Summer of No Surrender

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  On camp, Six-gun Massey crept upstairs with his shoes in one hand, the fingers of his other entwined with those of Mrs Elaine Dundry Todd, as she led him through the darkness of a strange house. Everyone else was asleep and neither of them knew when a creaking stair might betray them. With as much caution as though he were stalking a Heinkel through broken cloud, Massey glided along the upstairs corridor, following another man's wife to her bedroom. He was a brave man, but would only dare to do this behind her husband's back. Her husband, however, was not much in either of their thoughts.

  She opened her door and shut it behind them and the only sound they made was their heavy breathing. There was a pause in the blacked out room before they found each other. Not a long pause.

  Tuttle and the country girl from No 1 O.M.Q. strolled towards the camp gates with their arms about each other. She had to check in at the W.A.A.F. Guard Room before going to her quarters and Tuttle waited for her. 'Alf a pint o' cyder on top of a double gin and orange ought to 'ave done the trick. She was only a kid, not used to drinking. Ought to be all right for a bit o' grumble-an'-grunt tonight, then.

  He saw her come towards him and went to meet her. "you bein' new 'ere, an' all, I oughter shew yer where the nearest air raid shelter is. Yer never know when the siren's goin' ter go, one night...'

  He put his arm around her waist but she pulled away. 'You are awful. Me mother warned me about boys like you. Thank you ever so for taking me out, Norm; I did have ever such a nice time.' She kissed him, clumsily but with enthusiasm, on his mouth, which was half-open with surprise, and he heard the patter of her running feet.

  'Well Oi'll be booggered!' Still, there was always tomorrow night.

  Dunal was not refused, however. He had picked up a girl at the Spider's Web, a secretary in some local office, and gone with her to her bed-sitter. He was bored and tired, and habitually contemptuous. He did not stay long in her bed and when he left her he had done more for her patriotism than any number of enemy air raids: My Gawd, if that damp little squib's what they call a marvellous French lover, give me an English boy any time.

  Lotnikski was with a woman, too, another road house pick­ up; but this one was higher in the economic scale than Dunal's and had a car. Her husband was with his regiment in the Outer Hebrides and she took her new Polish friend home to their detached Jerry-built house in a quiet road. The blackout gave them immunity from the embarrassment of street lights and inquisitive neighbours. Within three minutes of going upstairs she began to yelp and when he set out to walk back to the Spider's Web, where he had left his bicycle, she felt as though she had been through a typhoon in an open boat; she might have borne some of the same scars if she had: her lip was bleeding and there was a bite on her shoulder, her ribs were bruised and her pelvis felt crushed. But she was already looking forward to the next night with him and lay with a smile both reminiscent and anticipatory until she fell asleep.

  Knight had dropped Massey and his lady aviator at the end of the Officers' Mess road. Now Anne moved closer to him and laid her head on his shoulder. When they came to her home he stopped the car on the grass verge outside the gate. 'Don't want to disturb your people.'

  'You will come in, won't you?'

  He kissed her first. 'What do you think?'

  They walked hand-in-hand up the drive and when they entered the darkened house there was a torch on the hall table to light them. She checked that the curtains in the drawing room were drawn dose, then switched on a heavily shaded table lamp. Knight felt at home. The room, with its conventional chintz-covered sofa and armchairs, its well polished antique mahogany tables and display cabinets, its silver vases and photograph frames, was a replica of his own parents' drawing room. It smelt the same, with the faint lavender odour of furniture cream and the scent of the same flowers as they would have at this time of year. The bow window at one end and the french window at the other were as familiar to him as though he had always lived here.

  The girl stood near and he drew her close against him to kiss her again. They sat with their arms around each other on the sofa.

  'Thank you for a lovely evening, Peter.'

  'I'm glad you liked Elaine. I wasn't sure about her at first.'

  'She's fun. And very brave and clever to fly so many different kinds…types of aircraft all over the place. I really ought to do something instead of staying at home.'

  'You're not serious?' He was troubled.

  'It's on my conscience, Peter.'

