Over dinner she studied him covertly. She thought he looked even more exhausted than when she had last seen him. There were dark rings under his eyes and the scar on his forehead showed very red against his pallor. He kept propping his chin on his hand and once or twice she thought he was going to fall asleep, sitting at the table.
‘Rum sort of war, this,’ he said, waving his fork vaguely. ‘There you are chasing some Jerry across the fields, hopping over hedges, both of you screeching along like bats out of hell, and you can see people picnicking as though nothing was happening at all . . . White cloths laid out, pouring the tea, passing round the cucumber sandwiches . . . Life going on as per usual with us thrashing about in the skies overhead. I went over a cricket match the other day and they didn’t even look up.’
‘It must seem strange.’
‘Well, it does. It does indeed. And it’s just as odd upstairs, sometimes. Do you know we often get BBC broadcasts on our radios, right in the middle of everything. There we are listening to our revered and gallant leader rallying us to the flag, exhorting us to go in and give our all, and suddenly some woman’s telling us to take 4 ounces of fat and half a pound of flour and blend well together.’
Felicity laughed. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘I swear it’s true. Last time it was a recipe for rock cakes. Whitters was kindly drawing my attention to some Hun on my tail and this woman starts saying “Bake the cakes for ten minutes at Gas Mark Seven until well risen and golden brown”.’
She still wasn’t entirely sure whether to believe him, but he seemed quite serious now, turning his wine glass stem round and round between his fingers thoughtfully. Staring at it.
‘The weirdest thing of all is to go into the pub of an evening, as we are wont to do. The locals are all there, sitting over their pints, and in we come pretending we’ve had our feet on the ground all day and that everything’s tickety-boo. Nobody mentions what’s been going on. Or who’s missing. It’s pints all round and talk about the weather. Been a lovely summer, hasn’t it, and all that . . . To be honest, half the time we pray for a good old peasouper so that we can get a bit of rest.’ He lifted his head and smiled at her wearily. ‘I didn’t tell you I came down in the drink the other day, did I?’
She caught her breath. ‘No . . . actually, you didn’t.’
‘Well, you know me. Always a spot of drama. Some Jerry made a confounded nuisance of himself – they’ve got no consideration at all. Scored a bullseye in the engine. Flames all over the shop, and getting warmer, so I had to hop out and take a little swim in the Channel.’ Speedy wagged a forefinger at her. ‘Don’t ever let anyone tell you that the water’s warm in summer because they’d be lying.’
She tried to smile. ‘Was it long before you were picked up?’
‘Not sure. My watch had stopped and I sort of lost track of time. I paddled about a bit and sang a song or two to keep my spirits up. Not ones you’d know, Titania. At least, you might know the tunes, but not the words . . . I kept wishing I had a dinghy like the bomber boys. For some reason they seem to think us fighter chaps are unsinkable. Then I was trying to think of a good quotation for the occasion and I remembered that bit from The Ancient Mariner.’
‘Water, water everywhere?’
‘No. Better than that. Alone, alone, all, all alone. Alone on a wide, wide sea. Rather apt, don’t you think? Old Snodgrass would have given me ten out of ten.’
‘Top of the class?’
‘Definitely. Anyway, I said that to myself a few hundred times and just as I was beginning to think that everyone had forgotten all about me, this splendid launch turns up. Very decent chaps on board, too. One of them had had the foresight to bring along a bottle of brandy . . .’
Afterwards, as they had done before, they walked along the quayside towards the boatsheds. It was almost dark with just a faint, dull red glow left in the west, like the dying embers of a fire. She remembered how far away the war had seemed last time. Now the Germans were only on the other side of the water. Speedy put his arm round her shoulders.
‘When I was waiting to be picked up – or not, as the case might be – I thought about you a lot, Titania. That kept me going.’
‘That’s a very nice compliment, Speedy,’ she said carefully.
He stopped walking and turned towards her. He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘You know I’m awfully in love with you, don’t you?’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘The funny thing is I’ve been out with lots of girls, but I’ve never really cared two hoots about them until now. I’ve never met anyone like you, you see. I told you that before.’
