I can’t tell you that it was terrible. I knew it wasn’t just, but then justice was something we’d long given up even missing. Put within that picture, and of the falling bombs and the falling bombers, I understood that the chop girl was a little thing, and I learned to step back into the cold and empty space that it provided. After all, I hadn’t loved any of the men—or only in a sweet, generalised and heady way which faded on the walk from the fence against which we’d been leaning. And I reasoned—and this was probably the thing that kept me sane—that it wasn’t me that was the chop. I reasoned that death lay somewhere else and was already waiting, that I was just a signpost that some crewmen had happened to pass on their way.
Me, I was the chop girl.
And I believed.
Such were the terrors and the pains of the life we were leading.
With the harvest came the thunderflies, evicted from the fields in sooty clouds that speckled the windows and came out like black dandruff when you combed your hair. And the moths and the craneflies were drawn for miles by the sparks and lights flaring from the hangers. Spiders prowled the communal baths, filled with their woodland reek of bleach and wet towels. The sun rippled small and gold like a dropped coin on the horizon, winking as if through fathoms of ocean.
With harvest came Walt Williams. Chuttering up to the Strictly Reserved parking space outside the Squadron Leader’s office in once-red MG and climbing out with a swing of his legs and the heave of his battered carpetbag. Smiling with cold blue eyes as he looked around him at the expanse of hangers as if he would never be surprised again. Walt had done training. Walt had done Pathfinders. Walt had done three full tours, and most of another that had only ended when his plane had been shot from under him and he’d been hauled out of the Channel by a passing MTB. We’d all heard of Walt, or thought we had, or had certainly heard of people like him. Walt was one of the old-style pilots who’d been flying before the War for sheer pleasure. Walt was an old man of thirty with age creases on his sun-browned face to go with those blue eyes. Walt had done it all and had finally exhausted every possibility of death that a bemused RAF could throw at him. Walt was the living embodiment of lucky.
We gathered around, we sought to touch and admire and gain advice about how one achieved this impossible feat—the we at the base that generally excluded me did, anyway. The other crew members who’d been selected to fly with him wandered about with the bemused air of pools winners. Walt Williams stories suddenly abounded. Stuff about taking a dead cow up in a Lancaster and dropping it bang into the middle of a particularly disliked Squadron Leader’s prized garden. Stuff about half a dozen top brass wives. Stuff about crash landing upside down on lakes. Stuff about flying for hundreds of miles on two engines or just the one or no engines at all. Stuff about plucking women’s washing on his undercarriage and picking apples from passing trees. Amid all this excitement that fizzed around the airfield like the rain on the concrete and the corrugated hangers as the autumn weather heaved in, we seemed to forget that we had told each other many of these stories before, and that they had only gained this new urgency because we could now settle them onto the gaunt face of a particular man who sat smiling and surrounded yet often seeming alone at the smoke-filled centre of the NAFFI bar.
Being older, being who he was, Walt needed to do little to enhance his reputation other than to climb up into this Lancaster and fly it. That, and parking that rattling sports car the way he did that first day, his loose cuffs and his other minor disregards for all the stupidities of uniform, his chilly gaze, his longer-than regulation hair, the fact that he was almost ten years older than most of the rest of us and had passed up the chance to be promoted to the positions of the men who were supposedly in charge of him, was more than enough. The fact that, in the flesh, he was surprisingly quiet, and that his long brown hands trembled as he chain-smoked his Dunhill cigarettes, the fact that his smile barely ever wavered yet never reached his eyes, and that it was said, whispered, that the Pilot Officer in the billet next to his had asked to be moved out on account of the sound of screaming, was as insignificant as Alan Ladd having to stand on a box before he kissed his leading ladies. We all had our own inner version of Walt Williams in those soaringly bright days.
For me, the shadow in bars and dancehall corners, potent in my own opposite way, yet now mostly pitied and ignored, Walt Williams had an especial fascination. With little proper company, immersed often enough between work shifts in doleful boredom, I had plenty of time to watch and brood. The base and surrounding countryside made a strange world that winter. I walked the dikes. I saw blood on the frost where the farmers set traps to catch the foxes, and felt of my own blood turn and change with the ebb and flow of the bomber’s moon. Ice on the runways, ice hanging like fairy socks on the radio spars as the messages came in each morning. The smell of the sea blown in over the land. In my dreams, I saw the figures of crewmen entering the NAAFI, charcoaled and blistered, riddled with bleeding wormholes or greyly bloated from the ocean and seeping brine. Only Walt Williams, laughing for once, his diamond eyes blazing, stood whole and immune.
