THREE
FOR FIVE YEARS FOLLOWING the Autumn of 1940, Bruce Fraser saw neither Lucy nor Marcia nor any of the people he had known in Grenville or New York. In the spring of 1942, navigating a Wellington bomber on his twenty-third mission, he was shot down over Mannheim. The pilot, a boy who had once operated a hot-dog stand in the Toronto ball park, with one hand blown off and his body creeping in flames, held up the nose of the craft long enough to let the rest of the crew escape.
Bruce was blown away from the city and came down in fairly open country to the south of Ludwigshafen. One side of his face was injured, one eye blinded, and his left shoulder shattered, and he remembered almost nothing until he was discovered the next day by a French prisoner-of-war on his way to work in the fields. The man concealed him until night and then arranged for another Frenchman to have him smuggled across the German border in a freight car. Three days after the raid a doctor in a small town in the Franche-Compté operated on his left eye and removed it. The shrapnel had crushed some nerves in his left shoulder and for many days he was in great pain, lying alone in the attic of a house he had never seen. The doctor visited him often and finally contrived to get him into a hospital for another operation. Afterwards he conveyed Bruce to a private home in the country near Besançon where a French family, at the risk of their own lives, nursed him back to health. By August he was well enough to travel, though there would always be a scar crossing his left cheek from the temple to the chin, he would never be able to lift his left elbow above shoulder height, and he would one day have to exchange the glass eye with which the doctor had fitted him for a plastic one.
By slow stages he managed to reach Perpignan, and five weeks after crossing the Spanish frontier he was back in England. From there he was sent home to Canada, ordered to appear before a medical board, and released from the Airforce.
In the winter of 1943, Bruce returned to England as a minor correspondent for the Canadian Press. At first he was given routine office work in London. He asked to be sent with the army on the Sicilian invasion, but he was turned down, and finally late in January in 1944 he was ordered to a night-bomber station in Yorkshire to do a series of impressions of an airfield in operation. It was a job he could have done in the London office from memory, but he was bored with London and glad of an excuse to get out of it for a week.
It was a cold night when he reported at the station and the northern edge in the air reminded him of Canada. He watched the planes get away, made a few notes for local colour, and then the long wait began. It was the first time he had ever been forced to stay on duty at the base to sweat out these hours of the night, and an overpowering loneliness began to grow out of his sense of being utterly useless. It was less than a year since he had been flying over Germany himself, but already those days seemed to belong to another era, almost to another war. He felt superannuated from life.
He found a corner of the lounge where he would not be disturbed, opened his notebook, and on the coarse grey paper covered with green lines he began to write a letter. He gave it no heading and no salutation, but he knew he was talking to Lucy.
Perhaps if I see a little more of the war I'll learn finally why things have to be as they are, he wrote. Tonight I feel either too old or too young for the world I'm living in and I don't know which it is. A few hours ago I was talking to a Pole with that look so many escaped Europeans have – their eyes remind you of statues in the British Museum – as if they had seen the beginning and the end and had nothing more to learn. Thank God the English haven't got that look – not yet anyway. But the war has taught me one important fact – the world is filled with men of good will. Even that Pole is a man of good will. It comes out in some people as intense loyalty – even the Nazis are loyal to Hitler. And in that case loyalty seems to be no more than a trap. Why? Because it is fixed on a system instead of on people? I seem to be haunted by the fact that at a time when more of us have good will in our hearts than ever before, the organized doing of evil has become our chief industry.
There's been too much feeling for us in too little time. Too many ideas to understand without enough information. For instance, everyone of my old crew is gone, all but me. Why should I still be alive?
Tonight I'm supposed to be writing about an airbase, but I won't be able to do it – not honestly, at any rate. So for a little while I'm going to write to you, instead. After that I'll set down the routine and meaningless facts. Of course, the whole organization of an air base has a sort of superhuman grandeur about it. It seems to make us all, for a short while, larger than life, but there is the evil of it. During the Depression I was nothing. As navigator of a Wellington I was part of a certain greatness. I love planes even while I hate the idea of them. A year ago I even loved the moment when the bombs dropped. Had I been on the ground when our own bombs fell I'd have hated myself for what I'd done. And now I feel old and out of it and at the same time glad I didn't fall apart when the pressure was on me. Do you understand what I mean, Lucy, when I say that it's horrifying, sometimes, to feel safe again?
I've stopped writing poetry. You'll probably be glad to hear it, considering what my old poetry was like. It makes me wonder if the war has killed all natural beauty for me. Today as I came up here there was a bright morning sun – a wonderful light over everything – but I hated it because it reminded me of the same kind of sun that was shining the morning a friend of mine was killed on his first operational flight when an Me-110 dived at him out of such a sun. He should have known better, of course, but he was a kid – he couldn't have been old enough to get into the Airforce legitimately.
