They never replaced the Woolworth’s ring with a more expensive one, even though the cheap alloy sometimes left an unattractive circle of black on Nancy’s finger. Teddy did buy her a diamond though, a small one, when Viola was born.
Betrothed,” she said as they walked arm in arm along the beach after breakfast. They had negotiated the shingle and the anti-tank traps to reach the coarse brown sand near the water’s edge, exposed by the low tide. The dog was running in and out of the waves. Occasionally Teddy tossed a pebble for it, but it was too in thrall to the novelty of the sea to be interested in the mundane canine tasks of fetching and carrying. “Plighting our troth,” Nancy persisted merrily. “How archaic. Where does the word ‘troth’ come from, do you suppose?”
“It’s the Old English word for ‘truth,’ ” Teddy said, his eyes still on the dog.
“Of course. That makes sense.” She squeezed his arm and Teddy thought of the officer’s wife last night. Nancy smiled at him and said, “Are you happy, darling?”
“Yes.” He had no idea any longer what that word meant, but if she wanted him to declare happiness then he would. (“The mistake,” Sylvie said, “is thinking that love equates with happiness.”) “I was going to tell you,” he said, relenting and offering the Halifax anecdote that he had denied her the previous day, “I was in the mess last week, playing cards actually. We were on ops that night, Wuppertal, and there’s always this lull around mid-afternoon, after you’ve done all your flying checks and you’re waiting for the briefing—” He felt her arm slacken slightly. He would happily have listened to the everyday details of her life if she had cared to offer them up. “Shall I go on?”
“Of course.”
“Well, then I heard an aircraft engine—nothing unusual about that, obviously, but then Sandy Worthington—my navigator—poked his head round the door of the officers’ mess and said, ‘Come and see, Ted, it’s the new Halifax, the Mark III.’ ”
“And it’s much better, it’s got a different tail,” Nancy piped up, like a keen pupil pleased with their memory for dull facts.
“No, that’s not the interesting thing—although it is, to me, very interesting because it will save lives. So anyway, I borrowed a bicycle and raced along to the runway—the mess is a long way, it’s a big airfield—” Nancy picked up a piece of driftwood and threw it into the sea for the dog, who seemed to consider retrieving it and then thought better of it. “And the aircraft,” Teddy continued, “was just taxiing along the perimeter fence to the dispersal, and guess who had flown it there?”
“Gertie?”
Now at last he had her attention. “Yes, Gertie. It was such a surprise.”
Nancy’s elder sister was in the Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying aircraft to and fro from squadrons, factories, maintenance units. She had gained a pilot’s licence before the war and Teddy remembered how envious he had been. The men in Teddy’s squadron, although they didn’t always admit it, had a lot of respect for the ATA girls (“women,” Gertie amended). They flew anything and everything at a moment’s notice—Lancs, Mosquitoes, Spitfires, even the American Fortresses—feats of aviation that would have defeated most RAF pilots.
“Yours, I think,” the CO said to Teddy as they stood at dispersal with Gertie, admiring the new aircraft.
“Mine?” Teddy said.
“Well, you are squadron leader, Ted, methinks you should have the best kite.”
“She flies well,” Gertie said to him. And so Q-Queenie became his.
Gertie was treated as an honorary officer and invited into the mess for tea (“And scones! How lovely.” They weren’t). By chance, rather than her having to catch a train, there was an aircraft that needed to be flown to a maintenance unit to have its twisted fuselage straightened out. Aircraft hadn’t been designed for the kind of violent manoeuvres that corkscrewing necessitated (neither had he, Teddy often thought). Gertie had not set any male hearts a-flutter during her brief sojourn—except perhaps the CO’s, who remarked that she had “guts”—for, like Winnie, she was a straightforward, rather homely type. Teddy tended to rank the Shawcross girls (“women”) in terms of attractiveness—he suspected everyone did—from Winnie, the least pulchritudinous, down to Nancy and elfin Bea. In his heart he believed Bea to be the most attractive, but loyalty to Nancy usually censored that thought. “Each Shawcross girl is smaller and prettier than the last,” Hugh had said once when they were younger. Millie, in the middle, would have been most annoyed to hear this judgement.
