Something Dangerous

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘Tell you what. Wait for one more letter and then tell him. How about that?’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ said Venetia, visibly cheered by this plan. ‘Yes, I’ll do that.’

  In the officers’ mess of their training camp in the furthest point of the Orkneys, Captain Mike Willoughby-Clarke poured Boy Warwick another large whisky and then watched him slightly anxiously as he downed it at one go. He had seemed disproportionately upset by the news that his ex-wife had been dancing cheek-to-cheek at the Dorchester with a handsome young officer. Funny, really. They’d been divorced over a year after all.

  Barty often said afterwards that the primary qualification for life at Glen Parva Barracks – ‘and every other branch of the services, I daresay’ – was patience. Patience for the queueing. It was hardly exciting. You queued for everything: for uniform, blankets, medical inspections, hair inspection – ‘I have been pronounced lice-free, you’ll be pleased to know,’ she wrote to Celia and Oliver – eye tests, hearing tests, and worst of all, for endless inoculations. The further down in the queue you were, the blunter the needle; there was no question of changing one until it literally wouldn’t puncture the skin. Lots of the girls reacted quite violently to the inoculations, with first large sores and then scabs appearing on their skin, but Barty had nothing to show for hers. She worried about it until the MO told her she obviously hadn’t needed the jabs in the first place; remembering the excruciating pain of some of them, this was not entirely welcome news.

  Her uniform was extensive: skirts, slacks, tunics, shirts (with detachable collars), leather anklets, two caps, tin hat, leather jerkin, something the MoD was pleased to call a corset (to hold her stockings up), a greatcoat and some hideous stout khaki knickers which some of the girls had bleached to cream. The uniform was worn at all times (their own clothes having been sent home), she felt her own identity leaving her along with her suitcase. She was now simply Miller – perversely, she rather liked it. It seemed an important part of her new life.

  She was surprised to find herself relatively unaffected by the early ritual humiliations and brutality of the basic training, the things the other girls complained about: being endlessly shouted at and insulted by corporals for the most minor misdemeanours (shoelaces done wrongly, coughing on parade, insufficiently polished buttons and boots), latrine parade (one minute allowed inside), the issue also on parade of sanitary towels – ‘one packet, size 2, if you want 1 or 3 you ask your corporal’ – the instruction never to remove your identity discs – ‘one goes to your next of kin, the other stays on your body, then they know which way to bury you’ – and, of course, the disgusting food.

  Somehow she took it all in her stride; it seemed to her to most closely resemble what Giles and indeed Sebastian had told her of early life at public school.

  They slept in hideously uncomfortable beds under scratchy blankets (no sheets in Nissen huts), hot that wonderful summer, but clearly destined to become extremely cold.

  Having spent her childhood being mocked by nasty little girls for not being posh enough, Barty was now nervous of being mocked by nasty big girls for being too posh. But from the moment they got in the railway carriage that first day, the comradeship was strong. She saw a few girls exchanging glances when she asked if a seat was free, and noting the quality of her leather suitcase; but a pack of Navy Cut handed round the compartment (Sebastian’s tip – ‘I was a private in the first war, my darling, I know all about it’) swiftly established her as a good egg, and they were in any case all in the same boat, all nervous, and that did a lot to cut across any other barriers.

  There was one girl called Parfitt (Christian names were sent away with the clothes), who had looked as if she might cause her some trouble; she was scrawnily thin, with a sharp, beaky little face, rather small eyes, and extremely colourful language. She asked Barty in a rather hostile voice why she wasn’t joining the WRNS – ‘That’s where your sort usually go’ – and pushed her quite sharply out of the way in order to get herself an end-of-row bed in the Nissen hut. But that night there was the sound of muffled sobs from beneath Parfitt’s blankets; Barty went over to her and sat on her bed and learned that she had never left home or her mother for more than twenty-four hours.

  Barty told her that homesickness was like seasickness: ‘you suddenly get used to it’, supplied her with a handkerchief and a couple more Navy Cuts (sold at a special rate of eight pennies for fifteen that summer), and responded to Parfitt’s threat to fucking break her head in if she told any of the other bleedin’ wimps with an assurance that there was nothing to tell.

