A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  Teddy’s sister Pamela was married to a doctor who told him that he had read some data about experiments in oxygen chambers and that oxygen would help the gunners’ eyesight, which was also the first thing that would go if they started to suffer from oxygen deprivation. After that Teddy had started keeping his gunners on oxygen from take-off to landing.

  They were in the thick of a heavily defended area. A grey curtain of smoke from the flak barrage lay dead ahead of them, a curtain of explosive that they had to get through.

  Compared to those big thousand-bomber raids, tonight was a relatively modest one, some two hundred or so aircraft—twelve from their own squadron—all heading in their loose gaggle towards the Ruhr, the Happy Valley.

  They had seen a Lancaster go down, hit in the wing by a fighter, seen it turn into a falling leaf of fire, and they had seen, too, a fellow Halifax being coned as it came through the Ruhr’s defences. It was caught in the blue master beam and they watched without comment as the slave beams turned, like soulless automata, towards their prey, trapping it in blinding white light and pumping their shells remorselessly up at it. The aircraft dived desperately into a corkscrew, but the beams were locked relentlessly on it and the heavy flak must have found it because they saw it explode in a great ball of flame.

  “Log that, navigator,” Teddy said in a dispassionate voice. “Did anyone see any parachutes?”

  A murmuring of “no”s on the intercom, a “poor bastards” from Keith, settled flat out on his front in the nose of the aircraft, ready for the run in. It was always a shocking thing to see an aircraft going down but there wasn’t time to think about it. It wasn’t you, that was the important thing.

  If we go, Teddy prayed, let us go instantly, the fireball not the fall. There would be no soft landing, whichever way. He was fatalistic rather than morbid. The last thing his crew needed at the moment—at any moment—was a despondent captain. Especially tonight when they were so jittery. They looked exhausted too, Teddy thought, a weariness that went beyond mere tiredness. What they looked was old, Teddy realized. And yet Keith had only just celebrated his twenty-first birthday, with a raucous party held in the sergeants’ mess. There was an innocence in all their celebrations, like naughty boys at a noisy children’s party. The sooty footprints on the ceiling, the unseemly lyrics of the sing-songs around the piano after the WAAFs had decorously retired for the night (a bolder one or two sometimes remaining). Not so very different from Augustus and his little pals, after all.

  Sylvie, rather inclined to indolent timekeeping, kept the clocks at Fox Corner running ten minutes ahead (a practice that tended to lead to confusion rather than punctuality). Teddy thought now how much better it would have been if someone had pushed their clock backward, if they had been led to think that this was their twenty-ninth sortie rather than their thirtieth, freeing them from their gloomy premonitions.

  To make matters worse, they had a second dickey on board. He was a novice pilot being blooded on his first trip. It was customary to send a tyro up with an experienced crew for a “look-see” before he took his own crew on operations, but for some reason a green second pilot was regarded as a jinx. There was no rhyme or reason to this belief as far as Teddy could see. His own first blood was drawn on a flight to bomb the docks at Wilhelmhaven with C-Charlie, a crew on their twelfth op, and they had barely acknowledged his existence, as if by ignoring him they could pretend he wasn’t sitting there in the dickey seat. C-Charlie came back with hardly any damage—some holes from flak and one engine out—but even after they had landed the crew still avoided him as if he might taint them somehow. Unlike his own crew, who were overjoyed to have him back “safe and sound” on the earth, and they all went on a mighty crew binge at a local pub, ground crew included, to celebrate this fact. The Black Swan, known by everyone as the Mucky Duck, had a very accommodating landlord who let the aircrews have running tabs knowing that many of them would never be paid. The dead reckoning.

  On Teddy’s second tour there was a sprog crew—W-William was their aircraft—who lost their pilot when he took his flight with another crew. They were immediately given a replacement, who duly took his dickey flight and also didn’t come back. (Perhaps they were bad luck, after all.) The pilotless sprog crew were beside themselves at this point, like anxious dogs, and so when they were given a third (understandably nervous) pilot Teddy took the whole crew up on their first op together, the new pilot in the dickey seat of W-William, his own aircraft. It was a testing maximum-effort raid to Berlin and they more than held their nerve.

