Where the Heart Is (16 page)

Lou strained her eyes, searching the sky. From the sound of it, it was a heavy aircraft of the type used by Bomber Command on its nighttime raids on German towns and defensive positions, perhaps. Bomber Command HQ was at High Wycombe, but their airfields were further to the east. For a bomber to try to put down here must mean that it was in desperate trouble.

Then she saw them: airmen tumbling from the grey bomber into the dawn mist, their parachutes opening over the farmland on the other side of the base, whilst the plane flew on, losing height fast. Automatically Lou noted that she was right and that it was a Wellington, one of the older bombers still in use. Her heart was in her mouth as the plane only just cleared the base’s buildings. Then she saw that one of its two engines was on fire and that the undercarriage had been shot away.

Somehow despite her anxiety for the crew who had ejected from it, and the pilot who was still in it, there was still space in her thoughts for a rush
of emotional pride in their skill and bravery, their mauled and savaged aircraft witness to the bloody fight they and it had had to survive.

Trailing smoke and flames, the bomber was now lurching to one side as it came towards her. The pilot wasn’t going to make the runway, Lou realised; the plane was diving too steeply and too fast. It thudded down and then lifted so close to her that she could feel the heat from its burning engine along with the draught of its flight.

On the far side of the base, lights were coming on and she could see movement. Soon the rescue squads would be here with a fire engine and medical staff.

Lou heard a terrific thud, the ground beneath her feet shaking, forcing her attention back to the bomber, which had now come to rest with its nose almost buried in the ground, flames licking at the wing and reaching greedily forward. Why wasn’t the pilot getting out?

Lou started to run, her heart hammering into her ribs. Ignoring the smoke and the flames, oblivious to the risk to her own safety, she reached up to the pilot’s door–unluckily the fire was on the pilot’s side but luckily the plane had slewed to that side, so that it was relatively easy for her to wrench open the door. Coughing and choking on the thick smoke, she could feel the heat of the flames, but she ignored them. Inside that plane was a man who needed her help, a man prepared to risk his life in the service of his country. How could she refuse to risk hers to save him? She couldn’t, Lou knew, as she refused to give in to the heat
threatening to burn her skin and the smoke filling her lungs.

The pilot was slumped over his controls, a trickle of blood coming from his nose, but he was alive, she knew because he was groaning. Alive now, but not for much longer unless she could get him out of the plane.

Their tutor was thorough, and how glad Lou was now that he had insisted their learning every detail of the interior of the RAF’s planes. Miraculously, somehow her fingers were reaching automatically for buckles and fastenings, as she released his parachute harness, the better to get him out of the cockpit.

‘You’ve got to help me,’ she yelled in the pilot’s ear. ‘Come on unless you want us both to be burned alive.’

She could smell aviation fuel. If that caught fire then they would have no hope of surviving. The plane would explode into a fireball. Her stomach cramped with a panic she refused to let take hold of her.

Somehow her words must have reached the pilot because she felt him move with her as she struggled to tug him out. She could smell burning hair and fabric, and her hands were stinging and hot. Every second was so precious and they had so few of them left. The smell of fuel was growing stronger. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the lights of the vehicles racing down the runway towards them.

Gritting her teeth, Lou pulled harder, muttering to herself, now more than to the pilot, ‘Come on. Come on …’ unaware that she had succeeded in pulling him free of his seat until the weight of him
falling against her drove the breath out of her lungs, sending them both tumbling to the ground, and then rolling away from the plane.

The lights and noise of proper rescuers were closer now but Lou knew that she couldn’t wait for them. Desperately she held on to the pilot and rolled them both with the last of her strength as far from the plane as she could, grimacing against the pain in her hands as she did so.

Flame had engulfed the plane, the heat intense, the smell of aviation fuel heavy on the air. When the fuel tank ignited with a fierce crumping sound, Lou pushed the pilot to the ground and flung herself protectively over him. Something–a spark or a piece of burning wreckage–hit the back of her leg, the pain stinging, sharp and so intense that momentarily she thought she might pass out.

