Lost in the Flames (8 page)

Shortly before Christmas, Jacob finally received his letter and took the bus to Oxford. He fidgeted in his chair and bit his lip as he waited to be seen at the RAF recruitment office. They tested him for physical, mental and intellectual preparedness.

‘You appear to be an adequate candidate. What role do you envisage for yourself?’

‘A pilot. That would be my preference.’

‘Of course, everyone says that. How old are you?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘How old are you really?’

‘Eighteen.’

‘Very well, then. Bomber crew?’

‘Yes, that’ll do me fine.’

‘You’re in. Sign here. We will summon you for training in due course, within a few months at the most.’

Jacob’s heart soared. He signed his name on the form and was given his RAF number and went home to count the days. He found
Alfred in the orchard with the pigs.

‘Hello, son,’ said Alfred glumly. ‘How did it go?’

‘I’m in.’

Jacob tried to suppress a smile but failed.

‘I knew it,’ Alfred said.

‘It’s what I wanted.’

‘You’re too bloody young. You’re still not eighteen.’

Alfred spat at the earth and sighed.

‘You’ve always been a damned fool, Jacob. A damned bloody fool. But at least you’ll have some real wings now, not like that time you chucked yourself out of the window playing bloody Icarus.’

‘I’ll be all right, father. You’ll see.’

Alfred prodded a piglet away with his toe.

‘That’s Churchill, that is. Right feisty little bugger. Look at the way he’s chasing Goebbels about.’

‘Goebbels?’

‘The scrawny little one over there.’

‘And that fat one?’

‘That’s Goering. Go on Churchill, shove the bastard out of the way.’

The fat little piglet squealed and scurried away behind the sty.

‘So when are they taking you away?’ said Alfred.

‘They said they’d write to let me know.’

‘Your mother’s very upset.’

‘Not as upset as you, I bet.’

‘She hides it better, Jacob, that’s all. She’s barely slept all week, knowing you were going back there. Why don’t you go up and see her? Go on now, she’s in the bedroom.’

Jacob went in the door and up the narrow stairs and he paused on the landing and heard his mother breathing

‘Come in, Jacob.’

‘How did you know it was me?’

‘I know my son’s footsteps after all these years.’

Jacob went in and sat on the bed next to his mother.

‘Jacob, I want you to know that I understand. I understand why you’re going and I’m proud of you. I’ll miss you like heaven-knows-what, but I know you’re doing what is right.’

‘You’re not angry with me, then?’

‘How could I be angry with you?’

‘Father is.’

‘He’s worried, Jacob, that’s the thing. He’s afraid he’ll lose you, and William too.’

‘Is William coming soon?’

‘He wrote to say he has some leave after Christmas.’

‘Let’s hope I see him before I go, then.’

William arrived for three days’ leave in early February. The snow had stopped but the ground was white from January’s heavy falls and ice placed its chill hand around the countryside and closed its fingers so that by day the fields never lost their hoar frost and the nights set hard and in the morning when Jacob and William collected Rose from the cottage across the lane, and they went together across the field that led down to Pool Meadow, the grass crunched like glass beneath their feet and the tops of the trees were lost in the mist and the calls of the rooks hung ownerless in a void. The shallow pond in the valley had frozen hard and they took off their shoes and laced up the old boots they kept in the loft with the screw-in skates. Rose went first, skimming away across the pond, first on one leg, then the other. She turned half-way across and called back to Jacob and William, indistinct figures now in the mist.

‘Come on you two, get a move on!’

Her voice echoed up the valley. She laughed and skated further out across the pond.

‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’ said Jacob to William, as he helped his brother up onto his skates.

‘Oh yes,’ said William. ‘She is that.’

They set off behind Rose towards the far side of the pond where the tips of trees hung trapped in the ice. She smiled as they reached her and she stretched out her hand to steady Jacob as he stopped. William skated past and Rose put her hand on Jacob’s shoulder, then pulled him gently towards her and as she hugged him she whispered in his ear.

