‘So Charlie’s on his own at the back? There’s nobody near him? None of you?’
He shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘It’s not like it sounds. We talk to each other all the time. And I go aft for things. I’m the fetch and carry one.’
‘Would you know if anything had happened to Charlie?’
He nodded. ‘The skipper calls us all up regular. We’d know. Don’t you worry. I’ll keep an eye on him, I promise.’
She changed the subject and asked him about himself. He muttered something about a wife who’d left him and he mentioned a daughter.
‘Then you know what it’s like,’ she told him. ‘To worry about a child.’
‘I don’t see her much. Hardly know her. It’s not the same as you and Charlie.’
‘I oughtn’t to have come here, though, did I? Fussing over him? You must all think so.’
‘We don’t think that at all,’ he said. ‘We think Charlie’s right lucky.’
He stood up to go as soon as he’d finished his tea, and she saw him to the door. With the double summer time, it was still light and so quiet there might not have been a bomber station there at all.
The wireless operator turned to look up at the cottage roof. ‘That gutter needs fixing. Ought to be put right before winter comes. I’ll come by and see to it, if you like.’
‘You’ve done enough for me, Harry. I wouldn’t want you to trouble.’
‘It’s no trouble, Mrs Banks. It’ll give me something to do when we’re on stand-down.’
‘Please call me Dorothy.’
He put on his cap. ‘Goodnight, then – Dorothy. And thank you for the tea.’
He was unpadlocking his bike by the gate when she suddenly remembered something.
‘Wait a moment, Harry.’ She ran indoors and came back to the gate. ‘Marigold suddenly started laying, like you said she would. These are for you – for making the run and mending the wireless.’
He stared down at the two eggs in her hands and then closed her fingers over them gently with his own. ‘Nay, you keep them, Dorothy. Keep them for you and Charlie.’
When he had ridden off up the road, she put the precious eggs back in the bowl in the kitchen and went to shut Marigold up for the night. The hen was still outside, pecking about the run, and she had to chase her, as usual, until she stalked up the gangplank into her house. Dorothy wired up the guillotine door tightly and went back indoors to wash up the teacups and set them on the rack to drain. After that she switched on the wireless again. Lovely dance music filled the room and she held out her arms to a pretend partner and did a few steps to and fro and then round the room. Years ago – before she married Edward – she used to go dancing at the local hall. There’d been a band, of sorts, but nothing like this one. This was one of those big London ones, smooth as silk. It made you want to dance and dance . . . only, of course, her dancing days were over.
She didn’t bother with the blackout yet; instead she curled up in one of the easy chairs and stayed there for a long while, head pillowed on her arms, listening to the music. Gradually the room grew darker around her until the only light came from the little oblong yellow glow on the wireless dial.
‘Can I buy you a drink?’
She looked as astonished as when he’d offered her a light in the pub. ‘Well, I was just going, actually.’ She’d been sitting in a corner of the Officers’ Mess in one of the sagging armchairs that must all have been collected off the local dump. She’d been talking to another WAAF officer and he’d been observing her from behind his newspaper. When the other WAAF had left he’d put down the paper and strolled over.
‘Have one for the road.’
She smiled. ‘I wasn’t planning on leaving camp. Just the room.’
‘Figure of speech.’
‘Well, all right. Thank you. A shandy.’
‘Shandy?’
‘Beer and lemonade.’
‘Ow! Some mix! You sure?’
‘Quite sure. I like it.’
‘It’s Van, isn’t it?’ she said when he’d fetched the drinks from the bar and sat down in another sagging armchair with broken springs. ‘That’s what they all call you?’
‘Except my parents. They call me Lewis – the name they tried to give me in the first place.’ He lit her cigarette. ‘And people call you Catherine. Mind if I do the same?’
‘Not at all.’
‘I’m sorry about Pete.’ He’d never liked the guy, but that had nothing to do with it. Jerks or nice guys, you were sorry when they went missing. As sorry as you could afford to be. Along with being sorry, there was always that nasty little gladness that it was someone else, not you. ‘Any news?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing, so far. It can take a long time to hear through the Red Cross. He could have evaded capture and be hiding up somewhere.’ She drew on her cigarette. ‘Or, of course, he could have been killed.’