  When they landed they were filled with jubilation. “Well done, boys,” he said. They were boys, not one over twenty. They invited him to have a drink with them in the sergeants’ mess—he was, after all, part of their crew, they said. He went but bowed out early, “Discretion being the better part of valour,” he wrote to Ursula, as it was one of her favourite aphorisms.

  “Not always,” she wrote back.

  W-William was on the battle order next day, a relatively safe mine-laying trip to drop “veg” off Langeoog in the east Frisians. Teddy felt more than usually sad when reading the familiar entry in the operations log the next day. This aircraft took off at 16.20 hours and failed to return. It has therefore been reported as missing. He found it difficult after the war to look at the North Sea without thinking of it as one enormous, watery graveyard, full of the rust and bones of aircraft and youthful bodies.

  On their next sortie the crew of C-Charlie, who had so reluctantly taken Teddy as their second dickey, ran out of fuel looking for somewhere to land in fog and crashed on the moors near Helmsley. “Their thirteenth,” Vic Bennett said, as if that explained it. He was the most superstitious of all of them. When they flew their own thirteenth op, to Stuttgart—on a Friday, no less—he asked the chaplain to put a special blessing on poor old J-Jig, which the chaplain, a jolly, obliging sort, did quite happily.

  The first five ops and the last five ops were believed by crews to be the most dangerous, although as far as Teddy could see the laws of probability applied every time. Only one in six aircrew made it through their first tour. (Never before or since, he thought, would so many be so obsessed with statistics.) He hadn’t needed Ursula’s girl in the Air Ministry to tell him that the odds were stacked against them. At the beginning of this tour, if Teddy had been a gambling man, which he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have laid bets on them living to see their grandchildren. Or their children, for that matter, as they hadn’t even reached that stage in their lives yet. None of them were married and according to Teddy’s reckoning at least half of them had been virgins when he first met them. Were any of them now? He didn’t know. Not Vic Bennett, he was engaged to a girl called Lillian (Lil) who he never stopped talking about, including everything they “got up to.”

  Vic was getting married to Lillian next week; they were all invited. Teddy didn’t think Vic should have made plans. He didn’t make plans himself any more. There was now and it was followed by another now. If you were lucky. (“What a fine Buddhist monk you would make,” Ursula said.)

  “If you look at the percentage loss,” Ursula’s girl from the Air Ministry said, sipping primly on a pink gin, “then, mathematically speaking, death is inevitable.” There were other ways of looking at the figures, she added hastily when Ursula glared at her. Teddy met her when he was on leave the following May. The three of them went for a drink together and then on to dancing at the Hammersmith Palais. Teddy didn’t enjoy himself, he had the uncomfortable feeling that every time the girl from the Air Ministry looked at him she was seeing a set of actuarial tables.

  Did Nancy know the cold calculus of death in Bomber Command? Probably not. She was cocooned somewhere in the clinical safety of an intellectual post. She was trying to make arrangements to see him in London as soon as the tour finished. She had written, “Perhaps I could come to your colleague’s wedding? Can you wangle an invitation or are girlfriends considered surplus to requirements?!” The tone of this letter felt all w
rong to him. The unfortunate use of the word “colleague,” for one. Vic Bennett wasn’t a “colleague.” He was part of Teddy, like an arm or a leg. He was a pal, a mate, a comrade. If civilization survived—and it was currently hanging in the balance—would it be as a society of equals? A new Jerusalem full of Levellers and Diggers? And it wasn’t just the RAF, surely, where class barriers had broken down as everyone was forced to muck in together. Teddy rubbed shoulders with men—and women—he would never have come across in a world of public school, Oxbridge, banking. He might be their captain, he might be responsible for them, but he wasn’t their superior.