‘I’m nothing special at all.’
‘I think you are,’ he said solemnly. ‘Very special. The thing is, I know you’re not in love with me. Not yet, anyhow. But do you think there’s a chance you might be . . . later on?’
‘I honestly don’t know, Speedy. I like you very much. I’m very fond of you, but –’
‘Not quite the same thing, is it?’ He sighed deeply. ‘Maybe if I’m very good and patient, you will be one day.’
‘You’ll meet someone else, Speedy.’
‘Not like you, Titania. Never like you.’
When he kissed her she hadn’t the heart to stop him. He held her close against him for a moment and then sighed once more.
‘I suppose it’s time to take you back. Then tomorrow it’s back unto the flipping breach again. I must say the old ticker sinks a bit at the thought. Ah well. Press on regardless, as they say.’
They walked slowly back along the quayside and he kept his arm firmly round her shoulders all the way.
‘Come and have a cup of tea, Winnie?’
‘No, thank you.’
But Taffy blocked her way. People were pushing past them in the NAAFI corridor and someone jostled her so hard she almost fell into his arms. Someone else was grinning at her and making some remark she didn’t catch.
‘It’s only a cup of tea, Winnie,’ Taffy said pleadingly. ‘We could just sit and talk a bit, that’s all.’
She gave way. Taffy wouldn’t budge and it was hard to make a fuss with everybody going past and staring at them and sniggering. After all, she was safe enough here in the NAAFI and there was nothing wrong with having a cup of tea with him.
They queued at the canteen counter for tea and buns which Taffy insisted on paying for. As he set them down on the table she noticed that there were corporal’s tapes on his arm now. The table was sticky with spilled beer and speckled with cigarette ash. He made a face as he took a sip of the tea.
‘This stuff’s worse than ever. Tastes like sawdust. I bet they do put bromide in it.’
‘Bromide?’
‘You know, the stuff that makes you drowsy. They’re supposed to put it in the tea to keep our passions down.’
She went red.
‘I’m only joking. It’s just a silly story. You know the rubbish people talk in this place.’ He rubbed a hand over his eyes. ‘No need for it anyhow. It’s been hard enough keeping awake lately. Not much time for sleep.’
She’d watched the fighters taking off time after time since the big raid, craning her neck to follow them as far as she could from the Orderly Room window. She always counted them and crossed her fingers for them. When they came back she counted them again to see how many were missing and watched the ones that had been shot up wobbling and spluttering past, fuselage sometimes in tatters.
Taffy went on. ‘All night it is sometimes, with the CO screaming for aircraft and most of them U/S . . . We’re beavering away like a lot of lunatics.’
‘I’ve watched them goin’ out every day,’ she said.
He smiled with a quiet satisfaction. ‘We can turn the Hurries round in eight minutes if there’s a flap on. Refuel, rearm, engine check, instruments, radio, the whole lot . . . Not bad.’
She’d seen ground crew swarming over a fighter that had just landed. The pilot hadn’t even left the cockpit before it taxied off again.
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Taffy was watching her intently. ‘You look tired too, Winnie. Have they been working you hard?’
‘We’ve been busy.’
Endless forms. Endless queries. Endless filing. So many more people now on the station.
‘You’re all right, though?’ he persisted. ‘No ill effects from being in that shelter, I mean?’
She shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about it. She had tried hard to forget what had happened and not to think of Enid. Blast did funny things sometimes, everybody had told her. It could get someone and leave the person right next to them quite unhurt. The Hand of God, Vera had called it dramatically, though why should God have chosen just to put His hand on Enid?
Vera was making faces at her now from across the canteen, mouthing widely: are you all right? She nodded and gave her a quick little wave to show so.