  In the morning, Parfitt swaggered out on to the parade ground full of bravado and the statement that she wasn’t taking any rubbish from any bloody sergeant major, but not before winking at Barty and thanking her for what she called ‘waking her from her nightmare’ the night before.

  Drill was surprisingly hard and they all had to take a great deal of rubbish from the sergeant major; they were marched in their new shoes until they got blisters. Barty – and Parfitt – were among the lucky ones, they learned quickly, but there were others, who found it terribly difficult and would stand on the parade ground trying not to cry while they were shouted at and insulted by the male sergeant.

  They did very little in those early days except drill and queue and attend boring lectures on documents, crime and punishment and messing; the one on how to avoid wasting fat being particularly memorable. As the month progressed they were asked what they would like to do. Barty and Parfitt both opted for anti-aircraft defence, and were given a great many more tests, eye tests, tests for steadiness of hand, for mechanical aptitude and even for finding planes in photographs flashed in front of them on the wall.

  ‘Wasn’t no fucking plane there, was there?’ said Parfitt afterwards; Barty didn’t like to say she had spotted several, all camouflaged in the trees, and feared that was the end of Parfitt’s anti-aircraft training. But Parfitt was so good at the other tests that she passed; and the two of them were told, along with several other girls, that they were now being sent to Oswestry to a mixed, heavy ack-ack battalion; Barty felt as proud as when Brilliant Twilight had reached the New York bestseller list for the first time.

  It was then that the selection officer sent for her and told her she thought that she should apply for a commission and train as an officer ‘to train recruits and therefore release the men’.

  Barty refused; it was the last thing she wanted to do. She wanted to be in the front line, or at least very close to it; teaching raw recruits hardly met that criterion. She could tell from the stunned response that she had blown her chances probably for ever of becoming an officer, but she simply didn’t care, and she left with a sense of genuine excitement for Oswestry.

  It was Tuesday, 20 August.

  That was the day Churchill made his speech in the House of Commons in praise of the fighter pilots who were ‘turning the tide of war by their prowess and their devotion’. Celia, reading it aloud to Oliver from the next day’s paper, faltered at the words: ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’, and looked at Oliver, her eyes filled with a mixture of terror and desperate pride.

  ‘That’s Kit,’ she said simply, ‘one of those few.’

  Venetia’s voice on the phone was choked with tears.

  ‘I’ve had this horrible letter. From Boy. I can’t – Adele, I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘Saying he’s got some leave in three weeks, but he thinks it’s better if we don’t meet. And that he imagines I’ll agree.’

  ‘What! But why?’

  ‘Oh, Dell, I don’t know.’

  ‘But what does he say?’

  ‘Just that. That he’s hoping to be able to see the children but he’d prefer to go down there alone. And that then he’s got to see various people about his business affairs and then he’s going straight back up to Scotland.’

  ‘How – extraordinary.’

  �
�Oh I don’t know that it is,’ said Venetia, blowing her nose, ‘leopards don’t change their spots that easily, do they? He’s probably found some wildly beautiful WAAF officer or something—’

  ‘I’m sure there’s no such thing.’

  ‘Well, Wren, then. Everyone knows they’re beautiful. Why should I think he’s suddenly fallen in love with me again?’

  ‘Because he told you so.’

  ‘Well, he wanted to get me into bed, didn’t he?’

  ‘Venetia, I just can’t believe—’

  ‘Well, I can. Boy is a very practised seducer, don’t forget. He knows exactly how to make one feel – well, you know, tender towards him.’

  ‘But he – I don’t know, Venetia. I think you should write to him and—’

  ‘Adele, I am not writing to him about anything at all. I feel so stupid, such a complete and utter fool.’

  ‘But you’ve got to tell him about—’

  ‘I absolutely have not. It’s the last thing in the world I’d tell him now. I don’t want him even to know.’

  ‘But he’s got to know sometime.’

  ‘No, he hasn’t.’

