A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  They lumbered along the runway, everyone waving enthusiastically at them, particularly the CO, who made a point of always being there at every take-off and often gave the impression that he believed that if he waved vigorously enough—with both arms aloft, running along the flare path beside them—he would help them lift their wheels successfully and drag their full bellies of bombs into the air. Crashing on take-off accounted for so much loss of life that it was always a moment of supreme reprieve for Teddy when he had managed to haul the Halifax off the concrete and above the hedges and trees.

  If you turned back from the target—and it happened all the time because of weather or technical problems with the aircraft—then those runs also didn’t count as an op, no matter how hair-raising. “Bloody unfair,” Teddy said. “Iniquitous, old chap,” Keith said in an atrocious attempt at a posh English accent. They were uproariously drunk at the time, on the forty-eight-hour stand-down after Turin. They should have turned back from Turin, Teddy realized that now, but he was one of those pilots who “pressed on.” Some didn’t.

  The first time they ever turned back—only their second sortie—was because their starboard engine started leaking coolant over the North Sea and then the spark’s intercom packed up and so Teddy made what he thought was the sensible decision to turn for home, jettisoning their bombs harmlessly into the North Sea. Their CO—a different one from now—wasn’t impressed. He frowned upon early returns and he interrogated them for a long time about why they had thought they shouldn’t press on to the target. Teddy thought it was fairly obvious why—the engine was going to overheat and catch fire (in those early days they were less sanguine about such things) and they needed to be able to communicate with the spark. “Do you?” the CO said. “In an extremity you would manage surely? And a good pilot wouldn’t think twice about flying on only three engines.”

  It was then that Teddy realized that they were not so much warriors as sacrifices for the greater good. Birds thrown against a wall, in the hope that eventually, if there were enough birds, they would break that wall. Statistics in one of Maurice’s great War Office ledgers. (“What a pompous ass he has become,” Ursula wrote crossly.)

  And that was when Teddy resolved that he would not have their courage questioned again, they would not be Harris’s “weaker brethren,” but would “press on” to the target every time unless it was absolutely impossible, but that he would also do everything he could to keep them all alive. Over the rest of the first tour whenever they weren’t on ops he had them constantly doing parachute and ditching drills—unrealistic perhaps with neither air nor water to practise with, but if they knew what to do, if it literally was drilled into them, then they would—might—beat those overshadowing odds. When they had first crewed up at the OTU, Vic and Kenny had done more air-gunnery practice than anyone else. They had gone on dummy bombing runs to Immingham harbour and done countless fighter affiliation exercises, practising evasive manoeuvres. Teddy still took them up on as many cross-country exercises as he could and did fighter affiliation with the Spitfires from the nearest fighter station. He coaxed the whole crew into being proficient in Morse code and having an understanding of each other’s jobs so that in that unsympathetic CO’s “extremity” they might be able to understudy for one another. In theory, Keith, who had trained initially as a pilot, would be the best person to take over if something happened to Teddy, but Teddy had also trained Norman Best in the rudimentaries of flying, “because that bloody Aussie shearer might be able to fly the kite but he won’t be able to land the bloody thing.” Teddy swore a lot these days, blasphemy was infectious, but he still tried to avoid the worst words. Of course, if something happened to Teddy they were probably all doomed already anyway.

  Teddy knew that Mac always worked out the route to the nearest neutral territory—Switzerland or Sweden or Portugal—and whenever it was a clear night he would hone his astro-navigational skills. And the shy and retiring Norman Best wore an entire set of French clothing, right down to the underwear, beneath his battledress, the clothes acquired in Paris when he was a student. An authentic French beret in his pocket too. A Boy Scout if ever there was one, Teddy thought. “Be prepared in mind by having thought out beforehand any accident or situation that might occur.” Somehow it seemed unlikely that his own Kibbo Kift training with a bow and arrow was going to be much of a help if he was on the run in France.

  Norman did bail out over France, as it happened, flying with another crew on a second tour of duty in ’43, but his preparation for evading was all for nought as his parachute was already on fire when he exited the aircraft and he fell to earth like a fiery plumb bob, his body never recovered. Norman carried no good-luck charm, had no compulsive rite like George Carr, who had to turn round three times to the right, like a dog settling, before entering the aircraft and thought that no one noticed.

