Lost in the Flames (9 page)

Vera looked towards the hall as she heard the postman’s footsteps across the yard, then the rattle of the letterbox and the gentle union of envelope and mat. She shivered at the thought of more bad news after the shock of the previous day and she steadied herself in her chair as Daphne dashed out of the kitchen to retrieve the letter.

‘From Uncle Jacob!’ said Daphne, beaming at the airmail envelope and the now-familiar Canadian stamp as she ran back into the room. ‘Open it.’

Vera dredged up a smile.

‘Of course, my dear.’

‘Mummy, a photo. Look.’

Vera looked at the photo, Jacob in his uniform at the door of a timber building, next to him a taller man in a thick roll-neck sweater and an Irvin jacket.

‘Read it to me. Please.’

‘Dear Vera,’ she began, as Daphne perched on a chair and propped her chin on her hands. ‘I hope this letter finds you well, and Norman and little Daphne …’

Vera paused and inclined her head as Daphne smiled at the mention of her name.

‘… and mother and father too. I was very pleased indeed to receive your airgraph. I also recently received a letter from mother, and two airgraphs and a letter with some photos from Rose, so you can guess how pleased I am with all that mail. Thank you for writing, for you don’t know the thrill I get receiving letters from home when I am so far away from you all. And have you had news of William recently? I should very much like to know how he is getting along in North Africa. Here things are going well. I spent a very peaceful and enjoyable Christmas with the family of a friend, and I’ve progressed from Elementary Flying School and am going out nearly every day in the
larger twin-engined planes. The training is top-notch, and the class work is extremely detailed, and I know I’ll make it to the end of the course and that I’ll be well prepared for when I come back to England to get on with the real business. If all goes well here, I’ll be home before the end of the summer. I can’t wait to see you all. Life is good here, everything is plentiful and the people are most welcoming, but there’s still no place like home! Please tell Rose that I’m asking after her, and tell Norman that when I’m back home we can go for that pint he keeps talking about – the beer here isn’t nearly as drinkable as good old English ale! Your loving brother, Jacob.’

Norman returned at lunchtime and wolfed down his soup and was out again within half an hour, a thousand jobs to do and too few hours in which to do them. He returned again after dark, soaked to the skin and an early-born lamb in his arms, the little beast shivering and bleating, and he passed it to Vera and went out again into the fields to check on the others. Vera warmed a pan of milk and the lamb sucked away at the teat and soon Norman was back in with another and they sat up through the night nursing the lambs into silence. Vera passed Jacob’s letter to Norman. He read it, then looked up.

‘Are you going to tell him?’

‘I’ll have to,’ she said.

Jacob received Vera’s letter several weeks later. Before the evening meal he went to the crew room and sat in the leather chair by the window. He settled down, began to read, then suddenly stopped. He had a shocking vision of William as he looked out of the window to where a Tiger Moth lifted itself up off the runway, silhouetting itself against the fading pink sky and across the setting sun. Jacob stood and walked out of the room, onto the tarmac and across the rough grass that bordered the perimeter fence. He followed the fence the full length of the runway as the wet grass soaked his shoes and a thin mist lifted itself off the ground. He walked past the main gate and out onto the road that disappeared into the mist, across the lip of the world, into the night. He walked through thoughts and memories for hours, past lone farmhouses and picket fences, and finally he saw lights far off in the night and he found himself back at the entrance to the base. He
found Harry in the dormitory.

‘We spent so much time bickering, you know,’ Jacob said. ‘Like we hated each other. He bullied me and I bullied him, mentally at least, made him feel stupid, but he wasn’t. He just liked different things, tractors and engines, down-to-earth things. And tanks. Can’t shoot at me in a tank, safe in all that metal, that’s what he always said. It’s not fair, is it?’ Harry shook his head. ‘William in a brewed-up tank in North Africa, whatever’s left of him. And all that time we wasted when we were young.’

The instructor called Jacob in the following day.

‘I’m taking you off flying for a few days.’

