by Peter Rimmer
Autumn and winter came and a good fire was lit in the nursery where Will spent his days with the young nurse who thought more of the chauffeur in his fancy uniform than the child crawling around the floor, very often smelling. Will’s brothers and sister never came into the nursery as if, after Byron’s perfunctory flick, they had all lost interest; Byron found more fun in teasing his twin sister while Randolph followed his father around the estate with consummate interest. Even at that age the only thing they had in common was a mother and father and the same roof under which they all lived. Will was sure, looking back, if he had been loved as a baby, his path would have been different.
The first thing he ever remembered was sitting in his high chair in the family dining room, strapped in, with a bowl of food that came in a warmer, as William was never to be a fast eater and the surrounding jacket of the warmer was filled with warm water to keep the mushed up food hot. As usual no one was paying him any attention and if it were not for the nurse’s day off, he would have been up in the nursery all on his own. Will’s first, vivid recollection of life was being ignored with the spill-proof warmer of food and himself in the high chair feet away from the long dining room table. Will rebelled, picked up the warmer and dumped it on the floor, waiting for a reaction, and watched his mother get up from the table without interrupting her conversation, pick up the warmer that had landed flat on its bottom and not spilt a morsel, and put it back in front of her son as if she had retrieved a bone for an errant dog. The bellow of rage and frustration that Will had ready to burst with the first smack died, stillborn. No one, not even his mother, had taken the slightest bit of notice. He was two years old.
Four months later Germany marched into Poland. England and France declared war on Germany and Red Langton went to live at Boscombe Down permanently. That week, workers came in to build a large air-raid shelter among the oak trees some seventy yards away from the manor house. Will took no more notice of the comings and goings than the rest of them took of him, his thirty months of wisdom unable to grasp the gravity of the happenings that would totally change the comfortable prospects of his life. 1939 turned into 1940 and the British fought their last great battle as the power that controlled the world and in the process exhausted themselves for the foreseeable future.
From the nursery window, high on the second floor of the manor house, high on its hill, young Will could see over the Nine Barrow Down to Poole Harbour where a squadron of German Heinkel bombers had mistaken it in the dark for Southampton. Will stood at the window, his soft pillow under his left arm feeling the soft material between his left forefinger and thumb while he sucked the thumb of his right hand in peaceful contentment. The searchlights of the ack ack regiment scoured the night sky for the elusive bombers and the sounds of the guns and exploding bombs reached Will through the open window and, as he was unable to comprehend what was going on, he enjoyed the distant spectacle of sweeping lights and bangs. Down below he watched people run out of the house in their night clothes and disappear into the trees not to come out again. Over in the distance, across the estuary, big bonfires were springing up and the wailing noise of the sirens echoed amid the booms of the big guns and the exploding bombs. Down below they had stopped running into the trees and if Will had turned round from the spectacle, he would have seen his young nurse hiding under her bed too terrified to make any noise. Will watched for quite a while but when the big lights searching the underbelly of the clouds were turned off and all that was left was one big bonfire, Will grew bored and took his pillow back to bed. He was still contentedly sucking his thumb when he fell asleep and when the Germans came back at three in the morning, attracted by the fires, he did not even wake up. He often wondered in the years to come whether anyone had noticed he and the nurse were not in the air-raid shelter with everyone else.
Shortly after the start of the Blitz, a good part of it aimed at London and the London docks, the government sent children out of the danger areas into the country, appealing to the country folk to take the young refugees into their homes which was how Hilary Bains first came to Langton Manor with twenty-two others. Will’s nursery became a place of joy and laughter, filled with youngsters of his own age. When the warning sirens blared they all rushed down and into the trees and the questionable safety of the extended air-raid shelter which, as the bombing of Southern England increased, became their ignoble home. Everyone was pushed close together under the warm feeling of shared, exciting danger, with duckboards down as the concrete floor underneath sloshed with water, wooden bunks up the concrete walls, two children per bunk, and dripping candles that were always falling over in their saucers constituting as big a danger to life as the German bombs which, distant and soundproofed by the breeze-block walls, fell on the small port. When an air raid was in progress the grown-ups started a game of I-spy-with-my-little-eye, to comfort themselves despite directing their energy at the children and, if the children were lucky – which was quite often as old men liked to reminisce – they would listen to Granda Langton tell them wonderful stories of his war, the war on the highveld of Africa, the Boer War, which he had fought with a good horse between his young legs, in the days when a man could see his enemy. There were only old men and boys in the air-raid shelter, the rest having gone off to fight the Germans. It was a great levelling of the classes, the air-raid shelter, all the Langtons still at home, the servants and the twenty-three refugees from the poorer parts of London.
