Somewhere Over England

by Margaret Graham

  Ed flew the day after they returned and Helen counted the planes as she hoed the beet in the fields. Only seventeen Fortresses returned; twenty had flown out. Chris counted in Laura’s kitchen and waited for the phone to ring but it did not and Ed came back that night to the cottage, tired and trembling but safe. Again and again he came back until, at the beginning of June, no more leave was granted. Helen lay in bed that night alone, missing him, wanting him, and full of fear because there were no Americans in the villages, in the towns. Something was happening in England.

  As the fifth of June became the sixth the village and the country did not sleep because, wing-tip to wing-tip, British and American planes roared, circled and assembled: Mustangs, Thunderbolts, Flying Fortresses, twin-engined Marauders, Dakotas with wings swept back, Mosquitoes, Spitfires and Hurricanes, Halifaxes and Stirlings. In the cottage Chris and Laura wondered if now, at last, Hitler would stop fighting, but Helen knew he wouldn’t because she had seen his image in the eyes of the black-booted torch-carrying soldiers.

  All that long night preceding the sixth dawn in June the weather was not good, a strong north-westerly blew offshore from Europe but the German batteries were pounded along the French coast as night turned to day. At five a.m. while battleships pounded the German defences, a seaborne force of Allied soldiers landed on the coast of Normandy. British and Canadian troops took Gold, Juno and Sword beaches. American troops took Utah and Omaha. Omaha was steeper and there were many German soldiers behind quick-firing guns. Too many died.

  At eight p.m. that night, while Ed was at the air base, safe, thank God, safe for now, Helen listened to the King calling for his people’s prayers ‘as the great crusade sets forth’.

  She sat before the fire with Laura, Chris and Mary and listened as they talked of peace, and the children said they could not remember what that was like and she cried.

  The next week the Allied advance continued and there was hope and satisfaction in the faces of the people she met. The next week Marian rang the air base. Their friend Roger, the vicar of St Bede’s and the crypt, was ill, and Ed was given a thirty-six-hour pass to accompany Helen to London because his station was being stood down now that the initial invasion force was working its way inland. He drove her to the station and travelled in a crowded train to London, walking to the Underground, then passing through a capital which was bare of troops though there were children. Again there were children but Helen watched them as they played and looked up to the skies. They walked to her flat through streets broken like rotten teeth. Rosebay grew in the bomb craters and over the ruins and all the time Ed looked around but said nothing.

  The flat was untouched and the vicar pale.

  ‘You’ve been overdoing it, my dear,’ Helen said, sitting in the room holding his hand, looking round and remembering the telegram and her despair but she no longer had to remember Heine because he was always with her.

  ‘Dear Roger, you really have been overdoing it,’ she said, leaning over and kissing his thin forehead.

  They had brought ham from the base and eggs from Laura’s hens and together with Marian she cooked in her own kitchen again, looking out on the shelter, talking of the crypt members who, Marian had told her, still met each night but only because they wanted to.

  As the afternoon drew on Helen watched Ed, who stood at the sitting-room window, looking, just looking. Then he reached for his hat.

  ‘Guess I’ll take a walk, honey, just a walk.’

  His eyes were shadowed and his hands trembled and so she grabbed her jacket and went after him, walking down the street, holding his hand, which was warm and strong, hearing her shoes but not his, because of his rubber soles.

  He looked at the streets, the buildings, the fronts of stores which had no backs, the wooden crosses which were hammered into rubble where a daughter, a son, a husband, a wife had died. There were flowers on some, wilted and sad.

  That night he did not make love as they slept in the spare room but he held her all night, feeling not her soft flesh but the vibrations of the Emma B as he delivered her bombs. But buildings had no shape from 25,000 feet when flak was all around and fighters were diving. No human was ever visible beneath the falling bombs. No screams were audible, only those of his gunners as they bled for a second before their blood froze. He must think of them, not of the people beneath the ruins, the families he destroyed. He must not think of them because it was not his job to think. His job was to help to win the war. He knew that, it was what he told his nineteen-year-olds when they flew their first mission. It was what he told them when they were sick in the latrines after they landed.