‘My rear gunner definitely saw a ’chute. He’s got exceptional vision and he’s a reliable kid. He wouldn’t have made a mistake about it.’
‘One. Out of seven.’
‘Charlie couldn’t keep on looking. There may well have been more. They were at twenty thousand. There was time.’
She tapped the end of her cigarette against the ashtray – unnecessarily. ‘I wouldn’t think it was particularly easy to get out of a Lanc going down fast, in flames.’
You’ve got that right, sister, he thought. Only for that glorious piece of British understatement, substitute fucking impossible. First, find your parachute. Unlike the rest of the crew, Pete would have been sitting on his, so that was a point in his favour. Get it clipped on right. Crawl through the fuselage to one of the escape hatches, down in the nose preferably so the tail plane didn’t mash you to pulp when you jumped out, or up in the roof, mid-ships – too bad for you if you had to clamber over the main spar to make either of them. Once there, get the damn hatch open. Turn the handle, lift it inwards and throw it out – always supposing it hasn’t jammed – and then launch yourself into the roaring slipstream and pray you miss the rest of the bomber as it goes by.
And all this upside down in the dark, maybe with a little touch of centrifugal force from a spin trying hard to keep you inside, not to mention the flames trying even harder to get you and your parachute. Oh, and the small matter of your parachute opening before you hit the ground around twenty thousand feet below. Or the Jerries not taking pot shots at you on the way, if they felt in the mood.
‘We practise the escape drill pretty often,’ he lied. ‘And Pete had a quick-release panel in the cockpit roof he could have used.’
Don’t tell her about the chances of smashing into the mid-upper turret or getting cut in half by the tail plane or rudders if he was desperate enough to try that.
She looked him straight in the eyes. ‘It’s nice of you to be so encouraging, Van, but I do know the odds. Only too well.’
‘Yeah. Well, I guess you do in your job.’ He sipped his beer. ‘You see them come and you see them go. Must get kind of depressing.’
‘I’m so sorry – I should never have said that to you. It was inexcusable.’
‘In case you depress me as well, you mean?’ He smiled. ‘Don’t give it another thought. I know the odds, too.’
‘But you’re doing awfully well with your tour,’ she said brightly. ‘How many is it now?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Half-way through. Veterans.’
‘Yep.’ The sprog crews watched them now – copied them and hung on their nonchalant words.
‘I overheard Squadron Leader Lowell say he’d thought you’d make it all right. He doesn’t say that about many crews.’
The Squadron CO was a demanding sort of guy, to put it mildly. He wondered if she was telling him a little white lie – if she fed that sort of bull to everybody. ‘That’s not exactly what they were saying about us when we started. We were odds-on for the chop.’
‘So are most sprog crews. Sadly. But you’re well past
that stage, and you’ve got a good crew, haven’t you?’
‘Yeah . . .’ He smiled again. ‘I think so, but then I guess you could say I’m prejudiced in their favour. For one thing, they put up with me driving them around.’
‘Your aiming-point photographs are pretty good. Often the best.’
‘I’ve a very competitive bomb aimer.’
‘Oh yes, the Australian. There are so many of them from the colonies. It’s wonderful the way they’ve come over here.’
‘Tell that to Stew. He’d be delighted.’
‘He usually looks anything but delighted at debriefings.’
‘That’s if he thinks you’re questioning his accuracy.’
She said defensively, ‘Really, I’m not. It’s just that I’m supposed to get it as exact as possible. It’s important when they analyse all the information . . . I know the crews often hate it, though – Peter always said so. Having to sit there for ages, dog-tired, being interrogated by somebody who’s been safe and sound on the ground. I’m afraid I must sound very bossy sometimes but I’m trying to make sure I get all the details. That nothing vital’s left out. Inside, I feel awful at keeping crews from their rest.’
‘You always look pretty calm.’
