by Andrew Greig
‘Down beside where the waters flow … ‘I heard the accented warble on my headphones, then Sniff’s near-hysterical laughter. For there was Tad, calmly flying his plane upside down, with a pipe stuck in his mouth that looked remarkably like the CO’s.
The way I saw it, my dad had always suited himself. He was, in his easy-going way, at once the most amiable and most selfish person I’d ever known. He did absolutely nothing he didn’t want to do, and even at this late hour, as I sat in the back of Mr Mackenzie’s little Ford as we trundled screamingly slowly towards the hospital, I couldn’t decide if this was reasonable or unforgivable.
He’d inherited some money from my granddad who’d survived the Great War then promptly died in the flu epidemic after it. Dad always lived cheaply, so he only worked when he had to. He mostly built and repaired small boats. Sailing was his passion so it was a nice enjoyable way to get by. But he married a woman who worried and worked to plans, so whenever the planning or the worrying got too much he simply moved out. He had a daughter (who from the start he alternately indulged and neglected), then foresaw how much having a child could limit his freedom of movement and had no more. At least, I supposed that was the reason. It was not the kind of thing I could ask my mother. He was also rather fond of women.
When I was a child and still living at home, he spent most of his evenings in the workshop or out drinking in company. He had an endless supply of good humour, jokes and tall stories, was a dab hand at finding creative solutions to little mechanical problems around the house and people’s cars and garages and sheds. He was often intoxicated but seldom drunk. He was one of those people who just wanted everyone to be having a good time and couldn’t see why they weren’t. An ordinary, unusual man. My father.
Then the War came. We were all sitting in the kitchen, listening to the broadcast. At the end of Chamberlain’s announcement my mum got up, tut-tutting, switched off the radio and started cooking. I sat on in a daze, wondering how this was going to affect me and whether I was for or against it. I had signed the Peace Pledge after all, was meant to be a pacifist.
I gradually became aware my dad was still sitting in his easy chair, unusually silent. In fact he was gazing across the kitchen as though the other wall were a long way off, as though he were watching something sail off into the distance. Then he lifted his clasped hands towards his chin, cracked his knuckles as he did before starting a job.
‘About bleeding time,’ he said.
I looked at him, startled by something unusual in his voice. And he looked back at me, and I’ve puzzled for a long time what I saw in his eyes.
Then he picked up his jacket and grinned. ‘Just going out for a couple before tea, May,’ he said, and was off.
He came back home and announced he’d joined the ARP. He nearly succeeded in making himself unpopular during the phoney war, zealously enforcing the blackout. Now the bombing had started on the coastal towns, the ARPs were seen as heroes instead of pains in the neck. I gathered he spent nights patrolling the streets, or ducking into shelters during sporadic raids then emerging soon as the all clear howled. He worked days and nights among the rubble, the ripped-apart warehouses and factories, sorting out gas mains and water and electricity. No one was as useful and quick-witted at propping up walls, opening up cellars, locating mains, comforting and joking with those whose lives had suddenly disintegrated.
He had little time for pubs, lost weight but kept on singing and talking. Very quickly he was put in charge of the squad. The few times I’d seen him in the last months, he seemed the same man but leaner and somehow focused, as if he’d finally found a purpose for his talents. For the first time since I’d ceased to be a child, I respected him. And the atmosphere was better at home – now that Mum had something real to worry about, she worried less. (Also Mum and Dad were seldom awake and in the house at the same time, which I reckoned might be something to do with it.)
The car drove slowly through darkening streets. People were making their way home or to shelters, wondering what the night would bring. I wondered at how already I was summing up his life to myself. I held my head in my hands, as though it was a fractured, aching globe that might split in two.
Mr Mackenzie began to speak quietly as he drove on towards the centre of town. He told me what he’d been told by his younger brother who was in my dad’s squad.
The raid had been one of the spasmodic ones on an aircraft construction factory. First by day, then using the flames as guides when they came back at night. There was a bad oil fire, and the water supply kept cutting out. Four firemen were killed as a diesel tank exploded. Nearly a hundred workers had been killed on the day shift.
