Pieces of Light

by Adam Thorpe

  Rachael and I were too busy saving civilisation, that was the trouble. Once we’d saved it, then we would go to Paris – if Paris was still standing. So I was saving Paris, I suppose. While I was up with an SL battery in Hull, as a very junior NCO, she left the HMSO office and trained to be an RAP nurse. Our leaves never combined. A year passed. She was lightly injured in a Baedeker raid on Guildford. The Humber was brilliant with flame, too; we wrote to each other in the red glow from burning cities. It was all very exciting, Mother. Then one May night in 1941 – the second night of heavy raids – our light engaged a Junkers 88 coming over too low, too big, with what looked like flashes of fire in its port engine. We could taste Hull’s black smoke in our mouths. Nuncle was right, you see; the night attacks had begun in the summer before. But while the rest of the world crouched in darkness, we showed ourselves in bright sweeping columns. Look, here we are, down here! The fighters came like moths would come to our Tilley lamp in Bamakum, killing the light with their wings. It was a long way from the hushed boredom of Mam Tor. I didn’t mind in the slightest, as long as Rachael lived. If I didn’t live, then I wouldn’t know, so it wouldn’t matter.

  ‘It’s been shaken up, sir,’ said the Lewis Gunner. ‘It’s losing height all the time.’

  He was in the gun’s swivel seat and I was standing next to him, about to hand him a mug of tea. He was holding the gun nearly vertical, the back rim of his helmet digging into his coat. Redheaded Alf Jellicoe, from Brierley Hill. I had no idea where Brierley Hill was, he always said it as if I should know. The Midlands, from the way he spoke. Alfs eyes were very bright in the glare.

  I ran over to my SL a few yards away and told my crew to hold the bird, whatever. One of the men had time to grin at me. ‘Save a drop for me, will you, sir?’ I was just nineteen, he was forty (though they thought I was twenty, of course). Yet the ‘sir’ came out loud and clear. It was like being the school prefect again, but with grown men fagging for you instead of boys. I found the tin mug still in my hand, steaming into the air; I must have run over with it, gingerly, looking the nancy! I flung it away – and then the plane banked and dived towards us, as if it had noticed. Its glass nose flashed, dazzling us with our own light. The thing was absurdly large. It was like a bomb-site crane suddenly beginning to lean over you, too heavy to right itself. ‘Here she fucking comes!’ Within seconds it was so close I could see the hatches in its belly swing open. They were laying prehistoric eggs. Tyrannical lizards of fire.

  I stood, unable to move. Heads and shoulders disappeared into the emplacement. Belly down! Someone was yelling an unintelligible and unnecessary warning which turned out to be me. I flung myself, not into the emplacement, but on to the flat and open ground, clutching my tin hat and wanting to scream still more – screwing up my eyes so tight that they ached, my face thrust so hard downwards that the tiny stones in the dried mud embedded themselves in my cheek and cut my lip.

  Or perhaps that was the nasty man who jerked me by the ankles. Then a great heat and brightness, a wind, a noise of ten thousand waterfalls plummeting. Crashing. Down very far. Silence. Plummeting. Down very far. May hedge blossoming white NOW! Hot. Pale pink-tipped petals. A white hand, waving. All on its own.

  Seconds, but lasting years. Billions of years, as the volcanoes roared and belched and the sea broiled. Now I was tiptoeing about on its cooled lava and calmed shallows. Those seconds weren’t the only time I’d heard them, surely.

  Out of breath, somehow, and on my back, and not where I was. So many billions of years. Everything was much further off. Maybe this was hell, because there was fiery spitting and black smoke, thick rubbery stenches. Through the smoke appeared a stick with tangled wires, spitting and blazing at its root, set black against a further fire. Was that the Devil with his fork? There were ashes like tiny glow-worms in the air, settling on my hands and face. I don’t remember any human sounds: the odd silhouette running and gesticulating, but no sounds. It was up to me to make the sounds. SL 05K. What did that mean? My mouth. Grit glued my tongue. Up into the dull red sky rose this huge shining pillar, so tall it made me dizzy. It never ended, it travelled on into desolation, into the vacant spaces of night. This pillar had something to do with me. Its name was Rachel. No, that was a long time ago, where there was frost, not fire. Then there was a wood. Then there was Rachael.

