed and swallowed noisily and Elizabeth frowned. ‘And then it will be us.’

‘There’s not a lot to stop them,’ said Norman.

‘They’ll take William, and Jacob too before long,’ said Alfred in a low voice. ‘Just you wait. They’re just the right age for all this carry on, William out of school now and Jacob leaving soon. Jacob’s down for university, you know, but they’ll have him away too, you’ll see. Damn them all.’

After lunch, William and Jacob sat in the window-seat and compared the books they had received that morning, William’s a guide to basic tractor maintenance to augment the knowledge he was acquiring in his apprenticeship at the garage in town, and Jacob’s a volume on the history of military aviation, including a hastily-written chapter on modern German aircraft and how to identify them – stark
black silhouettes drawn to scale, top, bottom and lateral views of the aircraft that everyone feared would soon become all too familiar in the skies over England.

‘You’d better get used to those shapes if you’re going to be a pilot,’ said William.

‘I know them all already,’ said Jacob.

‘Their planes aren’t as good as ours, are they?’

‘They’re better.’

‘How are we going to stop them, then?’

‘We’ve got better pilots. And I’m going to be one of them.’

‘You’ll have to wait a bit, you’re not even seventeen. They won’t take you yet.’

‘We’ll see about that. I’m not joining the bloody Army, that’s for sure, and that’s where I’ll end up if I don’t volunteer first.’

‘I’m going for the tank corps.’

‘Tanks? William, are you mad? Riding round in a death-trap?’

‘A plane would be worse. At least I’ll have my feet on the ground. And they can’t shoot you in a tank, can they? Anyway, I always wanted to be a driver. It can’t be that different from driving a tractor, can it?’

When the snow had melted and the post-office vans made their way up again from Oxford, a Christmas card arrived from Webster, a soldier now in the Army in France.

‘We’ve been in France since the autumn,’ read Jacob, looking up at Rose as he held Webster’s card in his hand. ‘We don’t know when, but we know they will come, it’s just a matter of time. I’ll write again soon, but if the fighting starts first, remember me when you read of it.’

‘Poor Webster,’ said Rose. ‘What did he go and join the bloody Army for?’

‘I think it might have been on account of you.’

‘Yes, that’s what I feared.’

Early in the New Year, Jacob and Norman and William walked into town to watch as King George VI inspected the Durham Light Infantry in the market square in the snow, a stray dog shadowing the king as he stooped back and forth along the lines of shivering men in their greatcoats. Shortly after, the shivering troops were gone, to wait for Hitler’s men in France. The Bamptons soon followed, returned to their family in a London not yet significantly battered by bombs. Norman and Jacob walked them down to the station and the train pulled away and all they could see were four small hands waving from the window and then the train went round the bend and they were gone. That night, the top room of the farm was eerily quiet and just occasionally when they were sitting downstairs in front of the range, Norman and Vera thought they heard the boys’ footsteps and their fraternal cursing, but it was just the wind in the chimney and the knocking of the pipes.

In February a recruiting stand appeared at the Town Hall to lure the local youths, and Jacob and William stood in line. William pushed himself to the front, past his eager brother.

‘How old are you, son?’

‘Eighteen,’ said William.

‘Right, you’ll do. Sign here. And you?’

‘Nearly seventeen,’ said Jacob.

‘Come back when you’re older.’

‘But I want to join up now.’

‘I’m afraid you can’t. Come back when you’re older.’

Jacob was in the garden later that day when angry voices reached him from the house. The front door slammed and William marched down the path towards him.

‘What’s wrong, William?’

‘It’s father. He’s bloody furious with me.’

‘For signing up?’

William nodded.

‘They’ll get us all sooner or later anyway,’ said Jacob. ‘And we’ve got to do our bit.’

That night at dinner Alfred barely said a word. He passed round the food and exchanged occasional glances with Elizabeth, and every now and then he looked hard at William and shook his head and shovelled another forkful of vegetables into his mouth.