She tapped her cigarette end again. ‘A navigator in one of the crews once told me that seeing me sitting there every time he got back, acting as though everything was perfectly normal, was the only thing that kept him going. He found it a great comfort. I’ve always remembered that.’
He could see the point. ‘Did he make it?’
‘He was killed on his last op.’
‘Tough luck.’
‘Yes . . . very tough luck.’ She drank some of the shandy. Lousy-looking stuff, he thought – like fizzy bathwater. Tepid fizzy bathwater. What had the British got against ice? He didn’t get it. Also, he thought, how the hell could I have got her so wrong?
‘Of course,’ she went on quite seriously, ‘you’re not from the colonies—’
‘Not since seventeen seventy-six.’ He smiled.
‘So what on earth made you join up? Long before your country came into the war?’
‘That’s another story,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll tell you some day.’
As soon as he saw the girl on the tractor, Stew twigged why Jock hadn’t wanted them to come a-harvesting with him. No chance of stopping them, though – not once they’d spied the cackleberries and heard about the beano tea. If he’d wanted to keep her to himself, Jock should’ve hidden the booty and kept his trap shut. The minute they’d got wind he was going again, they’d tagged along, harder to get rid of than a dose of clap: him, Bert and Charlie. Harry was off mending gutters at Charlie’s mum’s cottage, or he’d have come along too.
Stew didn’t mind the hard work part of the deal. He was strong as a bloody ox and he enjoyed heaving sheaves of corn around. He knew he looked good stripped to the waist and still with a bit of his Bondi tan – a lot better than old Jock, lobster-red from the sun, let alone skinny white Bert and Charlie. And he knew the girl had noticed.
She stopped the tractor by him as they were finishing off the stooking in one field. ‘When this lot’s done, we can start the next. If you’re up to it.’
He grinned up at her. ‘I’m always up to it.’ He liked the tweed cap and the weird hair-do and the big brown eyes. And he’d liked the way she hadn’t batted an eyelid when Bert had pulled his Victor trick, whistling to the snake so he poked his head out of his breast pocket and looked around. Most women screamed the place down whenever he did that, but she’d just laughed. She was on the thin side – all bones and not much meat – but the rest was bonza.
She was giving him a straight look from under the cap that told him she’d got his number pretty well. And she wasn’t playing. That didn’t worry him. He was used to sheilas who put up a red flag and then hauled it down when they’d got tired of playing hard-to-get. And he could tell she’d been around.
‘Can you shoot? The rabbits’ll come out when I start with the reaper.’
‘Too right I can.’ Well, he was a dab hand with the Brownings, if not the sort of gun she meant. The Poms seemed to think Aussies spent their time shooting kangaroos.
‘How about the others? Can they?’
‘Bert and Charlie are gunners – not that that means a thing. Don’t know about Jock.’
‘OK, I’ll fetch the guns.’
He watched her go off, following the tractor’s bumpy progress across the stubble. She handled it pretty well – for a woman. He was looking forward to a shoot-out – see who could get the most rabbits and impress the lady at the same time. Like one of those olden day tournaments with knights charging up and down, knocking each other off their horses. The best bloke got the classy sheila in the wimple waving her lace hanky.
But when it came to it, and the girl was handing out the twelve-bore shotguns, Jock and Charlie both chickened out. Jock said he’d never handled one before and Charlie said he didn’t like the idea of shooting animals. Just as well he didn’t feel the same about Jerries. So it was between him and Bert, and with Bert’s eyesight being what it was, he didn’t reckon it would be too much of a contest.
The minute the girl started off with the tractor on the far side of the field, working round in a big circle, he positioned himself, lying down at the edge in what he judged would be a prime spot. At first, nothing happened. Not a dicky-bird showed up. Not even a field mouse. He’d begun to think maybe she’d got it all wrong about the bunnies until she was on the fifth or sixth circuit and a rabbit suddenly came streaking out of the corn, heading right towards him. No time to take aim properly before it was into the hedge and out of sight. Then another appeared and the same thing happened. And another. On the far side of the field, Bert’s gun was blasting away. Stew swore violently. The little buggers were craftier than a bunch of Messerschmitts, split-arse-turning in all directions, and he was firing away like a loonie and not hitting a flaming thing except clods of earth.