Hilary Bains’s father was a tail gunner in Echo-Bravo-Foxtrot, a Lancaster bomber powered by four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines captained by Squadron Leader Red Langton, which was how Hilary the refugee was directed to Langton Manor, air crews becoming as much family as blood relations. Hilary had been at Langton Manor for seven months when a badly shot up Echo-Bravo-Foxtrot returned to Boscombe Down on two engines, the pilot subsequently receiving the Air Force Cross (AFC) for superb airmanship in bringing the plane home. They had been attacked twice by German night fighters who always came in from the rear, taking out the tail gunner and rendering the aircraft defenceless from behind. When the ambulance collected the wounded, which included Red who had taken a bullet through his ankle and would limp for the rest of his life, the rear bubble was empty, the perspex shattered, and Hilary’s father presumably dragged out, presumed dead. The only successful way for a tail gunner to bail out was to crawl through the body of the Lancaster and join the rest of the crew to drop down through the bomb bay while the pilot held the aircraft steady. Bomber Command lost twice as many more tail gunners than any other aircrew. Hilary was six years old. The following summer, during the final Blitz raids on London, Hilary’s mother was killed when a bomb hit Charing Cross Hospital where she worked as a night nurse. Hilary’s only friend or relation was young William, three years younger but with certain privileges as a son born of the house. It was a friendship that would last them for the rest of their lives as, when the bombing came to an end in May due to the RAF, the refugees went home, all except Hilary who had no one to take him back. His other alternative was an orphanage.
“Can’t he stay with us?” asked four-year-old Will, who enjoyed the protection of the nearly seven-year-old Hilary against the bullying of the twins who were going to boarding school in the following term, something William relished as for once he would be left alone.
“This war has turned everything on its head,” said his mother, and it was all she had to say on the matter for the next three years. Then one afternoon, tuning to the one o’clock news that talked of nothing but the war, she listened in stony silence to the usual litany about progress in France, advances in the Far East, the brave Russian allies on the Eastern front and the fight up through Italy, until suddenly she heard the one thing she feared most in her day. In clipped tones, as if the newscaster was reporting on a sport that had the annihilation of homes and families as the touchdown, the commentator’s voice echoed round the small cosy room in the manor where they now lived to save fuel. “Last night the Royal Air Force flew
a thousand-bomber raid into the heart of Germany with great success, destroying a ball-bearing factory. The city of Cologne is burning from one end to the other. Seventeen of our bombers failed to return… And that is the end of the one o’clock news.”
Adelaide Langton knew with certainty her husband was part of the raid so she could not concentrate on the children or her home, picturing Red’s aircraft burning and crashing headlong into the ground. She looked at Hilary and they stared at each other. She put her arm around the ten-year-old boy. He understood about the seventeen planes shot down and the many more bombers limping home with dead aircrew. What neither of them thought of in their hatred for the Germans was mutilated families, homes and lives destroyed forever as a result of Red’s bomb aimer calmly announcing ‘bombs away’. It was revenge for the Blitz and they thought it was right. She and Red, who was now in command of one of the three wings at Boscombe Down, had an unbreakable agreement: neither one would phone the other after a raid. ‘Bad for morale, old girl. Don’t you worry. The experienced pilots bring the crates home. Anyway, the war’s nearly over.’ The previous night’s raid would have made it Red’s ninety-seventh operation over Germany. Three tours and two Distinguished Flying Crosses to go with his AFC. But the RAF still kept him flying and Wing Commander Langton, thirty-seven, was tired beyond repair.
The day dragged by and the phone kept silent. She could hear the children playing on the front lawn, treble voices innocent of the crushing weight of the war. She was not even sure young Hilary understood what it meant to be without parents. It was cold outside and she hoped the children were well wrapped up.
Old Harold Langton, veteran of the Boer War and the best storyteller in the air-raid shelter, came in and sat down next to the small fire. He was seventy-six years old and had been running the farm from the day Red went to live permanently at RAF Boscombe Down. They sat in silence, waiting. Harold, named after King Harold II of England who had lost the Battle of Hastings and died in the process, had lost two sons in the last war and to make his misery complete, his wife in 1919 to the flu that killed more people than the war itself. The voices of the children tailed off as they moved further away to play their games. Harold stood up slowly and went to the window. His youngest grandson was jumping from the low bough of a tree, pretending he was bailing out of a burning aircraft, planes and dogfights being preferable to cowboys and Indians. He wondered what future lay in store for William Langton. The boy had already lost too many years of schooling, there being no petrol to drive him to school. The boy couldn’t even read. In his day they had a schoolmaster on the estate but the war had made private tutors another thing of the past.
What Harold knew that Adelaide did not was that last night’s raid over Cologne was to be Red’s last operation before taking up his new job as Commanding Officer (CO), Boscombe Down, with the rank of group captain. They were finally going to put his son behind a desk. Down the lawn, the children grew tired of climbing up and down the tree. He would have a word with Adelaide about William. The other children had stayed on at their preparatory schools as weekly boarders but no one had found the time to think about William or the young boy who would never again know the love and care of his parents. They were always saying they would wait and see after the war whether seven was too young to be away from home and maybe Adelaide was right. Wars affected the lives of everyone, permanently, and a few years later made no sense to anyone on either side. The Boer he had chased in ’01 was now a field marshal in the British Army, trusted by Churchill to attend the war cabinets and forty-three years earlier, if Lieutenant Langton of the Dorset regiment had put Jan Smuts in his gunsight, he would have shot him dead and received a medal from the King. The whole thing made no sense, and he was sure this war would make no better sense in twenty years’ time.