  ‘Sir?’

  A man with a bloodied head. Pulling the pillar about was a big shining bird. I pointed. The man shouted and ran away. The bird’s nose was made of glass, in which I could see heads and shoulders and a hand. That is the blowfly’s brain, I thought, and the big black crosses on its underwings are its lungs. I stumbled and staggered back to the Lewis gun. My legs knew this was a Lewis gun, and that Alf from Brierley Hill had disappeared – that’s why they had moved the rest of me. But they didn’t know where Brierley Hill was. Could I ever get to Brierley Hill? There was something bulky smoking on the ground near the bucket seat. I stepped over it and sat. My trembling hands knew what to do, too – they grabbed the gun and swivelled it so fiercely the butt hit my ribs.

  I swore, but the awful pain cleared my head. I knew who I was, and why.

  It was back. The Junkers 88 was back. It had bombed us and now it was back, shrieking and rattling out of its tight bank, levelling towards us, the searchlight’s beam flashing off its propellers, off its swelling windows, turning the smoke from its port engine to carved marble drapery. I shouted something very obscene and pressed the trigger. As I did so, I realised that my tin hat had gone. My skull was a blown eggshell, like the type you made at Bamakum for Easter, painted in bright colours. And my life was shaking, suddenly. I was a pair of baggies without their braces. I had to hold myself up.

  The glass cabin on top of the Junkers shattered, throwing out tiny diamonds or particles of ice. It was more like ice, I think, but scintillant in the sheer light. Could this be to do with me? I sent more bullets up to it and, amazingly, it responded. It shuddered, it took bits off itself, it opened its vital parts. It was helpless, completely helpless. Bits of the fuselage tore off and rolled through the air like strips of skin, a tiny hand poked out, little flashes appeared around the belly as it passed overhead – I was shooting up vertically into its soft belly. I was burying myself inside it. I was travelling up with the bullets and burying myself inside it, guiding myself in, jabbering and groaning and shrieking. Or perhaps the plane was making all the noises. Then I remembered to breathe.

  I disgust myself as much as I disgraced myself then. You know what I mean, Mother.

  The Junkers came down in fields beyond our vision, and the fires lit by its incendiaries crackled too loudly for us to hear the explosion. My face was spattered with its life’s glycol. The pilot was recovered with a bullet in his head. I wasn’t officially given the bag, but my crew disagreed. That was more important, in daily terms. The celebrations were soured by the casualties. The smoking heap by the gun turned into Alf Jellicoe. A grinning skeleton smeared with fat turned into the plump, jolly cook. A lazy No. 4, sleeping by the burning canteen, left half of himself stuck to the ground. Five other men were brought out of the canteen alive; a blazing hut, broken into from the back with crowbars, yielded two more, scorched and sobbing. Communications and electricity were restored within hours, and a damaged SL on a neighbouring site repaired within a day. My ribs had been badly bruised. I had to rest in my little room for the next two days, its shattered windows covered over with cellophane which a strong wind off the Humber kept blowing out of its tape or flapping loudly all night. I had plenty of time for reflection, but I didn’t reflect. I simply lay there half breathless all the time, with the whole lot running through my head over and over again.

  I wrote to Rachael the next morning. I had something to impress her with, now. And I was proud of what I had done – the men made sure of that. They exaggerated my role in the fury of not having the bag allotted to one of the crew, as the HAA that had first winged it were given the chalk. The plane would have gone on losing h
eight and come down in the open sea, even without my bullets in it. Yet I killed the pilot. The crew might have baled out. It might have pancaked and settled on the swell, burning under its pall of oily smoke – but not as a crematorium. Those German boys would now be tending their tulips and taking their grandchildren out for a creamy cake in some neat Kaffeehaus. Yet if they hadn’t been shuttlecocked by the AA guns, they’d have dropped bombs on Hull and its people. Don’t tell me, Mother, unrolling your lint, that I did wrong.

  With much love, your loving son,

  Hugh

  Grey, but I am enjoying the cricket on the radio.