Jim Gardam’s unit had just been thankful they weren’t sent to clear the factory. Instead they were sent to the streets behind the gutted factory. They took cover as more bombs came down, then emerged again. A couple of stray bombs had demolished the house opposite, left only one wall standing above a pile of rubble. Under that wall, a neighbour said, was the entrance to the cellar where the family went when there was a raid.
They started shifting rubble with crowbars, pickaxes and bare hands. One of the squad levered up some bricks below the wall and saw the dull gleam of a large bomb. He lowered the bricks gently and backed away on suddenly weak legs. An unexploded bomb on a time fuse could go off any time.
While they waited for the bomb squad, a faint sound rose from the rubble. A scratching then the faintest cry. A whimper. Again. It sounded like a baby’s cry.
‘We’d best get them out,’ my father said, stepped over the UXB and began levering up some planks.
After a short pause, three other men followed him. They tore away at the rubble, very aware of the bomb six feet behind them. They opened up a hole, Jim Gardam propping it open as they went. They got down into the cellar and eventually managed to force the door open. Jim crawled in, disappeared then emerged holding a small dog. There’d been nothing else there. He stood among the rubble with a big grin on his blackened face and the dog in his arms, prepared to walk back over the bomb.
Then the wall above him collapsed.
*
Mr Mackenzie drew up at the darkened hospital. I took his arm as he helped me out, and together we groped for the front door and went inside.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mid-to late August
I sat for a long time before I could look at him properly. My eyes kept jumping off him. His face was still smeared with dust and oil, but he looked quite calm. Unsmiling for once.
The damage was to his back and his chest. The doctor admitted his back was broken and his ribs had caved in. Even if he lived, he’d be paralysed. How I hung from that ‘if’, like a butterfly from its pin.
So many jokes, so many yarns, so much sliding away from anything difficult. So many boats and yards and rivers messed about in. So many pints of beer between those parted lips. A mistaken marriage, but I existed because of it, and most of the time I was very glad for that.
How to sum up the shape and meaning of a life? Then his eyes opened and he looked at me, blank at first then as though he was coming part-way back from a long way off. I could feel he was there again. Saying nothing, just looking at me.
‘You had an accident, Dad,’ I said. ‘A wall fell on you. You’re in hospital. Mum’s coming back soon.’
He nodded slowly. His lips opened.
‘Good,’ he said, so hoarse I could scarcely make him out. A pause, then he spoke again. ‘It’s good.’ Then he closed his eyes again and went away again.
Good? I thought. What was good – that the wall had fallen, that he was in hospital, that Mum was coming? Life itself or his life, that affair of jokes and drinks and ingenious solutions and good company?
Mum arrived. Now the worst had happened, she was calm and sensible, not bitter or hysterical. She took his hand and looked at him for a long time. There was so much I wanted to ask about their marriage but couldn’t. Even if I had and she’d told me – like whether she lov
ed him, and how she felt about his other girlfriends, what she thought of him – I still wouldn’t have really understood it. Sitting in the chair looking at them both, I felt that a marriage was a mystery that could never be adequately grasped from outside, not even by one who had lived near it for most of her life. Good? Bad? Awful? I didn’t know.
He died that night while I was asleep in the chair. She woke me up and told me he’d gone, which was very like her. He looked just the same, foreign in his unsmiling dignity, very far away from me. Internal bleeding, the doctor said, nothing to be done.
I took his hand. Perhaps I imagined it was cooling already. I leaned forward and kissed his forehead like I’d seen in films. The doctor and nurses busied around, they needed the bed, I suppose.
At the door we both stopped and looked back. I don’t know what she saw but I saw a grave stranger, a man who used to be my father and had become, like so many, changed by the War. Had he found himself in those last few months? Had he found a cause to give meaning to his weak, enjoyable life, or had it just been his last and most spectacular lark?
I took my mother’s arm and we left the building. Outside, as we waited for our lift in the summer dark before dawn, she turned to me.
