That Summer

by Andrew Greig

  ‘Yes sir! Absolutely, sir!’

  Whatever the future held, I reckoned, it was worth it for this.

  The Spits were different. They came later, were even more of the future, were somehow aristocratic. Art deco, Stella called them. The art deco fighter plane. I took against them, though they were faster and more manoeuvrable, with a higher ceiling. They were too posh, too sleek. They were like overbred dogs, a total bitch to build, temperamental, unstable and easily messed up.

  Then the War came, and finally the invasion of France. I was still training, volunteered to go full-time and I left the office. Awkward farewells with Christine, far too much I didn’t know how to say. We wished each other good luck. Privately I hoped she’d find someone else to take her out. It was all in the arrangements we didn’t make. I walked home alone, late, bumping into walls and tripping over kerbs in the blackout because I’d forgotten my torch and I was giddy with guilt and relief. Only later did it occur to me maybe she was too.

  They held us back from going to France. We weren’t too worried; we thought then the war in France could go on for years. Six weeks later it was all over, and we still hadn’t fought. Not that I was that keen on fighting. It was flying and adventure I wanted. Something other than the day job.

  I waited for peace. That’s what normally happens. The leaders get together, have secret discussions and announce peace and its terms. But somehow the moment passed, somehow it didn’t quite happen. Somehow we weren’t ready to cave in.

  And now we’re in it. I realize I’ve really gone and done it as I switch off and jump down from my plane and look round the bombed half-repaired shambles of our airfield. If they wipe us out, there’ll be an invasion, and wipe us out they could.

  I never realized it would be so bloody, so close to, or so frequently dull. Terrifying. Yet when you finally give yourself away, fly above the past and future for an hour and get life back again, unexpectedly, walking in the evening on the way to the pub, you will see houses, trees, faces of your fellow citizens, all sharpened in intense relief, and realize this is what you sought all along.

  Evelyn phoned me at my digs, said he’d got the number from my mother. He’d been posted as group organizer with the mysterious Civilian Repair Organisation based over at Maidenhead. If he was able to borrow a truck, could he come over and see me tonight?

  I stood in the hallway with the phone pressed to my ear, thinking how good it was to hear from him, a warm familiar feeling that came from much shared. His easy confidence, his humour, his education. Quite unlike the intensity of young Len, struggling to articulate … And there was the vague sense of guilt I’d been left with after I’d explained that too much of me was still with Roger, and now I was joining the WAAFs I would be posted away … I was so touched and relieved he didn’t seem to hold that against me that I said Yes. Come on over and we’ll go out for a drink.

  After all, my pilot is scarcely my boyfriend. We’re not exactly going steady. And Evelyn is just an old friend from the past, one who’s likely to have more future than Len.

  I rang off and shivered as I turned to go back up the stair. Someone walking over your grave, my mother would say. Or someone else’s. And I already knew, like so many others, that I might as well grab what was there even if it meant being short of sleep and easy conscience, in those days that were so crammed and uncertain and sweet.

  I went upstairs, ignoring Mrs Mackenzie’s curiosity and disapproval, and began to run a bath and look for my better stockings.

  We came back late from The Cock, drifting in the half-light up the lanes and through the orchards. An evening of competitive line-shooting with the Spitfire glamour boys down the way. Line-shooting in reverse, we downplay everything that happens except for our fear and incompetence and luck, but still the facts are there. We shot down this, we did that.

  And though the neighbouring Spitfire squadron was more famous than us, being closer to the coast and so more front line, we’ve both experienced the same things. We’ve all looked wildly round a shining empty sky suddenly filled with growing specks, our hearts thundering, super-alive, supercharged by a high-octane mix of terror and excitement. We’ve all pulled the plug to Boost and felt the surge as we flew into battle, leaving our daily selves behind. That’s what let us talk and joke so easily, what flowed between us with the drinks – an unspoken common knowledge no one else could possess.

  These were not the people I wanted to spend all my time talking to, but it sometimes seemed they were the only ones I could talk to.