‘Before the raids started,’ Taffy was saying, ‘some of the boys hadn’t a good word to say for you WAAFS. They think differently now, I can tell you . . . the way you’ve stuck it all and kept going cool and calm as anything. Mind you, I don’t know if they’d go so far as to want any of you in the hangars . . . not yet, anyhow. Maybe one day.’ He smiled at her. ‘See, I don’t forget anything you’ve ever said to me. Do you still want to be a flight mech?’
‘I don’t think they’ll ever let us,’ she said wistfully.
‘They might.’ Taffy watched her face. He said softly: ‘I could teach you a bit about aircraft, if you like – so’s you’d stand a better chance, if it ever came to it. What would you like to know?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Just ask away. I’ll do my best.’
Winnie blushed. ‘I still don’t understand how the ’planes fly. I can’t see how they get up into the air when they’re so heavy.’
‘That’s simple really.’ He put down his tea and held his hands out, turned away from each other and tilted upwards slightly. ‘The wings are set at an angle, like this, see, so that when the airscrew’s turning and pulling the aircraft along fast enough, the angle drives the air flowing past the wings underneath them and forces them upwards.’
She tried to follow him, but it still made no clear sense.
He sketched a curve with one hand over the back of the other. ‘As well as that, the wing is cambered on the upper surface, like this. That makes the air pressure less on top and greater underneath, where it’s flatter, so that sort of sucks the wing upwards. See?’
‘I think so,’ she said doubtfully.
He dropped his hands and rummaged in the breast pocket of his battle dress tunic. ‘Well, there’s a lot more to it than that, of course.’ He took out a piece of paper and unfolded it, smoothing it flat. ‘Look you, I’ll give you a demonstration of air flow lifting something. Watch this.’
He let the paper hang loosely from his fingertips, holding it by two corners a little way from him. As he blew gently along the upper surface the paper rose into the air. ‘See? Me blowing like that makes an airflow across the top surface of the paper and that causes a decrease in air pressure there. But the air pressure below the paper isn’t decreased, so the paper rises up, just like you saw. That’s the secret of flight.’ He smiled at her, holding out the piece of paper. ‘Here, you try.’
He stared at her soft lips, pursed to blow. The paper fluttered and then lifted for her. She handed it back to him, looking both pleased and shy.
‘Of course,’ he said casually. ‘There’s other things you ought to know about. You’ve got to keep the aircraft stable in flight so it doesn’t swing about in the air, or pitch up and down. And you’ve got to be able to turn it left and right, and go up and down, and bank . . . But that’s all getting a bit more complicated.’
‘Would you mind very much explainin’ some more to me?’
He grabbed at the chance she had given him, veiling his triumph. Taking a pencil stub from his pocket, he leaned forward across the table and began to draw a picture of an aeroplane on the piece of paper.
‘Well now . . . Your tailplane here gives fore and aft stability. It has to support the fuselage in just the right position, so it isn’t nose-heavy or tail-heavy. Then you’ve got your fin at the back, sticking up like this, with the rudder attached. The rudder’s connected to a bar in the cockpit that the pilot pushes with his feet. If he pushes the left side forward, the machine turns left. If he pushes the right, it goes right. Easy.’ He sketched on quickly, deftly. ‘And here’s your elevator on the tailplane, at the side. That’s connected to the pilot’s control column in the cockpit. When he pulls it towards him this way, the elevator goes up and catches the wind. That forces the tail down, which makes the aircraft’s nose go up, and so she climbs . . .’ Taffy demonstrated with the pencil stub. ‘If he pushes it forward, the opposite happens and she dives. See?’
Winnie, chin on her hands, concentrating hard, nodded. She had forgotten all about being afraid of Taffy and was quite oblivious to the buzz and clatter of the canteen around her. Vera passed by the table, dragging her feet and coughing helpfully, but Winnie did not even notice her. She was watching the pencil moving across the paper again.
‘These flaps on the trailing edge of the wings are called ailerons,’ Taffy told her. ‘They’re attached to the control column too. Push it sideways – to the left, say – and the port aileron goes up and the starboard one down. The wind catches hold of them and makes the port wing tip go down and the starboard wing tip come up. So, the machine banks, like this.’