‘It’s as well,’ she said firmly. ‘He’d have hated being paralysed.’
I wasn’t sure of her mood. I wasn’t at all sure of my own. I was numb yet curiously wide awake, felt the next seconds and minutes of my life were crucial.
‘I imagine so,’ I said cautiously. ‘I expect he’d have been a terrible patient.’
‘Terrible!’ she said, and she began to laugh at the sound of her voice and I did too, and we were both still laughing as her neighbour pulled up in the car.
Only when we got home and I lay once again in my own childhood bed did it get through. He was gone for ever. It was the fault of those bombers. I fixed on that so hard I could hear my teeth grinding. For a moment I saw Jean Finlay, a broken doll with her head at an impossible angle and her long black hair flowing out and her legs not there.
I truly think I’m learning to hate as much as to love.
*
You’d think the faded diary a window, so clearly does it show through to the dispersal hut. They’re sitting fully kitted up. It’s hot, the door’s wide open and they sweat under their Mae Wests. One plays cat’s cradle, his hands flickering obsessively. Sniff Burton and Tadeusz are playing ‘Up the River’ and fleecing two officers. Two more kip in deck chairs. The kettle boils continuously. There’s the occasional flick of a magazine page.
Len sits at a small table, writing his diary, his left hand thrust knuckle-deep in his hair. His ankles are locked, his right elbow is held at an awkward angle. The draughtsman’s point wears down to dull and broad at the foot of the page. He writes:
First: Forget the jousting, all that ‘chivalry of the air’ guff. All that went out with France. The meek inherit the earth all right – six feet down in bloody no time. The seaplanes the enemy have for picking up their air crew can be considered legitimate targets – they’re using them for reconnaissance. Ignore the hospital crosses, right? Yes, it’s come to that.
Second: We hit bombers, 109s are out. Got it? Leave ’em to the Spits. Just dodge them and get back to the bombers. Break up the formation, have a squirt, then piss off home. It’s not magnificent, but it’s war.
Third: This is ambush, not duelling. Whenever possible we go in with height and sun on our side. Pick the straggler, get in close, nail him, get the hell out. And forget the fancy acrobatics, and the tight formations that went down well with the brass hats and the ladies. The Display days are over.
Fourth: The WAAFs on this base are strictly off-limits, and that’s official. So: paws off!
Fifth: Stay alive. If we’re still flying, we’re not defeated and that’s all that’s being asked of us. This comes from Fighter HQ; that’s the way they look at it. Drink if you must. Sleep when you can. And to the new boys: get through the first week and you’re in with a chance.
Sixth: This round’s on me. What’ll yours be – watered Scotch or potato-and-oats-flavoured beer?
The new CO goes through the same pep talk whenever new boys arrive, and they come and go quite fast now. I’ve got it off by heart.
He’s right, of course. The odds we can do nothing about, so cold method must be part of our madness. Calculating, measured, unheroic.
I’m so tired. My bad elbow aches. Four sorties already today. Everyone’s touchy. Worse, everyone’s trying to be polite in case our last words to someone are angry ones.
I wish to be in a room with no curtains and sharp little panes and the morning light across her face. That would be good.
Dated 18 August, the day of another huge attack. The 15th had been the biggest single effort the Luftwaffe made during the Battle, but this one was nearly on the same scale, one the RAF couldn’t and didn’t attempt to match. Dowding’s strategy remained one of limited engagement, conserving his precious pilots.
The sky was clear and attacks started early and went on into the evening. More aircraft factories were gutted. Front-line airfields were bombed again until at one the ground crew refused to leave the deep shelters. An over-enthusiastic officer was only just prevented from firing into the shelters to flush them out.
Flying this number of sorties from vulnerable airfields, the pilots were becoming exhausted and ratty. They disagreed with their Controllers, disputed the tactics coming from Fighter Command HQ, wondered why they were always so outnumbered, and argued with each other. After the fifth sortie of the day, Tad’s Hurricane landed safely, but when it taxied to a halt he didn’t get out of the cockpit. The groundcrew ran to it, fearing the worst. They found him head down on the controls, fast asleep.