‘But sir …’

‘Arbuckle, do you want your mother to lose both her sons? Your mind won’t be on the job.’

He spent extra time in the classroom while the others were away on cross-country flights. He got into the air again the following week, but the errors crept in.

‘You’re still not fit to fly. I’m taking you off,’ said the instructor.

‘But sir, I have to fly. I was born for it.’

‘You were born to do what you’re told, just like everyone else. Now if you’ll please excuse me …’

‘Harry,’ he said later. ‘They’ve taken me off again. They think I’ve lost my nerve – I just need more time.’

‘They won’t give you time, old chap. This place is a conveyor belt, in one end and out the other, back to Blighty as soon as possible. Months more training there too and we won’t be on ops for another year – you never know, the war might be over by then, you might not miss a thing.’

When the course ended, Jacob fell to a stroke of the examiner’s pen.

‘I’ve been washed out, Harry, right at the last,’ he said as they sat in the mess. ‘They didn’t fail me, as such, but I have to stay in reserve if I want to go the pilot route. Or they’ll train me for another role and send me on ops sooner.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I want to get back home, get on with the job. So I’ll take another role, navigation I hope. So I suppose this is where we go our separate ways.’

Harry shook his head glumly.

‘Not you as well?’

‘Yes, washed out too, I’m afraid. A right pair, we are.’

‘Damn it, Harry.’

They were put through further tests and interviews and awaited their fate.

‘Arbuckle, there is currently a shortage of all the aircrew trades. Your psychological and written tests show you to be particularly suited to the role of air-bomber. Bombing accuracy is paramount and this is a vital job for which we must take only the most competent candidates – you will be pleased, I am sure, to hear that you are among them. The next course starts in two weeks. Until then you will take leave. You start back here in June. That is all.’

Jacob saw Harry later that day as he was packing to go.

‘Hello, Harry. What have the fates decided for you?’

‘Bomb-aimer.’

‘Snap. Must be a shortage …’

‘Or we’re particularly suited to dropping the bombs.’

‘Someone has to, I suppose.’

‘More important than the pilot, some say.’

‘Still, not really what I had in mind.’

‘Well, we’ll all be in the mire one way or the other.’

‘Have they given you leave?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘Same here. Let’s head off for a while?’

They hired a car and pointed its long bonnet to where the highway narrowed into infinity, and the sun-burnt prairie sped away behind. They spent the evenings in dimly-lit taverns and the nights in roadside motels and by the end of the two weeks they had almost forgotten why they were in Canada.

They completed their courses and received their bomber’s wings on the same day.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Jacob, as he touched the badge that had been sewn onto his jacket, just above his heart. ‘They’ve offered me a training post, you know, as a bombing instructor.’

‘You’d be mad not to take it. You’d be safe out here. Let the other bods do the fighting.’

‘No, I’ve been trained for ops – that’s my job now, isn’t it?
Got to do my bit.’

So Jacob boarded a ship in New York, a cold November rain drumming wet fingers upon the deck, the head of the Statue of Liberty lost in a low squall as the ship slipped by below. The New World fell out of sight beneath the slate-grey waves, the imprecise blur of the horizon at his back. Then the Old World heaved into view and Jacob bounced down the gang-plank above the troubled waters of Southampton docks, boarded his train, and was gone.

Rose was sitting with Vera on the bench in front of her grandmother’s house when she heard the whistle of the train down in the valley, pulling away again now, and then Jacob was striding up the hill from the station. She could see his face looking up, small and distant, his hand lifting to wave as he walked, and Rose jumped to her feet and hurried to the stone wall that separated the garden from the lane. She saw the blue uniform not yet stained by sweat and fear, a virgin white wing just above his heart and a flight-sergeant’s cap pushed back upon his head. She followed Vera out of the gate and down the dusty lane, and as Vera embraced Jacob, Rose paused, not knowing what to do, then suddenly for a moment she was in Jacob’s arms, awkward, wanting to cling on but not ready for that, not in front of others, so just a swift hug to hide her feelings, and in that instant the wool of his uniform was harsh against her face, roughing her cheek as she held him, and then his voice in her ear and the sweet smell of him.