Walt was already halfway through his tour by the time Christmas came, and the consensus amongst those who knew was that he was a unfussy pilot, unshowy. Rather like the best kind of footballer, he drifted in, found the right place, the right time, then drifted out again. I stood and watched him from my own quiet corners in the barroom, nursing my quiet drinks. I even got to feel that I knew Walt Williams better than any of the others, because I actually made it my business to study him, the man and not the legend. He always seemed to be ahead of everything that was happening, but I saw that there was a wariness in the way he watched people, and a mirrored grace in how he responded, as if he’d learned the delicate dance of being human, of making all the right moves, but, offstage and in the darkness of his hut where that pilot who was dead now had said he’d heard screaming, he was something else entirely. And there were things—apart from never having to buy drinks—that Walt Williams never did. Games, bets, cards. He always slipped back then, so smoothly and easily you’d have to be watching from as far away as I was to actually notice. It was as if he was frightened to use his luck up on anything so trivial, whereas most of the other crewmen, fired up and raw through these times of waiting, were always chasing a ball, a winning hand, thunking in the darts and throwing dice and making stupid bets on anything that moved, including us girls.
Watching Walt as I did, I suppose he must have noticed me. And he must have heard about me, too, just as everyone else here at the base had. Sometimes, on the second or third port and lemon, I’d just stare at him from my empty corner and will him, dare him, not to stare back at me. But he never did. Those sapphire eyes, quick as they were, never quite touched on me. He must, I thought. He must look now. But never, never. Except when I stood up and left, and I felt his presence behind me like the touch of cool fingers on my neck. So strong and sharp was that feeling one night as I stepped down the wooden steps outside the NAFFI that I almost turned and went straight back in to confront him through those admiring crowds. But loneliness had become a habit by now, and I almost clung to my reputation. I wandered off, away from the billets and into the empty darkness of the airfield. There was no moon, but a seemingly endless field of stars. Not a bomber’s night, but the kind of night you see on Christmas cards. After a week’s rain, and then this sudden frost, I could feel the ground crackling and sliding beneath me. The NAFFI door swung open again, and bodies tumbled out. As they turned from the steps and made to sway arm in arm off to bed, I heard the crash of fresh ice and the slosh of water and as they broke into a huge puddle. They squelched off, laughing and cursing. Standing there in the darkness, I watched the same scene play itself out over and over again. The splash of cold, filthy water. One man even fell into it. Freezing though I was, I took an odd satisfaction in watching this little scene repeat itself. Now, I thought, if they could see me as well as I can see them, standing in the darkness watching the
starlight shining on that filthy puddle, they really would know I’m strange. Chop girl. Witch. Death incarnate. They’d burn me at the stake…
I’d almost forgotten about Walt Williams when he finally came out, although I knew it was him. Instantly. He paused on the steps and looked up at the sky as I’d seen other aircrew do, judging what the next night would bring. As he did so, his shadow seemed to quiver. But he still walked like Walt Williams when he stepped down onto the frozen turf, and his breath plumed like anyone else’s, and I knew somehow, knew in a way that I had never had before, that this time he really didn’t know that I was there, and that he was off-guard in a way I’d never seen him. The next event was stupid, really. A non-event. Walt Williams just walked off with the loose walk of his, his hands stuffed into his pockets. He was nearly gone from sight into his Nissan hut when I realised the one thing that hadn’t happened. Even though he’d taken the same route as everyone else, he hadn’t splashed into that wide, deep puddle. I walked over to it, disbelieving, and tried to recall whether I’d even heard the crackle of his footsteps on the ice. And the puddle was even darker, wider and filthier than I’d imagined. The kind of puddle you only get at places military. I was stooping at the edge of it, and my own ankles and boots were already filthy, when the NAFFI door swung open again, and a whole group of people suddenly came out. Somebody was holding the door, and the light flooded right towards me.
