A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  He was on his third tour. There had been no obligation to sign up for it, he could have returned to instructing, he could have requested a desk job. It was “madness,” Sylvie wrote. He tended to agree with her. He had flown now on over seventy raids and had come to be regarded as untouchable by many on the squadron. This was how myths were made these days, Teddy thought, simply by staying alive longer than anyone else. Perhaps that was his role now, to be the ju-ju, to be the magic. To keep as many safe as possible. Perhaps he was immortal. He tested this theory by getting himself on the battle-order as often as possible, despite protests from higher up.

  He was back with the first squadron he had served with, but now they were to be found not on the comfortable brick-built, pre-war RAF base that had housed them near the beginning of the war, but in a hastily erected township commandeered from corrugated iron and mud. It would only take a few years after they left (for leave they surely would—even the Hundred Years War had come to an end) for it to return to fields. To the brown, the green and the gold.

  If he went on a sortie he flew in F-Fox. She was a good sound aircraft that had already beaten the odds by carrying one crew safely through their tour, but really he just liked the name and its associations with home. Ursula reported that Sylvie, who once upon a time loved the foxes at Fox Corner, had been laying poison down for them after they had committed a particularly successful raid on the henhouse. “She might come back as a fox in the next life,” Ursula wrote, “and then she’ll be very sorry.” She “liked the idea” of reincarnation, his sister said, but of course she couldn’t actually believe in it. That was the trouble with faith, Teddy thought, by its very nature it was impossible. He didn’t believe in anything any more. Trees, perhaps. Trees and rocks and water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer.

  He mourned for the foxes, he would have placed them above a coop of chickens in the order of things. Above many people, too.

  He had sidestepped Christmas at Fox Corner, saying that he had to remain on the station, which was only half a lie, and he had not seen their potentially vulpine mother for many months—not, in fact, since the irritating lunch at Fox Corner after Hamburg. He realized that he had ceased to have any affection for Sylvie. “One does,” Ursula said.

  F-Fox’s ground crew always issued dire warnings to anyone who had been allowed to borrow her—“bring the Wing Co’s kite back safely or else”—although really as far as the ground crew were concerned the aircraft belonged to them and they admonished Teddy himself in much the same terms.

  Sometimes Teddy went up in one of the ropier old kites to test further his theory of immortality. His regular ground crew were unhappy if he flew with the new, the untested and the shaky. He occasionally piloted a sprog crew but usually he took the dickey seat and flew as a reassuring second pilot with them. It wasn’t unlucky if he was in it—quite the opposite. “We’ll be safe now the Wing Co’s with us,” he heard them say. He remembered Keith and his widdershins luck that had let him down in the end.

  He made his way out to the dispersal pan to visit F-Fox and her ground crew.

  It was the first flight for the crew Teddy was going up with. They had been delivered fresh out of the box from the OTU at Rufforth that morning. They had been assigned their own aircraft, but the ground crew had declared her unserviceable after her air test and Teddy had offered F-Fox to them, along with himself. They were as cheerful and excited as puppies at the prospect.

  A bowser was already feeding fuel into F-Fox’s wing tanks. The ground crew knew roughly where they would be going by the amount being taken on board, but never talked about the target to the aircrew. They kept everything close to themselves. Perhaps they thought it was bad luck. Some of them would be keeping a long vigil through the night, usually huddled around an inadequate stove in their bleak little hut at dispersal, snoozing fitfully on a camp bed or even sitting on an upturned toolbox, waiting anxiously for F-Fox’s return. Waiting for Teddy.

  A trolley of bombs trundled towards the aircraft, a miniature train, and the armourers started winching the bombs into the bomb-bay. Someone had chalked on one of the bombs, “This is for Ernie, Adolf,” and Teddy wondered who Ernie was but didn’t ask and no one said. One of the erks, a cheerful Liverpudlian, was at the top of a ladder, preoccupied with polishing the Perspex on the rear-turret with a pair of “blackouts”—the large serviceable knickers that the WAAFs wore. He had discovered—perhaps it was best not to imagine how—that they were the best material for this vital job. A little speck of dirt on the Perspex could be mistaken by the gunner for a German fighter and before you knew it he’d be shooting his guns off all over the sky, betraying their position to the enemy. The erk caught sight of Teddy and said, “Everything OK, skip?”