Gertie got a good send-off from the squadron, partly because she had delivered the very welcome new “Halibag” and partly because of her connection to Teddy, “like a sister-in-law” he had explained, as he supposed she would be if there were an afterward. A little huddle gathered at the control caravan for her take-off, Teddy amongst them, and they all waved as vigorously as if she was off on a raid to Essen rather than delivering a Halifax to an OMU in York. She waggled her wings in farewell and roared off into the blue. Teddy felt proud of her.
“I haven’t seen her in ages,” Nancy said.
“You haven’t seen anyone in ages.”
“Not by choice,” she replied, sounding rather brittle. He was being unfair, of course the war must be taking a toll on her too. He tucked her arm tighter into his and whistled to the dog. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll buy you a sandwich in the station tea rooms. There’s plenty of time before the train.”
“You certainly know how to treat a girl,” Nancy said, good humour restored.
The dog didn’t reappear when Teddy whistled. He scanned the beach, the sea, a bubble of panic rising in his chest. The dog always came when he whistled. The Channel looked calm but it was a small dog and perhaps it had worn itself out by swimming too much, or it had met a treacherous current or a fishing net. He thought of Vic Bennett slipping beneath the waves. Well, good luck to you then. Nancy was walking up and down the beach, shouting the dog’s name. He knew its senses were tuned to some higher animal frequency. His ground crew had told Teddy how Lucky would wait with them for his return and knew long before they did when his aircraft was approaching the airfield. If he was late returning or had to make an emergency landing elsewhere the dog remained resolutely at its post. When Teddy finally didn’t return at all, when he was taken prisoner by the Germans, the dog remained for days, gazing steadfastly at the sky, waiting.
Eventually the dog was returned to Ursula’s care and when he came home Teddy didn’t claim it back, much as he would have liked to. He had Nancy as his companion, he reasoned, but his sister had no one and loved the little dog almost as much as he did.
Not long ago the dog had stowed away on Q-Queenie. They had never quite been able to work out how. It was sometimes in the habit of hitching a ride in the lorry that transported them to dispersal, although no one remembered seeing it on this occasion and the first they knew of it being on board was after they had reached their rendezvous point over Hornsea when it had slunk—rather guiltily—from beneath the port rest position where it had concealed itself.
“Ay up,” Bob Booth, their wireless operator, announced over the intercom, “we seem to have got ourselves a little second dickey.” The fact that this was against all rules, more so probably even than taking a WAAF up in the air, wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they were already above five thousand feet and Teddy had just told everyone to put their oxygen masks on. The dog already looked unsteady on its feet, although that could well have been due to being inside a monstrous four-engined bomber struggling to reach operational height over the North Sea.
Teddy had suddenly remembered Mac singing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” on the journey back from Turin. He didn’t think that Lucky was capable of anything so outlandish, but there was no doubt that the inevitable outcome of oxygen deprivation would be the same for both men and dogs.
Perhaps the dog had just been curious to know where they went when they climbed inside their metal behemoths. Perhaps its loyalty to Teddy had driven it, or a des
ire to test its own canine courage. Who knew the mind of a dog?
Everyone but the gunners shared their masks with the dog, an awkward experience for all concerned. “Oxygen,” Teddy said to the dog as he placed his own mask over its small snout. Luckily it was a gardening run in the Dutch shipping channels rather than a long raid to the Big City. After they had landed safely, Teddy smuggled the dog out of the aircraft, stuffed inside his flying jacket.
After that Teddy tried to remember to take a spare oxygen mask on board so that in the event of another stowaway they would be able to hook them up to the central oxygen. Although who in their right mind would want to stow away on a bomber?
He turned round and suddenly the dog was there, bounding along the beach, looking rather tired but without the vocabulary to tell him of any adventure it might have had.
