by Shirley Mann
In a matter of minutes, they reached the coast. The sea was blue on this warm early October afternoon and the sky above merged with it as they sped out over the waves. Lily wistfully remembered days out to North Wales with her mum and dad, making sandcastles and eating ice creams. Maybe she and Danny might take a trip one day, she suddenly thought, and then drew herself up with a frown. Danny? Why was she thinking of him? She shrugged, dismissed the thought and concentrated on the ground below. A few minutes later, they swept around towards land again and Lily lurched forwards. She felt her stomach tighten and realised she was going to be sick. In a panic, she turned away from Bill and looked for something to be sick into, but there was nothing in the confined space of a war plane. As she hurled her dinner against the side of the plane, she heard Bill chuckle.
‘It happens to the best of us,’ he said, handing her his handkerchief and smiling back at her when she had finished, but Lily was too mortified to smile back. By the time they landed, Lily could not look Ted in the eye, but he knew nothing about her throwing up all over the side of the plane, so he was just grinning at her in triumph.
‘See that? Perfect flying,’ he crowed.
She nodded and clutching Bill’s handkerchief to her mouth, muttered her thanks and scuttled off to her hut.
*
That night, she went into the pub to meet Ted as arranged. He was with his crew, who all smiled knowingly at her. She cringed and touched him on the arm, signalling she needed to talk. They drew to one side and Lily started to speak, spluttering her apologies out, but he interrupted her.
‘Don’t worry, we’ve all done it. Bill does it regularly. Anyway, forget it, I want to know what you thought of your first flight.’
Reassured by his casual attitude, she enthused.
‘It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done. It was spectacular and the flying was so amazing. It was amazing to see the land below and I was amazed at how little everything was.’
‘So I gather it was amazing, then?’ he grinned.
‘Yes, sorry, but I just got so carried away. It was the most amaz— incredible thing I’ve ever experienced.’
‘Flying is my life, the war’s given me that chance at least. I just wish the Germans would leave us in peace to get on with it. But I am going to be a commercial pilot after the war . . . if I get through it that is.’
Lily was horrified. ‘Oh, please don’t say that. You’re such a brilliant pilot, you’ll get through it fine.’ But even as she was saying it, she knew that her voice was faltering and that she was as uncertain as he.
The evening was a happy one, spent with the whole crew in the pub and as Lily returned Bill’s hankie, she felt part of a team in a way that she hadn’t since Blackpool. This was potentially very dangerous, though, as the day before, one of the telephone operators had been completely traumatised at hearing over the airwaves a dog fight of a crew she had become very friendly with. Unable to have a two-way conversation, she had been forced to listen to the boy she had danced the foxtrot with the night before screaming in agony as his plane burst into flames – and then nothing. Lily could only hear Morse, but her imagination was vivid and her dreams were already a morass of burning metal, gunfire and mangled bodies. She didn’t need to hear the pilots’ voices to feel a close link with them. To become friendly with young men who were facing those sorts of dangers every day was a risk she had tried to avoid.
But that night, the pub was so relaxed, she attempted to forget about everything else and, realising she was starving after being sick, went through three packets of crisps. However, this wasn’t quite enough to soak up the two glasses of cider she had drunk. Fiddling with the little blue pack of salt at the bottom of the third packet of crisps, she noticed that Ted’s arm was around her shoulders.
Oh well, maybe it’s time I let go a bit, she thought and smiled up at him. He had nice eyes, she decided.
Ted kissed her gently at the end of the evening and she decided to respond, feeling his lips press against hers. He finally drew back.
‘I think you are a lovely girl, Lily, but you need to know, I don’t intend to get involved with anyone until this war is over. There are too many war widows out there already.’
‘I think that is a very sensible attitude and I agree completely. I’ve watched people rush into relationships that are doomed to failure and when I marry, it’s for life,’ she said, slurring her words slightly as she determinedly nodded her head.
‘So now we’ve established that, does that mean I can kiss you again?’ he laughed.
Chapter 25
Getting mail was the highlight of the day and Lily was a good correspondent. She wrote regularly to her family and to Alice and Amy, and their letters back were eagerly anticipated. Her letters to Danny were briefer. He always seemed to go to the bottom of the ‘to do’ list. Lily was having more and more trouble remembering what he looked like. That was until she received a letter from him. Then, she could just picture Danny talking and hear his voice in the way he wrote, and his letters always made her smile. They were comforting, somehow. A reminder of a less complicated time. But he was on the other side of Europe and good-looking pilots, like Ted, were right here with her.
Lily’s mum, who was much better at writing than her dad, regaled her with titbits of information about how she was trying all the recipes out of the National Food Campaign booklet. She was apparently becoming quite an expert at cooking everything on one unit of heat and now it wasn’t quite so warm, the coolness of the larder meant she was able to store a few days’ food at a time. She told Lily she had discovered curry powder and was using it to spice up potato pie, but her dad, a stickler for meat and two veg, was accusing his wife of ‘going all foreign’ on him. Her letters were often accompanied by a raisin cake, which made Lily extremely popular in the hut. Glad, in particular, had a sweet tooth and would bribe Lily with cigarettes in exchange for a large slab of the cake.