‘Elizabeth, these carrots are burnt nearly black.’

‘They’re still carrots. Eat them up.’

Alfred stood up and went into the living room and sat in the armchair by the hearth and stared at the flames and when he spoke only Elizabeth, who was nearest the door, could make out his words.

‘I’ve already lost three sons to fire,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to lose the only two I have left.’

‘What’s he saying, mother?’ asked Jacob.

‘Nothing, dear, eat your dinner. It’s been a long day.’

William left for basic training and at Easter there were empty places around the table. Little Daphne had sickened with a spring cold, so Norman and Vera stayed with her at the farm and at Mill View Cottage only Alfred and Elizabeth and Jacob sat down to eat. Norman came up later to collect a cut of pork from the carcass Alfred had hung from the out-house beam.

‘What’s this one called, then?’ asked Norman.

‘Guderian.’

‘Who?’

‘General Guderian. Panzer Corps. No point killing off our own any more, is there? Might as well start on the Germans.’

‘But not Hitler yet?’

‘No, I’m saving him up for Christmas.’

Norman looked at the grizzled snout, the blood still dripping from the dead nose onto the earth floor.

‘You’ll be eating a lot of pork before this war is over,’ Norman said.

‘I should say I will. Let’s hope it’s not like the last one. I only spent six months in the trenches but it was more than enough for a lifetime.’

That evening a man from the Kingham Local Defence Volunteers approached Alfred and Norman and Jacob in the pub.

‘Signing up, are we, lads? For the Home Guard, I mean.’

Norman looked him up and down. ‘What are you going to kill the storm-troopers with, old man? Cattle prods and spades?’

‘That’s not the attitude, now is it?’ said the man. ‘You could be in the real army, a strong young chap your age.’

‘Afraid not,’ said Norman. ‘Reserved occupation, you see, feeding the nation, I am. No time for killing my fellow man. It’s all I can manage to keep the farm ticking over, now my labourers have all gone to France.’

‘And I did my killing in the Great War,’ said Alfred. ‘If they come, I’ll fight them all right, but I’m not going to waste my bloody time preparing for it.’

‘And this young chap here?’ asked the man, pointing at Jacob. ‘Which of the Forces will you be volunteering for?’

Alfred was suddenly up on his feet and in the man’s face.

‘None of them if I’ve got anything to do with it! And he’s still too young, so sod off and mind your own business. Bloody do-gooder!’

The man hurried off to talk to a more amenable group.

At home, Jacob helped Alfred hang the black-out curtains and they painted the window panes black around the edges just to be sure, and when he left the house to go and help Norman and Vera to black out the farm, Jacob switched the hall-light off before opening the door and the only light to guide him down the track was the sparking of his match and the glow of the cigarette that he could not allow himself to be seen with at home.

‘Been smoking again, Jacob?’ said Norman when he leaned over him as they stretched the black tape around the window frame. ‘Bad for your health, that, you know.’

‘It’s hardly going to kill me, is it, the odd puff or two? But don’t tell Vera. If father finds out, it really will be bad for me.’

The air-raid sirens wailed infrequently and at Mill View Cottage, without a cellar, Elizabeth tugged at the edges of the black-out curtains and huddled down beneath the kitchen table with Alfred and Jacob as their dinner went cold in the dark, and once, in early May, a lone German bomber did pass overhead and a single bomb fell with a distant crump in a field in the valley.

By day the sky throbbed with the roar of aircraft engines as the Wellington bombers took off on training flights from Moreton-in-Marsh, and at dusk the sky shook as the planes took off again and climbed over Chipping Norton on their way to Germany. Half-way through the night the inbound planes returned in loose gaggles of ones and twos, long intervals between them, their engines whining down across the rooftops as the pilots dropped the airspeed and searched for the gooseneck flares of the airfield, and sometimes on misty nights, when visibility was poor, the planes would pass so low overhead that the windows shook and Jacob would jump from his bed and rush to the window and glimpse a dark shape passing quickly in and out of sight. And once, the voice of an overflying plane was followed by the louder roar of an explosion as it dipped too low and clipped the trees on the brow of a hill and disintegrated in a great eruption of flame and a pall of smoke merged with the mist, nothing left to see, when Jacob went up there the next morning, but a pile of blackened wreckage and a mess in the seats where the crew had been.