Do you think the war may have killed all my sense of feeling? I begin to suspect it has, you know. I watched the planes go out tonight and all I could think about them was that they were a great machine and I hoped the human elements in them wouldn't make any bad mistakes. What I mean to say is this, I don't think I got that way from callousness but from a surfeit of feeling. Battles of all kinds are a colossal sensuality. You can't think, except to do your job almost mechanically, but the moment the height of the danger passes you feel with an incredible intensity. That's when you discover your buried self. You get so close to the buried you – that part of us that the mind of Ontario tries to censor out of existence – that sometimes you become afraid of yourself. But it doesn't last long because after a space your feelings seem to dry up and you begin to talk and think like staff officers and air marshals and when that happens you know that the war – so far as you're concerned – ought to be over.
I hope you don't mind what I've said about Ontario. Something quite wonderful has happened to Canada in this war and I don't mean to belittle it. Over here in the Canadian Army and the R.C.A.F. you can almost see and hear Canada growing up. We were sent over so early, you know, to train here instead of at home, particularly the men in the army, and that meant that for three years we were dreadfully isolated. All we had were letters that didn't tell us very much because they come from people who don't express themselves any too freely, and a few baseball bats and worn-out footballs and hometown newspapers weeks old. The British were in their own country, the Americans who finally arrived three years after the war began came as lords of the earth, but we were just Canadians in everyone's eyes. Nobody knew what we really were, or cared much. So we had to think more about ourselves and our country for ourselves. Nobody else had ever set much value on her and we tried to figure out why. So we discovered her for ourselves – in the things men say to each other after lights-out, in the subtle differences between ourselves and the Americans whom we had always assumed were about the same as ourselves. We liked the Americans and we got on with them, but they weren't the same. Particularly they weren't the same when we felt deeply about things, for in those moments we found we no longer talked precisely their language.
Dear Lucy, I was thinking about you when I began this letter, but I've forgotten how to talk easily of the things most human beings find to say to each other. I would like to be able to ask the que
stions that would lead you to answer – to tell me about yourself and your husband and Marcia Stapleton and your son, whatever you like that would give me a glimpse of your life. But I've forgotten how to word such questions. Still, I believe your intuitions are quite good enough to understand a good many things I can't say – why I'm writing you tonight, for instance, what I'm thinking when I think about you now, what I thought all through that night I spent with you in New York, though hardly any words passed between us the entire evening. The feeling I had then is still there, though I'm no longer fool enough to let it take me at the back of the knees the way it did once.
Forgive me if I've said too much. It's four in the morning and no man is safe with himself at such an hour, particularly at a bomber station in Yorkshire waiting for the planes to come back and remembering so much more than he can understand.
Bruce tore the pages he had covered with pencilled lines from the notebook and folded them to fit a crumpled envelope he found in his pocket. He wrote Lucy's married name on the envelope, tried to remember her New York address, failed, and returned the envelope to his pocket, the letter sealed within it. It was several days later before he found it there, for the letter went out of his mind as soon as the bombers began to return that morning. When he did look at it again he turned it over in his hand, opened it, and read it through for the first time. It was the kind of letter, he decided, that a man writes only for himself and should never mail. So he tore it into scraps, promising himself that he would try to remember to send Lucy a card one day soon.
A month after D-Day Bruce was allowed to follow the army into France, and after the breakthrough at Caen he went on through Belgium into Holland and finally into Germany. As he was never given a by-line his name was unknown in Canada, but for a few months millions of people read the reports he wrote. Most of them were small items picked up from individual soldiers or companies, from stretcher-bearers and overworked orderlies at dressing stations, stories personal enough to have human interest and impersonal enough to pass the censor. Toward the end of the war in Europe his mother and father, listening to the radio one night in Grenville, heard his voice in a transcribed news report from Holland after the capture of Bergen-op-Zoom.
AFTER taking her degree from Queen's University, Nina Cameron got a job in Toronto as secretary to a prominent lawyer and she lived in the city for nearly two years, sharing an apartment with two other girls she had known in college. It turned out to be less fun than she had always thought such a life would be. She spent the Christmas of 1940 in New York with Lucy and Stephen and she was bewildered by the apparent change in her sister. She returned to Toronto with an odd sensation that she was alone in the world and with a suspicion that somewhere along the line she had missed a cue.
When the Wrens were organized Nina left her job in the law office and enlisted, convinced that the Wrens were the most select and desirable of the women's services. Dressed in a flat sailor's hat, navy suit, black stockings, and well-shined black oxfords, she saw herself at the elbow of handsome officers heavy with gold braid and a natural shyness, men to whom her charm and gaiety would be unexpected comforts. But after months of hard training, she was stationed for nearly a year in a small town on the lower St. Lawrence, doing routine work in signals and feeling herself totally cut off from everything she wanted. Though she encountered a certain amount of gold braid, all of it was wavy and none of it was exciting.
So Nina went back to Grenville whenever she had a long enough leave. There was an Airforce training camp only four miles away from the town and the older merchants were doing well. On Saturday nights King Street was filled with airmen trying to raise hell without much help from anyone but Nick Petropolis, for most of the girls who lived there had followed the native young men into one of the services. But Nina stayed close to the house with Jane whenever she was home. There was no one on King Street any more whom she knew well enough to speak to.