  He had burnt Nancy’s letter in the stove in his hut. They were always short of fuel.

  Four minutes to target, skipper.”

  “OK, navigator.”

  “Four minutes to target, bomb-aimer.”

  “OK, skipper.”

  “That ruddy port inner’s still not happy, skipper,” Norman Best said. The light on the fuel pressure gauge had been flicking on and off for the whole flight, seemingly living a life of its own. It was the same engine that had delayed their take-off and Norman had been monitoring it suspiciously for some time now. It was just as well they’d been late getting off, Vic Bennett said. He, of all people, had somehow or other managed to forget his good-luck charm and had persuaded the WAAF driver who had brought them out to dispersal to race him back to the crew room to retrieve this item while the ground crew worked on the misbehaving engine. They were the unsung heroes of the “spanner brigade”—the riggers and fitters and mechanics. NCOs or lowly erks, they worked all day and night in every kind of weather. They waved them off when they left and greeted them when they returned. They might stay out all night in their huts on bleak dispersals waiting for “their” aircraft to return safely. No good-luck charms for them, just civil handshakes all round on departure and “See you in the morning then.”

  Vic Bennett’s own particular fetish was a pair of red satin knickers belonging to his fiancée, the aforesaid Lil. These “unmentionables,” as Vic called them, were carried, neatly folded, in the pocket of his battledress on every trip. “If we make it to his wedding,” Keith said, “I know what we’ll all be thinking about when the blushing bride walks down the aisle.”

  “It’ll be me that’s blushing,” Kenny Nielson said.

  Luck was everything. “No lady,” according to Keith, “just a bloody tart.” Superstition was rampant on the station. Everyone in the squadron seemed to have their own voodoo—a lock of hair, a St. Christopher, a playing card, the ubiquitous rabbit foot. There was a flight sergeant who always sang “La Donna è Mobile” in the crew room when they were getting dressed in their flying clothes and another who had to put his left boot on before his right. If he forgot he had to take all his kit off and start again. He survived the war. The flight sergeant who sang “La Donna è Mobile” did not. Nor the other hundreds with their weird rites and sacraments. The dead were legion and the gods had their own secret agenda.

  Keith did not have a mascot, claiming that his whole family was “widdershins,” their luck back-to-front, and he could probably have walked under a ladder with a dozen black cats crossing in front of him and he would be “just fine.” His convict antecedents were Irish gypsies, deported to Australia for vagrancy. “Not proper gypsies, probably,” he said. “Rogues and tramps, I expect.”

  Kenny Nielson was the youngest in a family of ten, “the bairn,” and his lucky mascot was a shabby little black cat—just the one—made of pieces of felt sewn together rather ham-fistedly by one of his many nieces. It was a deplorable creature that looked as if it had spent most of its life in the mouth of a dog.

  And, yes, Teddy’s ju-ju was the silver hare that Ursula had given him, which he had initially treated with careless disregard but which now flew every op cradled snugly in his battledress pocket, lodged above his heart. He had unconsciously developed his own ritual, touching the hare like a relic before take-off and after landing, a silent prayer and thank-you. Not that he could feel the little inanimate creature through the thick layers of his sheepskin flying jacket and Mae West. But he knew it was there, silently doing its best to keep him safe.

  They mooched morosely around as they waited for the WAAF to bring Vic back. George Carr ate his chocolate ration as usual. Everyone else saved theirs for later, but George reasoned that he might die during the raid and “never get to enjoy it.” Chocolate had been in short supply in his Lancashire childhood, he said.

  They smoked their last cigarette for the next six hours or so, emptied their bladders against S-Sugar’s tail and stared glumly at the ground. Even their normally chirpy little Scot was silenced. The poor second dickey was beginning to look as if he was on the way to his execution. “Are they always like this?” he muttered to Teddy, and Teddy, who could hardly say to the poor boy, “They think they’re for the chop tonight,” instead betrayed the collective character of his crew and said, “No, they’re just a miserable bunch of so-and-sos.”