Lunch was ready for the table and as Jacob dropped his bag on the bed in the top room he could smell the roast pork as it emerged from the furnace of the oven, and as he came down the stairs he heard the beer tumbling into the glass and the sound of Alfred calling him down. They embraced again where the galley stairs met the back door and the afternoon passed in a haze of news and memories and as the fire was stoked and the flames surged high into the chimney the name of William, which had rested unspoken through the meal, slipped from someone’s lips, and a silence fell upon the room and Alfred stared at the fire and the flames continued their rage and the coals glowed hot, and overhead the Wellington bombers wailed a plaintive soaring cry as they carried their crews away to the searchlights and guns of German
cities that would hack back in fury as they burned.

Jacob told them about Canada and about Harry and the trip they had made in the old Buick out across the prairies, and Norman, who had come up from the farm when it was too dark to work and now sat exhausted and dozing on the settee, pricked up his ears at the mention of livestock, breeds of cattle he had read about but never seen at the agricultural shows, and it was only when Jacob and Vera were alone in the top room late that night that Jacob told her that what he had really learned to do in Canada was to destroy and to kill as efficiently as modern technology would allow and to avoid being killed himself for the longest possible time while doing so.

The following morning, Rose knocked on the Arbuckles’ door and Elizabeth let her in and Jacob and Rose walked into town and ate at the café on the top-side of the market square, then went down to Pool Meadow where they had skated with William two winters before. Jacob picked up a flat stone and sent it skimming across the water into the vegetation on the far bank, a little bouncing bomb that flushed something out of the reeds. They watched as a little ball of black fuzz topped with red, a moorhen chick that had been born too late to survive the winter, scudded around in futile circles, whistling a repetitive plaintive cry, looking for its mother.

‘When do you go away again, Jacob?’ asked Rose.

‘Next month. To an OTU up north. Norman’s neck of the woods.’

‘An OTU?’

The whistling cry was receding now, the black shape losing itself along the reeds.

‘An Operational Training Unit, where we crew up and get the hang of flying in these conditions.’

He glanced up at the low cloud.

‘And then to a squadron somewhere. And then Germany.’

‘You should have stayed in Canada,’ she said. ‘You’d have been safe there.’

‘I had to come back.’

‘I know …’

They sat together and looked out across the water until dusk came and the wind fell still and the birds stopped singing as they readied themselves for night.

‘It’s going to be better now, isn’t it?’ she said at last. ‘The war, I
mean – it’s not so certain we’ll lose now, is it?’

‘We can’t lose. Whatever it takes, we can’t lose this war.’

‘And the Americans are with us now too – there are some over at Daylesford. I see them at the Army Forces Club here in town. They get through those spam rolls like there really is no tomorrow.’

She paused suddenly at the significance of what she had just said.

‘There will be a tomorrow, Rose,’ he said, but his voice seemed to fall off a cliff as he uttered the words and he felt compelled to repeat himself. ‘There will be a tomorrow, Rose, don’t you worry about that.’

As Jacob and Rose walked back up the hill together in the cold, she slipped her hand again into his and they paused as they had on that warm June night three years before, and she kissed him again on the forehead and held him to her, and then, at last, as they stared at each other in the dark, her lips touched his. She was the first girl he had ever kissed.

Jacob spent Christmas at home and then in early January his month was up and he packed his bag and put on his uniform with its silver-white wing and the train took him again and pulled him into the tunnel that led north to the OTU.

The hangar was packed with men of the various bomber roles as the Chief Ground Instructor leapt up onto the wooden platform and called them to silence. A Wellington bomber passed overhead, its engines droning into the distance as the instructor raised his voice above the roar.

‘OK, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I think you know why you’re here. It isn’t quite a marriage market, but think of it like that. Choose your crew-mates and choose them well. Once you’re operational, in fact as soon as you walk out this hangar today, you will depend on them for your lives. And remember, you’re in this for the long haul, till death do you part and all that – though that might be only a few weeks. If you think that kind of arrangement might not be for you, then leave now without disgrace or forever hold your peace.’