  He tightened his grip on Helen. But did the Germans put wooden crosses in their ruins too?

  He wished that he had not come today. He wished there had never been a war.

  He travelled back the next day but Helen stayed for two more days and it was while she was there that the doodlebugs hit London. Droning, revving, the searchlights tracing the streaking tail and the shells bursting to either side but without effect. On they came, buzzing, until, suddenly, there was silence and it was then that they fell to the ground and exploded. Helen insisted that Roger should move to the crypt and they took him in the afternoon, returning for tea and provisions and it was in the evening as they returned to the church that one came buzzing through the air and cut out. She and Marian threw themselves to the ground screaming, both of them screaming, because they had been through this too many times before.

  The explosion rocked the street, showering dust, so much dust, and then they heard the roar and saw the flames but turned away, hurrying to the crypt, because the ambulances were already coming and they were not needed. Hurrying away from the shrieks and the groans, knowing that this pilotless plane which catapulted from the Continent in the direction of southern England was going to wreak every last inch of havoc that Hitler could manage.

  Helen ran down the steps of the crypt, checking that Roger was all right, listening as Ruth knitted and cursed ’itler for not knowing when he was beaten. She drank tea already strained twice through a sieve and felt as though she was running away as she took the train back to the village.

  Helen drove the cart out to the field for the hay harvest and this time there was no help from the young American boys, most of whom were now dead, but neither was there help from the new intake because they were too busy in the skies, too busy trying not to die.

  She heaved at the hay, smiling at John as he told her to work harder and build up those muscles because the war would be over soon and Montana would want to know what little British girls were made of. They carted loads back and then forked again. They raked the next day and Chris came, drinking cold tea at lunchtime, picking up the grass beneath the hedge and tying it into knots before throwing it up to the wind and watching it as it fell.

  ‘Will the war be over soon, Mum?’

  ‘I don’t know, I really don’t know,’ she said but she did know that it wouldn’t. But John nodded because the Allies were advancing across France and the Americans were attacking Japanese strongholds in the Marianas Islands.

  Hitler did not give up and bombed England with more doodlebugs and the crypt was busy every night. In July children who had returned to London were evacuated again and so too were those in the bomb alley in Sussex, Surrey and Kent because Hitler’s doodlebugs were intensifying. Mrs Vane now glared at Helen but Mrs Williams patted her and told her not to take ‘the merest bit of notice’.

  Ed flew only when there were no other crews because he was too busy on base, but each night when he could he came for a few hours and laughed as Helen dropped grass on the bedroom floor and held her tight as she slept, knowing that when he was with her he was safe from the fear of dying, safe from the knowledge of his destructive load, though he did not tell her that. But Helen knew, each night she knew, because she did not really sleep and heard his whispered words which he spoke aloud to himself.

  In August Russia captured Bucharest and its oil, a
nd Nazi death camps were found in Poland, at Maidenek where one and a half million people of every race and creed had been murdered with great efficiency. Helen cried that night and was glad that Heine was dead. She cried too for his parents because they might still be alive. And still Hitler did not give up.

  As they harvested the wheat, Chris asked if the war would be over by Christmas and Helen said again that she didn’t know; but she did because the Allies had not reached Berlin yet and that madman would claw and bite every drop of blood from everybody before he laid down his arms, and so would the Japanese.

  In September the British and American attack on Arnhem failed and now other people also knew that there would not be an early peace. Now also the V2 rockets fell on England.

  In October MacArthur landed in the Philippines and Helen harvested the beet, driving Rocket forward for the men to heave and empty their baskets up into the cart, then changing over so that John led the horse while she picked up beet, working in a steady rhythm, so much stronger than when she had arrived from the beet factory with the smell still in her hair.