  The wretched second dickey stood next to Teddy for take-off. He was called Guy—an old Etonian, he said, hoping to form some kind of bond with Teddy. “I didn’t go to Eton,” Teddy said rather dismissively. Guy had a lot to learn. If he lived long enough. (“What a mug,” Vic said.)

  Of course, he wasn’t the first second dickey they had carried and they had flown with a couple of odd bods when various members of the crew hadn’t been able to go on ops. George Carr had been given leave to go to his father’s funeral. Mac had missed an op because of stomach ’flu and Kenny had a sprained ankle that put him out of action for a raid on Bremen (the result of one of Teddy’s parachute drills). Vic Bennett had missed J-Jig’s final eventful op to Turin last week because of a debilitating cold.

  Mac had made up his numbers flying with another crew but that still left both their gunners an op short of a full tour. They would have to fly as odd bods in someone else’s crew. Unlucky mascots.

  On the Turin raid they had flown with a replacement air-gunner in Vic’s position in the mid-upper turret. He had a soft West Country burr (“Zummerzet”) and spoke no more than a few words on the whole trip.

  They had flown over the snowy peaks of the Alps by the light of a brightly full moon. “Not many people have seen that, eh, skipper?” Kenny Nielson piped up on the intercom. Even Mac came out from behind his curtain to “take in the view.” “Almost as good as the Rockies,” he said and Kenny said, “Aye, but you haven’t seen the Rockies from above, have you?” and Keith started muttering something about the Blue Mountains until Teddy said, “OK, everyone,” before a full-blown discussion about the relative merits of the world’s mountain ranges took hold.

  The odd bod had nothing to say about mountains. Teddy supposed they didn’t have many in Somerset. Apart from a few seaside holidays in Cornwall when they were children the south-west was not a part of the country that he had explored. If he survived the war, he thought, he would rather like to go on a grand tour of England, all the highways and byways, the hidden villages, the grand monuments, the meadows, moors and lakes. Everything they were fighting for.

  They were “privileged,” Norman said, to see the world in a way that few people ever had. A privilege they were paying a terrible price for, Teddy thought.

  They had been awestruck not only at the sight of the Alps by moonlight but by the depthless inky-black skies, pricked with thousands upon thousands of stars—bright seed broadcast by some generous god, Teddy thought, drifting dangerously close to the forsaken realm of poetry. There were sunsets and dawns of thrilling grandeur and once, on a run to Bochum, a spectacular show that the Northern Lights put on for them—a vibrating curtain of colours draped in the sky that had left them searching for superlatives.

  In his isolated position at the back Kenny Nielson claimed that he had “the best seat in the house.” Sunsets in particular left him wonderstruck. From the tail of the aircraft he could see the sun going down long after the rest of the crew had flown into the darkness. “The sky’s on fire,” he reported excitedly one time after Teddy had lugged the Halifax off the runway and into the air. Teddy had a moment of terror�
��a vision of Armageddon being wreaked on them by the enemy—but then Vic Bennett in the mid-upper turret said, “That’s the best sunset I’ve ever seen.”

  “Aye, like God’s painted the sky,” Kenny said, and Teddy said, “Can we have some peace and quiet?” relieved that the end of the world was not nigh and shocked at himself for having thought that it might be. “It is braw,” Kenny persisted, not quite able to let the beauty go. Or “Beauty” as Sylvie might have said.

  As a rear-gunner, Kenny was the least likely of all of them to live to see a sunset in peacetime. Only a one-in-four chance of staying alive until then, Ursula’s girl said. In the end, of course, it was the girl from the Air Ministry who was living without a future, killed by the Aldwych V-1 rocket in June of ’44. She had been on the roof of Adastral House, where the Air Ministry was housed, sunbathing whilst eating her lunchtime sandwiches. (What were the odds against that, Teddy wondered?)