Glad was a mine of late-night stories, most of which made Lily blush vivid red under the cover of darkness as she whispered her tales. Lily tried to close her ears as Glad openly discussed her colourful life on the streets of Glasgow but found she was fascinated and, she hated to admit it, a little bit excited by the freedom of such an open attitude to an act she had been brought up to believe was a duty, and a sacred one at that. Glad missed out some of the details so Lily’s knowledge was extremely sketchy and the thought of a man and woman in bed was something she didn’t want to dwell on. Her mum and dad shared a bed for heaven’s sake!
Glad had been brought up in the Gorbals, a rough area where survival relied on quick wittedness, resourcefulness and sheer guts. She was the third in a family of five brothers and three sisters and her mother had struggled to make ends meet. Glad’s dad worked at John Brown’s shipyard, but he drank far too much and sometimes came home violent, lashing out at Glad, her mum and her sisters. Glad explained how he had worsened since 260 German bombers attacked the site in 1941, killing more than 500 civilians. The family had lost their home and had had to move in with a neighbour, cramming an extra ten people into an already crowded tenement. The murky window onto a very different sort of life was a shock for Lily and some of the other girls, but Mary nodded in a way that led the rest to realise she understood what Glad was talking about.
‘I left home,’ Glad said. ‘I couldn’a stand it no more. I had to find somewhere to live and a way to make my living. I tried, I really did, but there wasn’t much work in Glasgow at that time and, oh, I don’t know . . .’ she shrugged. ‘I found an easier way to get by an’ I was doin’ all right at it until this war came along. War and conscription’s not good f’ business so I volunteered before they made me join up. I thought I’d find myself a new career.’
Her voice was almost proud as she described her fall into hell and she didn’t court any approval, disapproval or condemnation. She just didn’t care. She was who she was and was making no apologies to anyone.
Lily finally turned
over after Glad’s life story had come to a chapter’s end and thought about the strange places that war takes people to. She would never have come across a prostitute and she certainly would never have learned to like one. Her prejudices were based on ignorance and a blissfully ignorant upbringing. She couldn’t help but smile when she thought what her dad would say if he knew she was sleeping next to a prostitute.
Better than sleeping next to a German, she mused as she drifted off.
The next morning, Lily got some post – a letter from Alice, who was apparently dancing her way through the war. The only problem she was having was understanding the Scottish accent. Lily sympathised with this, knowing that sometimes when Glad got excited, there ensued an incomprehensible torrent of Scottish slang, swearwords and jargon. Alice also told of the worries about the coming winter on the Lancashire hill farm. With intense pressure by the Government to produce more food, her parents were struggling to buy the feed for the animals, so Alice was sending much of her RAF pay home. This apparently meant that she had to flirt outrageously so that men would buy her drinks. The thought of the solid Lancashire woman batting her eyelashes like Viv made Lily giggle.
Oh, I miss that girl, she thought.
The second letter was from Amy, who was finally back at home and beginning to take control of her life. She told Lily that the psychiatrist had been wonderful and had made her see how important it was that she should be strong for her dad and brother. They had been struggling to keep going after the funeral and had been so worried about Amy that her dad had stopped eating. Seeing him dwindle into an emaciated shadow had made Amy snap out of her depression and she had eventually marched into the house, straight through to the kitchen and started to make an onion and cheese pudding. She told Lily that standing at the kitchen table, preparing food, she was sure she had heard her mum saying ‘Thank you, Amy’ and from that moment on, she had taken on her mum’s role, bossing and organising the two men in the house. The RAF had given her a combination of medical and compassionate leave and she had been left free for the next six months to support her family.
Lily sat back on her bed and frowned for a minute as she fingered the letters in her hands.
Hmm. Nothing from Danny. Strange. Normally she couldn’t shut him up.
Chapter 26
Danny peered warily out of the copse. He could not feel his left leg. He did not dare stand up but he tried to extend the muscle to make sure it was still there. Frank had fallen asleep, uncomfortably perched against some tree roots. Alan and Charlie were leaning against each other and Charlie’s mouth was open. Danny had spent the last hour straining his ears to hear whether Charlie was about to start snoring.
If I look that pale and wan, then we’re in trouble, Danny thought, taking in Frank’s grey, exhausted face in the dim moonlight. He glanced at his watch. Half past five in the morning. They had been there for fourteen hours now, four of them, hiding like moles in the Sicilian countryside. He looked through the bushes and could see the enemy vehicles just a couple of hundred yards away. He could just about make out the uniforms of the Germans as they tried to sleep on the bench seats of the trucks.
