The House of Flowers

by Charlotte Bingham

  But they were still alive, and while they were still alive there was hope – particularly once the engine coughed and spluttered into life at Poppy’s second attempt. Now all she had to do was control the spin and pull out of the dive.

  ‘That’s all,’ Poppy thought as she began to go through the procedures as taught to her in her crash course of flying at the aerodrome. ‘I simply have to control the spin, get the nose up and kick on. Child’s play really, compared with being on a mad Arab mare bolting out of control.’

  Derek and Trafford had both done their job. But then as both Derek and Trafford would have readily volunteered they had a star pupil, someone who was a naturally gifted pilot. Not many tyro pilots could have survived the spin and stall Poppy had encouraged; in fact a lot of experienced pilots would have encountered great difficulty in saving themselves from such a situation. Yet within a quarter of a minute Poppy had pulled the plane out of its death spin and had it back flying on an even keel.

  By way of thanks her passenger half turned round in front of her and gave a double thumbs up. Poppy responded by thumbing up in return, while privately thinking they weren’t out of the woods yet. Even so, now they were far below the cloud cover it became plain and level flying until they reached the Dieppe coastline where Poppy once again anticipated trouble.

  Expecting more anti-aircraft fire she dropped down even lower, hoping to fly over the coast at not much more than one hundred feet. Her only problem might be encountering some lethal object of the same height or higher than her plane. But having carefully charted her approach along the flatlands before arriving at the low lying coastline itself, Poppy reckoned the risk was minimal, so from a hundred and fifty feet she took the plane fifty feet lower and hoped for the best.

  Again her luck held until she was over the dunes and heading for the sea – but then just as she hoped she had made it to relative safety she heard a burst of high-powered shooting break out from below and then behind the plane. Easing the joystick back she felt the plane begin to climb at once, only for it suddenly to shudder as a hail of bullets ripped into its tail area.

  ‘Damn, damn,’ Poppy swore as she felt the plane begin to falter. ‘Damn, damn and double damn.’

  Checking both flaps and rudder she got the impression that she still had control; at least, enough control to fly the aircraft in a straight line, as long as the enemy scored no more hits from what she imagined had to be a heavy machine-gun nest somewhere in the sands over which she had just flown.

  Next she breathed in briefly to see if she could smell fuel, but again mercifully she drew a blank. To judge from the signals Poppy was getting from the figure in the front seat, her passenger was also unharmed. Hoping they had escaped relatively unscathed, she eased the stick back in an attempt to climb higher, but the little plane faltered, failing to respond. Poppy eased the stick back even further and at last the nose rose and the plane began to climb, though how high she had no idea since when she checked her instruments she found the altimeter was no longer functioning, along with all the rest.

  Understanding that as a result of the hit she had lost her instruments, Poppy took stock and thought ahead. As long as the plane had suffered no other serious damage, particularly to flaps and rudder, then provided she made enough height they might just be able to limp home. She could only guess at their height, which was worrying since the course she had plotted was designed to take them in right over the massive cliffs at Beachy Head. It would therefore seem only sensible to replot their route and try to get home by diverting west to come in over the relative levels of Brighton Beach, hoping they had either enough height to clear the Down directly behind the town or enough aircraft left to make an emergency landing there.

  But when she tried to steer the plane left she got no response, only a drop in height. Quickly she eased the plane back up to the height she hoped she had been maintaining, only for the engine to splutter, miss and splutter again. At once she adjusted the fuel feed, and, miraculously, seconds after doing so – seconds that felt like minutes – she felt the engine begin to fire again on all cylinders, although now when she asked it to climb it stayed resolutely level.

  Again she tried to turn to the left, and again the same thing happened. The same thing happened when she tried to steer to her right, although at least when she tried this direction the loss of height was not accompanied by any loss of power. Even so, there was no way Poppy was going to be able to change the direction in which she was headed without going down in the drink. She was faced with Hobson’s choice. Swallowing hard, Poppy flew straight on at her present altitude.