Towards the end of April, as the Local Defence Volunteers practised their Home Guard drills in the market square outside, Jacob and Vera and Rose sat at a table in the café.

‘Webster’s still in France, isn’t he?’ said Jacob, pointing to an article on the front page of the paper. ‘Germans mass on border! France and Belgium on guard,’ he read.

Rose shifted in her seat and took another sip of her tea.

‘That’s right,’ said Vera. ‘Norman got a letter last month. Dug in good and proper, by all accounts.’

In early June, Jacob walked into town to find the pavements strewn with battle-weary remnants of a multitude of regiments, stretched out asleep in the sun as small boys approached them with requests for French chocolate and coins or snatches of what had really befallen them in France. Soon after, Webster arrived for a short spell of leave. With no home to go to, he came to Elm Tree Farm and stayed in the room at the top of the house and divided his days between the fields and the pub, trying to forget about Dunkirk and what he had seen, and the evenings in the kitchen with Norman and Vera, telling them about it all over
again, digging up memories he had put in the earth and buried.

Webster went up to see Alfred and Elizabeth, and Jacob took him across the lane to Rose’s house.

‘Come on, Webster,’ said Jacob. ‘She’ll be pleased to see you.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Webster.

‘Of course.’

Jacob was already across the lane and shouting over the wall towards Rose’s window.

‘Webster!’ she cried, as she stuck her head outside.

She rushed out of the door and opened the gate and the three of them sat on the bench at the front of the house and talked until the swallows were swooping around the telegraph wires in the dusk. Then Jacob and Rose walked Webster back to the farm and when he had gone inside and they were returning back up the hill, Rose slipped her hand into Jacob’s and she held it tight for a moment and then she let it go. They paused in the middle of the lane and she coaxed a lock of hair from where it had fallen across his eyes, the tentative easing back of a black-out curtain, and the light behind the curtain blinked at her in the night. She kissed him on the forehead.

‘How old are you now, Jacob?’

‘Seventeen, you know that. Too young for you.’

‘If you’re old enough for war, you’re old enough for love.’

‘I’m not at war yet.’

‘But you soon will be, the way you go on. You don’t have to go, you know. Not yet.’

‘It’s too late for that. There was a recruiting stand in town again last week …’

‘Yes, I saw it,’ she said. ‘The bastards are always here.’

‘I’ve put my name down for the RAF. I’ll be going for an assessment before too long.’

‘But you’re only seventeen. You can’t go yet. They won’t take you’

‘I lied.’

‘For God’s sake, Jacob, why?’

‘The same reason as always – I want to fly. And it’s the right thing to do.’

‘You’re a gem, Jacob, you know that? A real gem.’

And she took his hand again in hers and they walked together up the hill in the warm summer night.

The war brought a swelling of the local population and an increase in its variety. The London evacuees had come and gone but the Land Army moved in more permanently, mostly girls from towns further south. Some stayed on the farms, others in the villages and Chipping Norton itself, and a few travelled in on the train, shod in heavy boots suitable for the fields where they helped with the potatoes and the sugar beet. Norman turned the top fields over to crops and took on his quota of help and set them up in Cottages One and Two as these had been vacated when his farmhands went to war.

War Illustrated
brought Jacob news from Kent, where German bombers were targeting the airfields and the skies were filled with vapour trails and soaring, falling, spinning planes and the white fungal blooms of parachutes while the invasion barges were prepared on the coast of the Pas de Calais and the country held its breath. One day in mid-September a German Dornier flew low over the farm, blazing flame from its engines as a Spitfire followed it down until it hit the ground in the fields beyond Over Norton, where Jacob and Norman went later that day to see the wreckage.