Then help was there, people scrambling over the fence as she had done earlier to get to them, a crisp male voice reaching through her sickening dizziness to announce, ‘Atta girl. Just keep still for us for a minute and we’ll soon have you on a stretcher. Careful with her,’ the voice continued. ‘Her hands are burned and there’s what looks like a piece of ruddy fuselage in her leg.’

A stretcher. Burns … fuselage in her leg? Lou was indignant. She was perfectly all right, and she was determined to say so.

‘I don’t need a stretcher. I can walk. It’s the pilot who needs help,’ she began, but then out of nowhere pain overwhelmed her, and she blacked out.

‘I’m really glad that Wilhelm has come back. I missed him, and I don’t care what Davey Burrows says.’

Emily looked at Tommy’s downbent head with maternal concern. ‘Well, of course not.’

Obviously encouraged by this support Tommy continued, ‘Davey Burrows says that it’s treason to like a German, and that if I don’t watch out Wilhelm will put me in an oven and burn me to death like Hitler is doing all the Jews.’

Emily put down the carrot she was dicing for their evening meal. ‘It would only be treason if you were telling Wilhelm things about this country that might put us all at risk,’ she told Tommy firmly. ‘And then of course Wilhelm would have to pass what you told him on to someone in Germany who could use that information against us. You and I know, because Wilhelm had told us, that he didn’t really want to become a soldier and fight for Hitler. He can’t pass any information on to anyone even if he wanted to, because we’ve got censors checking everything that everyone writes. He wanted to stay on the farm. And as for what Hitler is doing to the poor Jews …’

Emily sighed. Tommy was such a quick, bright boy and of course children were bound to talk about what they heard their parents discussing. People naturally were horrified by the dreadful stories coming out about the death camps to which Jews were being sent.

Putting her arm round Tommy’s shoulders, she drew him closer to her. ‘Now you listen to me, Tommy. You know how much I love you, don’t you?’

Immediately he nodded.

‘And you know too that I’d never let anything bad happen to you?’

Now he said hesitantly, ‘Grown-ups say that but sometimes bad things happen that they can’t stop happening. They can’t promise.’

Emily’s heart was wrung with protective love for him. Who knew what terrible dreadful things he had experienced before she had found him? He never talked about his past, and she never asked, but something must have happened to have made him mute like he had been when she had first found him scavenging in the rubbish behind the Royal Court Theatre.

‘That’s true, Tommy,’ she felt obliged to answer him honestly. ‘But I can promise you that I will always do my utmost to keep you safe. I love you and there’s no one and nothing that will ever mean more to me than you do.’ Still holding him to her, she exhaled and told him, ‘If Wilhelm coming here bothers you in any kind of way, then you just tell me and I shall tell the farmer not to send him any more.’

‘No. I want him to come. I like him. Davey Burrows is daft; everyone knows that.’ Tommy’s voice was scornful now.

What she had said to him had obviously banished whatever it was that had been preying on his mind, Emily decided, relieved, her relief turning to a rueful smile when he added, ‘We aren’t having carrots again, are we? Only it’s light nights now and I won’t need to see in the dark.’

‘Well, the thing about carrots is that you need
to keep on eating them to make them work,’ Emily informed him, watching as he digested her statement without comment.

‘You know what I think?’ Tommy asked her sagely, looking pleased with himself, obviously having accepted that he was not going to win the war over the carrots. ‘I think that Davey Burrows is only saying those things about Wilhelm because Wilhelm has been teaching me to play football, and I got two goals right past Davey.’

‘Well, I’m sure you’re right, Tommy, and that could have something to do with it,’ Emily agreed, hiding her smile.

It had been lovely having Wilhelm coming round again, but if having him here upset her Tommy in any way, then Wilhelm would have to go, despite the sharp pang the thought of that caused. Tommy wasn’t just any boy–he was special, he was hers, given to her by the war. He had filled her empty heart and her equally empty life and there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him.

Lou was tired of having to stay in bed in Halston’s medical unit in the grounds of the base, under the stern eye of a medical orderly, who wouldn’t so much as let her put a foot down on the floor unless the doc sanctioned it.