Len made it through that day though he was too tired at the end of it to write up his diary, too weary even to take a walk in the woods. Instead he took the lift back to barracks, ate some food then stared at a pint of beer. He became aware of a ripple of disturbance in the far corner. He looked and saw Tad in an armchair openly weeping.
Len went over and sat awkwardly on the arm of the chair. No one else dared go near. Tears were not part of the form.
‘What’s up, Tad?’
Tad lifted his hand from his face. There was a soggy note in it.
‘My cousin Ludwik,’ he said. ‘Boyhood friend, you know.’
Then he carried on weeping noisily. Len hesitated then went to the bar and got a double whisky, brought it back and put it in Tad’s hand. Tad looked at it, at Len, drank it in one.
‘Like another?’ Len asked.
Tad shook his head.
‘Flying early,’ he said. ‘I must be clear.’ He straightened up, rubbed his hand across his face. ‘I’ll take a walk now.’
He got up and walked past the silent pilots, out of the door and into the night. After a pause Len went back to his pint, drank it quickly then swayed to bed and fell asleep face down, fully clothed.
I jumped down from the adjutant’s staff car, waved as it drove away. I crossed the street in the dusk and waited a moment outside the familiar door. It wasn’t a moment I wanted to hurry. For the last days I’d been living for nothing else. I breathed in the thick roses, the more homely wallflowers and honeysuckle up against the trellis by the front door. Somewhere across the street, ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ was playing from a wireless, and the tune or the words thickened in my throat.
I felt nervous but pretty well. Well because several cloudy days on the trot had given us a break and a chance to rest. Odd how even in our incredibly modern war we were still dictated to by such a thin thing as cloud. And my new skin was growing back, smooth and pink. Nervous because I hadn’t seen her since her father’s death. We’d spoken on the phone, I couldn’t get away to see her or go to the funeral. That felt so wrong.
Now I felt like the first time I flew solo and wasn’t at all sure if I could bring her back to ground safely but there was no one else around who would.
&nb
sp; I rang the bell. Mrs Mackenzie answered, full of Poor child and Dreadful news and how they’d suffered a power cut all afternoon just when she was cooking, which was all pretty gruesome but at least let me escape past her up the stairs.
Stella put her arms round me, didn’t kiss me but leaned herself in to me as though all her bones had been removed. We held each other a long time, standing swaying on the threshold. I was just remembering the feel and smell of her, the hair springing free from its clip, the slimness of her back and the solidity of her hips.
‘Want to go to the pictures?’ I asked eventually. ‘Or go for a drink?’
‘Don’t feel like going out,’ she muttered to my neck. ‘Tea and music?’
And that’s how we spent the whole evening. She made some fancy tea, then she put on something classical with a clarinet. We lay on the bed together and she began to talk about her dad. I noticed she now had a small picture of him on the bedside table, sailing a boat and grinning like crazy at the camera. She talked of her childhood memories of him, how much fun he was when he was around, how as an adolescent she’d realized his shortcomings, how she’d largely cut off from both of them when she went to university and the remorse she felt about that.
She talked and talked in my arms as the clarinet unfolded its patterns. When the piece ended I asked what she wanted.
‘Same again,’ she said, so I wound the gramophone, changed the needle and we began again. She lay squeezing a button on my shirt as she told me about his last call-out, the UXB and the collapsing wall, the wait in hospital. There was talk of him being awarded a Medal, which would be good but she’d prefer he was still alive.
Then she was silent and we both listened to the music being melancholy and beautiful for a while. Then she tried to tell me how angry she was, how she wanted me to kill the people who dropped bombs, and I told her about Mackay and the other dead new boys whose names I’d forgotten already. And I admitted it sometimes seemed the only time I got excited these days was when I thumbed the red button and my plane juddered and slowed from the recoil, and the tracer bullets began to dance across a fuselage.