  I was thinking about this as we drifted in groups through the light mist, home towards the big house that served as our barracks. Something clattered into the tree in front, then I felt a thud between my shoulder blades. I snatched a windfall apple off the ground and with St John and Tad in tight formation turned on our attackers, and we fought a battle of apples and pears in the moonlight, ducking and weaving all the way through the orchards and up the pale flinty lane to Parsonage Farm.

  Evelyn turned up late but triumphant, pushing firmly up the stairs ahead of a muttering Mrs Mackenzie, who for once seemed quite abashed, perhaps because he wasn’t a youth but a man, one used to being in control, whether in front of a lecture class or in charge of a CRO squad.

  When I greeted him at the top of the stair he looked at me full-on, nodded briefly, smiled, put his hand lightly on my arm and kissed my cheek.

  ‘It’s good to see you again, Stella,’ he said. ‘You look lovely still.’

  I felt the scrape from his shaving that morning. I’d forgotten how firm and steady he was – his movements, the skin over his face, his speech. And also how old he was. No, not old; senior was the word. He was only ten years older than me, but despite growing up in the twenties he seemed to come from a more substantial and serious age. Two of his elder brothers had died in the Great War, which linked him to a different generation in my mind. After all, that war and the silence that followed it were part of what had happened to my mother and father, not my friends.

  I blushed and made an effort not to run my hand through my hair.

  ‘It’s lovely to see you, Evelyn,’ I replied. ‘You look well.’

  He smiled. In truth he did look good, in a suit but without a tie, quite raffish. Carrying a tan overcoat, hat, full of energy and purpose. The War has that effect on some people, as though they’ve finally found their calling.

  He hailed Mrs Mackenzie heartily as we went down the stairs, practically slapped her on the back, and I could swear that complaining old crone smiled as we went out onto the dark street.

  I lay listening to Tad and Sniff Burton’s breathing settle then snore, but I was much too awake. Perhaps the moonlight pouring in the curtainless window was something to do with it. Also the excitement of that day’s raid. I lay in bed still seeing the fat slug bombs dripping slowly from the planes, then the gutted remains of my kite, the bomb craters across the grass runway as though some giant moles had been at work. And before that, the sleepy afternoon heat, the dazed drifting of nothing happening in an English village. The fruit fight as we came home in the moonlight …

  I got up, pulled a dressing-gown over my pyjamas, found a cigarette and pushed the window up, lit into the cool night air. It wasn’t so late, not even eleven o’clock yet, but we’d be woken by six tomorrow …

  I stubbed out the cigarette on the brick sill, paused then lit another. Why not? It could be my last. No, that was getting morbid. These thoughts are true, but we can’t afford to think them. See too clearly and we can’t function. But if we don’t see, we miss so much and that’s a waste because this time may be all we’ve got. That’s what’s odd about these blokes, these companions of mine – they’re so very aware in the sky and so deliberately blind on the ground. We just chat and joke, drink and flick through light magazines.

  Tad, now, he’s not blind. He’s just very focused on whatever he’s doing, chasing women or trying to revenge his family and his vanished country. Either way it’s whole-hearted
. He’s got a bigger picture that keeps him going.

  I leaned on the windowsill and breathed deep. And had a memory flash of myself as a child, leaning on a windowsill in a summer night while our neighbour Mr Hartwell mowed his lawn. And I was calculating in a school jotter how long I’d been alive, expanding the years into months, days, hours, seconds. Then I began to calculate how many more I had to go, assuming I lived till seventy. And as the mower clicked, revved down, turned, it struck into me that the time I took to do this calculation would have to be subtracted from that total, and the time it took to do that subtraction would be as well. And I’d seen for the first time how our time is running away, and I’d stopped mid-calculation and just stared into that long dusk with my childish heart hammering, appalled.

  I watched the fire crawl down my cigarette as I looked into the dark and yearned for Stella to help me see right. I waited till the red circle closed in on my lips then threw it away, trailing sparks. I pulled down the window and went to my bed, and this time slept till tea was brought at dawn.