Taffy stretched both arms wide and demonstrated for her. Winnie watched attentively. He dragged his eyes away from her and went on drawing.
‘You’ve got your airscrew on the nose, of course, and when that’s turning, the blades chop at the air and pull the machine along. Same as paddling a boat in water, really . . .’
She listened and watched, totally fascinated. Taffy had opened a new door for her, and onto a world she had longed to discover. When, finally, he put down the pencil, she was transparently disappointed.
‘That’s enough for now. You’ll get muddled, Winnie. I’ll tell you more another time.’
After that, it was an easy matter for him to persuade her to go out with him.
He took her to the cinema in town, travelling in on the bus. It was a Betty Grable picture and Winnie enjoyed it. Compared with wartime England, America seemed a wonderful place. Everything on the screen up above her looked dazzlingly beautiful and so full of colour and light. The people were so good-looking and well-dressed that she could scarcely believe that they were real. Everything about them was perfect. And their homes were like palaces. She had never seen such space, such luxury . . .
Afterwards they went to the cinema café and had sausages and chips, and a pot of tea. Again, Taffy paid for her though she tried hard to stop him.
Over the café table he explained a bit more to her, this time about the aircraft engine. She listened entranced to him speaking of pistons and four-stroke cycles; of carburettors and cylinders; of compression and sparks and ignition; of valves and cams and magnetos. They were all magical-sounding words to her and she began to understand what she had only been able to reason instinctively about the Fordson. Taffy drew more diagrams for her on a piece of paper, among the teacups and plates, and, again, he stopped just when she wanted badly to know more.
It was dark and raining when they walked to the bus stop and they waited in the shelter of a nearby doorway. He screened her from the slanting rain, one arm raised protectively against the wall. Her closeness tantalized him, but he was careful not to touch her. He wished he could see her better. He had always thought her adorable in her uniform. He loved the way her hair curled up round the edge of her cap and the way her large eyes looked at him from beneath its jutting peak. The belted tunic fitted her so neatly at the waist and the severe, masculine cut only made her seem all the more desirably feminine in his eyes. He was not the only one, he knew, to think so.
‘You know what some of the lads call you girls?’ he told
her. ‘Bluebirds. From the bluebird of happiness, see? That’s what you can bring us . . . if you want to.’
He knew she was blushing in the darkness.
‘The bus is comin’,’ she said, and ducked under his arm as it came swishing along the street towards them.
The chalk mass of the South Downs lay a few miles to the north of Colston, where it curved inland away from the sea. Anne, standing on the top of them, and thinking back to geography lessons at school, remembered that the mass had once been joined to France thousands of years ago. When the Ice Age had ended the melted waters had flooded the depression between England and Europe, creating the Channel. Just as well, in the circumstances. She was still panting from the steep climb up as she surveyed the countryside spread out far below. Everything was in miniature. Little fields, all shapes and sizes, fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw, trees looking just like the toy ones made of lead that she and Kit had played with in the nursery, lead cows and sheep dotted about, and a toy lorry speeding along a road. The houses were Monopoly houses and a toy train, just like Kit’s, puffed along at the far side of the jigsaw. The colours were all dusty late summer green and harvest gold, the horizon a hazy, distant border.
She took off her cap and shook her head, letting the wind blow through her hair. ‘We could walk for miles along the ridge, as far as Beachy Head that way, and Hampshire that way.’ She waved her arm vaguely east and then west. ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it? Like being on top of the world.’
Standing beside her, Michal Racyñski smiled. ‘Beautiful England. The most beautiful country in the world.’
‘Do you think so?’ she said, pleased. ‘More beautiful than Poland?’
‘I think so – yes.’
She had no idea what Poland looked like. Not the faintest clue. Forests, most probably. Dark fir trees, though, not leafy English ones. Gloomy clearings, not sylvan glades. Where had she been when the geography lessons had covered Poland? Asleep at the back of the class, most likely, while Miss Carpenter droned on about climate and crops and natural resources.
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