  Guessing at both her airspeed and the distance, Poppy calculated they were still about twenty-five miles from the English coastline. Even though her instrumentation was down, she knew they were travelling a long way short of full speed, estimating from the sound of the engine and from the difficulty she had in gaining altitude that their speed was probably no greater than eighty knots, which meant they should be arriving at Beachy Head in between fifteen and eighteen minutes’ time, provided she could sustain her current rate of velocity. The fact that she saw the huge cliffs looming up in front of her in the pale light of a moon that was at last clear of the cloud cover that had earlier saved their lives meant she had miscalculated.

  It also terrified the life out of her, as well as suddenly giving her heart. For although they were much nearer the cliffs than she had estimated, the fact that they had arrived there sooner than her calculations had suggested could only mean that somehow they had picked up air speed, which in turn meant that Poppy might now be able to get the plane’s nose up. She was going to have to do so, because as she stared ahead of her at the cliffs that seemed to be rushing towards her, she realised they were flying in at a height of at least fifty feet below their top. If she couldn’t gain height, and quickly, they were dead.

  Checking that she had the throttle set to maximum, which indeed she had, Poppy prayed hard and set her hands either side of the joystick. Her passenger was unmoving, all attention seemingly fixed on the mountain of white chalk and stone ahead of them. Checking the distance and able only to guess at it, Poppy reckoned the distance that lay between them and certain death could be no more than a quarter of a mile, and given that they must be travelling at nearly one hundred miles an hour that gave them approximately a quarter of a minute to gain sixty feet, in a plane that seemed unwilling to rise another sixty inches.

  She pulled the joystick back, not hard but with utter determination, the sort of purpose designed to will Tiger Tim not to fail her. For two, three, four, five seconds there was no response at all, other than the chilling sound of a splutter as all at once it seemed the engine was about to cut out altogether and the plane, simply glide silently into the cliffs to explode with a shattering concussion and a life-enveloping ball of flame.

  But it didn’t. Instead the splutter seemed to galvanise the engine into stronger life, and suddenly Poppy saw the nose start to lift. She eased the joystick back even more, knowing that she was running the risk of over-cooking the climb yet having to take that risk since it was the only chance left for survival. And as the nose lifted so the plane climbed slowly, inexorably and then with a sudden surge as if the plane had got inspiration from a vortex of air beneath its wings. Whatever the explanation it was now climbing surely and steadily, and as Poppy dared to look directly forward at the solid mass of cliffs that had been about to take away two lives, she saw it falling away beneath the Tiger Moth, at first by only a matter of feet as the little plane cleared the very edge of the stone and chalk massif, so near in fact that Poppy swore the undercarriage was about to catch and bring them down head first; yet on the plane climbed until now they were flying a good thirty to forty feet over the grassland below, when it could climb no more. Then, once it had reached its safe height, it began to falter the way a winged bird sometimes does, fluttering and tipping before it crashes to the ground.

  The moment she felt the plane begin to fail Poppy
hit her internal emergency button, knocking back her airspeed instead of panicking and trying to increase it. The Tiger Moth steadied, just long enough for Poppy to trim the craft sufficiently to get her level; then she dropped the nose by a matter of a few degrees, just enough to begin an uncontrolled descent towards the downland that was now coming up to meet them, but not so much that they would nosedive into the ground. Enough in fact to leave her some control over the descending plane, enough to lift the nose, which she did, just enough for the plane to level itself – which it did – then to cut the engine – which she did – and for the plane to glide in to do an emergency landing – which it did.

  Poppy closed her eyes, held on to the side of the cockpit, prayed and sat out the bounces. The Tiger Moth, brilliant little plane that it was, bounced six times, each bounce lower than the preceding one, but never tipped and never nosedived. It kept its equilibrium, landing and running in a long uncontrolled semicircle on top of the cliffs until finally it hit a shelf of grass, a ledge firm enough and strong enough to halt its progress and to tip the plane slowly up on to its nose so that it rested on its now shattered propeller, its rear wheel spinning slowly and silently while the occupants sat at first too stunned to move.