  'But your voluntary work at the hospital...'

  'That's not much. And it's not directly helping the war effort...'

  'I don't think the wounded types in the hospital would be very flattered!'

  'It's selfish of me. I just don't want to leave home as long as you're here.'

  He said nothing for a while, holding her firmly to him and resting his cheek against her hair, soft and fragrant and infinitely stirring, so that he was overwhelmed at the same time by protectiveness and a desire to strip her naked.

  'You know I want to marry you, Anne.'

  She turned in his arms, moved her head back and smiled into his face. 'You've never said so.'

  'It wouldn't be fair. I might...' he hesitated. 'I might get an overseas posting, and the war's going to go on a long time.' Poor darling: I might...might get an overseas posting. I might be killed was what he meant. And he didn't say so, to spare her rather than himself.

  'I'll marry you tomorrow if you want me to, darling.'

  'I want you to, darling; but we can't.'

  Thus do the British do their courting and make their declaration of undying love and passion!

  A few miles away, Simon Blakeney-Smith was offering no resistance to his officer lady's importunities. They were both comfortably tight and staggered a little and giggled as they undressed one another in the cramped little room she occupied in a wooden hut on a dreary new A.T.S. barracks site.

  'Rotten example to the girls, aren't I?'

  'Damned good example. Should be a lot more of this, to help the war effort.' He fell heavily on her bed. 'Come here, you.'

  Her breath was sour and tainted with nicotine. He remembered the fresh young F.A.N.Y. in the ambulance. But this would have to do for now.

  They had enjoyed themselves in Boulogne. The blonde, the redhead and a couple of nondescripts had gone with Hafner, Ihlefeld and two other pilots, Weber and Baumbach. Dinner was quiet and well behaved, eaten with Teutonic concentration on the pleasures of the stomach which discouraged the girls from chatter. But by the end of it all eight of them were flushed and growing noisy. They sat at a corner table, among other Germans, isolated from the rest of the room. There were many German officers in the restaurant, some of them with French women; but apart from the obligatory heel­clicking and bowing to their superiors, none acknowledged the others. The French pointedly looked the other way.

  They blundered noisily into the farmhouse, the girls already half-undressed and laughing shrilly. There was some dispute about who would go with whom and finally Hafner took the redhead and left the blonde with Ihlefeld while the others argued drunkenly.

  Greiner, sitting in the big kitchen with the widow Proud homme, contentedly smoking his pipe, drinking coffee and, with her help, reading a French newspaper, heard them come in and jumped to his feet.

  She looked at him scornfully. 'Where are you going, Monsieur Greiner?'

  'Nowhere, Madame. I'm only listening: he may need help. I often have to undress him.'

  'I know.' Her tone was heavy with contempt. 'But you can hear that he won't need you to do that for him tonight; there are other willing hands.'

  'French hands,' he reminded her; not without hope.

  She spat into the rubbish pail by the stove but did not reply.

  They heard dragging footsteps overhead and the slamming of doors, the creak of bedsprings.

  Greiner sat down again and picked up his paper. Covertly he glanced at the woman. With compressed lips she glared at her knitting. In resigna
tion he put aside the newspaper and trudged off to his lonely bed in the barn.

  Eight

  Bernie Harmon had ceased to be afraid.

  Just as love can teach a man to hate, joy can make him miserable and despair turn him into a martyr, so a succession of experiences of total terror can, if survived, give him conscious immunity from fear.

  Harmon woke early the next morning and his first thought was that he welcomed the day. He looked forward to the fighting it would bring.

  This was not a sublimation of fear, not an instance of the truism that the bravest man is the one who is afraid but conquers his fear; that only a stupid, insensitive man can be unafraid; thus his acts of apparent bravery do not qualify, because he is not overcoming a weakness. Harmon's was a sublime self-confidence, acquired by passing through many mortal dangers in triumph. He knew his own quality as pilot and marksman and knew that nature had given him eyesight and timing of extraordinary sharpness. He was equipped with the best fighter aircraft in the world, if properly handled. He could see no reason to be afraid any longer.

