by Jason Hewitt
He saw her crossing the bridge and knew instantly that it was her. She was dressed efficiently in a grey skirt suit, a collection of files held in her arm. He watched her turn off the bridge and swing a right and then come flurrying through the arcade, threading through the passers-by.
‘Flight Sergeant Thomas?’ she said, a little breathless. Her words were clipped and well spoken. How refreshingly English, he thought. ‘Cathy Bridport. RAF Liaison Officer. So sorry. Have you been waiting long?’ She pulled up a chair and sat down, dumping the pile of folders she had been carrying next to the ashtray. ‘I’ve only been here a week myself. I’m still getting lost.’ She lit a cigarette and offered him one, which Owen politely declined. ‘Not helped, I suppose, by the fact that you never know which roads are going to be blocked. You think a building’s safe and then down it comes. Bosh. It’s a wonder anyone sleeps at night. I know I don’t.’ She took a puff and blew it out. ‘God, that’s better. I’ll just grab a coffee. Then we can get down to business.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Oh look! I’m sorry, you’ve been here an age.’
She signalled for the waitress and a thin girl with floury fingerprints on her apron stepped out from the café. Cathy ordered a coffee. ‘And one of those nice pastries, please. Eine kleine Konditorei.’
The waitress nodded.
‘And you?’
‘Coffee and cake,’ said Owen. ‘Yes. That would be lovely. Thank you.’
‘Well, least I can do for keeping you waiting,’ she said.
In the July 1943 bombings, forty-five thousand of Hamburg’s inhabitants had been killed, she told him. Half the city destroyed.
‘We’ve taken over the Gestapo headquarters,’ she said. ‘The British Army Field Security, I mean. The boys are in their element there. Can you believe it – the place was still fitted out with all their old telephone-tapping devices? They’ve been having high old jinks.’
‘Forty-five thousand?’ His head seemed stuck on the number.
‘Well, it wasn’t just us,’ she said. ‘The Americans too. It simply had to be done, didn’t it?’
‘Why?’
She gave him an odd look over the rim of her coffee, then leant across and stubbed her cigarette out in the cracked ashtray.
‘Perhaps we would be better off looking at your files,’ she said. ‘Fill in a few gaps.’ She opened the folder and leafed through. ‘Last dated sortie: twenty-seventh of July 1943. Declared missing: twenty-eighth of July. Last radio contact: somewhere over Hamburg. You’ve rather come full circle,’ she said, scanning down the page. ‘Captured on landing.’
‘Yes. If my memory serves me . . .’
‘Well, we’ll come back to that, shall we?’ She turned the page and read on. ‘From what we’ve gathered, you would have been taken to Dulag Luft, west Germany, then a camp over in the east. One of their Luftwaffe places, right?’
‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Then it gets murky.’
She rifled through more papers. ‘From our intelligence, there’s a record you were all moved to Nuremberg.’
‘Nuremberg?’
‘Yes. In the west. You arrived in early February.’
‘Yes, like you said, we were moved.’ He remembered the long walk, the snow and then, at some point, a train ride with other men crowded in with him. ‘How long was I there?’
She scanned the page. ‘Not sure. The camp in Nuremberg was evacuated about a month ago as well, in mid-April, just as we were closing in.’ She gave him a weak smile. ‘God, it all seems so long ago, doesn’t it?’
‘And then what?’
‘And then transferred again, to Moosburg. Southern Bavaria. They were getting desperate by that point, I shouldn’t wonder; moving you all into the furthest reaches they had.’
‘And I was there as well?’
‘You see, that’s what I was hoping you could tell me,’ she said. ‘We rather think not. It’s our belief that you never actually arrived in Moosburg. There’s been no mention of you on any records or from the men we pulled out from there. We think you disappeared in the transfer at Nuremberg. It was rather chaotic by all accounts. I like to think you might have slipped away, managed to get on a different train – hm? – going somewhere else. How does that sound? Feasible?’
He didn’t know.
‘But I was heading east,’ he said. ‘I remember the train now but I don’t understand why I would be heading east.’
‘I’m not sure I can help with that,’ she said.