  CHAPTER NINE

  End of July

  A good deal of the myth is true. It was a summer seen through heat haze. There were a very young men who flew and fought, killed and died over the Channel or the English countryside, and those who were not killed were back in the pubs that evening. They were seldom serious; serious was not their style.

  It was a time of rumour of Fifth Columnists and paratroopers, of elderly Local Defence Volunteers drilling with pitchforks or one rifle between them. It was a time of ARP wardens, the Observer Corps, Land Girls and Naval VADs, Auxiliary Fire Service and WVS, WAAFs and Wrens. Mobilizing the entire adult population, Britain had gone overboard on acronyms. The unions had made a deal with the wartime government and men and women were working ten-hour days, six or seven days a week in the factories.

  It was a time of uncertainty, fatigue and excitement. There were lots of parties and dances and the pre-war sexual morality was vanishing like the dew on those hot mornings.

  For the pilots that summer was a time of the head turning, turning, tuned to the little things, the specks that grow. A blur coming out of nowhere to fill a rear-view mirror, and then the army motorcyclist overtakes. The wooden handle of a trowel in a village garden, abandoned among flowers. Spent matches on the grass around the chairs by the dispersal hut, untold numbers of dog-ends flipped out of windows, ground white flecks into new concrete runways. Pale knuckles gripping the Daily Mail that just a year before had urged appeasement. Intricate stitching round the badge ‘Poland’ as it’s sewn onto a uniform sleeve, sun flashing off the needle as it works. These tiny details they live and die by.

  That’s how it was. The many untruths are more subtle.

  By the end of July the pilots in Len’s squadron were complaining they were being held back. Supply convoys and Channel ports were still being attacked, but now the emphasis seemed to be shifting to airfields. Formations of fifty or more bombers, with Me109s as fighter escort – but only a handful of planes were being sent up against them, enough to disrupt but not to knock out.

  ‘Never you mind,’ drawled St John. ‘The point is, if we can’t knock them out, the same applies the other way round, see?’

  Silence as they tried to digest this. Everyone knew St John had a hot line to Fighter Command because his cousin was a high-up there, and they were getting a rare glimpse of HQ strategy. Mostly they just relied on guesswork and rumour like everyone else.

  Len lay in a deck chair in the hot sun with the Picture Post across his knee. His friend Tadeusz was reading an indecipherable newspaper entitled Wiadomoscí ze Swiata. To his right, on a low table Johnny Staples was writing a letter, and Billy (Shortarse) Madden was playing Ludo with Dusty Miller. The CO strolled out with a photographer from the Ministry, who took some pics of them then asked if they minded setting out a chess board, it being more … appropriate. The photo was taken, with the two men leaning forward, studying the pieces (which meant nothing to them) intently. It remains yet, still reproduced from time to time in books about that summer, another small untruth, a joke among the vanishing few who were there.

  The photographer thanked them, the chess pieces were replaced by Ludo, the CO went back inside and Dusty and Shortarse resumed their titanic struggle. Another morning at the height of that summer. All the young men occupied or pretending to be, trying to make out they’re not hooked, like fish on a line, to the Tannoy’s click. Waiting, waiting, letting the hours go by.

  ‘I don’t care for all this high strategy,’ Prior complained again. ‘I’m just saying it’s time we got up in numbers and took ’em on.’

  St John patiently explained they weren’t even front line. They were near the rear of their sector and so would never be first choice to get up and dance.

  ‘But not to worry, laddie,’ he added. ‘Your chance will come soon enough, believe me.’

  Again a few ears twitched, wondering if this was St John’s guess or information coming from Intelligence. He reached over and flicked the magazine from Len and began skimming the pages.

  Tad grunted and threw down his paper. He sat scowling at the grass, his right knee jumping, his fingers drumming on his thigh.

  ‘Not good news?’ Len asked.

  ‘Very bad news from home,’ Tad said. ‘German bastards and Russian bastards. Terrible things have happened, you know.’

  ‘Remind me who’s in charge there now you’ve surrendered, old boy,’ Dusty asked casually.

