Pieces of Light

by Adam Thorpe

Anyway, we were in obeisance to the sky. The aerodrome was only the bottom of the sky, in the end. The detritus that accumulates.

  I sometimes pretended I was at university – where I should have been, of course, if Hitler hadn’t intervened. It wasn’t so different, I imagined, except for the uniform and the windy spaces and the fact that the drop-out rate was rather alarming. I never knew who I wasn’t going to sit down to breakfast with any more, from one day to the next. It could be my best friend, or that chap who ribbed me about my bad eye. Sometimes I would think it was more like an old people’s home, full of folk very close to the end of their days but who happened to be not much older than schoolboys. You forgot who’d gone: our shaved napes look too much the same from the back, over the same tunics. Grins lingered in the air like Carroll’s cat, voices hailed you in the thrum of a loose sheet of tin as you walked into the wind. No one died, usually: they vanished. You’d wait for the stragglers. The stragglers landed. There’d be a pause, a long pause, but the sky refused to yield my good friend, went on refusing until dusk. Went on refusing while the bombers were making ready yet again in a medley of winking lights and throbbing steel.

  Or sometimes the lost one did come back, terrifically late – and we’d all rush out and watch her limp closer and closer. ‘That’s him! That’s David! Good God! Well done!’ Smoking like a train. Very low. Clearing those damn trees, those telephone lines, that blossoming hawthorn. Silent watchers, preparing their cheers. Wheels bumping on England, England skidding. The smoking wings bouncing, the great fuselage careering. A bit of flame, there. Oh no. Oh dear me. He’s lost it. He’s lost it. The ugly disappointment, the wretched distress. Better to just vanish, in the end. Better to let the wind swallow your ashes.

  We were raided ourselves, once or twice. I realised again how the biggest blast can leave only a hole in the ground and a black V on the nearest wall. From the air we were a big clean handkerchief called central Lincolnshire with a tiny red initial sewn in at the corner. But the cities we were targeting were not like that: they were embroidered densely all over with a stitch so tiny and intricate that a careless prick of a pin would cause irreparable damage. We pricked and pricked, again and again, deliberately. I hardly ever considered that embroidery as anything but an industrious pattern of swastikas. It wasn’t schools or houses or hospitals, it wasn’t the cosy Kaffeehaus on the corner or the chanting Kindergarten or the sumptuous gallery or the packed theatre. It was either factories or docks or the enemy. It was vengeance. It was crippling their means of production and bringing them to their knees. They were evil, Mother. Please don’t look at me like that. A bullet cannot be stopped by a naked hand. Don’t say to me: ‘You wouldn’t even kill an ant, Hugh. Instead you would talk to them. You wouldn’t even kill one of those wretched ants.’

  Was it my fault I was born when I was born? I never asked to leave Eden. You know what I am talking about.

  I’m cross, now. I’m full of blistered babies and charred old women. Why should I write to you, anyway? You never write to me!

  Hugh

  Hot. We lost the cricket.

  Dear Mother,

  Sorry. I’m doing very well indeed.

  I was the only air observer with an eye-patch. Technically, I shouldn’t have passed the tests, particularly the judging of distance, but I did. I scored highest in pretty well everything – I always had done. I can’t explain this; I was nicknamed ‘Sonar’, for a time. Perhaps it was Quiri’s mark. I’ve never felt a lack of depth in what I see, but I don’t remember what it was like before. Perhaps I am imagining this depth.

  I was intensively trained in reconnaissance and gunnery. The body and soul of reconnaissance, according to our instructors, was ‘a spirit of restless inquisitiveness’. To this end, small dramas were enacted on distant hillsides for the delectation of our binoculars, guns were fired that we might recognise their different tunes, and we were finally placed alone in a dark room with an aircraft gun to play with and a small table to write upon. Over my heart I sprouted a single wing – I could feel it beat, dear Mother! Officially an air gunner, sitting in the front turret blister in the very snout of the plane, my main job was to spy upon the enemy’s ground defences, to scribble down a description of what exactly was trying to drop us. I was a hybrid, a sort of Air Army chap. I rather liked that.

