That Burning Summer

by Lydia Syson

  12

  Peggy heard the crash from the hall. It was followed quickly by the baby’s rising scream, and Myra’s above that. Safe to waltz into the kitchen then, as if she’d only just happened to arrive, instead of listening as she had, for five minutes or more behind the door.

  “You stupid, stupid boy!” Aunt Myra was shouting into Ernest’s baffled face. Claudette’s howls stepped up to an ear-splitting pitch.

  Clever boy, thought Peggy. Perfect timing, for a change. Good to have that subject closed.

  “Oh, Ernest! What have you done?” Peggy said. She knew it was a kind of betrayal, to align herself with her aunt like that.

  Ernest looked as dazed as she’d ever seen him.

  “No common sense at all,” Myra kept repeating. “If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. Not one drop.”

  “I know, Mum, but don’t keep saying it. It was just an accident,” soothed June.

  “It’s always just an accident.”

  “He was only trying to help.” June scooped up the baby, popping the cherries from her ears into her own mouth. She rocked her against her shoulder with one arm while trying to separate potato peelings from the rest of the cherries with the other.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll do that,” said Peggy, quickly stepping in before Claudette’s head could swing back. “Let me get a colander, and then I can give them a rinse.”

  The kitchen hadn’t been empty since she’d finally woken up, long after breakfast, and with an awful start—you never knew what time it was with the room so dark. June was hammering on the bedroom door, telling her she’d milked Marge already, and hadn’t she heard the racket the cow had been making, and that she might have got away with it this time, but that was the last lie-in Peggy was getting this side of Victory. Peggy briefly wondered if she’d dreamed the whole thing. The mud on her nightgown hem told her otherwise. Anyway, nobody could make Henryk up. He was too extraordinary.

  Ernest staggered to his feet, and managed to squish more cherries into the diapers in the process. Dark purple stains.

  “I’m so sorry, Aunt Myra. I just didn’t see the bucket there. I’ll clear it all up, I promise. I’m ever so sorry. I didn’t mean it. Look, I’ll take my shoes off right away. And I’ll make some tea, shall I?” he offered. “Yes, tea … Why don’t I do that?”

  Peggy nodded at him, and gave him a little shove in the direction of the Rayburn. Best get him away and busy as quickly as possible.

  “See! There are plenty of cherries here worth saving!” she said.

  Peggy was trying to ignore the tight, dragging sensation in the pit of her stomach. It was like carrying around a boulder, this mistake she had made: huge and indigestible, it weighed her down. She put the colander on the table and set her face into an encouraging smile.

  “You sit down, Auntie—you must be exhausted. I’ll clear all this lot up and I can easily put the dirty things in the tub to soak again.”

  “Boiling water for cherry stains. Stretch out the cloth and pour it through. Hasn’t your mother taught you anything? Goodness me. Well, you’ll learn when you have to. June can show you this time, and you’ll know for yourself the next.”

  Peggy’s jaw clenched. She had to keep her mouth shut. June turned from the draining board, and gave her a huge wink. A perfectly painted black line flicked up at the end of long heavy lashes, making Peggy wonder if she wouldn’t be better off learning June’s mascara trick, instead of top tips for stain removal. Except, with her luck, make-up would probably be yet another thing she’d have to “do without,” thanks to this wretched war. And just as she was finally getting old enough.

  Myra was still talking.

  “Could be worse. Could be blood.”

  On hands and knees back in the scullery, Peggy stared at the flagstones. The sun flooding from the open door lit the whole awful mess with brutal clarity. Whatever had she been thinking? People don’t just go round hiding people. It was absurd. Especially with Ernest always trailing after her, with his binoculars and his questions and his rules. Noticing things. What about food? What about the law?

  Her skin seemed to contract. For the first time she began to fear for herself. Maybe she was a traitor already. After all, she’d encouraged someone not to do his duty. That was a kind of treachery. Peggy didn’t know how old you had to be to go to prison, or if being a girl made any difference. But they hung traitors. She was sure of that.