He remembered now: the crowd at Nuremberg station. The guards had become lax, drunk and careless half the time; the war as good as over, their cause as good as lost. In the throng of people amassing on the platform there had been a scuffle and in the confusion he had slipped away, ducking into a lavatory. The room was empty but for a small gentleman at the sink. Owen had stood there in his battered RAF uniform and had known then that if he was to head back into Germany, he needed to change his appearance. He took the man quite by surprise – a sharp crack as his head hit the sink – and then Owen dragged him into the cubicle. The shirt was too small, the trousers too short and the shoes were falling apart, but they were less conspicuous than what he was wearing. He couldn’t get the man’s jacket on though – the arms were too tight – so, in a moment’s decision, he ripped the insignia from his cuffs and shoulders and then, instantly regretting that, stuffed the jacket instead into his bag, hoping that at some point he might be able to find another.
He saw in the mirror how ridiculous he looked, but there wasn’t time to change back. He could hear the shouts coming down the platform. He needed to run. He wasn’t going to Moosburg. He wasn’t even going home. He had been intent on nothing else at that point but heading back to Sagan.
‘Max.’
Cathy looked up from her folder.
All this time there had been a terrible fear that he had left his brother somewhere: in a camp, a field, on a path in the snow. We have to go back, he’d said, but Janek had been adamant.
‘I need to know if you have any information,’ he said, ‘on Flight Lieutenant Maxwell Thomas.’
‘Ah.’ She turned the page on the file. ‘Perhaps we ought to get another coffee.’
At 0120 hours on the twenty-eighth of July 1943, it was reported that a Lancaster Avro Mark III, flying a sortie over Hamburg, was shot down. Of the seven crew members of 156 Bomber Squadron, two were known to be found dead, two were eventually reported by the German Luftwaffe as ‘captured’, and the three remaining were eventually classified as ‘missing in action’. These were the facts as reported in the documents held in her file, and communicated to Owen over a second cup of coffee and a third cigarette. This was his plane. She wondered what he remembered.
Not his plane, Owen thought. Theirs. ‘Suzie Sue’ – a bomber so beautiful that they had named her twice.
It had been a calm night: clear and star-filled as they flew out from Warboys and left the English coast at Mablethorpe with the rest of Groups 1 and 5, heading north-east across the North Sea, before dipping in a south-easterly direction north of Heligoland. Owen remembered the battle roar of the engines as he had sat at the flight deck next to Max, their Lancaster flanked on either side by other bombers, Halifaxes and Blenheims too – over seven hundred aircraft in total. The night’s sky swarmed with them, their engines throbbing.
He was always edgy on the outbound journey, but that night an anxiety had gripped him harder than he could bear. Since the incident at the lockers, Max had hardly said a word – none of his usual banter and bravado – and now, glowering beside him like a thickening cloud, he was making Owen nervous. He could sense the awkward glances passing behind him in the cramped fuselage: Budgie, their navigator directly behind them, plotting their course, and Tapper at his radio desk, listening to the airwaves. How could the plane be so cold and yet so hot, he thought. He could feel his guilt leaking out from every burning pore.
Beside him Max gripped the yoke with his gloved hands, his face like stone. His brother’s
eyes seemed so intensely fixed on the sky that Owen thought he might explode. Owen looked out himself: nothing but the night sprawling endlessly around them, dark and empty but for the deeper shadows of other bombers migrating through the sky.
He needed to carry out his system checks and log the readings but his mind kept falling through a thousand moments, a thousand kisses, looks and touches when he should have stopped himself. And now it was over, and everything was going to hell.
He could hear the growl of the Merlin engines through the floor, and something rattling beneath him, the vibrations seeming to roll around in his head. Then through the earpiece he heard Tapper quietly sending out code, and a cough came from somewhere through the tunnel of the plane, probably Smithy, their new bomb aimer. With the air pressure and freezing temperatures, they were all in perpetual possession of a cold.