  When he had first met the enemy he felt sick with fright. He had gone on feeling frightened until he had fought in engagements and shot down three bombers and three Me. 109s. At that point his fear suddenly vanished. Now it cost him nothing, emotionally, to go into action. He had come to enjoy destruction. Other fighter pilots with whom he had tried to talk about attitudes to destroying an enemy aircraft had all backed away and dismissed the matter in the same embarrassed terms: they never thought of it as a fight against another human being; as killing someone. It was simply one machine against another.

  But to him, since he had first shot down a German aeroplane at the age of nineteen, it had always been personal combat of the medieval and most basic sort: man against man; never a mere impersonal contest between a Hurricane and a Messerschmitt or Heinkel. He had not yet admitted to himself that he was intent on killing: he believed still that all he wanted was to shoot enemy airmen down to put them out of action.

  When he spoke on the R/T, once he had sighted the enemy, his voice rose and became fixed on a note which suggested hypnosis. With each succeeding call he made, during an interception, its pitch went up until it reached a shrillness that could sound almost demented. The only ones who had registered the change which came over him were the Operations Room controllers who talked to him on the radio, guided him towards the enemy, listened to his comments when a fight was over, and helped him back to base.

  Once, the Senior Controller at East Malford had controlled him on a long pursuit through broken cloud in the fading light of a wet evening in early summer, when communication between controller and pilot became more a communion, in the intimacy and singleness of purpose which it demanded and provoked. A solitary enemy raider had sneaked over the coast and a single fighter was scrambled to intercept it. Harmon's. increasing excitement, tension and concentration had communicated themselves to the controller, who felt himself tingling and sweating from vicarious participation in what he recognised was a murderous lust to kill the men in the Dornier, not merely a determination to bring down the bomber itself. He was told afterwards that his face became a mask, as though he were in a trance. He had made some self-conscious and jocular comment about being mesmerised by the sense of responsibility, but he brooded on it for a long time and decided that 'trance' was a good word to describe what happened to young Flight Sergeant Harmon. Now, many combats and many kills later, Pilot Officer Harmon still lost himself in a kind of self-hypnosis when killing time was near.

  Bernie did not know any of this about himself. He only knew that it was a deep relief to be afraid no longer. He recognised his satisfaction in destroying the enemy fighter pilots and air gunners who were trying to kill him, and the bomber pilots who were trying to devastate his country, but rationalised this as the natural human instinct for self-preservation. He did not hate them for being Germans or because they were Nazis. He shot them down with conscious relish because he knew what they were trying to do to him and to his country: it was not machines that were trying to kill him and reduce England to ruins, but the men who flew them.

  The cause of his lethal frenzy did not matter as much as its effect: he was now immune from the fear which was felt by his comrades, who were ordinary young men without the touch of genius or talent or whatever the quality is which sets men apart from their fellows, and which made Harmon a supremely efficient and ruthless killing machine.

  There were other things that he enjoyed: rifle and clay pigeon shooting, at which he was brilliant; table tennis, where his lightning reactions and deadly accuracy had made him a champion. At shooting and table tennis a man did not have to be big, strong or fit, to excel. It was skill and timing which gave him superiority; just as in air fighting.

  Most of all he enjoyed making love to his wife. He turned and contemplated her now: small, pigeon-plump, with a rose-bud mouth and long lashes resting on rosy cheeks. He buried his thin, small hand - dancing with Bernie was like holding a bird's claw, Anne Holt said - in her long, dark hair and kissed her into wakefulness. Smiling sleepily in anticipation, Sarah took him in her arms and shifted cosily around.

  Later they both ate a breakfast such as few people in Britain then, with food rationing, could indulge themselves in. They lived in two rooms over a butcher's shop, which they had chosen not so much for proximity to the airfield and a low rent as for the ease and secrecy with which meat beyond the legal ration could be taken upstairs. And the butcher, naturally, was related to the grocer.