  June’s voice sang out from the kitchen, sounding blissfully normal: “I’ll have a cuppa while you’re on the job, Ernest.” Peggy knew exactly what she’d say next. “I’m parched.”

  “Would you like tea too, Peggy?” called Ernest.

  “Yes please!” she called back, unfreezing, glad nobody had been watching her.

  It was simple enough, Peggy told herself, scooping some carrot peelings back into the bucket. As soon as she could escape, she’d go back to the church and tell the poor pilot right away. Not much time had passed yet, after all. It wasn’t too late. He’d be back at the aerodrome soon enough, putting all this behind him, and nobody need ever know what had happened in a silly panic in the middle of the night.

  Nose wrinkling, she finished clearing up the slops. There had to be something here worth rescuing for Henryk, though even the chickens and the pigs were getting rather a rotten deal now, what with everyone having to be so careful about what they threw away.

  A slice of burned toast balanced where it had fallen on the row of gumboots. Her own were still slightly wet. She hoped nobody had noticed, and shoved the toast into the pocket of her cardigan. Feeding the pilot before she sent him away was the very least she could do.

  13

  As soon as his eyes closed, Henryk was flying again. Nothing could keep him out of the sky in his dreams. Before the war, he often found himself laughing in his sleep as he flew. It was an endlessly exhilarating miracle, and for the first six months of flying solo he never stopped dreaming about it. Why put an end to the most perfect liberty devised by mankind, even for a night? It was a glory like no other. He barely felt alive except when he was in the air.

  Not any more. Now when he slept Henryk always returned to the same flight. This was the tenth, or twentieth time or thirtieth time he had re-lived it. It was always the third day of the war. The moment when rage had whipped away doubt.

  No looking back at the mechanic sweating on the ground. The man’s encouraging shout was lost in the engine’s rising roar and the thud of turning propellers, and the final lurch into freedom. In the air at last, and not a breath of crosswind, Henryk turned the nose of his plane skyward, climbing almost vertically in formation with the others. Witold, Kazimierz, Jan, Tadeusz, and Wacław. Slow and steady. It felt too slow at first. But height was the thing, and he had to be patient.

  The fields below slowly shrank.

  It felt so good to be on the move again. Three days, hidden with their P.11s, watching wave after wave of enemy aircraft pass overhead from the shelter of the trees. More pilots than planes on their side: time after time the squadron commander had stepped in to stop furious attempts to take off without orders.

  “We can’t afford to lose more aircraft.”

  And now, finally, they were fighting back, and the British would soon send more planes, and the French were coming any moment too. It was just a case of holding on till help arrived. Not long. Then Hitler would see what he was up against. He’d see what the Poles were made of.

  Henryk barely noticed the chill as the rush of wind cooled his sweat-coated face. He knew the machine guns were checked and loaded. He trusted his aircraft completely, just as he trusted the groundstaff. His focus was all on the sky.

  Which had never looked so blue. Another perfect day. It felt so wrong. This was the kind of late summer Sunday afternoon you needed to hold on to, so that its magnificence could last you through the winter. He should be taking his sisters to Kryspinów for their last swim of the season today. That’s what they always did this weekend.
Before the water turned too cold to bear. While the leaves were still green on the poplars. No. Stop. Don’t think about this. Gizela’s pleading eyes. Klara and Anna pulling him out of the door, laughing, bubbling over with excitement, towels stuffed in bags and spilling out as they spun round. Stop. His mother calling down from the top of the stairs, making sure Anna had her float.

  Stop. Keep searching the sky. There’s no time for thinking.

  Where were these wretched planes then? How much longer could they take to arrive? Four minutes? Three minutes? Two? Henryk’s eyes ached with the strain of looking. Up, ahead, left, right. Perhaps there had been a mistake. Over and again he scanned the blueness. Kazimierz adjusted his course, just a little to the left, and turned in the cockpit. His mouth opened and shut as he signaled, and then Henryk saw them too.