  Teddy answered with a breezy affirmative. Calm confidence, that was the best demeanour for a captain, pull everyone along behind you in your optimistic wake. And try and learn everyone’s names. And be kind. Because why not?

  He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be kind, to live a good quiet life. Like Candide, he would cultivate his garden. Quietly. And that would be his redemption. Even if he could add only a feather to the balance it would be some kind of repayment for being spared. When it was all over and the reckoning fell due, it may be that he would be in need of that feather.

  He knew that he was just stooging around, doing nothing useful. These fits of restlessness, mental and physical, seemed to be increasing all the time. Sometimes he found himself drifting off, lost not so much in thought as no thought at all, and without realizing it he found himself now at the pigeon loft. The homing pigeons were kept in a shed behind the crews’ Nissan-hut sleeping quarters and were looked after by one of the cooks, who was a pigeon fancier and missed his own racing birds, back in Dewsbury.

  Teddy made the dog stay outside the shed. It always barked at the birds and set them fluttering nervously, even though they were generally, by their nature, a steadfast, even heroic sort of creature. The theory was that the pigeons on board an aircraft could be used to relay messages and that in the event of ditching or parachuting out you could write your location down and put it in a little canister and the bird would carry this precious information home. It seemed to Teddy, however, that it was highly unlikely that if you were trying to evade in enemy territory anyone would find you because of some incoherent scribble. You would have to know where you were, for a start, and the bird would have to overcome tremendous odds just to make it back to British shores. (He wondered if the girl from the Air Ministry had any figures for that.) The Germans kept hawks along the French coast solely for the purpose of bringing the poor birds down.

  And, of course, you would have to remember to get a bird out of the basket that was stowed in the fuselage and stuff it into a container that was not much bigger than a vacuum flask (a tricky feat in itself). Bailing out of a crippled bomber involved—at best—a mad life-or-death scramble to clip on parachutes, throw off escape hatches, help the wounded out, while all the time the aircraft was on fire or in an uncontrollable dive. The poor pigeons would not be uppermost in anyone’s mind in those last few desperate seconds. He wondered how many of them had been left behind, helplessly trapped in their baskets, abandoned to burn or drown or simply disintegrate in a little cloud of feathers when an aircraft exploded. Everyone knew not to put the pigeons on the Wing Co’s kite.

  Teddy was soothed by the soft cooing and the earthy ammoniac smell of the dim shed. He took one of the compliant birds from its hatch and stroked it gently. It suffered his attentions without protest. When he put it back it eyed him steadily and he wondered what it was thinking. Not much, he supposed. When he came back outside, into the harsh daylight, the dog sniffed him suspiciously for signs of infidelity.

  It was lunchtime and he set off for the mess. He had little appetite these days but he forced the food down in a dutiful fa
shion. There was a particularly stodgy kind of steamed sponge pudding containing prunes that translated as “plum duff” on the blackboard menu and which sat heavily in his stomach afterwards. He remembered with pleasure something called a Far Breton that he had eaten beneath a hot French sun. The French could transform even prunes into something delicious. He had made an emergency landing at Elvington, where the French crews were stationed, and discovered that their cooks were also French and they treated their rations with a good deal more élan than the RAF canteen staff. And what’s more, they took their meals with a glass of red wine, Algerian, but wine nonetheless. They would not have tolerated a plum duff.

  The crews had spent the rest of the afternoon resting—writing letters, playing darts, listening to the wireless in the mess, always tuned to the BBC Forces programme. Some slept. A lot of them had been on ops last night and had not fallen into their beds until well after first light.