  My dearest Mother,

  I have lied to you. They say I musn’t lie. One can lie by omission. This will not process the pain. Am I in pain? Not at all, Mother. That’s their expression.

  I crushed my finger on Mam Tor because I cheated – one cannot cheat with drystone walls. One has to dismantle and start again.

  Anyway, I must go back a little and fill you in, now, or the rest will fall down. I do apologise. It’s because they want to know about my war experience.

  First of all, she wasn’t a ‘young virgin’, though she was young.

  Second, I must not give you the impression that she left in any way dazzled by Nuncle. I’ll explain why.

  We emerged from the wildwood and skipped across the lawn – the first time I’d ever skipped across the lawn, I believe. There were dead leaves in our hair, green patches on our coats. Nuncle had gone out. Later, he found us lying on the grass, side by side under the blanket, by the copper beech. He towered over us, a silhouette against the sun, and said that lunch was served. He reminded me of a dolmen.

  We ate ravenously, and talked about the weather. Uncle Edward seemed elsewhere in his head. I certainly was. I felt like a god, an exhausted heroic god. Then he perked up.

  ‘Are you proposing to be eaten by a Frenchman, my dear Rachael?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You smell of garlic – most pleasantly, I might add. Your clothes, not your breath.’

  I coughed, in a sort of nervous spasm. Rachael was very cool.

  ‘We walked through a mass of it, in the wood,’ she said.

  ‘Of ramsons,’ I added. ‘Wild garlic.’

  ‘I know what ramsons are. Aunt Joy used to call them ransoms, and I was always correcting her. I hope you didn’t break any stems. Flowers scream when they are cut or trampled, you know.’

  ‘We were very careful,’ Rachael fibbed. ‘I love flowers.’

  ‘The human digestive system is quite remarkable,’ Nuncle went on, ignoring her. ‘This beef we are eating, for instance, is not much different from human flesh – it’s certainly just as demanding for our juices to break down. Now tell me: why does the human body not eat itself? Why do the oesophagus and the intestines not consume themselves, even when famished?’

  Rachael gave a little shudder, I was pleased to see.

  ‘There,’ Nuncle went on, ‘there is the answer. Because the thought revolts you.’

  ‘There are chemicals involved,’ I said. ‘Our linings are covered in something unpleasant, an inedible protection –’

  ‘Bah! It is mind over matter. Cannibals eat their own species because it tests that capacity, and thus strengthens it. It is a homoeopathic remedy against weak will.’

  ‘Are you suggesting we eat you for supper, then, Mr Arnold?’

  He was taken aback, I could see that. But he came back very quickly, breaking into a crooked smile.

  ‘For my vital parts to slide down your throat, my dear girl, would be counted among my greatest pleasures.’

  She flushed furiously, even though it was said lightly, followed by his wheezy laugh. I started to talk about the garden, which had been rather neglected since Aunt Joy’s day. This hooked him, since he liked to give the impression that he knew everything there was to know about the vegetal world.

  Afterwards, outside again, Rachael reckoned that Edward Arnold’s brilliance had its odd side. I bid her communicate that to her friends in London who admired him from afar.

  ‘They’re all vegetarian pacifists with dirty little beards and pebble glasses,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to tell them about his views on eating meat.’

  ‘I thought they were your friends.’

  ‘They declare that the future’s with us, quote Edward Carpenter or D.H. Lawrence or Gandhi or someone, and look smug. I can’t take anyone seriously who goes about in sandals, for a start. And their nut cutlets give me tummy-ache. As soon as Hitler’s over here, they’ll be finding something in his sort of purity. I’m sure he only eats carrots, to make him see in the dark. Anyway, at the very least he shares with them an absolute hatred of pleasure –’

  ‘That’s a bit unfair –’

  ‘No it isn’t. They’re like the Reds. How can anyone not think Stalin is just as horrible as Hitler? Because they all want someone to collect them together in a big mass and tell them what to do. If they need a Daddy, what’s wrong with their biological one?’

  ‘I don’t think Adolf hates pleasure. He just has some very peculiar tastes, and he’s unleashed those tastes on the rest of us.’

