The FitzOsbornes at War (24 page)

‘It’s
barbaric
,’ I said fervently. ‘Don’t those German pilots understand what they’re doing? They aren’t hitting military targets. They’re destroying rows and rows of ordinary houses, shops, schools . . . even hospitals, and
they’ve
got big red crosses painted on their roofs.’

‘Pretty hard to know what one’s going to hit, when one lets a bomb drop from four thousand feet up. And we’re doing the same back to them.’

I wanted to say, ‘Good! They deserve it! They started it!’ But I knew how childish that would sound, and I didn’t actually feel that way (well, not
really
). Instead, I changed the subject.

‘Have you spoken to Toby recently?’ I asked. ‘I had another letter from him, after that big battle last week. It sounded as though every plane in Fighter Command was called in for that one. Not that he said very much about himself. He did mention he’d probably be getting some leave soon.’

‘He didn’t tell you he’s been promoted?’

‘What?’ I said. ‘No!’

‘Flight Lieutenant.’ Simon hesitated, then added, ‘He’s been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, too. But they certainly won’t be presenting it to him at any official Buckingham Palace medal ceremony.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why do you think? Because he’s always in trouble! He never writes up his combat reports properly, he wore pyjamas under his flying kit one morning because he slept in and couldn’t be bothered getting dressed – he even invites the sergeants to play cards with him and the other officers.’ Simon saw my confusion. ‘That’s a court martial offence, officers socialising with other ranks on the base. Even when they’re all pilots, it’s against the rules.’

‘Well, that sounds like a
stupid
rule!’ I said.

‘Perhaps, but that’s the way it is, and the air force is still a lot better than the other services. I doubt I’d have had any chance of becoming an officer if I’d joined the army, and I probably wouldn’t even have been accepted into the navy. Anyway, Toby’s had so many official warnings that if he weren’t so good at shooting down planes and so bloody charming, they’d have got rid of him ages ago.’

I took a moment to try to assimilate these various images of Toby: ruthless fighter pilot and convivial colleague and decorated serviceman and irreverent rule-breaker (the last, at least, was familiar). But if it was difficult for me to merge all these Tobys into one whole, functioning person, how much harder must it be for
him
?

‘Simon, what were you two arguing about?’ I asked. ‘You know, that day we all had luncheon at Claridge’s.’

‘What? Oh, I don’t remember.’ He glanced about for the waitress. ‘Do you want tea? If one can
call
it tea these days, it always looks and tastes more like dishwater –’

‘
Simon
,’ I insisted. ‘Toby was really upset. I was so worried about him! I still am, actually, even though he’s trying to convince us all that he’s absolutely fine now.’

‘It was nothing. We were both tired and on edge, that’s all.’

I kept gazing at Simon, and he kept avoiding my gaze.

‘Anyway, it’s not . . . it isn’t a problem any more,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘God!’ he hissed. He looked about, then lowered his voice. ‘If you
must
know, it was about a new pilot posted to his squadron, some boy barely out of school. He was mooning about after Toby, completely besotted.’

‘Oh. But . . . that’s not Toby’s fault, is it?’

‘Toby could have brought the whole thing to an abrupt halt right at the start with a couple of well-placed insults – God knows he’s had plenty of practice fending off admirers – but no, he thought that would be “cruel”. I told him it would be a damn sight more cruel if anyone found out. They’d both have been kicked out of the air force.’

‘Why? They weren’t . . . doing anything, were they?’

‘Sophie, they wouldn’t
have
to do anything! The very
idea
of it is against regulations, against the law, against . . . against common decency!’

‘I know you don’t believe
that
,’ I said levelly.

‘I just thought Toby should have done something to stop it, that’s all. For the sake of that boy, if nothing else, to help him realise how futile it all was. But it doesn’t matter now.’

‘What do you mean? Why . . . Oh.’