She was wearing ‘blues’, as the regulation pyjamas were known, her hair cut short because it had been so badly singed on one side, the new style giving her face an elfin appeal.

The burns on her hands had healed well, although the skin was tight and tender. The worst of the burns had been on the backs of her hands and her arms, which meant that she was still able to use her fingers properly, and would be able to continue with her training, much to her relief.

The surgeon who had removed the piece of fuselage from the back of her leg had, according to the RAF MO, done an exceptionally neat job of ‘sewing her up’ so that she would have only a very small scar.

‘You were lucky.’ The MO had told her. ‘A tenth of an inch further in and it would have severed an artery.’

The pilot whose life everyone said she had saved would also make a full recovery, and the men who had bailed out were all also all right, although one of them had a broken leg and another a broken shoulder.

Lou hadn’t been informed of any of this officially; that wasn’t the RAF’s way. Instead she had been told in snippets of information whispered to her during the many visits she had had from the other girls in her hut.

It had been a shock to come round from her operation to find not just the corp standing by her bedside, but, even more astonishingly, Halton’s most senior WAAF officer, and the base’s C-in-C.

Nauseous from the gas used to anaesthetise her, her head pounding and her recall of what had happened confused and vague, Lou had wondered what on earth they were talking about at first when they had praised her for her quick action and her courage.

‘Corp’s got her chest puffed out with pride, and you’re a real heroine,’ Betty had told her when she had managed to sneak a visit to Lou’s bedside in the otherwise empty medical ward.

‘I didn’t mean to be,’ Lou had replied. ‘I just saw the plane and the pilot, and I just did everything automatically without stopping to think.’

‘Well, everyone’s saying that if it hadn’t been for you being there and your quick thinking the pilot would have been a goner. And he isn’t just any old pilot, you know. He’s a squadron leader and an honourable,’ Betty had informed her.

Lou didn’t really care about any of that. She was just glad that he was still alive.

She’d been well and truly spoiled since she’d been in here, she admitted, with special meals sent over to tempt her appetite, and yesterday a parcel had arrived, sent anonymously, but containing thirty bars of Fry’s Chocolate Cream–one for each of the girls in the hut, Lou guessed–and, as everyone knew that prior to being sent on an op the Bomber crews were given a special meal that included a bar of Fry’s, it hadn’t been hard to guess that the chocolate had come from the squadron leader’s pals.

Lou had written home, explaining what had happened, but playing everything down so as not to worry her mother, and there’d been a positive flood of letters back, from her parents, from Grace, from Sasha, of course, and even from Cousin Bella, all wishing her well and telling her to hurry up and get better.

She’d been told that once she had been declared medically fit she was being given some special leave so that she could go home and see her family. Lou wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Her mother would certainly have something to say about her being too impulsive and taking unnecessary risks.

It was a pity that she was the only occupant of the small ward, Lou reflected. She could have done with some company, although not perhaps the company of Sister Wilson, she acknowledged, as this rather formidable-looking individual came in.

Sister Wilson had been the kindest and most sympathetic person when she had been feeling really poorly, seeming to understand, without Lou needing
to say anything, how uncomfortable the sometimes scratchy sheets felt against her burned skin, but now that Lou was well on the way to recovery Sister Wilson had turned into a gaoler, determined that her patient was going to stay within the rigid confines of her bed with its bedding pulled so tight into hospital corners that it was like a strait-jacket, instead of doing what Lou would much have preferred to be doing, which was getting up to go and look out of the window to see what was going on outside on the base, and teasing the nurse on duty to let her friends come in to see her outside visiting times.

Now, summoning a nurse to pull the screens round her bed, Sister Wilson told Lou briskly, ‘You’re about to have an important visitor. Nurse Allington here will help you into clean pyjamas, and remember, you might be in hospital but you are still in uniform.’

‘What was that all about?’ Lou asked the nurse when Sister had gone.

‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ the nurse replied unconvincingly as she buttoned Lou into a clean pyjama jacket and then told her, ‘You’ll have to put this on,’ handing her the red tie that Waafs were supposed to wear with their blue pyjamas when in hospital.