  Other Air Ministry girls were sucked out of the shattered windows of the building and fell to their deaths in the street. One man was sliced in half by a sheet of falling glass, Ursula said. Teddy supposed for some people Ursula was a girl too—the girl from Civil Defence.

  She was called Anne. The girl from the Air Ministry. And when they parted at the end of the evening they had spent in each other’s company at the Hammersmith Palais (she danced a neat foxtrot) she said to Teddy, “Well, good luck,” and didn’t look him in the eye.

  There hadn’t been much in the way of flak on the run in to Turin, the Italian ack-ack guns always seemed half-hearted. They bombed the target from sixteen thousand feet, on the red markers. The weather had started to close in on the approach. The Alps were no longer beautiful—no longer visible, in fact—and as they turned for home they found themselves confronted by a huge dark tower of cumulus, looming high above them. Inside this monster there were flashes and sparks as if small explosions were going off and at first they thought it must be something to do with the bombing—or even some new kind of weapon that was being tried out on them—and it took a few moments before they understood that they were flying into an enormous, sinister thunderhead.

  The turbulence was atrocious, rocking J-Jig around as if it were a toy aircraft. As flies to wanton boys. Or wanton gods. Zeus throwing his thunderbolts, Thor wielding his hammer. The fairies moving their furniture, Bridget used to say, a less vengeful interpretation for a kinder time. Some fairies, Teddy thought. On the intercom he could hear the curses ranging from Norman’s terrified Christian restraint—“Oh, dear Lord”—to Keith’s bitter “Fuck, fuck, fuck, get us the fuck out of this, skip.”

  They were all agreed afterwards that it was worse than any flak they had ever encountered. Flak they understood, but this was something more primeval. Occasionally the lightning illuminated malevolent fissures and caverns within the dark mass. The turbulent air currents were random—bucking and bucketing them up and down or sideways—and Teddy wondered if the aircraft might simply break up from stress.

  The outside temperature dropped dramatically and ice started to form on the wings. Ice was a fierce enemy, it could appear rapidly and sometimes without warning—several tons of it, freezing the engines and the controls and covering the wings in thick white slabs. It could make an aircraft so heavy that it simply fell out of the sky or broke into pieces in the air.

  The intercom was alive now with involuntary “Jesus”s and “Christ”s and “Fuck”s as they were thrown around and, too, the murmur of Psalm 23, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” which was interrupted by several gasps of astonishment as J-Jig was abruptly ejected from the thunderhead only to find herself possessed by a phantom.

  Touched everywhere by St. Elmo’s fire, bright blue and unearthly—an eerie luminescence that flared along the edges of the wings and even whirled round with the propellers, spinning off them and making strange feathery trails in the darkness, like ghostly Catherine wheels. It was “dancing” between the tips of his guns, Kenny reported from the rear. “Up here too,” from the mid-upper.

  The strange phenomenon made Teddy think of the Willis in Giselle. He had seen a performance of the ballet when he was at school, a trip to the Royal Opera House organized by the music master. The dancers had been lit by the same rather sinister and otherworldly blue light that was now attracted to J-Jig. Looking back, it had been an odd choice for a class of boisterous thirteen-year-old public-school boys. His father, when told, had raised an eyebrow and asked the master’s name (“An admirer of Wilde, I expect”) and even Sylvie, with her love of Art, had questioned them being exposed to this rather “fey” choice, as she put it, when usually the only time they left the school grounds was to go to an away rugby match. Afterwards Teddy had nightmares, dreaming that the spectral women had their hands on him and were trying to drag him down into some dark, unknown place.

  The blue fire finally flickered and died and the starboard outer engine began to start and stutter with vibration before running wild. Teddy had just feathered it when the troublesome port inner also began to vibrate. It sounded as if it was going to shake itself free from the aircraft altogether. They would probably be better off without it.

  Teddy told Mac to draw up a new flight plan that would take them the quickest way home. The storm had left their magnetic instruments useless and Mac had to use dead reckoning to plot a new course, but not before the port inner decided to catch fire. Give me a break, Teddy thought, pushing the throttles forward to take them into a steep dive (“Hang on, everyone!”) that had the welcome effect of not only extinguishing the flames but also dislodging the ice on the wings. Every cloud had a silver lining, he thought. Conversely, every silver lining was in a cloud.