The girl finally got down to a small circle of standing corn and a rabbit came out much slower than the rest. Stew raised the shotgun yet again, fired as it loped past and saw it fall to the ground. He went over and picked it up by the hind legs. There was a grizzled look to the fur, a rheumy look to the open eyes. Poor old grandad, left behind when the rest were deserting the sinking ship.
He met Bert half way across the field and, stone the crows, he was carrying several of the little sods, dangling from each hand. Six, when he counted them – six to his one. And Bert was grinning all over his face, pleased as bloody punch with himself. Well, he knew when it was the time to be gracious, give credit where credit was due. Besides, it was nice to know their mid-upper could hit something.
At the farmhouse spread – and Jock hadn’t lied about that – he made sure he sat next to the girl. Beat Jock to the empty chair by a short head. With the cap off, he thought she looked even cuter.
‘When do land-girls get time off?’
‘We don’t during the harvest.’
‘How about after?’
‘We get a week’s holiday a year, Sundays and a half day. Sometimes we get a long weekend, but not often. There’s too much to do.’
‘Sounds like slave labour.’
‘It may be for some,’ she said. ‘But I like the work. And they treat me like family.’
‘Where’s your real family?’
‘I don’t have one,’ she said. ‘I come from an orphanage. And, by the way, Aussie, you’re wasting your time. Just thought I’d tell you that now, so’s you’d know.’ She picked up a plate and shoved it under his nose. ‘Have another scone.’
It wasn’t his day, Stew decided. You win some, you lose some. Rabbits, sheilas . . . what the hell!
The tea had been a real blow-out, and the old girl gave them each half a dozen eggs when they were leaving. Like the others, he tucked his into his jacket breast pockets. It might have been an accident, though he bloody well doubted it, when Jock ran
into his rear wheel, biking back to the station. Tipped him off so that he smashed every single flaming one.
It didn’t finish there, though. There was a letter from Doreen waiting for him.
Dear Stew, Sorry I won’t be able to come next weekend after all. My mum’s not well and I have to take care of her . . .
For mum, read Yank, he thought sourly. Or anybody with enough bait on the line. He went to phone The Angel and Miss Iceberg answered.
‘Sergeant Brenner speaking. About those two single rooms I booked – I’ve got to cancel.’
‘Sergeant who?’
‘Stew Brenner.’ She knew bloody well who it was. ‘Miss Roberts can’t make it.’
‘That doesn’t give us much notice.’
‘Well, she can’t get here. Someone’s ill.’ His temper was short after everything, and she’d no call to sound so flaming disapproving. Miss Roberts could be his maiden aunt for all she knew. Unlikely, it was true, but possible.
‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to cancel both rooms, then?’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Well, yes or no, Sergeant? I can’t keep the booking open.’
He considered the situation. What the hell was he going to do with his leave, anyway? There was nowhere to go except London and he was getting tired of it on his own. Besides, you could spend a bloody fortune down there, if you weren’t careful. Maybe he could stay at The Angel for the weekend – take it easy for a bit, be waited on hand and foot, and see what he could find in Lincoln? That still left time to head off to London if he felt like it.
‘Sergeant? I haven’t got all day . . .’
‘I’ll keep one room,’ he said.
‘For you?’
‘That’s right, sweetheart. For me. See you soon.’ He hooked the receiver back and grinned.
Mrs Mountjoy was making a big to-do over the soup again. She’d pushed it away from her, hardly touched, spoon plonked down in the middle.
‘This is exactly the same soup that I complained about yesterday, Peggy.’
‘I don’t think so, madam. Yesterday’s was pea soup. It’s potage au jardin today.’
‘There you are! All that man has done is add some tinned carrots and given it a different name. Never been near the garden. It was uneatable yesterday and it’s even more so today. It’s scandalous with the prices they charge here.’
The Crew Page 14