Harold sat down again in front of the miserable fire and wondered what his life would have been if his elder brother had come back from the Boer War. Maybe he would have stayed out there, even gone up north into the Rhodesias where the game was teeming and a man was only responsible for himself. He had gone up when the war was over to Barotseland, shooting crocodiles in the great Zambezi, but he knew he was running away from a far bigger responsibility than himself. The Langton land had to be nurtured by Langtons, a duty inherited at his birth. After six months, the most glorious six months of his life, he trekked back across the big rivers, crossed the highveld and at Johannesburg took the train to Cape Town and home.
Cowering in the air-raid shelter he had retold the days and the weeks of his big hunt, the candlelight changing to the flickering glow of the campfire, the wail of the all-clear siren, the keening of the jackals. He could taste the water of the Zambezi as he recounted the days and nights, William enthralled, Jo indignant at the crocodile slaughter, Byron probably working out ways of making himself rich and important, and dear old Randolph just being in his bunk at the top, looking at the ceiling. Harold wondered if a thought ever went through the boy’s mind… There was one of his grandchildren who would never set the world on fire and probably be the happiest of them all.
As the minutes passed away the picture of Red burnt to death in the wreckage of his aircraft receded and at four o’clock, the old maid came in with a tray of tea and they smiled at each other, old people communicating without the need for words. Langton Manor had been their home for all of their lives, the good and the bad. The old maid left them without saying a word.
Adelaide detected the engine of the motorbike as she was pouring their second cup of tea and put the teapot down quickly on the tray, listening. A few moments later, his old ears picked up the sound, and they both waited. The tension magnified as the light faded with the day and the sound of the engine drew closer by the minute, the volume changing as the motorbike wound its way through the Purbeck Hills. It was a trick of the hills that made the sound travel so far across the countryside. A door banged somewhere in the house. One of the children. They never shut a door, it was always banged. Relentlessly, the motorbike drew closer to Langton Manor until they both knew it had turned up the long, tree-lined driveway to the old house, the messenger of death. The bike ground its way up the hill and stopped. The engine cut and they waited for the doorbell and the old maid who would bring the wire from the Air Ministry. Another door banged, and they waited, frozen to the spot, the fire almost out. Then the door burst open.
“You want to freeze to death?” asked Red Langton. “Put some wood on the fire, for God’s sake. I’m frozen. Bought myself a bike. Like it? Petrol goes further.”
No one said anything, just stared at him.
“You want to tell me what’s the matter with you two? They’ve given me a week off. Why I’m in civvies and Adelaide, my love, you can relax for the rest of the war. I’m grounded. Last night was my last operation and my wing came back without a single loss of life. They’ve made me CO Boscombe Down. First reserve officer to command a bomber station. Sort of recognition, I think, for all the young kids who came out of Civvy Street and got themselves killed… Is there any tea left in that pot?”
Half an hour later, Red went out to the woodshed and came back to the cosy room with a fresh basket of logs. It was the end of October and growing cold. The two children had joined the grown-ups and were sitting in front of the fire, warming themselves. He was not sure whether young William understood his father would not be flying anymore but Norman Bains’s son looked at him with a distant air of understanding. Adelaide was visibly relieved. Bringing up four children would have been difficult. Granda was toasting bread on the end of a long, wire fork, trying not to burn his hand. As Red dumped the wood next to the fire, one piece of bread fell on the coals and had to be rescued. The old man blew away most of the ash and put it on the buttering plate with a thump that told everyone there was a war on. They were luckier than most, having real butter, making their own on the farm. A small standard lamp was burning in the corner to the right of the fire throwing a shadow of the carriage clock, made by some Frenchma
n whose name Red could never pronounce, across the room. The curtains had been drawn tight and for the first time in just over four years the war was far away. Red ruffled the children’s heads before sitting down in an old armchair between his wife and his father and they were all content to eat buttered toast and stare in silence at the dancing flames in the grate. His ankle hurt when the steel pin took up the heat from the fire. He would not be playing any more tennis but he did not think the wound would stop him riding a horse. Half an hour later the children were sent up to bed and Granda stoked up the fire.
“Young Hilary,” said Red into the silence, “can stay on with us. Probably make him a Langton by adoption. Something like that. The crew wanted to know what I was going to do. He’s good for William with the others away during the week, and soon for months on end.” He was holding his wife’s hand and his father had lit a pipe. “There are going to be a lot of changes after the war and most of them are going to be to the disadvantage of landowners. The war won’t last another year in Europe, though I’m not so sure about the Japs, and when it’s over, there will be a general election. My guess is the socialists will win and Atlee will be prime minister.”
“What about Churchill?” interrupted his father, indignantly. “Without Winston we’d lose the war.”