  ‘Surrendered? We have never surrendered! Never!’ Tad glared at Dusty.

  ‘Sorry, old chap,’ Dusty said, trying to keep a straight face for he pulled this routine most days and Tad never failed to rise to it.

  ‘Where did you get the paper?’ Len asked. He felt embarrassed by both Dusty and Tad.

  ‘Newspaper of Polish Air Force,’ Tad muttered. ‘It means “News of the World” but not like yours. It is serious.’

  ‘Serious?’ Dusty said as he rolled the dice. ‘This is no time for that sort of thing.’

  Len closed his eyes as the bickering went on. Far as he was concerned, this inaction suited him fine. He had a date for that evening and wanted to be able to make it. He wondered drowsily if the War was a side-show for romance or the other way round, and how was he ever to become regardless at either.

  I took my time off from the console, borrowed a cigarette and went to the door of the hut. Smoking gave me something to do in the breaks. It was something to look forward to, the lighting up then that harsh sweetness passing through my throat and nose. My mother would be horrified, thinking only very fast women smoked.

  I lit up and stared out at the bright morning. Rubbed my eyes and blinked a few times, trying to rub away the green blips. Trying to wake up a bit. Trying to think about Evelyn, about Len.

  Instead I stood in the open doorway and looked down the hill till the sound of wind in the trees was like running water and I was back there again, behind the childhood waterfall. Someone was coming up the river towards me. I saw the pale flash of his skin, felt that mixture of resentment and relief at being found. He was in the distance, water flowing over his arms, his back. His skin was so white, hair dark or maybe just wet as he came my way. Working steadily upstream like a returning salmon to join me.

  ‘Quiet this morning, Corporal!’

  I just nodded, not sure if Major Henley was referring to me or business on the screen. In any case it was too late. My rescuer, the only secret sharer of my childhood solitude, had gone. He never came close enough to identify anyway.

  I flicked away my cigarette and prepared to receive the Major’s gallantry.

  Hot in the sun, asleep among the buzz of voices, I’m young again. I’m leaning in pyjamas on my bedroom windowsill, watching our neighbour from the cottage next door mowing his rough lawn in summer twilight. My body feels smaller, lighter, cleaner. I’ve just finished calculating how many seconds I have to live. I feel the seconds drain away like water between my fingers.


  The thought makes my chest heavy and achy. It makes the evening more special and more painful. Even as Mr Hartwell wheels and turns at the end of a strip, the seconds are draining away and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  Then I’m in the outer porch. Dad has accused me of lying, which I haven’t in this case. It was my sister that did it, and I’ve been clouted across the ear and smacked again on the bum for insisting I didn’t do it. Oddly, I’m more angry at my father than my sister.

  I’m looking through blurry tears at a row of jam jars, each crowded with drowned and half-drowned wasps. Some of the wasps are well down, motionless, hung preserved in the depths. Others are still trying to escape, lifting spindly legs through the sugary solution. They haven’t yet accepted what’s coming to them. I can almost hear the buzz, and below that the tiny frantic screams. But there is calm in the depths, no motion.

  Scramble! Scramble! Red section scramble!

  I’m upright and running. Get to my plane and realize I’ve forgotten my parachute. Run back, pick it up, climb into the cockpit as Tate waits to strap me in.

  ‘Hey, Len!’

  I turn and our adjutant takes a picture. It’s his new enthusiasm. I give him the fingers and begin to roll.

  The photo exists yet – a young man grinning in his cockpit, apologetic in his way, still waking up and hair all over the place, so present and alive.

  Climbing into light cloud then above, he’s still yawning. He clamps the oxygen mask to his face and gives himself a quick blast from the bottle. Better. They climb to their given height then add on 2,000 feet for luck and fly on.

  The interception has already been made. Way ahead and at a variety of heights, dots are spread out and moving lazily round each other. For a moment he’s looking at a collection of wasps drowning in a sticky solution, dying in heaps in the vast sticky sky. For a moment he sees clearly that’s what’s happening. Then he’s right in among it, aiming himself at a group of Dorniers.