  That morning Teddy had received a letter from Ursula. Inconsequential stuff, but at the end she had written, “How are you?” and the emotion compressed into those three laconic monosyllables seemed to rise off the page and unfold into something so much larger and more heartfelt. “All is well here,” he wrote back, with equal compression. “Don’t worry about me,” he added, giving her the reassuring gift of a disyllable.

  He asked a WAAF, a parachute packer called Nellie Jordan who was sweet on him, to post the letter. The WAAFs were all sweet on Teddy. He suspected this was simply because he had been around longer than most crew members. It was a letter to be sent, not one to be kept in his locker in the event of him not coming back. Teddy had three of those, one for his mother, one for Ursula, one for Nancy. They all said much the same thing, that he loved them and that they mustn’t mourn him too much because he died doing something he believed in and they should get on with their lives because that was what he would want. And so on. He didn’t think this one-sided, final correspondence was a place for soul-searching or philosophical introspection. Or for truth, for that matter. It had felt strange to write about himself in a future where he didn’t exist, a kind of metaphysical conundrum.

  If he were to die, someone from the committee of adjustment—a ridiculous euphemism—would come and swiftly clear away his kit. Anything that would give a mother or a wife pause for thought—smutty photos, letters to other women or French letters—would be put in a different bag. Not that Teddy had any indiscretions to hide, none that would leave tangible evidence anyway. He sometimes wondered what happened to these benevolently censored items—were they simply thrown away or was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets? He never did find out the answer to this question.

  The following year, during his second tour, he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn’t more or less relinquished poetry by then.

  Sometimes when a new crew arrived at a station they found that the belongings of the previous occupants of their Nissan huts were still strewn around the place as if they were about to walk back in. The committee of adjustment would shoo them out while they “cleared up,” packing away the dead crew’s belongings as WAAFs or orderlies stripped the beds and made them up anew. And sometimes those same sprogs would go up on a sortie that night and not come back and never even sleep in those newly made beds. They could come and go without anyone even knowing who they were. Their names written on water. Or scorched into the earth. Or atomized into the air. Legion.

  Vic Bennett arrived back, bearing aloft the unmentionables (“And yet mentioned so often,” Mac said sardonically), and they climbed into S-Sugar, J-Jig’s replacement. J-Jig had been an unwieldy beast. Like a lot of the Mark
IIs she had seemed reluctant to leave the ground. If she’d been a horse she would be the kind that you had to encourage to start the race, let alone finish, and if you hadn’t known about her, if you hadn’t been warned about her foibles, particularly her suicidal desire to swerve to the right, then it could have been the end of you before you had even begun.

  Tonight was only the second op they had flown in S-Sugar. It was a new kite, straight from the factory floor, as fresh as her crew had once been. They had all wanted to finish their tour in J-Jig, already an object of fond reminiscence. She had brought them luck, she had kept them safe and they were still resentful at her loss and convinced it was yet another sign that they weren’t going to make it to thirty. She had had twenty-six bombs stencilled on her fuselage, one for every mission flown, a key for her twenty-first mission and an ice-cream cornet that some joker had given her for a raid on Italy. S-Sugar’s only op so far, to Dusseldorf, hadn’t yet been commemorated and despite her newness none of them trusted her. The overheating port engine was just one of many niggles.

  Their CO had hitched a ride out to dispersal with Vic and was fretting now at the time. “Ten minutes,” he said, tapping his watch. Ten minutes to get off or they would be out of time and would have to be scrubbed.

  The truck with the WAAF and the CO aboard followed them along the perimeter track and parked by the flying-control caravan, where they climbed out and joined a rather ragged-looking farewell party that was waiting patiently to wave them off. Teddy suspected some of them had given up hope that they were ever going to go and had abandoned them.