  From below, the enemy aircraft looked like a dark cloud, a swarm of locusts bigger than any he had sighted yet.

  Henryk continued to climb, pulling on the stick with increasing urgency. He was desperate to get closer, closer and higher. Now, through the propellers’ blur, he could count the planes. Six flights of heavy Junkers, low-winged bombers. Another two flights below. A fat batch of Heinkels. And, with a sickening jolt inside, Henryk registered four more flights behind these, huge and gray. Here and there, like dragonflies next to these well-filled locusts, single Dorniers flitted.

  Henryk’s head roared. It was so hard to be patient. But you had to wait. You just had to wait. Till the last possible moment. It was all about keeping your nerve.

  At last the Me 110s themselves appeared, noses up, as though the Polish fighters were not even worth their attention. Glittering in the brilliant sunshine, they radiated superiority in tight formation.

  “Come on!” Henryk shouted into the noise. “Come down and get us. You can see we’re here. Why don’t you come and fight?”

  You would think they’d heard the taunting. All at once the Messerschmitts suddenly dived straight for the Poles. Henryk just saw teeth, sharp and white, fangs painted on the snout of the plane whose gunner was aiming right at him, guns stuttering. Teeth clenched, jaw rigid, Henryk returned fire, felt the recoil jerk of his own plane, and turned instantly on his wing.

  The German plane flashed by, and turned too, but it was below him now. He had the advantage at last. Behind and above. And it was not for nothing the Polish planes were known as bees, angry ones at that, returning again and again to the kill.

  Henryk looped back and back, and fired his machine guns until they failed to respond. Then he kept on hammering the button with his thumb, almost unable to believe this fight was over for him. But his ammunition was finished. All gone, so soon. The important thing now was keeping his plane intact for the next attack.

  Heading back for the airfield, he caught a flash and another burst of fire at the edge of his vision. Oh Jesus! Number 3 was in flames. Witold. Like a comet, the machine plunged to the earth, a fiery, smokey tail streaming behind it. Escape looked impossible. Surely he was already too low and falling too fast to bail out? Henryk’s heart smashed against his ribs, and then he saw white. A slow, soft blossoming of silk against the dark stripes of newly plowed earth.

  His relief came too soon. A streak of tracer followed. Then another. A second Messerschmitt had swooped in. Far away as he was, Henryk could see Witold’s flailing limbs. They jerked repeatedly, then hung limp.

  Henryk’s sleep was disturbed by the jerking of his own body. His thrashing arms thudded against planks, and when he tried to sit up, the crash of skull on wood left his head ringing. He was trapped, boxed in on three sides. Only when he heard the depth of the stillness all around him did he roll over and out from under the seat of the wooden pew, and see where he was.

  His first thought was the window. A church. A village? That girl?

  He pulled himself up, registering pain in his ankle, the stiff, clinging dampness of his many layers of clothes, the dull ache in his heart. The box-like pews made the place feel like a courtroom. Even without witnesses, without a prosecutor, he felt himself on trial. The windows were criss-crossed with lead, the small glass squares thick and distorting. Henryk half-expected to look out and find himself fenced in by hostile peasants, ready to lead him to a prison cell. He had abandoned his post. It didn’t get much worse than this. He deserved to be punished.

  Henryk looked through the cobwebbed panes and saw nobody. Nobody, and nothing.

  Almost nothing, at least. He was briefly dazzled by the glittering blue of the water through which he had waded in the night. It snaked through lush grassland, forming something like a moat to this isolated church. No gravestones that he could see. Very few trees and fewer houses, save a couple of red-toned roofs dotted about in the distance, none very close. A great deal of sky, and the sun high in it too. He had slept too long.

  He raised a hand to rub at his bent neck. It was chafed and raw from turning his head, over and over again, constantly looking for the enemy. The bundle of fresh clothes still lay tumbled in a heap on the parquet floor where he had dropped it. The girl. Peggy. Was she coming back? And if she did, what would he say to her?