  There were prisoners-of-war to help now: Germans and Italians. And the villagers gave them fruit from their stores and knew that they did not suck blood from small children, but drew out photographs of their own, showing them and smiling, their faces gaunt from the war and memories which only they knew.

  There were not as many missions from the airbase now. The Allies were gaining air superiority as the German bases in occupied countries were overrun and industries fell into the hands of the advancing Allies.

  ‘Soon,’ Ed said as he drank warm cocoa in front of the small fire in the sitting-room that they had lit for Chris’s birthday on 1 December, ‘soon we shall not need to go up at all.’

  Helen did not reply because the Allies had not yet reached Berlin, though the Home Guard had been ‘stood down’ and Mr Reynolds had let his boar into the orchard because he was so angry.

  But, she thought again, Berlin had not been reached and so the war had months to run.

  That night Chris lay in bed, thinking of Mary because he had asked her again if she would come to America when the war was over, and again she had said she didn’t know.

  In the morning he asked Helen if they could take his friend when they moved to Montana and she nodded, pulling on her boots, wrapping her long woollen socks over the top, and her scarf around her neck because snow had fallen in the night and the cold almost crackled in the air. ‘Only if she wants to and then we would have to sort something out with her sister. Mark you, darling, if we adopted her she would be your sister, had you thought of that? You could never be anything else.’

  She opened the door, just a crack before saying again, ‘You must think of that.’

  Chris flushed, he felt the heat in his face. ‘Oh Mum, don’t be so stupid.’

  But Helen thought about it all the way to the farm because Chris was twelve now and he and Mary fitted like a hand in a glove.

  On 19 December, on a day of fog and cloud when Ed had been due to fly, the Germans attacked the Allied front in Belgium, following the same route through the Ardennes that they had used in 1940. England reeled from the shock because they had thought Hitler was finished, but Helen had not. The Germans held up the Allied advance in Belgium and the casualty lists of the Battle of the Bulge grew longer as the days passed. The skies stayed cloudy and no aerial help could be given. Ed’s nails were chewed by Friday and two of his crew had learned that their brothers were dead. The skies didn’t clear until the last week in December but it was still snowing on the twenty-third when Ed climbed the tree which was slippery with ice and nearly fell reaching for the mistletoe and as Mary shrieked, Helen called, ‘You bomber pilots! You can’t even cope fifteen feet from the ground!’

  He threw the mistletoe down on her and clambered to the ground, chasing her, calling to Chris to bring the sledge, scooping up snow and throwing it so that it sank down beneath her collar and on to her neck, laughing as he heard her scream. She ran faster, feeling the snow crunch beneath her feet but he caught her, swinging her off the ground and kissing her. Chris threw a snowball and it hit their faces and the snow found their mouths and they tasted it together.

  They roasted chestnuts on an old shovel that night, seeing the skins crack and grow black, smelling the sweetness in the air, and they talked of the midnight service on Christmas Eve when they would be allowed to show light from the stained glass windows for the first time since war began.

  ‘So it really will be over soon,’ Chris said as he sorted the straight pieces of the puzzle which he had done three times before but Mary hadn’t.

  ‘I guess it might,’ Ed said, smiling at Helen who said nothing, just looked into the fire as she reknitted a pulled out sweater. Ed picked out a chestnut, throwing it from hand to hand and blowing on it but in the end he flicked it back on to the shovel while the others laughed.

  ‘Don’t be so impatient,’ Laura said.

  Ed nodded, rubbing his hands together and grimacing, watching as Helen knitted, the needles clicking softly.

  ‘It’s kind of nice to see you doing that. In the States they don’t, or in Little Fork they don’t anyway, not much. My mom has some pins somewhere.’

  Chris looked at Mary. ‘Will you come with us?’ he asked her.

  Helen looked up at Ed and they both listened as Mary said, ‘I don’t know. I think Laura will be lonely and I’ve got me sister too. I don’t know what to do.’

  Helen said softly. ‘What’s happened with Irene’s GI then, Mary, do you know? Has she heard?’

  Mary shook her head. ‘No, he’s never written, not after she told him she was having the baby.’