  I always took one of Rachael’s letters up with me. If she hadn’t written lately I would take up one of the old letters, carefully folded in the hip-flask pocket of my tunic. Over my tunic I had my brown leather flying suit, fleeced with wool. I wore it dashingly open, imagining her watching me as I strolled across the concrete to the bomber. As soon as we were aloft in the freezing cold, I zipped up. I’d made a lot of sorties by this time, with no more damage than a peppered aileron or two. Enemy ack-ack through perspex was a familiar sound, a bit like drunken cavalry picking their way over gravel, or like God coughing in a cathedral, or like a walk across frozen snow. Statistically, the chance of going down was about five per cent these days – the three-month shindig over the Ruhr had been particularly costly, but we were now about to hit Hamburg. This was, in fact, the first sortie of an epic production that was to roll for five months.

  As I said, I always took up one of Rachael’s letters. Others took a teddy bear, a lock of a girlfriend’s hair, a shiny pebble, a snapshot. One bomb aimer had the dried larva of a caddis-fly preserved in a matchbox. Another had a spatter of russet hair in a locket: he said it was his girlfriend’s armpit hair. Well, these were all one had to hold up against the Gorgon stare of fatalism. Sometimes this fatalism was a steady river you knew would bring you safely home; at other times it was just as steady, but ended in a chasm, into which the river plunged a horribly long way down through pitch darkness. Neither prayers nor fetishes made the slightest difference, of course, yet we all used them. One chap, a friend of mine, very calm and collected, had this thing about Berlin – he’d tremble all over, when it was a sortie over Berlin. And that’s where he bought it, in the end.

  The letter had come in the evening, as I was preparing myself in my tiny room – the officer’s privilege. There was a cupboard, a chair, an iron bed with a red blanket, a shelf for my books, and a thin brown rug. An orderly knocked, handed over the letter, took my empty jug of water, and left me to my business.

  I recognised the bold blue-violet hand on the envelope immediately. She hadn’t written for a month, and now it wasn’t a postcard but a letter. My heart oozed rather than hammered, as it did whenever I spotted the long silky-orange gleam of the Ruhr out of the night’s blackness. Not that I wasn’t already nervous, as I always was just before a ‘performance’ – the same looseness of the bowels, the same shortness of breath. Stage-fright for the play whose principal character was Death. One wag had written a sketch for a concert party I’d produced in which a bomber-crew, bald and toothless and trembling over their sticks, sang a song in wavering falsetto called ‘Nobody Told Us It Was Over’, of which I recall only the last verse:

  Nobody told us it was over,

  We could have been sitting in clover,

  Now we are ninety in ’99

  And still dropping our pants on the Rhine!

  The next night, they went down, all of them.

  I tucked the letter in my tunic. I was too fidgety to read it now. But I’d take it up with me, to read as we were coming back. This assured me, somehow, that we would come back. I was particularly fidgety because the Hamburg defences were expected to be lively. My job was to dissect that liveliness, for the sake of future sorties. I would have to put the letter out of my mind.

  It was a terrific sunset, blood-red through my window, which faced west and let soldering beams in to fire the buttons and belt buckle of my tunic and bronze my leather flying suit. I was twenty-one, Mother. I think you’d have thought me handsome, the job well done. Can I be forgiven for squaring my shoulders and turning a little in the light, imagining myself as Odysseus before the high ramparts – spotted leopard’s skin over my
shoulders, ornate shield on my back, splendid greaves on my shins clipped with silver at the ankles, bronze and enamelled cuirass on my chest and a nodding, red-plumed helmet instead of my cap? After all, Homer had made an SL of Agamemnon in the passage that I had declaimed (in English, in my own toughly trochaic school translation) for a concert party up in the Hull battery:

  From the bronze he wore flashed beams

  High into the distant sky, where

  Hero and Athene thundered –

  Answering, by that salutation,

  Golden Mycenae’s King.

  Within half an hour I was inside our own Trojan horse (all rivets, fuel and duralumin rather than wood), clambering over the bomb-aimer’s panel, opening the stiff bulkhead door, tugging open the two turret doors, gripping a bar in the roof and swinging myself into my tiny nutshell of a kingdom, soon to be looking out on infinite space, the view that a clear night gives us of our imaginative limits. We shudder and groan aloft, the intercom babbles and clicks, we are one of a multitude, a great dark flock in the night around us. The crew are experienced, confident, motley: the captain is Canadian, the navigator Jamaican, the bomb aimer from Orkney. The rest of us are English, not all in our twenties – the rear gunner is forty tomorrow, we have a cake made in the shape of a turret, candles for guns, a party planned. Many Happy Returns, Reg. He was a stocking salesman before the war: we have a sketch involving bare legs and ladders, barely rehearsed but it’ll go down well.