  She looked at me. We were walking up Crab-Apple Lane, past the orchard, and the light was shredded by the overhanging boughs, falling like confetti on her face.

  ‘You’re making a connection again, aren’t you?’

  ‘What connection, my sweet?’

  ‘Between your uncle and Hitler.’

  I hadn’t meant to make it, but I was happy with her interpretation. I shrugged my shoulders and squeezed her waist.

  ‘Look at the blossom,’ I said.

  Some of the old, twisted apple trees were flowering on the outlying boughs. The bole-wood moulded into limbs towards the ground, as if each thick trunk was made from a hugging circle of men and women. I told Rachael that the wild apple and the wild rose were related, but no one sees this because the apple flowers are gone by the time the wild rose blooms. She said this was like family, that she thought something like this every time she saw a photograph of her mother. ‘If I walked up to her in the street, she wouldn’t know me.’

  I wondered to myself if my own mother would recognise me from the timid little boy she left. What do you think now, Mother? Would you recognise me now? This elderly gent? This seasoned pirate of life’s seas? This maroon?

  ‘There’s a whole line of hundreds of people who were born too early to know us,’ I replied. ‘Complete strangers, and yet they’re all our blood.’ I didn’t want to talk about mothers, Mother.

  ‘I talk to her, of course.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Don’t sound surprised. You’re very English, do you know that?’

  ‘What?’

  My body had been coursed through with something beast-like and fine, that morning. I took her statement as a rebuke.

  ‘Am I? Well, I am English.’

  ‘I don’t know what I am,’ she said. ‘All this, apples and wild roses and the lane and so on, it’s all so terribly English, and it’s what we’re supposed to be defending from the barbarians and all that, but it’s a sort of picture to me, it’s not really inside me.’

  I felt discomfited. The lane and its green shadows were so familiar, it was as if she was stepping outside me, saying this.

  ‘I wasn’t even born here,’ I pointed out. ‘You were.’

  ‘So what? I wasn’t born with earth in my mouth.’

  I laughed. I loved her so much, her jumpy ways, her sparkle. She lit a cigarette and we wandered about the orchard and then we took the path to the river. We watched the sun dance around our fingers, submerged in the cold rippling water, and imagined ourselves in Eden. Anywhere can be Eden, as anywhere can be hell. You don’t have to be born there. I hope you’re not in hell, Mother. We splashed our faces and held wet hands and kissed. I could taste the vegetal water of the river on her cool lips.

  Your affectionate son,

  Hugh

  Brighter. Cricke
t still on.

  My dearest Mother,

  I was at RAF Waddington in 1942, though I was still in the Army. Rachael’s letters were full of her new life as a nurse, but short on amore. Her father was very ill, mainly from losing all his paintings in a raid: when she wasn’t nursing soldiers, she was nursing him. I’d tried to travel down to Guildford on a rare leave, to meet her for a dinner-dance, but an air raid put paid to a stretch of the track; the train was maroooned for ten hours in the depths of the Fens, and I had to hitch a lift back in a truck.

  My first proper sortie over Germany was in May: I thought to myself, I haven’t seen Rachael for two years! My teeth rattled by four Merlin Rolls-Royce engines, gut fear, and the cracks of hostile ack-ack, I felt my first doubts about the whole thing. She must have changed, hardened – her letters showed this. Then the letters stopped and she scribbled terse postcards, fitfully, right through until February 1943. One of these, to my surprise, was of the Ulverton white horse, and postmarked locally. ‘One of your uncle’s pacifist meetings,’ she wrote, vaguely. But her father had died over the winter. (His death had been a relief, she’d said – as the end of a raid is a relief even when there is nothing left but rubble.) The horse galloped queerly into my thoughts: it was one of Nuncle’s favourite walks, along that crest.

  I wasn’t unhappy, though – not then. The aerodrome was a breezy sort of place, and not just literally. Only on fog days or after a heavy loss did the breeziness leave us, and we drooped like the windsocks could droop. Meanwhile, everything on land crouched – even the planes themselves crouched, until they left. Even the giant metal sheds and hangars that made your voice ring like a god’s. It wasn’t a cowering, it was like a cat about to spring. One cannot leap high without crouching first.