  The starboard outer was now smoking and a few minutes later Keith reported seeing flames and then without warning the engine exploded, the force almost flipping the aircraft over. A spate of “Jesus Christ”s and “Fucking hell”s on the intercom and Teddy said, “It’s OK.” What a ridiculous thing to say, he thought. They were flying on two engines, fighting a headwind, still icing up, with no wireless and only dead reckoning to get them home. They were not OK at all.

  Teddy was considering giving the order to abandon the aircraft when something even more alarming happened. Mac started singing. Mac! And not some ditty from the Canadian backwoods but a cacophonous performance of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Even allowing for the intercom it was a pretty dreadful rendition, particularly when he imitated the bugle, like an elephant in pain. This was followed, even more shockingly, by their dour Canadian laughing, rather in the manner of Charles Penrose singing “The Laughing Policeman.” Teddy asked Norman to find out what was happening behind Mac’s curtain.

  It transpired that his oxygen tube had become frozen. Norman tried to defrost it with the coffee from his flask but the coffee was only lukewarm by now. They dragged Mac out from his seat and managed to hook him up to the central oxygen tank and hoped for the best. Hypoxia tended to make you do the oddest things and then it tended to kill you.

  After the war, Mac worked for a big insurance company in Toronto. He married and had three children and had taken early retirement (“made some canny investments”) by the time Teddy met him at a squadron reunion dinner, the only one Teddy ever attended. He hadn’t seemed familiar in any way and it struck Teddy that perhaps he had never really known him. Perhaps he had never known any of them. It had just seemed so because of the circumstances they had found themselves in. This older version of Mac seemed rather self-satisfied to Teddy’s eyes. The awfulness of the time they had shared didn’t seem to have left a mark on him. He supposed that old men had reminisced about old wars since time began. Jericho, Thermopylae, Nuremberg. He didn’t really want to be one of them. Teddy left the reunion early, saying, “Sorry, have to give you the chop, chaps,” slipping back easily into that “lingo” that people now made fun of.

  Yet even then, all those years later, he found that in the long dark watches of the night, plagued by insomnia,
he would recite those names. Essen Bremen Wilhelmshaven Duisburg Vegesak Hamburg Saarbrucken Dusseldorf Osnabruck Flensburg Frankfurt Kassel Krefeld Aachen Genoa Milan Turin Mainz Karlsruhe Kiel Cologne Gelsenkirchen Bochum Stuttgart Berlin Nuremberg. Some might count sheep. Teddy counted the towns and cities he had tried to destroy, that had tried to destroy him. Perhaps they had succeeded.

  On the return from Turin they were caught by flak as they approached the French coast. An ack-ack shell blasted through the fuselage, almost jolting J-Jig out of the skies. They were flying through thick cloud and for a disorientating moment Teddy thought they were flying upside down. The aircraft reeked of cordite and there was smoke coming from somewhere, although no sign of flames.

  Teddy did a crew check. “Everyone OK?” he asked. “Rear-gunner? Mid-upper? Bomb-aimer?” Teddy always worried most about his rear-gunner, stuck out there at the back, far away from them. It surprised him that someone as garrulous and sociable as little Kenny Nielson was so cheerful in his cold and lonely nest. Teddy knew he couldn’t have tolerated that cramped, claustrophobic space.

  Everyone reported themselves variously “OK,” “Fine,” “Still here,” and so on. Norman went back to check for damage. Some holes in the fuselage and the lower escape hatch blown off. And the hydraulics must be severed, he said, because he’d been sloshing around in fluid, but there was nothing on fire. They were flying lower and slower with every mile. They were below five thousand feet and took off their oxygen masks. Mac had rallied by now and lay down on the crew rest.

  Teddy decided that they couldn’t limp on like this much longer and told everyone to prepare to abandon the aircraft, but they were already out over the sea and they all agreed they would prefer to press on than ditch. Their faith in Teddy’s abilities to get them to the target and home again had become unshakeable as the tour had progressed. Possibly a misplaced faith, Teddy thought ruefully.