‘A third of Toby’s squadron’s gone now,’ said Simon quietly. ‘In just six weeks. The RAF’s running out of men to replace them. They’ve cut training from six months to two weeks, and some of those new pilots don’t even last a day in combat.’ Simon fiddled with his knife. ‘Toby was right, it would’ve been needlessly cruel to say anything to that boy.’

The waitress came over to see if we wanted anything else. We didn’t.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered, after she’d gone. ‘About all those poor pilots. And . . . well, for making you talk about it when you didn’t want to.’

‘You didn’t
make
me,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you know what they say – a trouble shared is a trouble halved.’ He looked almost as exhausted as the last time I’d had luncheon with him – not at
all
as though his burden had been lessened by our conversation. I felt even worse.

‘And I’m sorry that – I mean, your job must be pretty awful, if you have to keep track of how many men need to be replaced,’ I said. ‘And you’re probably getting bombed just as much as the rest of us.’

‘It’s not too bad where I am,’ he said. ‘It’s not as though we’re in the middle of the East End.’

‘The raids have changed everything, haven’t they?’ I said, looking through the window, criss-crossed with gummed paper, past the mound of leaking sandbags, across the cratered road to a shop that was missing its awnings and half its roof. ‘You know, when I’m saying goodbye to Veronica each morning, I sometimes wonder if . . . well, if we’re both going to come home again that evening. It makes me feel I can’t ever make plans, not even for the next day, because who knows what might have happened by then –’

‘Stop it, Sophie,’ Simon said roughly. ‘You’re being morbid! I mean it, you ought to go back to Milford.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, that’s just what Hitler wants. He hopes we’ll all flee to the countryside, and then he can invade London – so that’s why I’m determined to stay.’ Simon opened his mouth to argue some more, so I rushed on. ‘Anyway, I can’t resign from my job now. One of the girls in the office has just left to get married, and Miss Thynne’s on sick leave. She burnt her arm putting out an incendiary on her roof. So, Mr Bowker really needs me there in the office.’

Simon sighed heavily. ‘Well, be careful, won’t you? And tell Veronica . . . no, actually, don’t tell her I said anything, because she’ll just do the exact opposite.’

‘You be careful, too, Simon,’ I said, when we were saying goodbye, and he said, rather gloomily, that he was always careful.

Which is quite true, he
is
. The problem is that being careful isn’t enough any more.

16th October, 1940

W
RITTEN AT
J
ULIA’S, BECAUSE THE
firemen found an unexploded bomb in front of Montmaray House today and everyone in our street has been evacuated. I suspect the Germans do it deliberately – send down bombs with a delay mechanism – because they realise it causes even more anxiety and disruption to normal life than an immediate explosion.

I’m a bomb expert by now. I can tell the difference between a high explosive and an incendiary, just from the sound. I know that the Germans have started attaching cardboard pipes to the sides of their bomb cylinders, so that the last thing the victims hear is a terrifying whistle announcing their oncoming death. I know that incendiary bombs burst into flames on impact, and shoot out shards of red-hot metal at anyone trying to put out the fire. I know there are bombs attached to parachutes, designed to drift down and explode in mid-air, flattening anything underneath.

Veronica threw out my
Evening Standard Guide to Air Raid Sounds
last week, because she said I was becoming obsessed. But the more information one has, the more one feels in
control
of the situation. That’s simply common sense. One would really think Veronica would understand that!

Anyway. She and I have Julia’s house to ourselves at the moment, because Rupert’s away, and Julia’s at the ambulance station (or more likely, driving round in the pitch black over roads littered with rubble, on her way to yet another set of horribly injured Londoners). We’re down in the kitchen now, as most of it’s underground and the window is protected by sandbags. It’s amazing how loud the Hyde Park anti-aircraft battery sounds from here. Julia says that sometimes she finds bits of shrapnel in her garden, depending on which direction they’re firing. I certainly hope they shoot down a couple of bombers tonight. Except then, I suppose the planes would crash on someone’s house, along with all their bombs, which would be even worse than bombs by themselves . . .