  I check the letter, suddenly fidgety, by placing my hand in my pocket. A certain military discipline forbids me to take it out, now.

  We bank tight, turning towards the North Sea, the Dutch coast, and I muzzle myself with my oxygen mask. The Canadian sergeant likes to bank tight, he likes to show the night what an extraordinary machine he is moving through it, how strangely manoeuvrable this great galumphing monster is – we’ve looked down half a dozen factory chimneys on training runs over Leicester, we’ve written the name of his girlfriend in the clouds – but this turn presses my left ribs against one of the ammunition tanks between which my seat is squeezed, and I softly curse him, and as softly ask God to forgive me.

  God is with me only, I might add, on a sortie. Mine is a gerrymandering belief (the cramped corridor of the Lancaster was later replaced by the cramped backstage of a full house, Mother). Nothing must happen to the pilots. Least of all a bullet in the head.

  I have a notebook on my knees, a pen in my top pocket, an orange lamp shining dimly over my shoulder, and two guns at eye-level which are, like the spar on a ship, the leading point of the huge bulk of it all – only these stick out from the snout like a tiny, vicious sting. Their handles remind me of our motorcycles in Africa: when I twist them the turret rotates, taking the guns with it, and if I wish to spit fire into the night I squeeze the triggers on the grips. There’s even a smell of Castrol; if I close my eye, I can see the river going the wrong way, feel Father’s soaked back. But I’m not meant to close my eye, I should be peering out and scribbling. If an enemy fighter rears into view (God forbid) I will fire at it. Otherwise I must note everything I see, and try not to think about dying. I can just make out my face, like a dim harvest moon in the dark. When I need clearer visibility, I switch off the lamp. Then the fireworks outside make my face loom and hiccup, half-missing behind its mask.

  We are over the sea. There are only a few lights. The odd pinprick, the odd little necklace on the coast. I wish we were over the famous forests further south, cooler after the day’s heat, sweet with pine sap, full of animals scurrying through the darkness! I am envious of these last, suddenly, despite the danger they are always in, the fear they feel. I shift in my seat, roll my head and shoulders a little at the first twinges of cramp. We are a strange-shaped house, a stretch of fetid rooms throbbing through the air – the bomb aimer under me, the pilot behind, long passageways and poky attics. Someone found a rat, once. The rent’s due, goes the joke. So where’s the services, then? When’s luncheon served, eh? When’s tea? Where are the whores?

  My elbows on the perforated tanks knock minutely as the metal vibrates: to write I have to lift them clear, or my writing will look like the note Father Christmas left me once, thanking me for the carrot and the ‘dram’. Aunt Joy wasn’t so bad, really. You never did that. You found Christmas strange in all that heat, but you’ll point out that we had sagging decorations on the ceiling and strings of paper angels draped over an acacia cut for the occasion. So my thoughts drift as we appear to drift lazily over the North Sea – once called, in happier days, the German Sea. Crouched in a cold our altitude has created, far in my little cell from the sweet July warmth of England, I drift.

  What does this ‘England’ mean? What did Rachael mean by saying I was ‘so English’? I never saw England until I was just seven. Everything I knew, everything I loved, was far away. Now I am encased in metal and bolted perspex, flying through the air to bomb a city, in the name of this England. How did I arrive by this? The mark on my nape tingles. That’s a good sign. But when I think of the fetish packet crumbling away to nothing years before, my stomach contracts with fear. These thoughts and reactions are nothing new. In this extreme case, when I start to imagine imminent extinction, and the horrible impossibility of it – or, worse, some slow-dying agony of flame – I call on my guardian angel, Herbert E. Standing. He stands behind me, a tall white figure crouched by the lamp, a vague cloud in the glass that curves in front of me, whose blister we occupy like infinitesimal parasites in the eye of a gnat. This is how things are. I cannot change them. (Did I ever wonder why, in that orange-tinted dimness, his togs stayed white? Don’t ask awkward questions, please. I have to concentrate.)