  Meanwhile the target was being revealed to the pilots and navigators in a preliminary briefing. There were specialist briefings for the wireless operators and bomb-aimers. Teddy more than half expected the op to be scrubbed—they were into the moon period and the skies were clear, but soon, with the shorter nights of spring, it would be impossible to fly the long raids deep into Germany. He supposed that this was Harris’s last hurrah in the Battle of Berlin. The long gruelling series of winter raids with their high toll was nearly over. Seventy-eight bombers lost to Leipzig last month, seventy-three to Berlin last week. Nearly a thousand crew lost since November. Every one a young man. “Flowers of the Forest,” the lament played at the funeral of a Canadian navigator that Teddy and Mac both knew on their first tour. Walter. Walt. His nickname was Disney. Teddy didn’t think that he’d ever known his real name, although he must surely have had one. It seemed so long ago now, and yet it wasn’t.

  The CO had asked them to accompany Disney’s body to Stonefall and act as pallbearers. A Scots piper had been found in Leeds and played at the graveside. Disney had been killed by flak on a raid over Bremen. The flight-engineer navigator had used astro-navigation to get them home, unable to consult Disney’s maps and charts because they were so sodden with his blood that they were useless.

  They were burning burnt-out towns, bombing bombed-out cities. It had been a good idea. Defeat them in the air and save the world from the horror of land warfare, from Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele. But it wasn’t working. When they were knocked down they got up again, the stuff of nightmares, an endless harvest of dragon’s teeth sprouting on the plain of Ares. And so they continued throwing the birds against the wall. And still the wall stood.

  An air vice-marshal had dropped in on the squadron. He had lots of medals and braid—“scrambled egg”—on display. “Like to show my face to the men,” he said. Teddy didn’t remember ever seeing his face before.

  His mind was on Nancy. He had received a letter that morning—many words, as usual, yet saying nothing, also as usual, but at the end a reference to their engagement and how she would “understand if your feelings have changed.” (“You write to me so rarely, darling.”) Was she really saying that her feelings had changed? His CO said, “Ted? Ready?” disrupting his wool-gathering, and they made their way to the briefing hut, the vice-marshal striding authoritatively ahead. He was accompanied by his rather glamorous WAAF driver, who surprised Teddy by winking at him.

  The crews were already assembled, ticked off on a roll at the door by the RAF police. Once everyone was in the doors would be locked and the windows shuttered. The air vice-marshal’s driver was left to kick her heels outside. Security was tight before a raid. No one could leave the station or make phone calls. Keeping the target secret was vital, although it was often jokingly said that if you wanted to know the next target you only need go to Bettys Bar. The reality was that one way or another the Germans were tracking them from the moment they took off. They listened on their radio frequencies, jammed the Gee, tracked the HS2 and caught them in the net of their own radar that stretched along the coast of Europe. Toe to toe, blow for blow.

  When they entered the briefing hut there was a great clattering of chairs as the crews, some hundred and twenty of them, stood to attention. The room—a Nissan hut—was the usual smoky, sweaty fug. More scraping and bumping of chairs as everyone sat down again. The map on the wall was hidden by a blackout curtain and the CO always drew it back with a theatrical flourish as if it was part of a conjuring trick, before pronouncing the by now time-honoured words, “Gentlemen, your target for tonight is…”

  Nuremberg? There was a rumble of discontent from the more experienced crews, a few “Jesus”s and “Christ”s, an Australian “Strewth,” despite the presence of the scrambled egg. It was a long flight, deep into the enemy’s heartland, nearly three times further than going to the Ruhr. The red ribbon stretched almost straight to the target with hardly any of the usual zigzagging.

  The senior intelligence officer, a stern-faced WAAF who took her duties very seriously, stood up and told them all about the importance of the target. It was seven long months since it had been attacked and was largely intact, despite being home to a huge SS barracks as well as “the famous” MAN armament works, and now that the Siemens factory in Berlin had been bombed they had stepped up production of searchlights, electric motors “and so on” at their Nuremberg works.

  The city was symbolic, where Hitler held his mass rallies, and was close to the enemy’s heart, the intelligence officer continued. It would hit their morale hard. The aiming point was the railway yards but the creep-back would find the medieval city, “the Altstadt,” she said, making a poor stab at German pronunciation. They were carrying high loads of incendiaries and the old wooden buildings would burn well.