At the back, Peri, and Barnes, who was their tail-end Charlie, were getting into their gunner positions. Speaking to each other through the radio had become second nature but now their voices testing the intercoms sounded strange, as if they were communicating through little more than thought. He could feel his own words bunching at the front of his mouth, all the things that he had not said but meant to, like: I’m sorry and I love her and I tried not to, Max, I promise.
Navigator to pilot, said Budgie through the intercom. ETA – twelve minutes.
Owen stared out at the black bulks of planes flocking around them.
Max did not respond.
Owen looked across. He could barely see any human sign of his brother at all beneath the paraphernalia of oxygen mask, jacket and helmet. There was just the cold stare of his eyes, the bridge of his nose and top of his cheeks. The sound of his brother’s breath came amplified through the microphone.
Max, he said. But it was too late.
Peri’s voice cut in. Mid-upper to pilot. Sporadic flak bursts coming.
Barnes’ voice broke in too over the heavy burr of the engines. Rear gunner to pilot. Confirm. We got Krauts.
Owen pulled out his log. He was supposed to note it. 0058. Sporadic flak bursts. They’d had encounters before but now his hands were shaking so violently that he couldn’t control the pen.
Three Bf 109s swept into view as if they’d been pulled in on wires, and now he could see their silhouettes alongside them and the sharp bursts of light.
Messerschmitts on the starboard, he said into his intercom.
Coming close at the back too, added Barnes. He could hear the tension in Barnes’ voice.
Through the side window the flak bursts were visibly heavier, but Max still wasn’t responding. Goddamn it, he needed to do something.
Max. Come on, he said.
Barnes’ voice broke through. Yes, come on, skipper. Get us out.
Owen could hear Max breathing heavily now, coming loud through his earpiece. Was he doing it on purpose? He saw his brother’s hands tightening, squeezing at the control yoke.
Skip, we need to manoeuvre.
More flak, said Peri.
They’re coming in.
For Christ’s sake! someone shouted. Manoeuvre!
Flak burst around them, flashes of light around the sky. Owen’s hand was at the parachute storage, the other clinging to the overhead struts, bracing himself.
What’s going on? Communicate! This was Smithy from the back. Why aren’t we doing anything?
Owen pulled his intercom away and leant in so he could shout. Max! Max! He grabbed at Max’s arm, trying to shake him from his trance. It was as if he’d fallen so deep within himself that he couldn’t be pulled out.
Max, look, for the love of God, I’m sorry. But you need to snap out of this.
There were tracers going into the wing and he was aware of a barrage of voices through the radio. Peri and Barnes were firing. The cabin was filled with noise as the darkness around them lit up with staccato blasts.
Corkscrew port! came a voice. Max! Corkscrew port, goddamn it!
What the hell’s going on?
Budgie was standing behind them, head cowering against the arc of the fuselage and one hand holding an overhead strut. Max, he shouted. For God’s sake!
Then, without a word, Max suddenly turned the yoke and dipped the plane. Owen rammed the throttle levers out to the stops. Max banked her violently down and to one side, then turned her towards the oncoming fighters so that Peri could get his aim. But it was too late. The cannon shells popped, scattering through the side of the plane, in a rapid fire of blasts.
Christ!
An inner light exploded.
Owen saw the starboard outer engine backfiring and lighting up the darkness.
We’re hit!
The flaming engine spluttered and stalled.
Engine down. We’re hit!
Max jammed the throttle and swung the Lancaster into a dive. They lurched forward, the dials on the instruments twitching around as they lost altitude, the plane accelerating, twisting and turning, the air rushing hard against it.
Through the intercom all Owen could hear was shouting. Smoke issued into the cockpit as the self-sealing tanks blazed. He could no longer see any of the controls, or Max, or even his own hands. They were in a gushing, blasting, raging fog. The plane filled with the foul-smelling smog as it screamed and turned, hurtling down, Smithy shouting: For the love of God! and Max yelling: Get out!
Such a noise, such a deafening noise, as the windscreen cracked, flames scoring around the sides, starting to fill the cabin and coming through the electrics. Owen fumbled at his chest parachute, clipping it on. Max or someone – he couldn’t tell – prised back the escape hatch and clambered up as it opened. There was a sucking roar that took the smoke and flames with it, the figure also disappearing. Owen hauled himself up and, with a hard kick, he too was away. He fell fast, the air whistling painfully in his ears, the pressure of it against his body so forceful that it scorched.