  There are pulsations in the distance, old gold and wild-daffodil-yellow. I wonder for a moment why there are so few orange wild flowers, and try not to. We are banking again, less tightly this time, and Pete’s drawl announces that we are almost over our target. I hear Dom the Jamaican navigator behind him, maybe making a joke. He has a reputation for bringing luck, though some of the men don’t believe a black can navigate. When a new fellow said this at the top of his voice in the mess, triggering a general laughter, I lost my temper and we tussled, losing my cap and a button. (He didn’t have time to nurse a grudge, since he was lost in a raid the same week.)

  The sea, a dim gleam where the lights pulse, suddenly contracts, is pinched by the darker coast. I swallow with difficulty, and I wonder again how my faithful heart copes with such an acceleration, such an oozy pounding. It is a healthy, strong heart, according to my medical. No one on this plane has anything but a strong heart. The first burst hits that organ before it hits my brain; it is underneath us, cracking like an ice sheet, deafening me through the din of the engines. Have they found our height? The city is fitful ahead, sprinkled with tiny dots of light, as if careless citizens are lounging and smoking in the streets, giving away their positions. One forgets the scale. Suddenly, red and blue dazzles, swings, makes pillars like sunlight through deep dark pond water. I scribble madly, then coolly. The red and blue might be an illusion, an optical trick.

  Possibly white searchlights in air disturbed by rising heat, I write. The end of an evening, warm night air, the beer halls stacking their chairs. Glow-worms nestle beneath, then go out. Those are our bombs, I think. Not this plane’s bomb. My stomach hasn’t yet declared that we are dropping, losing altitude, daring the sweeping arbitrary claws of their defences – to lift free afterwards as if the two tons of blockbuster were what had been dragging us down out of the clean air. Under me, under the ribbed plates, Steenie MacLean from Orkney would have opened the panel by now, staring into the chasm, lining up his crossed wires like a sniper. Instead of a buttoned chest – a geometry of streets through perspex, Flint’s bearings guiding us to the precise spot. Yellow and orange sprinkle themselves over the ground, like a stage Devil scattering thunderflashes. These are guns, firing at us. I jot the details as the barrage rocks us, makes us a little tipsy. I am on my stream of devil-may-care, my mi
nd hovering somehow on the edge of my body. The fleeced high collar of my flying suit irritates me; I press it down, bang my elbow on the tank. We descend abruptly, so abruptly my stomach is left behind as when a motor car takes a humpback bridge too fast. For a teeth-chattering second or two, I think it’s something to do with my elbow hitting the tank, then that we’ve been hit. But the barrage is too low and too high to worry us. We are at 13,000 feet. The firework display is no lower than 14,000 feet, but there is more quite a bit further down ... at, say (I screw my eye up), 10,000 feet. I spot the silhouette of a bomber – one of ours – sliding fleetingly between us and that far-down mass devotion of fire. She trails a little ribbon of sparks she won’t ever be able to get rid of, like an animal’s hurt, perplexing.

  We’ve caught them napping, though: no fire control, they’re just sending everything up as it comes, trusting to a thickness, a wall of fiery splinters, flame itself, the last convulsion of the gods. They are carving the air into dragons and worms, frothy billows, sharp spears and panic-making wolves, all sheathed in gold, all tumbling about and crashing into each other, seeking our dark, ominous shapes and sometimes striking home to the heart where the glycol seethes or blundering into an aileron, the hard rivets of a wing, the blister that shatters into particles of ice. I think of the jolly men of the Thule Society, looking up from the streets below at the hideous shapes rushing through the air behind one-eyed Wotan, Wotan the furious, the terrible, the wise – the little openmouthed boy in England now the rider of the skies behind his twin guns, Wotan himself! Ach! He’s come! The night of the gods has come at last and heaven shall be scorched to cinders, friends! Their little round spectacles flashing. A wind age, a wolf age, the age of Thule. But we are the ones with the fire! Ha haaa!

  We’re hit.

  I know it because it’s happened once before. Five per cent. Someone has to fulfil the quota, a few eggs have to shatter in the back of the cart. Oh, dear God and Jesus. Oh, Herbert E. Standing, save us. Oh Yolobolo. Kan wak, si-pap bobo, bolo yol nga.