Oh, I don’t know why I pretend I have any control over
any
of this!

To distract myself, I
was
going to copy Henry’s latest letter into my journal, but I don’t feel up to the task of trying to translate all the spelling errors into Kernetin. Her new school hasn’t yet led to any significant improvements in her literacy skills. It’s also far less ‘exclusive’ than her previous school, which greatly distresses Aunt Charlotte (oh, the horror, her niece being educated alongside the daughters of shopkeepers). However, as there weren’t many educational establishments willing to accept Henry as a pupil, we didn’t have much choice – and she does seem to have settled in fairly easily. In fact, she’s the most envied girl in the school at the moment, after Toby made a slight detour on his way back to his aerodrome last week and landed his Spitfire on her school’s hockey field. Two hundred screaming schoolgirls rushed out of class to greet him, and there were several instances of swooning as he climbed out of the cockpit and peeled off his flying helmet. Even the headmistress was observed to become slightly breathless and giggly when he asked her permission to take Henry to the village tea shop (they ended up having tea in her study). Henry devoted five sides of paper to an account of this momentous event – I think it’s the longest letter she’s written in her life. Most of the remaining page was about how it was a good thing she’d resisted when Aunt Charlotte wanted her to go to Canada, because one of the ships transporting the child evacuees has just been torpedoed by the Germans. I read in the newspaper that most of the children drowned. It was absolutely heart-breaking. Those poor, poor parents, believing their children would be better off if they left England – and then hearing that dreadful news.

It just goes to show that it makes absolutely no difference
what
one does. Mr Bowker was telling me that his friend had a neighbour whose Anderson shelter in their back garden received a direct hit. Everyone inside the shelter was blown to bits, but the house was barely touched – they’d all have been fine if they’d stayed in their beds. And then, on Sunday, there was that bomb in Stoke Newington, where the upper floors of an apartment building collapsed into the basement – where everyone had gathered because they’d been told it was the safest place – and all the water and sewage and gas pipes broke, and the people who hadn’t already been crushed to death were suffocated or
drowned
. Then, the very next day, a bomb drilled right through the road into the underground railway station at Balham, which hundreds of people use as a shelter, and a great gush of water flooded the dark tunnel and . . .

Now Veronica is threatening to confiscate my journal. She says she can tell exactly what I’m writing by the expression on my face, and that if I don’t change the subject to something more optimistic, she’s going to take away my book and put it on the highest shelf of the pantry, out of my reach.

Optimistic! Of course
Veronica
is feeling optimistic about life at the moment –
she
spent the whole afternoon with her
boyfriend
. Daniel has some hush-hush job in the north of London now, but he had the day off and she met him at the National Gallery at lunchtime. All the paintings have been taken down and stored somewhere away from the bombs, but there are concerts held in the octagonal room each day, and it only costs a shilling, and one can buy sandwiches to eat in the break. Today there was a string quartet playing Mozart, and the first violinist turned out to be a friend of Daniel’s mother. After the concert, Veronica and Daniel wandered up Charing Cross Road, where all the second-hand bookshops are, and he bought her two books, one about prehistoric stone monuments in Cornwall and the other about European diplomacy in the 1920s, both written in the sort of dense, scholarly language that gives normal people a headache (Veronica is already halfway through the Cornish one and says it’s absolutely riveting). Then they visited a professor friend of Daniel’s at the University of London, and after that, it was time to meet up with me for dinner. I
had
told them not to bother, but I think Veronica felt guilty because it was supposed to be her turn to cook tonight. Or perhaps she didn’t want me going back to the flat by myself, in case there was an early evening air raid. Or else she felt sorry for me, having to type Mr Bowker’s badly punctuated letters all afternoon while she was enjoying herself. Whatever the reason, I almost wish I’d
insisted
on going home by myself because . . .