Danny was cross. It had been such a stupid mistake. The four of them had been diverted because of a mine that had exploded, blocking the route. Their huge vehicles had been left behind while the smaller trucks moved forward round the debris but then the transporter drivers were told there was another route they could take. It was an old farm track but it was just about wide enough to allow them to pass. Danny drove warily down the unchartered Sicilian road, bumping the sides and hoping the Germans had deemed it too insignificant to place mines. As night fell, they stopped to bivouac and he, Frank and the two others were dispatched to look for water. To avoid detection by the enemy, they had dodged this way and that, in and out of trees. Leading the little group, Danny looked up and realised they were lost.
‘I’ll go and look over the ridge,’ Frank said, zig-zagging across the vegetation.
When he got to the top, he suddenly stopped and then started to walk, very slowly, backwards, signalling to his comrades to hide. He hissed that he had come across a German soldier having a leak but that he did not think he had been seen.
The four of them went on their bellies into the side of the hill, trying desperately not to crunch any leaves.
‘Here,’ Frank hissed. ‘There’s some sort of den. Some kids must have made it or maybe someone’s been hiding out in it.’ He parted the foliage and inside they found a circle with the remnants of bits of food, some scrappy rags in the corner and a homemade bow and arrow.
‘I’m not sure this will save us from the Hun,’ Danny whispered, moving the bow so he could make himself as comfortable as possible.
They had been there all night, unable to move or speak, listening to the patrol that was just over the hill above them.
Frank woke and moaned gently. Danny reached over and put his hand over his mouth, signalling to the wide-eyed private to keep quiet. They were all desperate for some water and food but had not dared to open their packs where they knew there were life-saving supplies. They had all wet their pants, unable to move to relieve themselves and there was a rising stench.
Danny settled back in his perch, working out they had at least another hour before the October morning dawned and the German patrol would move on. He was worried that, back at camp, Eddie would have sounded the alarm and his company would walk straight into the Germans in a bid to find them.
He mentally had a conversation with his father, who always seemed to know the right thing to do at a time like this. It was strange, he had never talked to him about the previous war. His dad had been a foot soldier just like him and had seen action in the fields of Flanders. He occasionally saw his dad’s hands shake when someone mentioned it, but he really did not know what had happened there. It helped Danny to think that his dad had been through something similar and had survived to bring up a family. He smiled to himself. At least his dad had managed not to be a monk then.
There was a noise outside the copse. Danny froze and they looked at each other with the intensity of four men who didn’t know whether the next moment would be their last.
Chapter 27
Ted took Lily’s mind off everything. His solid, attractive presence was there in Lincolnshire, whereas Danny was thousands of miles away – just a vague memory from a distant life. Cycling along a back road in the autumn sunshine, she took a moment to delight in the flatness of the Lincolnshire countryside. The hills above Manchester had always put her off cycling and her only memory was of a day out with Danny when she opened her mouth to say something on their way to Hyde and nearly choked with a mouth full of gnats. To shut out the piercingly disturbing memory and any Lincolnshire gnats, she kept her mouth firmly shut and pedalled furiously behind Ted to keep up.
Ted had brought a picnic and they stopped at a little village shop to buy some Corona. At their chosen picnic spot, the fizz spurted out of the bottle covering the pair of them in the orange coloured liquid.
‘Darn it, that will take some getting out,’ Lily complained. ‘I’m already having trouble getting my blouses clean. Last domestic night, I had three shirts I couldn’t send to laundry because they were torn or stained.’
‘I’m becoming an expert at ironing,’ Ted replied ruefully. ‘My grandmother would be horrified.’
The services demanded high standards from its servicemen and women and the daily inspections held them all to ransom as they begged and borrowed bits of equipment to provide a full kit. Freda, in particular, was an expert at discovering the order in which the huts were being done and she had taught Lily to race off to the one above theirs on the list to borrow shiny or ironed items that had already been checked, placing the booty triumphantly on their own biscuit mattresses in the nick of time.
‘I’m really struggling with the mending though,’ said Ted, slyly glancing up at Lily, putting his thumb through a hole in his shirt and waggling it at her.
Lily was torn between being helpful and knowing that her stitching would make a seamstress weep. But, aware that he had a series of ops coming up, she took pity on him.
‘OK, give it to me when we get back and I’ll see what I can do. I’m not promising haute couture though.’
‘That’s why I love you,’ he laughed, pulling her to the ground.
Lily froze. She didn’t want to be loved, at least not by an airman who was going out on a week of ops.
‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that and you’re right,’ Ted said, sitting up again. ‘I could love you, Lily, but we both know that would be a mistake.’
Lily gathered up the picnic thoughtfully. Could she love Ted? She looked across at him as he packed up the bikes, his floppy blonde hair dropping into his eyes. He was good looking and she certainly enjoyed his company, but love?
He was obviously embarrassed at his slip and they cycled back in silence. When they arrived at the camp, she put her hand on his arm.
‘We’re having a lovely time, Ted, and I really enjoyed today but I agree, let’s just live for the moment and we’ll see what happens.’
He nodded, gave her a peck on the lips and turned his bike towards the sheds.
Two weeks later, Ted, wearing a freshly mended shirt, was dead.