  They jumped even though there was no smell of fuel. Having got themselves unstrapped they stood up in their tipped up cockpits and leaped sideways out, landing on the wings and sliding forward. As soon as their feet hit the ground they ran. They ran harder than they had perhaps ever run until they were a good hundred yards from the crashed plane, where they threw themselves face down on the ground to await the inevitable explosion.

  There was none. Whatever had happened to the plane – and judging from the amount of bullet holes in the rear fuselage plenty had happened to the plane, including half a dozen entry points not six inches behind Poppy’s seat – the fuel lines had remained intact. Wires must have been damaged, broken in all probability – the same with any electrics and with pressure lines – but the fuel supply was intact, and, since the electrical system had failed, there were no sparks to ignite any possible fire.

  Poppy stood up, still gloved and helmeted, put her hands on her hips and surveyed the little plane with love and pride. If it had been smaller she would have gone and hugged it.

  Next to her, her passenger was also staring at the crash site, before turning to Poppy and removing goggles and helmet, throwing her arms around her. ‘I don’t care who you are, you’re a blasted genius. Marry me, please? Please!’

  Poppy, seeing who her passenger was, took her own goggles and helmet off and smiled back.

  ‘You might just want to reconsider the last part of your statement.’

  ‘Poppy?’ Lily stared at her. ‘Poppy! ’

  Chapter Fourteen

  By D-day, Anthony Folkestone had quite made up his mind that Marjorie was the girl for him, and having come to that particularly difficult decision he now had to find the right way to tell her so. It just did not seem good enough simply to take her out for yet another drink in a public house that, like everyone else locked up in Eden, he was beginning to find more than a little dreary and certainly most unromantic. The trouble was, with no leave in immediate prospect for either of them and so much work on their desks, it was all but impossible to get up to London, or indeed anywhere else. Then Marjorie inadvertently came to his rescue by learning how to jitterbug.

  In fact both she and Kate had been learning to jitterbug for quite some time now. It had come to them a little later than to most other young women of their age since they were not so exposed to the whims and trends of fashion as their urban contemporaries, but they had both been to a local hop six months earlier where many of the American soldiers posted nearby used to go to dance. And they had all heard about the jitterbug.

  When Kate and Marjorie first saw it being expertly danced by a couple who looked professional they were so good, it quite took their breath away. The man moved rhythmically and constantly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he spun his partner round him, her feet beating out double time to the music; the woman switching from left hand to right hand as her partner turned her then turned her again, being lifted and dipped over his shoulders, being spun round him with both feet off the floor, and finally, as a sort of coup de grâce, being thrown in the air above his head, caught, held aloft, turned and then dropped to the floor to slide through his open legs and out the other side. Then she was caught once more by her partner, who had swiftly turned to grab her hands and turn her for one last spin – whereupon she performed the perfect splits to land on the floor with one arm up in the air.

  The whole dance floor had come to a stop to watch them, and when the demonstration was over they had applauded and cheered the couple to the echo.

  ‘We have to learn how to do that.’ Kate had laughed. ‘I can’t wait to teach Eugene and have him twirling me round his head like that!’

  The two young women had spent many happy evenings in the cottage patiently learning the basic moves of what was also known as jiving, they discovered. They listened to the wireless endlessly, waiting for the right tunes to be played, and were soon on their way to becoming very polished performers. All they needed now was their partners.

  But with Eugene out of action for so long, and Marjorie still technically unattached, they found themselves dancing with each other more often than not until Marjorie saw a ‘Jitterbug Hop’ advertised one night when they were in the local pub. It was to be held the following weekend at the local fire station of all places, but then since the outbreak of war women all over the country had got very used to dancing in the most unlikely places, from deserted ballrooms in crumbling country houses that had been taken over by the army to huge echoing Nissen huts on busy RAF stations, and even between the aisles of department stores after closing time. But neither Kate nor Marjorie had ever been to a dance in the local fire station.