Reunited, they ambled along the pier until they were stopped by a photographer and agreed to have a snap taken. Teddy paid the man and gave his squadron address and when he came back from his six days’ leave, the photograph—which he had already forgotten about—was waiting for him. It was a nice one and he wondered about getting more copies—for Nancy perhaps—although he never got round to doing anything about it. He was in his uniform, of course, and Nancy was wearing a summer dress and a pretty straw hat, the cheap wedding ring invisible. They were both smiling as if they didn’t have a care in the world. Lucky was with them, also looking happy with himself.
Teddy carried the photograph in his battledress pocket, beside the silver hare. It survived the war and the camp, and was thrown, rather carelessly, into a box of mementos and trophies afterwards. “Objets de vertu,” Bertie said, looking through this box after he moved to Fanning Court. She was always fascinated by Nancy, the grandmother she had never known. “And a dog!” she said, drawn immediately to the little dog’s cheerful demeanour. (“Lucky,” Teddy said fondly. The dog had been dead for over forty years but he still felt a little stab of sadness to the heart when he thought of its absence from the world.)
The photograph had acquired a stain, a swathe of brown smeared across the top, and when Bertie asked its origin Teddy said, “Tea, I think.”
When his first tour had finished Teddy had moved to an Operational Training Unit as an instructor, but asked to be put back on ops before his stint was up. “Why, for heaven’s sake?” Ursula wrote. “When you could have had a few more months of relative safety before having to do another tour?” “Relative” was a good word for an OTU in Teddy’s opinion. When he first arrived there he had looked out over the fields surrounding the station and counted the wreckage of at least five aircraft that had not yet been cleared away. At an OTU you were given clapped-out old kites to fly—pensioned-off aircraft mostly—as if the dice weren’t already loaded against green crews. Teddy didn’t ask about the fate of the occupants of the aircraft that littered the fields. He decided he would really rather not know.
“Well,” he wrote back to his sister, “the job isn’t finished yet.” Nowhere near, he thought. Thousands of birds had been flung against the wall and it was still standing. “And I’m a damned good pilot,” he added, “so I think I can serve the war effort better by flying than by coaching sprogs.”
He reread the letter. It sounded like a reasonable justification. One that he could present to his sister, to Nancy, to the world, although he was slightly resentful that he felt the need to justify himself when they were in the midst of battle. Hadn’t he been designated the family’s warrior? Although he suspected that this noble mantle might now have passed to Jimmy.
The truth was there was nothing else he wanted to do, could do. Flying on bombing raids had become him. Who he was. The only place he cared about was the inside of a Halifax, the smells of dirt and oil, of sour sweat, of rubber and metal and the tang of oxygen. He wanted to be deafened by the thunder of her engines, he needed to be drained of every thought by the cold, the noise, and the equal amounts of boredom and adrenalin. He had believed once that he would be formed by the architecture of war, but now, he realized, he had been erased by it.
He had a new crew—gunners Tommy and Oluf, one a Geordie, the other a Norwegian. There were quite a few Norwegians in Bomber Command but not enough to form their own squadron, like the Poles had done. The Norwegians were almost as fierce as the bloodthirsty Poles in their commitment. They always pressed on. They lived for the day they could fly home to a free Poland. It didn’t happen, of course. He often thought of them as Poland negotiated its way through the twentieth century.
It was another motley crew. Sandy Worthington, his navigator, was from New Zealand; Geoffrey Smythson, his flight engineer, was a Cambridge graduate. (“Mathematics,” he said solemnly, as if it was a religion.) Teddy wondered if he knew Nancy and he said he had heard of her, she had won the Fawcett Prize, hadn’t she? “Clever girl,” he said. “Clever woman,” Teddy said. His wireless operator was Bob Booth from Leeds and his bomb-aimer was—
“G’day there, mate.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” Teddy asked.
“Well, I was instructing at an OTU when I heard that the renowned Ted Todd had come back on ops early and I thought, He’s bloody well not flying without me. An Aussie squadron tried to claim me but I pulled a few strings.”