  ‘Venetia, of course he has. Shall I—’

  ‘No! You are most definitely not to. Can’t you see how—’

  ‘Yes, I can. Of course I can.’ Adele’s voice was suddenly tender down the phone. ‘I’m so sorry. So very sorry.’

  ‘The worst thing,’ said Venetia, starting to cry again, ‘absolutely the worst thing is that I feel a complete fool. Well, I suppose that’s because I am. Oh, I must go, Mummy’s coming. Bye, darling. I’ll try and get down at the weekend. Love to the children.’

  The war in the air had changed. Everyone felt it. Suddenly it wasn’t just planes they were fighting, it was Germans. The change had largely been brought about by the fact that several of the pilots had been shot at while descending on their parachutes. As someone remarked, this was very dirty tactics indeed.

  Fear led to anger, which led to more fear and then more anger; this, combined with an absolute exhaustion, brought them to the very edge of human endurance. Flying to heights greater that Mount Everest as they did day after day in unpressurised aircraft made the flying more exhausting still.

  Every single day now, comrades were lost, usually the new boys; one night’s drinking companions would not be there the next. Not just one either, but many, the numbers mounting endlessly; it was horribly disturbing. The dashing boys were becoming desperate men; there were stories of tantrums in the mess over over-cooked eggs, cold coffee, trifles that once they would have laughed at or ignored. They sought release from the fear in drinking; if you weren’t flying you were plastered.

  Kit was too exhausted even to write to Catriona any more; they were all too exhausted to do anything except keep flying. Go up, look for them, find them, fire at them, come down, refuel, go up again. Often when he was in the air now he found himself thinking, quite calmly, that if he didn’t die today, he would certainly die tomorrow; it led him, with an odd calm, into greater and greater risks.

  The girls working on the radios reported horrific experiences, of hearing the boys calling out in delight when they saw a German plane, of hearing the crackle of the machine gun – and then of hearing them go down as bullets hit the planes and the transmitters went off.

  Five hundred planes were lost during those last two weeks of the mighty air battle to save Britain; one hundred and three fighter command pilots died. And still Kit rode the skies, alone in his face-to-face battle every day with fear, danger, exhaustion and death. He was wonderful about telephoning home, managed it most nights, usually from the pub, very often quite clearly drunk. ‘Still fine,’ he would say, and Celia could hear him laughing against the hubbub, ‘absolutely fine. Just thought you’d like to know. Got to go, serious drinking to do.’

  ‘Thank you for ringing. Bye, darling. God bless.’

  She always said that; half amused at herself, Celia Lytton, so famously a non-believer: ‘God bless’. There being nothing else she could say or do.

  Indeed, ‘God must be up there with him,’ another equally famous non-believer, Sebastian Brooke, said when she told him, ‘keeping an eye on him, keeping him safe.’

  She allowed herself to believe in the notion, found comfort in it even – for what else could be called into play against such dreadful, horrifying, hopeless odds? – and indulged in every other foolish fantasy, touching wood, wishing on stars in the briefly peaceful night skies, lighting candles in Westminster Cathedral, anything that might bring special favour, special protection, upon him, upon Kit, her brave hero of a son, to whom so many of them owed so much.

  And then, finally, the stars faded and the candles went out; and at last God looked away.

  CHAPTER 31

  ‘Kit, come on. Here, take my hand. That’s right. I’m going to take you for a little walk.’

  Izzie smiled up at him encouragingly, at the person she loved best in all the world – apart from her father of course. ‘You’ll enjoy it when we get going. Promise. It’s a lovely day.’

  ‘I’d – rather not. If you don’t mind.’

  ‘I do mind. Very much.’

  The doctor had said she must be firm with him; her father had said so too. Firm and very positive. And that was what she was trying to be. It wasn’t easy, but Izzie had not been raised to ease.

  ‘Now come on. You might need a scarf, it’s cold.’

  ‘I really don’t care.’

  ‘You will when you’re halfway round and you’re shivering. I’ll get it for you. Wait there.’