No one moved a muscle.

‘Very good, gentleman. As I expected. Now get on with it, and may yours be a marriage made in heaven. But not one that takes you there …’

This raised a grim laugh and with that he stood down and left them to it. Jacob looked around the room at the dozens of strangers and saw that they were similarly looking about, as if attempting to discern in their fellows’ features some inkling as to what they would be like to fly with and whether they could be depended upon to do their jobs and do them well when fear shoved at their guts over the target. These men were not warriors, he thought, the whole of society was reflected in their faces, their bearing, the air they had about them, the chubby amiable-looking type who might possess some inner strength, the long lean Australian from the outback who had trained in South Africa, or the public schoolboy who had joined the RAF in the hope of flying in Spitfires only to have his reactions deemed too slow for the
quicksilver planes of Fighter Command but ideal for the powerful steady bombers. Jacob shifted on his feet as the men began to mingle, approaching each other timidly at first like teenagers at their first ball asking for a dance, then the noise levels gradually rose as the conversations got going and men who had formed themselves into twos found another man or another pair, and in this way the atoms of Bomber Command began to form themselves into little clusters of substance.

‘Hello,’ said a man next to Jacob. ‘Jolly affair this, isn’t it? The name’s Andrews, Ralph Andrews.’

Jacob noted the man’s confident tone, diffident and distant, that presumption of authority a privileged upbringing bestows.

‘Jacob Arbuckle,’ he said, more quietly than he had intended. ‘Bomb-aimer.’

‘Ah yes, I’d quite forgotten what this was all about. Pilot Officer Ralph Andrews, I should have said.’

They shook hands and Jacob weighed him up and felt the other man peering into him too, quietly working him out, weighing him up against some vague criteria.

‘Right, then,’ said Ralph. ‘You’re in. Now we need some additional members for this fledgling little crew of ours. We can hardly fly on our own, can we? Now let’s see, I was talking to a rear gunner last night over supper. Oh look, there he is.’

Ralph Andrews strode away across the room, a good three inches taller than anyone else. Jacob followed and by the time he caught up with him, Ralph was already in conversation with a pair of rough-looking types.

‘This is my mate Jim,’ one was saying. ‘He’s mid-upper turret, I’m arse-end charlie. We’re old mates from Perth, did our initial training together in South Africa. I’m Donald, but call me Don. I don’t much care for formality.’

‘South Africa? That’s where I grew up,’ said Ralph. ‘Must be serendipity.’

The gunners looked at each other.

‘No mate, not Serendipity. Cape Town.’

Ralph ignored their attempt at humour. ‘This is Jacob Arbuckle,’ he continued. ‘He’s my bomb-aimer. And a bloody good one too.’

Jacob smiled at the premature compliment and wondered whether Ralph would be proved right in his assessment.

‘Good, then,’ said Don. ‘Four out of seven already. Anyone know a navigator? I’ve got no sense of bloody direction myself.’

Towards the end of the afternoon, when crewing up was nearly done, they found their navigator, Charlie Appleforth.

‘A vicar’s son?’ said Don, repeating what he had heard.

‘That’s right. From Kent.’

‘Well pray for us, son,’ said Don. ‘Have a word with the man upstairs.’

‘Oh, I will,’ said Charlie. ‘I will. In fact I already have, several times daily.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ said Ralph. ‘But we won’t be needing Him, of course. We’ll look out for each other instead, isn’t that right boys? Jacob?’

‘That’s right, skip. That’s what we had in mind.’

‘Good lad. Now apparently flight engineers won’t be allocated until we go to an HCU for training on Lancs, so we only need a wireless op and we’ve got the full set.’

They found their wireless operator that night in the bar, and they heard him before they saw him. The piano flared up and a voice rose above the hubbub and Jacob and Ralph and the two Australians and Charlie the vicar’s son crowded around the piano with their pints of Northumberland ale and sang along. One song followed another and at the end of the evening Ralph approached the pianist with a fresh foaming pint in his hand.