  ‘I wonder what you two are so busy laughing about,’ Anthony wondered as he joined them and peered over their shoulders at the hand-painted poster. ‘Gracious me – what’s a jitterbug hop in heaven’s name? And in the fire station?’

  ‘Don’t be such a grandfather, Tony!’ Marjorie teased, taking his hand. ‘Why don’t you come and see for yourself? Kate and I are going – as I should imagine are the rest of the section.’

  ‘Jitterbugging?’ Anthony had persisted. ‘Don’t you have to be a Yank to jitterbug?’

  When they got to the dance the following Saturday they found the fire station already packed and jumping, one set of the station doors having been thrown wide open so that the overspill could dance on the concrete apron outside to the music of a great-sounding six-piece band that came from the local US Army base. And everyone was already jitterbugging with various degrees of experience and skill.

  ‘Hey!’ Kate laughed. ‘This looks great! I just wish Eugene was well and fit enough to be here.’

  ‘I should think Eugene does, too,’ Anthony agreed. ‘The wonder is he let you come by yourself.’

  ‘He hadn’t any choice,’ Kate replied. ‘I said I’d wring his neck if he said no. Seriously – he was very good about it. After he’d stood outside roaring like a bull for ten minutes.’

  ‘Actually, you know, looking at it, I’m not sure this would be Eugene’s thing exactly, are you?’ Marjorie wondered. ‘Isn’t he inclined to get all romantic?’

  ‘So come on – who’s going to ask me to dance, I wonder?’ Kate enquired generally. Within seconds she had half a dozen offers, finally selecting a tall, well-built GI who whisked her on to the floor and at once began to jive with tremendous skill and speed. When last seen Kate had one arm stuck high in the air and was whooping with unbridled delight.

  Anthony sat out the first number, and then the next, until Marjorie wondered whether he would ever ask her on to the floor.

  ‘Look,’ he said finally. ‘This isn’t very fair on you. Why don’t you do what Kate’s done and find yourself a partner? I’ll have one of these Coc
a-Colas that are on offer and try and pick up a few hints. Go on, Marjorie – you’re here to enjoy yourself.’

  Reluctantly Marjorie allowed herself to be escorted on to the floor by one of the local firemen. He was not a good dancer; enthusiastic certainly, but devoid of any sense of rhythm and co-ordination, condemning poor Marjorie to five minutes of dancing from hell. Thanking him politely she hurried back to Anthony, who encouraged her to enjoy the singular lack of dancing talent of another couple of local young men before suddenly surprising her by leading her on to the floor at the start of a very up-tempo number.

  ‘You don’t have to do this, you know!’ she called to him above the band. ‘This isn’t in the line of duty sort of thing at all!’

  ‘Save your comments for afterwards, miss,’ Anthony smiled before proceeding – as Marjorie later put it – to dance her socks off.

  He was not just good, he was very good: light on his feet, beautifully balanced and with a tremendous sense of rhythm and invention. In fact he was so good that Marjorie spent most of the hectic jive with a deeply puzzled frown on her face. When the number was over Anthony said nothing, but just bowed, while she said nothing to him because she was speechless. Before she knew it the next dance had begun and they were off again, this time to a slower beat but with no loss of expertise. They danced three times in a row before the band took a break, whereupon Anthony took her outside for a breather, walking her away from the station until they found a bit of peace and quiet under the shade of a huge mature chestnut tree.

  ‘They call people like you dark horses, you know that, don’t you?’ Marjorie said after she’d got her breath back.

  ‘They call people like me all sorts of things,’ Anthony replied, producing his silver cigarette case and offering her a smoke. Marjorie took it and then wondered why. The last thing she suddenly found herself wanting was to have a cigarette in her hand or mouth should Anthony suddenly decide to kiss her, but then she realised he wouldn’t be thinking of kissing her if he himself was also smoking a cigarette. ‘When you achieve the rank of major, people call you all sorts of names, and you can’t blame them. There’s something that comes with the rank of major that makes people want to stick their tongues out at you. I don’t know what it is. But there you are.’