  Little clouds of dust rose in the air and invaded his nostrils as Henryk inspected the pile of clothing. He shook out baggy corduroy trousers flecked with pale crumbling paint, a fisherman’s jersey, and a canvas smock. It was stiff in places and also encrusted with some chalky substance. Thick, knitted socks. All apparently packed away in a hurry, unwashed, unironed. Not that he cared. But it made him curious about the man these clothes belonged to.

  Before peeling off his uniform, Henryk removed a stone from his inside pocket. He kissed it once, and placed it carefully on the white painted bench in front of him. Then he sat down and withdrew his revolver. Nearly everyone in his squadron had carried a handgun during the Battle for France. Who wanted to come down defenceless behind enemy lines? So many planes destroyed on the ground, but this, at least, he had rescued.

  Elbows on knees, head down, he weighed the gun in his hand, remembering. The solidity of the weapon no longer eased his nerves. Neither friend nor enemy, neither cold nor warm, it simply existed. Neutral, passive, a cog in a machine, it was a rank-and-file instrument, awaiting orders, which it would simply obey. You had to admire it, really.

  Henryk turned it around, and closed one eye so he could look down into the darkness of the barrel. Not much to see. A faint smell of metal and grease. It was awkward holding it like that, wrist twisted. And he felt so stiff. His armpits still ached from the parachute harness. His ankle gently throbbed. He felt as hollow as the barrel down which he peered.

  Well, he could just see, couldn’t he? Find out what it felt like? See if he could? The roof of the mouth. That was meant to be the way. A straight path to the brain. It should be easy enough. A simple solution. His lips parted and his jaw loosened, his tongue retreating to the back of his throat. It made him gag. There’s no flesh to speak of in that soft, dark archway. It’s too hard to take more hardness, hard like the mouth of a gun itself. It will bruise and splinter.

  Henryk heard a noise, and realized he was making it himself. A soft, choking kind of sound, wet and dry at once, like a breath stuttering to a halt in the last hours of a long illness.

  The safety catch. He couldn’t do this with the safety catch on.

  The truth was he couldn’t do it at all.

  14

  Peggy drew herself sharply against the wall by the window so she could not be seen. Heart thudding, eyes shut. A white figure appeared in her mind just as clearly as she had glimpsed it moments before. She could trace the line of his back as he bent before the altar, a little distorted by the window glass, but clear enough. Not prostrate or even kneeling, but simply pulling on a pair of dry trousers.

  When her breathing had become slower, she was tempted to look again. But she found she couldn’t. The idea of being seen looking was too excruciating. She felt hot with shame even for thinking of it.

  Peggy had made a wide circle round the
church before approaching it this time, over the bridge. Why hadn’t she led him round to the causeway in the night? No time. This way was better. You could just about see the building from the farmhouse. Coming from the far side was definitely safer. Creeping round towards the porch, she knocked gently on the door. A waiting stillness came from within, and the handle of the string bag she was carrying cut into her hand, as if to chastise her for stealing the food it contained.

  “It’s me. Peggy,” she called softly. Heaven knows why. Out here on the Marsh you could shout and scream and the sound would vanish into the skies and nobody’d know you’d ever spoken. You’re trying to make this into a big adventure, she told herself. How long would it take for him to pull on his clothes, and how would he look then? She called a second time, more loudly.

  “Open the door. Henryk. I’ve brought you breakfast.”

  The lock turned, and the door swung away from her.

  “Sorry it’s so late,” she said as she slipped inside, where she found herself immediately squeezed against Henryk. He had been waiting this side of the inner door so he could shut the outer one behind her. They tried to maneuver around each other. A familiar, comforting smell of lanolin, sweat, and clay filled the tiny space. It was the smell of her father, rising from his old jersey, warmed by a new body. Unbalanced, Peggy sat down suddenly on the bench behind the door. She took a breath to calm herself, and looked up to see Henryk’s face. Dark with beard-growth, it had a hunted appearance already and his eyes were bloodshot.

  “You are cold,” stated Henryk. “You … brrrrrr …” He mimed shivering.