Ted had felt almost overwhelmed at the sight of Keith—he had been the one he was closest to in the old crew and they had shared so much that they couldn’t talk about with anyone else, yet on meeting again they had controlled themselves to a short manly handshake of greeting. Later, as the century wore on, Teddy observed how men seemed gradually to lose constraint where their feelings were concerned, until by the time the twentieth tipped into the twenty-first (and the advent of the unattractively named “noughties”) they gave the appearance of having lost control of their emotions altogether, perhaps their senses too. Footballers and tennis players blubbing all over the place, the ordinary man in the street embracing and kissing other men on the cheeks. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dad,” Viola said. “How can you think such crap? The stiff upper lip! Do you honestly think that the world was a better place when men kept their feelings hidden?”
“Yes.”
He still sometimes remembered with horror how he had broken down in Vic Bennett’s mother’s kitchen. He couldn’t see that it had done anyone any good, particularly him. When Nancy died he had wept quietly and privately, it had seemed the respectful way to mourn someone.
“I blame Diana,” Bertie said.
“Diana?”
“Princess. She made being hurt look heroic. Used to be the opposite in your day.” They were sitting on top of the White Horse at Kilburn eating sandwiches that a nice B&B landlady had packed for them at a stop on their farewell tour.
Like a dog, Teddy thought, he had had his day. “I’m too old for the world,” he said.
“Me too,” Bertie said.
Nancy had only been able to get one night off and so they parted on yet another station platform barely twenty-four hours after they had met on one. He had been under the impression that they would be able to spend longer together and felt rather blue as he waved her off, but once the train had disappeared he realized that perhaps what he felt was guilt at the relief.
Keith had also come up to London on leave and they met up and made a congenial, platonic foursome in Quaglino’s with Bea and her friend Hannie, a refugee. They all drank a good deal, and Keith did his best to flirt with two women at once. Hannie was very pretty but seemed uninterested and Bea was “spoken for,” engaged to a doctor, although they were both very sweet to Keith. Teddy never met Bea’s doctor. He went over with the troops on D-Day and was killed on Gold beach and instead she married a surgeon after the war.
Bea was working at the BBC, producing and doing a little continuity, and some “behind-the-scenes” things, and Hannie worked as a translator for an obscure-sounding government department. Bea had moved in a medical world during the Blitz when she had been recruited to work in a mortuary, piecing tog
ether jigsaws of body parts. Her art-college background had, for some unlikely reason, deemed her suitable for this work. “Anatomy, I suppose,” she said. Even Teddy, who had become inured to the sight of the disintegrated bodies of men, didn’t think he would have had the stomach for such work. In later years, in a different age of terrorism, Teddy read about bombs in parks and nightclubs, in skyscrapers and passenger airliners, bodies blown to bits or falling to earth, and wondered if someone pieced them together again. Sylvie had always maintained that science was about men finding new ways to kill each other, and as the years went by (as if the war wasn’t evidence enough) he grew to think that she was perhaps right.
He danced with Hannie, she was just the right height for him, and she smelt of Soir de Paris, which she said “someone” had brought her back from France, which made him think that she must move in rather secretive circles. (Was there a woman he knew who didn’t?) She was wearing emerald earrings and she hooted with laughter when he commented on them and said, “Costume! Do I look like someone who can afford emeralds?” She had left her family behind in Germany and wanted “every single Nazi” to die in agony. Fair enough, Teddy thought.
The four of them arranged to meet up again the following night and went to see Arsenic and Old Lace, which they all agreed was an excellent antidote to the war.
After the war Teddy learned from Bea that Hannie was with the SOE and had been parachuted into France before D-Day. Ursula and Bea had done their best to find out what had happened to her (“because she has no one else now”). It was the usual awful story.
It turned out those earrings weren’t paste but genuine emeralds, French, fin de siècle, very pretty and had belonged to her mother, who was herself French. (“And I have some Hungarian blood as well as German, of course, and a little Romanian even. A European mongrel!”) The earrings had begun their life in a goldsmith’s atelier in the Marais in 1899 and, in the manner of objects, lived on long after the people who had worn them. Hannie left them with Bea for “safekeeping.” (“You might not see me for a few weeks.”)
A God in Ruins Page 30