‘I’ll miss you, Jacob,’ she said in a voice barely audible. ‘You must come back to me.’

‘I haven’t gone away yet,’ he said.

She kissed him gently on the cheek, then took his hand and led him off in the direction that William had gone.

Jacob spent two more months at home. Then the letter came and he left for an aircrew reception centre in North Yorkshire. He saw the row of Nissen huts adrift in a tide of unrelenting mud and negotiated a path along duckboards that led from the road to the dormitory huts and from there to the gym and the classroom block and the mess. A rat-faced man showed Jacob to his bunk half-way down a row of twenty beds, another twenty opposite.

‘Hello,’ said a pale young voice two beds further down the row. ‘Harry Pollock.’

‘Jacob Arbuckle. Nice to meet you.’

‘Pleasant here, isn’t it? The glamour of the RAF.’

‘When did you get here?’

‘Lunchtime. I’ve already sampled the delights of the canteen, I’m afraid. Not exactly the Ritz. A couple of other fellows are here, survived lunch too somehow. They’ve gone out for a smoke to recover.’

They found the other two by the side of the hut and the four of them stood in the half-light of dusk and their cigarette ends glowed as darkness came and then the rain began to fall and they went inside. A short time later the drill sergeant came across and summoned them to the mess for the evening meal.

‘Come on, get a bloody move on,’ the sergeant moaned at Harry as he tip-toed along the slippery boards. ‘You’re not at boarding school now, you’re in the RAF.’

Jacob and Harry sat and ate a lukewarm grey meal of non-descript soup, cottage pie heavy with potato, and tasteless bread that was spread with something pale that should have been butter. Throughout the evening more recruits were brought into the dormitory and during the night Jacob heard the doors banging as late arrivals stumbled in the dark and threw themselves down and slept on their beds fully dressed. Jacob spent the next morning bashing his way up and down the parade square as the drill sergeant bellowed at the recruits. More grey food was followed by a ten-mile run through grey-green fields and cloying bogs that sucked at his shoes and sent him slithering about, and all the while the sergeant simmered in his ear as he ran.

‘Come on you horrible individual!’ he yelled at Jacob, who ignored the splenetic face until it hurried after Harry instead, leaving Jacob
muttering oaths under his breath.

‘You fat little bugger!’ the sergeant screamed at Harry. ‘You’re not ready for this, are you? What’s your name, lad?’

Harry wheezed out a response.

‘Harry Pollock? Hairy Bollock, more like! Now run!’

Before the evening meal they went to the classroom block for their first lecture from the Medical Officer. A succession of gruesome slides was projected onto the wall as the medical man offered a swift commentary long on detail and short on doubt.

‘This,’ he exclaimed grimly, tapping the image on the wall with his long cane, ‘is a set of male genitalia, barely recognisable as such due to a rather severe form of infection. And I can assure you this condition cannot be acquired merely by sitting on the seat of a public lavatory. This …’

He tapped the image again with his cane.

‘… is the fate that awaits each of you if you should hazard communion with certain members of the opposite sex. The consequences are serious, and include, but are not necessarily limited to, impotence, infertility, total physical paralysis, insanity, death, and expulsion from the RAF. Though not necessarily in that order. During your service, you will refrain from any activity that places you in danger of such consequences. It takes up to two years to train aircrew, and we will lose enough of you in operations over enemy territory. We cannot afford to lose any of you to … how shall I put this … friendly fire.’

Jacob’s laughter was cut short by the even more vividly diseased organ on the next slide, and when he went for the evening meal he found his appetite strangely subdued.

‘Been having your sexual hygiene lecture, have you?’ asked a fat woman as she served dollops of mashed potato onto his plate.

‘Can you tell?’ asked Jacob.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘They always come in a bit subdued after Doctor Myers has said his bit. But don’t worry, lad,’ she winked. ‘The Germans are far more likely to get you than us girls.’

The next morning, the dormitory door slammed open at half past five.