‘Here, have this,’ said Ralph, pushing the glass towards him. ‘I hear you’re a wireless man. I expect you’re crewed up already? You extrovert types aren’t likely to have been left on the shelf this afternoon.’

‘No mate, I was bloody late, wasn’t I? Train got held up, Jerry bombed the line. I had to get the bus in the end, only arrived when everyone was leaving the do in the hangar. Nearly got crewed up with a spare-bod pilot who was hanging around looking for men by the door on the way out, but I thought better of it. Right fucking basket-case, he looked, a right ruddy weaver, the type who’d kill you first op out. Fuck that, I thought, any pilot worth his salt would have been fully kitted out by then, navigator, radio op, the lot.’

‘Well I’m still missing a radio op. Do I look like a basket-case to
you? The type who’d get you killed?’

The man looked him up and down. ‘Can’t say you do. You look all right to me, skipper.’

‘Good, then come and meet my boys.’

With the addition of George O’Neill, the swearing singing pianist, the crew was formed. They spent the next three weeks in training and were then given a day’s leave. Jacob caught a bus into the Northumberland countryside and on towards Durham in search of Black Hill Farm where Norman had grown up. He got off the bus and walked out of the village, past the church and the pub that Norman had described, past the milestone and the burn that ran gin-clear across mossy stones. Thin white clouds crept across the tops of the hills on the other side of the shallow valley as a freezing wind keened through the hawthorn that grew along the fence. Jacob came to the granite columns of the gate that led up to the house and he walked up the slope and across the yard but the old lady who answered the door would not let him in.

‘Yes, I remember Norman Miller,’ she said. ‘But that was all such a long time ago. I’d rather it stayed that way.’

Jacob looked around at the brown-clod fields and saw upon the crest of the hill a man and a horse and a plough sending crows into the air, and he thought of what Norman had told him about John Bainbridge and the random nature of fate, and he turned and caught the bus back to the airfield and his new life as an air-bomber.

Their training flights began the next day. Cross-country daylight runs took them up into Scotland and across the north of England and down into Wales, and then night training began and they found themselves over the Irish Sea with cloud all around suddenly lit by lightning bursts, and the thunder rumbled down their flanks and the plane jumped in and out of giant pot-holes in the sky. Then the cloud broke and they saw in the distance the searchlights of Liverpool clawing around at the sky as the distant flash of bombs blinked through the rain and the city glowed orange beneath the German bombs.

As winter ebbed away, the cold hard frosts of dawn were nudged aside by soft edges of fog that layered the fields through the night and
long into the day. Mist thickened around the trucks as the crews awaited the order to board for a dummy raid on Bristol. The station commander tore up in his car and jumped out.

‘What are you lot waiting for?’ he called out, his irritation doubled by the fact he had tripped up as he leapt from the car. ‘Come on, off with you, take off is at 1900 hours in case you hadn’t realised!’

‘We can’t take off in this,’ whispered Jacob.

‘Too right,’ muttered Charlie. ‘And far less land in it. They’ll be needing the blood wagon tonight.’

‘Belt up, lads,’ said Ralph. ‘Of course we can land in it. We can do anything, this crew.’

‘I think old skip’s trying to get us killed,’ said Don.