  Ed took the shovel off the logs. It had burnt black from the smoke.

  ‘Maybe the guy just got busy. He’ll get in touch, Mary.’

  Mary shrugged. ‘I like it here so much,’ she murmured and Chris looked up at Helen who smiled gently, and that night, as she said goodnight, she told him that he must let Mary make up her own mind because Laura had said she could live with her and come across to America in the holidays.

  ‘I like England too,’ Chris said, ‘but I want to go to America.’

  ‘I know, darling, but it’s different for us. We love Ed so much.’

  She walked down the stairs, running her hands down the vertical beams, hearing the creak of the cottage which had been home for so long and which she loved as much as she loved the fields and the towns of England. But she loved Ed more, she knew that now.

  She told him as he left that night, called back to the base early by the Colonel, and she watched as the jeep drove away. Its lights were still dimmed but they would not be for much longer if the rumour was correct, but Helen knew that this did not mean that the war was almost over.

  She looked down the road, following the path of the jeep, knowing that the recall meant he was flying and that night she lay and cursed the clearing skies.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Sergeant woke Ed with a 04.00 call. He had slept and dreamt of Helen laughing up at him from the snow and he swallowed hot coffee quickly before walking through to the briefing room. He wouldn’t think of Chris lighting the Advent candle tonight, he wouldn’t think of the stockings on the bottom of his bed because there was a whole goddamn day to get through first and many miles to fly.

  The Colonel told them that the weather had at last improved enough for air support in the Ardennes. That there was to be a combined attack on enemy airfields along the Rhine and other targets in support of the troops being pounded and pressed by von Rundstedt’s offensive. They were given their route and the weather report and Ed lounged back as the others were doing because losses were light now and they should act relaxed.

  He drove with two other officers on to the airfield, the wheels spinning on the hard packed snow of the verge.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, driver, let’s get to the ships at least before we take a fall,’ Bob Tucker said, chewing gum, rubbing his fingers t
ogether as he always did before a mission.

  Ed grinned. ‘Take it easy, Bob, you might end up with a sprained wrist and have the day on base.’

  Bob laughed, throwing his head back and slapping his leg. He was over-reacting, too nervous, but then weren’t they all? It helped them stay alive.

  Ed was dropped at the Emma Lou. He felt the sweat start on his hands as he walked beneath her wing. The Emma B had blown up over Hanover with a new crew. The pilot of the Emma Lou had completed his twenty-five missions and, except for Marco from the Emma B who had been grounded for months, this was a new crew fresh from the States he was taking up, poor buggers. Poor damn buggers, Ed thought as he smiled at them, tipping his hand to his cap, thinking how alike they looked in their heavy cumbersome sheepskin jackets with gum rolling from one cheek to the other, helmets dangling from their hands. He wouldn’t tell them until they were airborne that they had been assigned the Purple Heart Corner.

  He handed out their packets of money, maps, survival rations. Joking, chatting, not remarking on the shaking hands which took them from him, hoping that his own weren’t trembling. He took a look around the airfield, the ground crew in coveralls and fatigue caps were hanging around; the sky was pink where the sun was rising. Helen would be up by now, stirring meal and potato peelings for the hens.

  He looked at the other bombers lined up, enormous, powerful, and then up at the sky again. Just get these kids back, he ground out to the Fortress, then grinned at his men.

  ‘OK. Let’s get in.’

  Ed checked the instruments with Barney, his co-pilot, then used his hands palm up on the throttles. This old lady was heavy like the Emma B, but balanced. Yeah, she was pretty well balanced. The sound was deafening as the engines turned over then caught and held, and he saw the ground crew clutch their caps as winds swept across the deck. He tipped his fingers to them through the cockpit window knowing that as the Emma Lou took off these men would drift back to the Nissen huts whose walls were covered with pictures of half naked women. Here they would play cards and shoot crap with only half their minds because the other half would be up here with the Emma Lou until she came back – or didn’t.