  As usual, Bernie Harmon cycled into dispersals a good quarter of an hour before the other pilots appeared.

  He went straight to his aircraft and was soon the centre of a group of ground crew, chatting and joking with them on terms of easy equality. He had been a technician himself, when he passed out of apprentice school, and until very recently an N.C.O.: there were no barriers between him and any of them, just as there were no barriers between him and his brother officers.

  One of the new Hurricanes was standing next to his.

  He noticed that Blakeney-Smith's personal insignia had already been stencilled on to it: a mailed fist holding a battle-axe. 'The family crest, actually, old boy,' as Simon had explained; and been met by Peter Knight's acid 'Which family old boy: the Blakeneys or the Smiths? Surely the Smiths' should be a bloody anvil? And isn't a blakeney something you mend shoes with?'

  Even the absurd Simon had not been so crass as to prolong the matter by pointing out that those were blakeys.

  Bernie Harmon, the only natural, and most accomplished, killer at East Malford, did not bother with defiant decorations on his aircraft. He sometimes thought that he might let the ground crew paint a Mickey Mouse on it; perhaps even Mickey cocking a snook or sticking up two fingers. But nothing in the nature of a line-shoot like heraldry or belligerent caricatures. At the back of his mind was a vague intention to indulge himself in some whimsy when his score of confirmed kills reached twenty. If he had thought about that a bit he might have perceived a hint of superstition in it, but the idea never occurred to him. Meanwhile he humoured the erks by allowing them to mark his score on the fuselage in the customary way; he was uninterested in this display, but it kept them happy.

  Hafner stood morosely under the shower, with an aching head.

  Presently Weber shuffled in, yawning. 'My God! These French frippets make me appreciate my wife more than ever. I wish to God I could go home on leave.'

  Baumbach, on his heels, agreed. 'Makes me appreciate my fiancée, too, when these empty-headed French bitches make themselves so cheap. I can't stand drunken women. And some of the things they want to do in bed! Damned disgusting …'

  'I'll take the burden off you,' one of the others offered with a laugh.

  Another said 'Yeah, and we ought to find some other way to make Weber appreciate his wife, too. I'll take that piece off your hands, Johann, if you like...'

  'Go and take a running screw at yourself.'

  'I
may have to! I haven't found a girl who appealed to me for at least two weeks.'

  Ihlefeld lurched in. 'God, I feel grim this morning. That blonde's insatiable, Erich.'

  'You'd better have the redhead back, then: I managed to satisfy the blonde easily enough!'

  The two-week celibate asked, 'You or that randy Alsatian of yours?'

  It was the kind of remark which appealed to the German sense of humour and set everyone guffawing and elaborating on the theme. Only a joke about excreta could have amused them more. So much for Teutonic fun.

  They went to breakfast with their usual ravenous young appetites, despite the punishment they had inflicted on their stomachs the previous evening. All they remembered were the pleasures of the night; its miseries were already forgotten.

  Greiner watched them strut towards the mess and shook his head tolerantly. What a bunch of lads they were! Living for the moment, careless of what the immediate future held in store. Even the best was not good enough for these fine young gentlemen. What stories he would have to tell around the fireside when this was all over: Yes, I knew General Hafner when he was a young lieutenant. He remembers me well: every year, at the old comrades' reunion, he has a word with me. That's right, the same General Hafner who commands the British Air Force: good allies, those British, now that they have settled down under the Führer as a German colony.

  But they hadn't won the war yet And Leutnant Hafner may not be one of those destined to survive it, despite his papally blessed medal. Poor young devil, how could anyone begrudge him his pleasures?

  He set about tidying the disorder in the room.

  They were all far from home, Greiner told himself, strangers in a hostile land, and it must be much worse for the youngsters than it was for the likes of him. He could find a certain philosophy of outlook, at his age; and he was not accustomed to much, at the best of times: unlike the officer-gentry.

  A more than philosophical gleam lit his eyes as he thought ahead to the moment when he could take a respite from his work and go out to the fields to give Madame Prudhomme a hand on the farm.