‘Right then, out of bed you lazy blighters! Get your kit on, we’re going for a little run!’

Jacob stumbled out of bed and fumbled into his clothes and followed the others as the drill sergeant hared off down the road in the
dark and the birds in the bushes tuned up for the dawn chorus.

Four weeks of basic training passed in a blur of sweat and exhaustion, and when the sergeant woke on Jacob’s last morning at the camp he found a selection of his underwear drawn up the flagpole and fluttering in the breeze. As the underwear was retrieved, the guilty party laughed his way onto a bus that took him to the railway station, then away on a train to one of the Initial Training Wings that had sprung up around the country in university buildings and conference halls and large hotels. For the next twelve weeks, Jacob worked six days on and one day off, four hours of drill and physical training each day and the rest of his waking hours filled with academic study, hurried intake of food, and beer-fuelled bonding in the nearest pub before he returned to the boarding house in which he had been billeted for the duration of his stay. The classroom instruction took him through a crash course in meteorology, mathematics, and Morse code, armaments, anti-gas procedures, and parachute training. Instruction in aircraft recognition took place in a large lecture room where small models were suspended from the ceiling and the instructors would point at a plane.

‘Er …’

‘Too slow, lad. I want an instant answer. Every second counts when Jerry’s on your tail. How about you?’

‘Messerschmitt?’

‘Not good enough. Too vague. You there?’

‘Messerschmitt 110.’

‘Wrong. It’s a Junkers 88. That’s you dead.’

Then Jacob was given aptitude and psychiatric tests and was allocated to the pilot group and his training continued with the basics of aerodynamics, airmanship and the principles of flying. At the end of twelve weeks, he was given a uniform and a period of leave.

He caught the train and it ran through fields of wheat ripening to gold in the sun and Alfred and Elizabeth were waiting for him when he stepped down onto the platform in Chipping Norton. As they walked up the hill from the station, Jacob could sense the eyes of curious neighbours upon him and his mother walking slightly more upright than usual at his side, and he walked awkwardly in his new uniform and smiled in embarrassment when two young boys ran up and asked him how many Germans he had killed so far.

William arrived on leave the following day and Vera came for
lunch with Daphne while Norman was out in the fields, and it felt strange for the five of them to sit around the kitchen table now, a whole family again. In the evening, Alfred took Jacob and William into town along the blacked-out street, and the occasional car that passed by had headlamps blacked out into slits so as not to be visible from the air. In the pub the landlord gave each of them a free beer and the best seats at the bar and the Local Defence Volunteers no longer bothered Alfred with requests that he join their platoon.

‘I’m sorry if I made things difficult for you both,’ said Alfred gruffly after he had drunk his fifth pint. ‘I just couldn’t stand the thought of losing you two. But I understand what you’re doing and I’m proud of you.’

Jacob saw Rose again early the next day before he left, but the war was tugging at him now, leaving little time to talk, and shortly after breakfast he was gone.

Jacob left England in the early autumn of 1941 aboard the SS Andes, a South American liner built for 600 passengers but in wartime equipped for 6,000. He arrived in Southampton with Harry and several others from the Initial Training Wing on the evening before the ship’s departure.

‘Where’s our hotel, then?’ said Harry.

‘Lord knows,’ someone said.

‘Down by the docks,’ said another.

They bundled in, six to a room with a bathroom shared by twenty. Jacob slipped himself into a lukewarm bath around midnight, just as the air-raid sirens began to wail. Too tired to move, he slipped his head beneath the surface and the water muffled the frantic banging of the ack-ack guns that blazed away on the roof above his head.

In the morning they found their way up the gang-plank and into their cramped accommodation above the engine room at the back. Hammocks were slung side-by-side between the wooden trestle tables and chairs that served as mealtime furniture. Jacob and Harry dumped their kitbags and went up on deck and the day passed in unceasing bustle down on the quay and a growing sense of anticipation on board. Jacob leant against the handrail as night fell and the ship slipped its
moorings and crept out of the harbour under the thickening cover of darkness, the blacked-out town disappearing into the night, and the last signs of England that Jacob saw, as the ship sailed into the Channel, were the wands of the searchlights scraping the sky and the silent flash of bombs that lit up the cloud-base, and all he could hear was the throb of the ship’s engine and the rushing past of the waves.