Jacob tucked the hare’s foot that Norman had given him into the breast pocket of his battledress and closed his Irvin jacket. They boarded the trucks and bumped across the field to the dispersal pans where the planes waited. They climbed into the cramped ribbed interior, the belly of their whale. Don wedged himself in through the tiny door of his tail turret, Jim hoisted himself into the harness from which he would sit suspended beside his mid-upper gun, and the others worked their way to the front of the beast. George sat at the radio adjacent to Charlie’s navigator’s desk with its angle-poise lamp and maps and logbook and electronic aids, and just beyond them was the pilot’s seat, and alongside Ralph the drop-down seat for the stand-in flight engineer. Finally, contrary to regulations for take-off and landing, Jacob crouched down in the nose where the bombsight sat inert and the selector switches were fixed to the fuselage. All around the airfield, engines were starting up and the noise rose to a roar that carried though the night to the nearby villages and farms. The pre-flight checks were concluded and Ralph signed the acceptance form and the flight engineer carried it to the back door and passed it down to one of the ground crew whose mouth moved in silent farewell, his words lost in the well of noise that was erupting from the engines, his cap blown from his head by the wild back-draft of the airscrews. The flight engineer pulled the door shut and worked his way back along the throbbing, straining plane. Ralph edged it forward off the dispersal pan and slipped in behind a Halifax taxiing in front and the Halifax swung onto the runway, its pilot leaned on the throttle, and his plane sped into the fog and lifted and disappeared. Jacob sat and listened to the disembodied
voices on the intercom as the engines hurled the airscrews around in accelerating fury and then the brakes hissed and George made a joke and the tension melted a fraction.

‘You’ve got your green, skipper,’ said the flight engineer, and the tension came again. Ralph thrust the throttle forward and let the plane off the leash and Jacob felt it pick up speed into the wall of fog and finally it lifted up, rising just above the fence and the trees at the far end of the runway, the flare-path blurring then falling out of sight and he prayed they would not collide with one of the other planes flying blind into the night. The fog had thickened again on their return and as they dropped into it Jacob crouched in the nose and searched for signs of the gooseneck flares and George radioed the tower. The flares rushed up to meet them and the wheels bumped down and Ralph steadied the shaking plane as it slowed along the runway and a voice down the intercom said ‘Thank God for that’.

When the fog cleared that afternoon there was a black gash in the trees where a plane had come down in the night, and the smell of burning and fuel was still in the air when the planes took off again that evening to set course above the blackened wood, their engines undulating and melancholy as they left the earth behind.

The next morning the world was white from a late fall of snow and near the mess a small crowd of aircrew were engaged in a snowball fight, their boyish cries rising and falling in the icy air. In the crew room Jacob found ‘Humpty’ Haynes, prematurely balding, rotund of physique, and with a keen appetite for the eggs that were sometimes available for breakfast.

‘I expect they’ll scrub training today,’ said Humpty, looking out of the window towards the dispersal pans where the aircraft stood beneath their thickening white hoods. ‘They can’t send us up in this, can they?’

But the ground crew were soon setting about the planes, sweeping the snow off with brooms, and the aircrew were sent out with shovels to clear the runways and the taxiing areas and the dispersals. Jacob watched the ground fall away again at dusk and the plane was lost in low cloud. They touched down several hours later and went to the crew room and sat with those who had made it back earlier. One by one the planes came in and the crews sat and exchanged occasional words as they drank their mugs of tea and smoked their cheap cigarettes and then they drifted off to their quarters to shiver away their night’s
work beneath thin grey blankets as ice layered the window panes.

‘Is Humpty back in?’ Jacob had asked as he left, but the following morning he heard as he ate his eggs that Humpty’s Halifax had struck a mountain in the Scottish Borders and the blast had scrambled him and his crew across the hillside.

‘Poor Humpty, they couldn’t put him back together again,’ someone said. ‘More eggs for the rest of us, though.’

‘Sod you,’ said Jacob. ‘Don’t you have a heart?’

‘I had one once. Seem to have mislaid it, though, since I came to this place.’

Jacob sensed the bond between the crew beginning to harden, a glue to keep them in one piece in the skies over Germany.

‘Look at old skip,’ he said in the bar late one night when the beer had run out and all the other crews had gone. ‘Epitome of the pilot officer, tall and dashing in his Air Force blue …’

‘Let’s see how dashing he is when we get out the cricket kit,’ said Jim. ‘He’ll be dashing for the bloody pavilion.’

‘Skip played for the Oxbridge side against Middlesex in a pre-season game at Lord’s, I’ll have you know,’ said George. ‘Whatever that bloody means.’

‘I think it means he’s a damned good bat,’ said Charlie.