  She looked back at him anxiously as she ran to the utility room, where all the coats and scarves were kept. But he was doing as she told him, standing quite still, facing the window, his eyes fixed on the sparkling day.

  He looked much better than he had even three weeks ago when he’d arrived; not so thin, much less pale. He wasn’t quite the same Kit, who had always been so gloriously healthy looking, sunburned in the summer, red-cheeked in the winter, but at least he wasn’t the shadowy wraith she had met on the doorstep of Ashingham when Celia and her father had brought him down.

  In fact, he’d looked just the same, really, his face was a bit thin and his eyes were somehow sunk into dark shadows, but he was just as handsome – he was so handsome, as handsome as a film star.

  Izzie knew about film stars, Cook let her look at her Picturegoer magazine every week. She’d hardly ever been to the pictures herself; she and Henry and Roo had been taken to see Pinocchio, which was lovely, although devoid of film stars – and Adele had said they would all go and see The Wizard of Oz when it came round – but she thought she would really like to see a proper picture, a romantic one, like Gone With the Wind, which everyone was talking about, or a Western, with Gary Cooper. Kit looked a bit like Gary Cooper, she thought: or even Leslie Howard. Everyone said he was as handsome as a film star; and when they heard about his plane crash, the first thing Cook said once she knew he hadn’t been killed, was, ‘Pray God he’s not been burned.’

  And he hadn’t been.

  She returned to him now, handed him the scarf.

  ‘You do it.’ (‘Get him to do things for himself,’ her father had said, ‘as much as you can, it’s important.’)

  ‘No, I don’t want to.’

  ‘Kit, you’ll be cold.’

  ‘I told you, I don’t care.’

  ‘Then let me do it. Bend down. Towards me, no, towards me, that’s right. There.’

  She knotted the scarf carefully round his neck, tucked it in. ‘Very good. Now you’ll be all right. Come on, this way. Take my hand. Careful, mind the step. That’s right.’

  They walked out on to the terrace; he held her hand loosely, carelessly, as if he could hardly be bothered.

  ‘It’s a lovely day, Kit. Really lovely.’

  ‘I thought you said it was cold.’

  ‘It is cold. But it’s frosty and sunny and the fields—’

  ‘Izzie, I’m sorry. I kn
ow you mean well. But I can’t quite – cope with this. Not today. Can we go back please.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Izzie, I said I want to go back. Now. At once. Please take me.’

  ‘All right. Yes, all right, Kit. Turn round. Now this way. Sorry. Careful. Didn’t see that post.’

  And then realised what she had said, what it must have meant to him, to hear her say it. That she hadn’t seen something. A post. Just a post. When she could see everything else. And he couldn’t see anything, anything at all . . .

  It was the G-force that did it; the thing he had described to his mother, the temporary loss of consciousness after a sharp turn.

  He’d had this bloody great Messerschmitt 110 on his tail, came at him out of nowhere, and he knew a sharp turn was the only thing to do. He’d done it so many times, coped with the G-force perfectly OK, it would be fine.

  Only it hadn’t been; he’d blacked out for longer, lost a crucial extra few seconds – and fallen forwards, hitting his head on the controls with such incredible force he’d knocked himself out. And came down, he never remembered how, afterwards, in the sea. Some miracle – actually another pilot – had saved him from the Messerschmitt. Miraculously too, the plane had slewed into the water undamaged, rather than hitting it nose down – when it would have somersaulted – and he’d been thrown out of the cockpit. He’d come to, a bit confused, couldn’t understand why it was so dark, but he’d managed to get out, somehow. He’d had his Mae West on of course, and he waited patiently, oddly calm (wondering if it was night-time), till he’d been picked up. Everyone said he’d been incredibly lucky.

  Incredibly lucky. Not dead; not burned; not disfigured; just blind. Totally blind. For the rest of his life. All sixty or seventy years of it, if he was unlucky enough to live that long.

  He wished, with a savage misery, that he had been killed; that it had ended. They would have grieved for a while, his parents, his family, Sebastian, and then they would have got over it. And he would be over it. Everything would be over. Instead of going on and on and on . . .