The ship sailed past Land’s End and into the Atlantic where the U-boats lurked. In mid-ocean the weather deteriorated and the hammocks swung about below deck and tin mugs and bottles dropped off the tables and rolled about on the steel floor, backwards and forwards, bumping over the rivets and waking him throughout the night. For weeks the ship sailed west, reaching New York on a bright clear November morning, and Jacob watched the Statue of Liberty shining copper-green in the sun as the ship passed by in its shadow.

New York was a blazing blur of light after the grey austerity and blacked-out windows of wartime England. Jacob and Harry ate T-bone steaks washed down with milkshakes and bourbon chasers, then boarded a train at Central Station with dozens of other cadets for the long journey to the main aircrew reception centre in New Brunswick, Canada. From there, the cadets were dispersed to the multitude of flying schools set up across the country as part of the Empire Air Training Scheme. Jacob and Harry arrived at the flying school at Medicine Hat in the vast sweep of prairie near Calgary.

The weather was bright and cold as Jacob sat trembling in the plane for his first flight, sitting in line behind an instructor in a bright yellow Tiger Moth as the earth fell away beneath him and the plane rose up on the prairie winds and his face melted into an enormous smile as the winter sun lit his face with its burning glow and he laughed with joy at being up in the air at last, in a plane, the thing he had always read and dreamed about, soaring above the earth, the gift of flight the war had given him, asking nothing of him in return for now. He looked down at the aerodrome, the criss-crossing runways sketching a rough triangle, and the plane banked away and climbed higher and the buildings became a child’s small toys on the carpet of the world and the air turned colder.

Then he took his first solo flight, circuiting the aerodrome at eight hundred feet, bringing the plane back in to land, bumping down onto the runway and coming to an unsteady halt.

‘You’ll have to do better next time,’ said the instructor who was waiting for him when he came in. ‘That was a rather ropey landing.’

The next man dropped too fast and his plane tipped over and burst into flames, the war starting to ask for something in return now. The wind howled around the guttering that night and in the morning the aerodrome lay under a blanket of cloud and the snow did not stop for three days. Flying was off, and Jacob and Harry caught a slow bus into town and spent the morning walking around the shops, then headed off on bicycles into the countryside, slipping and sliding along the tyre tracks that trucks had carved in the snow on the unending roads, isolated houses lost in farmland turned white, and the occasional roar of a flat-bed truck sounding its horn as it passed.

On evenings off they went to diners and bars and consumed plates of food as large as a family Sunday dinner in England, then returned to the aerodrome late at night, singing their way back in the brightly-lit bus, a reminder of the other life they had left behind before the war, somewhere beyond the curvature of the earth.

At Moreton-in-Marsh near Chipping Norton, the squadron’s ageing Wellingtons would head off at dusk, passing over Chipping Norton as they climbed before banking away towards the rendezvous point over Reading. Rose would count them out – nine, ten, eleven, twelve – and stand by the garden wall until the sound of the engines had ceased, and several hours later she would be lying in bed in the dark early hours and she would listen and count the planes back in – twelve, eleven, ten, nine – and on most nights the returning numbers could not match the ones that had departed and the crew room at Moreton would have a number of lockers from which the belongings had to be removed and forwarded to relatives by the Committee of Adjustment. New crews would arrive and go out the following night, and many would fail to return from their first op, and on it went, night after night, the erosive power of darkness dissolving the ranks of aircrew coming off the conveyor belt of the Empire Air Training Scheme, and when Rose heard the planes going out and coming back in, she thought of Jacob, and she wondered when it would be his turn to throw himself off the cliff at dusk and into the long dark valley of night.