‘It says here that the Germans have lost more planes over Kent than they can bear,’ said Jacob the next day, looking up from what he was reading. ‘They can’t invade us now, without control of the air.’

Alongside the falling German planes had come a steady harvest of German airmen, floating down into the orchards of Kent, frightening livestock and old ladies with the dull clump of their flying boots hitting the ground, to be gathered up by eager volunteers with Home Guard armbands and farmhands with bill-hooks and spades. The land was short of labour and the prisoners were dispersed around the farms of the south and the Midlands and a changing cast was brought to work every day in Norman’s fields. They gave no trouble and moved across the beet fields stolid as cattle, heads down and undemonstrative, and like cattle their mood hung between resentment at being fenced off from freedom and relief at no longer being loose in the wild world beyond their invisible prison walls. And the weather was fine and the land girls were pleasant, if not especially friendly, and Norman worked the prisoners hard but treated them with respect and Jacob would come down to the farm at the end of the day when the airmen were
coming out of the fields and he watched them as they waited in the yard for the bus to arrive, and one or two of them spoke excellent English and he asked them about their planes and what it was like to fly.

‘I’m going to be a pilot myself,’ he told them. ‘So people like you will be my enemy then.’

‘No, we flyers will always be friends,’ said one. ‘But you’re too young to understand that now.’

Jacob looked more closely at the man and saw that he was barely twenty himself.

‘Well, good luck,’ said the man, as he got on the bus, ‘because you’ll need it against the likes of us. But if you’re a good pilot, flying will keep you young. And if you’re a bad one, well, you’ll never have the chance to grow old.’

In early September came newspaper reports of the first mass bombing of London, Jacob reading about streams of Heinkels passing above the snaking bends of the Thames around the Docklands and the City, first by day and then by night, the planes silhouetted against orange-tinged clouds above and sheets of flame below. Looking at the photos of those who had been bombed out of their London homes, Jacob’s imagination worked up a vision. He saw in his mind’s eye the Bampton children in their terraced house on the Isle of Dogs. They were hurrying downstairs into the cellar they had told him about, the one to which he knew they would go when the air-raid sirens wailed.

‘Hurry up,’ he saw Bobby saying to the scurrying figure of his brother. ‘Get a bloody move on.’

‘Bugger off!’ Billy said. ‘I’m going as fast as I can.’

And their cellar stairs shook as a stick of bombs fell in a line all the way up the other side of their street, and the incendiaries that followed, breaking apart with a fluttering sound like a hastily departing flock of birds, set off a chain of fires that merged together into an unbroken conflagration and another plane released its bombs and high-explosive fell through the tiled roof of the Bamptons’ house and crashed through to the ground-floor kitchen before it blew away the supporting walls. The roof collapsed and the rubble covered over the cellar stairs and down underground the dim lights went out and the flame of a solitary candle flickered and died in the eruption of dust from the walls. Jacob saw the Bamptons on the trembling floor, listening as more bombs
thundered above, tracking away up the street, and then the raid faded away, the diminishing rumble of a passing storm, and there was now only the sound of running water as the firemen trained their hoses on the burning rubble above and broken water pipes leaked their contents around the Bamptons’ feet and Mr Bampton went to the top of the stairs, feeling in the darkness for the door, but his hands scraped frantically now across the unfamiliar contours of loose bricks and stone. He called out at half-voice, lifting to a roar, but outside the roar of the flames and the cries of the injured drowned out his shouting as the water crept higher. Mr Bampton roared again, but no one came and the water continued to rise, and finally towards dawn, Jacob decided, a fire crew would hear their cries and they were dug out, shivering in their grimy cloak of fear and exhaustion, and they were led away from where their house had been to a church hall several streets away and they were given hard oat biscuits that stuck in their throats, and they washed them down with weak grey tea in the bleak grey dawn. And as Jacob exhausted his imaginary narrative, he steeled his resolve to join up just as soon as the RAF would have him.