  Dürer’s birthplace was in the Altstadt. Teddy had grown up with two of Dürer’s prints. They had hung in the morning room at Fox Corner—one of a hare and one of a pair of red squirrels. The intelligence officer didn’t mention Dürer, she was more interested in the flak and searchlight positions that were marked on the map with green and red celluloid overlays. The crews, too, paid careful attention to them, their unease growing all the time as they looked at the long straight red ribbon.

  But it was the moon that was really upsetting them, upsetting Teddy too. It was an unusually bright half-moon and it was going to be shining down on them like a bright coin through a long dark night. Their unhappiness was compounded when they were told they were to fly through the Cologne gap. It was “unlikely” to be heavily defended this late in the year, they were told. Really, Teddy thought? The route passed close to the Ruhr and Frankfurt defences, to night fighter airfields and their beacons, Ida and Otto, around which the German fighters circled, waiting, like hawks after pigeons.

  The Met officer took the stage and gave details of wind speeds, cloud conditions and the weather likely to be encountered. He said there was a “possibility” of fairly good cloud cover on the way there and back that “might” hide them from the fighters. The word “possibility” made them shift nervously in their seats. The word “might” made it worse. “Fairly” wasn’t too promising either. It would be clear over the target, he said, even though the first Pathfinders had already reported cumulus at eight thousand feet, information that wasn’t passed on to the crews. They needed it to be the other way round—cloud on that long leg to hide them from the fighters and the moon illuminating their target.

  The CO had confided in Teddy that he was “certain” the op would be scrubbed. Teddy didn’t know why it had been considered in the first place. Churchill liked the target. Harris liked the target. Teddy didn’t. He didn’t suppose Harris and Churchill cared much for his opinion.

  The specialist leaders made a few pertinent remarks. The navigators were taken over the route and the turning points. The sparks were reminded of their frequencies for the night. The bombing leaders detailed the payload and ratio of high explosive to incendiaries and the timing and phasing of attacks, the colours of the target indicators that
they were to drop their bombs on. Everyone was reminded of the colours of the day. They all knew of crews shot down by friendly fire for shooting off the wrong colours of the day.

  Then Teddy was up. A constant course of two hundred and sixty-five miles over well-defended enemy territory in bright moonlight with little chance of cloud cover. For the sake of morale (the quietly confident leader) he tried to spin these bleak facts into something less dire—highlighting again the importance of the city as an industrial and transport centre, the blow to enemy morale, and so on. The long leg will suggest a number of other possible targets to the fighters so they will be distracted from the Cologne gap. The sheer simplicity of the long leg will fool them and the lack of doglegs will conserve fuel, and that means that you can carry heavier bomb loads. And, being more direct, it will mean less fatigue for you, you will get there quicker, and the quicker you get there the quicker you will get safely back here. And keep a tight bomber stream. Always.

  He sat down again. They trusted him, he could see it on their haggard faces. There was no going back for them now so it was best that they went out in a good frame of mind. There was nothing worse than setting out oppressed by the feeling that you were for the chop. He remembered Duisburg, the last op of his first tour, how his crew had been jittery, convinced they were going for a burton. Two of them had, of course. George and Vic. Of J-Jig’s original crew there was only himself and Mac left. He had a letter from Mac, telling him that he had got married, honeymooned at Niagara, “little one on the way.” The war was over for Mac.

  Kenny had gone on to train new air-gunners at a gunnery school and had written a letter to Teddy in his almost illiterate hand. “Me—an instructor! Who’d have thought it?” A few weeks later he was in an aircraft that crash-landed on return from a cross-country training exercise. Three crew members survived. Kenny wasn’t one of them. One of his many sisters wrote to Teddy, “Wee Kenny is an angel now,” in a hand almost as poor as Kenny’s. If only that were true, Teddy thought, if only the ranks of Spenser’s bright squadrons were being swelled by those of Bomber Command. But they weren’t. The dead were dead. And they were legion.