Late in 1943, she was transferred to Halifax, where she worked as secretary to an elderly desk-commander in the Dockyard who had won his medals in the old war and treated her with a distant and fatherly consideration. She was still discontented because it seemed to her that by now she should have been at least engaged and in Halifax it was impossible to meet the kind of boy she understood, as she might have done in Montreal or Toronto.
Halifax during those last years of the war was bursting at the seams, mostly with young men who wished to God they were somewhere else. Crews coming in from the convoys had no place to relax and get a drink or a change of feeling except in a hired room or in somebody's house, and by this time there were no rooms for hire and fewer invitations to homes because there were almost as many servicemen in the town as citizens. There were no taverns in Halifax because the Calvinists who dominated the place thought it more moral for a man to buy a bottle of whiskey at the government commission and drink it in secret in a boarding-house room or behind a tree in the park than to sit at a table or stand at a bar and drink it comfortably in public. Halifax was a fairly tough town, but its toughness was so old-fashioned it was almost Victorian and the inlanders who comprised most of the corvette crews that came and went with convoys were unable to understand it. They failed to realize that Halifax was so accustomed to wars of all kinds that she was making the mistake of trying to take this one in her stride, never guessing how the boys felt about the place until the day the war ended, when the sailors joined forces with the slum population and tore the town apart.
The sense of savagery and desperation under the surface of the town during the last years of the war often frightened Nina, but she began to feel better when she met three boys in succession who showed interest in her, all veteran airmen.
The first took her to several dances before she discovered that he had a wife in Vancouver. The second, stationed in Canada on coastal command after a tour over Europe, took her out five times before she saw him in the Nova Scotian with the middle-aged wife of a colonel of ordnance then posted in England. The Wren who was with her at the time, a sharp-eyed French-Canadian girl, indicated the older woman with a lift of her eyebrows and murmured, “Comme le Belt Line Tram, eh? Tout le monde peut monter.”
Nina flushed and decided never to go out with him again. If that was the kind of man he was, what would people think when they saw her with him?
Her third boy came from Peterborough, a town which she thought must be enough like Grenville to be practically the same except that it was larger. He had been at Queen's a year ahead of her and he had already won a D.F.C. She felt very proud when they danced at the Lord Nelson and she could introduce him to friends, or when they sat under the trees at the Waegwoltic where people could see them together.
One afternoon, at an hour when he knew she would be free, he turned up with a borrowed car and they drove out of town over a rocky road to Terence Bay on the seaward side of the Halifax peninsula. For nearly five hours they were alone under an enormous blue sky. They listened to the sea sucking at the rocks and insects murmuring in the blueberry bushes that grew in crevices of the dusty grey granite. They lay on their backs watching gulls wheel in the sky. And the air was astringently clean, yet aromatic, for the northwest wind blowing over them had sifted through thousands of firs and spruce on its passage across Nova Scotia to the sea.
He pulled a bottle of Scotch out of a pocket, offered her a drink, and when she refused, took a drink himself. After that he took another drink every half hour. “The ship came in this morning,” he explained. “So it's my last three days. They've not told us yet, but we know it's the one we're going on.”
As the whiskey worked in him he told her things about himself he would not have said normally, for he was a tense, proud boy. He was afraid of going back. He had never admitted his fear to anyone else, but he had to tell her because he had to know now whether or not she understood how he felt. He asked her if she knew what the initials L.M.F. meant. “Lack of moral fibre,” he said. “That's what they put on your record if you welsh o
n your target too often.”
“But they've never put that on your record!” Nina protested. “You've won the D.F.C.”
He looked at her strangely. “So I have,” he said. “And that's supposed to fix everything forever, isn't it?”
He made Nina uncomfortable so she tried to change the subject by asking him what he planned to do when the war was over, though she already knew that he intended to study law and she thought it would be fine to be the wife of a lawyer with a practice in Toronto, a man who would be a replica of the lawyer she had worked for there, a man with a Buick, a blue Homburg hat, three children, and a summer cottage in the Muskoka. But her airman just smiled to himself.
That evening in Halifax, eating at Norman's with the usual crowd standing in front of the doors waiting for a table, the boy asked Nina to spend the night with him. The hunger in his eyes frightened her and she flushed and refused stiffly, not even offering as an excuse the fact that she would hardly be able to get away from her quarters for a whole night. He took a long look at her face, seeing the blue eyes and the yellow hair falling in curls under her Wren's cap, and the faint trace of two lines which had begun to show on either side of her mouth. Then he got up from the table without a word, paid the bill, and Nina followed him across the room. As she walked out through the crowd of servicemen at the door she hated them all. They seemed to be jeering at her with their eyes. No matter how nice they might seem on the surface, they all held together whenever one of them tried to get a girl to step out of line. She had never felt so vulnerable in her life.
Without a word the boy drove her back to Stadacona. When he left her at the door he said, “I wonder if you'd been in England for the past few years if even then you'd know there was a war on.”
She never saw him again and he never wrote to her, though she half expected he would. Four months later she learned that he had been killed in an accident over his home field in Yorkshire.
The Precipice Page 28