Below him his beloved blazing bird fell like a beauty, the dust and smoke and flecks of debris whipping up around him, and he saw nothing but the thick smog-filled sky that he was falling, blasting, tumbling through. When he thought he must be at about 1,500 feet, he pulled the ripcord and felt the jerk of the parachute opening. Some distance away the plane hit and exploded, still full-bellied with its bombs. Above him his white canopy billowed. Shreds of the Lancaster, metal and cloth, still fluttered past like smouldering ash, the flittering silver strips of window.
A thousand feet up and slowly drifting, everything cold and quiet. He looked around him. The sky was empty. No dark silhouette of anyone else parachuting down.
And only then did he realize that he was crying. The wreckage of the plane was burning in the distance.
Max! he screamed. Max!
‘I say, are you all right?’ It was the woman opposite him, her name momentarily gone. ‘You seemed to blank out there for a moment.’
Perhaps he had. The images now came too fast. The heat of the smoke burning his eyes. Its foul stench. The billowing dust.
He had drifted for some time over black fields and the occasional nub of a house. The air buffeted at the canvas. He felt the cold bite of it at his legs. As he came in over a pasture and then crossed an empty lane, he could see people with flashlights hurrying, the lights swinging over the crop at him and then a voice. All the torches shone up at him coming down like a black angel. They started to run – he could hear their voices – as they followed his descent over the field.
He was going to collide with the wood beyond but he could do nothing to stop himself. The wind threw him over the treetops, the branches scratching and scraping, lacerating his legs, and then he fell through, caught within the branches. He hung breathlessly, helpless. The torchlight shone up through the limbs of the tree towards him, strung up like a marionette.
‘Any news then of the others?’ Owen said now. ‘Any survivors, I mean?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. Look, I know it’s all terribly muddy for you but if there’s a
nything you could tell us that might help join the dots . . .’
There wasn’t, he told her. He just needed her to go.
In a darkened cinema he stared at the screen. There was a newsreel playing images, a commentary running over the top of it. Some man from the BBC. Two seats down from him a woman was crying into her handkerchief, and further across a couple of soldiers both sat with their fingertips pressed to their lips. No one spoke – there was just the commentary.
The images flickered, but he barely saw them. It seemed impossible that it had been the same camp that he had just come from. By the time he had got there, most of it had been cleared up and he had seen hardly anything through the wire. But now the full horror of it was played out before him, the bulldozers sweeping up the hundreds of naked bodies, no more than bones dressed in skin, their matchstick limbs turning and tumbling over each other, bodies splitting as the bulldozer pushed them over the dirt and shovelled them into a pit. In the distance a wooden building was being torched. There were images of huddled people, their faces hollowed out, their eyes bulbous and watery. The commentary droned on.
When it ended, the rest of the people in the auditorium slowly got up and left, the woman taking her snivelling out into the foyer. But Owen didn’t. He sat there in the darkness staring until eventually, with the last whirr of the projector and a click, the screen went blank.
The tram from Victoria Embankment took him over the Thames, moving with slow persistence past the lines of traffic. London felt surreal. The streets were recognizable but the war had cast a shadow over them; the blackened buildings seemed to loom despite the mid-May sun. His greatest fears lay scattered around him. Even buildings here had been taken out, bombs and fires ravaging the city in much the same way as he had seen in Hamburg. It seemed to Owen to be a city damned beyond repair.
After he had come out of the Ministry, he had walked along the river and cut across Victoria Embankment Gardens, where in a bandstand a group of returned soldiers were singing hymns and women from the Red Cross rattled collection boxes. All the men were parcelled up in bandages, one or two even missing an arm or leg. He wondered if any of them had been at St Mary’s and dealt with by his father; whether his father, in fact, was still working there. He stood for a few minutes on the neatly trimmed grass and listened to the tune he’d carried all this way in his head – ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’ – being sung out, proud and strong.