Even though I was sure they must all have seen me and knew who I was, I got up and scurried away.
All in all, it was a strange winter. We were getting used to Allied victories, and there’d even been talk summer of a summer invasion of France that had never happened. But we knew it would come next summer now that the Yanks had thrown their weight into it, and that the Russians wouldn’t give up advancing, that it was really a matter of time until the War ended. But for us that wasn’t reassuring, because we knew that peace was still so far away, and we knew that the risks and the fatalities would grow even greater on the journey to it. Aircrew were scared in any case of thinking further than the next drink, the next girl, the next mission. Peace for them was a strange white god they could worship only at the risk of incurring the wrath of the darker deity who still reigned over them. So there was an extra wildness to the jollification when that the year’s end drew near, and a dawning realisation that, whether we lived or died, whether we came out of it all maimed or ruined or whole and happy, no one else would ever understand.
There was a big pre-Christmas bash in a barn of the great house of the family which had once owned most of the land you could see from the top of our windsock tower. Of course, the house itself had been requisitioned, although the windows were boarded or shattered and the place was empty as we drove past it, and I heard later that it was never re-occupied after the war and ended up being slowly vandalised until it finally burnt down in the fifties. The barn was next to the stables and faced into a wide cobbled yard and for once, out here in the country darkness and a million miles from peace or war, no one gave a bugger about the blackout and there were smoking lanterns hanging by the pens where fine white horses would once have nosed their heads. It was freezing, but you couldn’t feel cold, not in that sweet orange light, not once the music had started, and the Squadron Leader himself, looking ridiculous in a pinny, began ladling out the steaming jamjars of mulled wine. And I was happy to be there, too, happy to be part of this scene with the band striking up on a stage made of bales. When Walt arrived, alone as usual in his rusty MG, he parked in the best spot between the trucks and climbed out with that fragile grace of his. Walt Williams standing there in the flamelight, a modern prince with the tumbling chimneys of that empty old house looming behind him. A perfect, perfect scene.
I did dance, once or twice, with some of the other girls and a few of the older men who worked in the safety of accounts and stores and took pity on me. I even had a five minute word—just like everyone else, kindly man that he was, and spectrally thin though the War had made him—with our Squadron Leader. As far away from everything as we were, people thought it was safe here to get in that bit closer to me. But it was hard for me to keep up my sense of jollity, mostly standing and sitting alone over a such a long evening, and no chance of going back to base until far after midnight. So I did my usual trick of backing off, which was easier here than it was in the NAFFI. I could just drift out of the barn and across the cobbles, falling through layers of smoke and kicked-up dust until I became part of the night. I studied them all for a while, remembering a picture from Peter Pan which had showed the Indians and the Lost Boys dancing around a campfire.
Couples were drifting out now into the quiet behind the vans. I tried to remember what it was like, the way you could conjure up that urgency between flesh and flesh. But all I could think of was some man’s male thing popping out like a dog’s, and I walked further off into the dark, disgusted. I wandered around the walls of the big and empty house with its smell of damp and nettles, half-feeling my way down steps and along balustrades, moving at this late and early hour amid the pale shadows of huge statuary. It wasn’t fully quiet here, this far away from the throb of the barn. Even in midwinter, there were things shuffling and creaking and breaking. Tiny sounds, and the bigger ones that came upon you just when you’d given up waiting. The hoot of an owl. The squeak of a mouse. The sound of a fox screaming…
Perhaps I’d fallen asleep, for I didn’t hear him coming, or at least didn’t separate out the sound of his footsteps from my thoughts, which had grown as half-unreal as those dim statues, changing and drifting. So I simply waited in the darkness as one of the statues began to move, and knew without understanding that it was Walt Williams. He sat beside me on whatever kind of cold stone bench I was sitting, and he still had the smell of the barn on him, the heat and the drink and the smoke and the firelight. The only thing he didn’t carry with him was of the perfume of a woman. I honestly hadn’t realised until that moment that this was another item I should have added to my long list of the things Walt Williams avoided. But somehow that fact had been so obvious that even I hadn’t noticed it. I wouldn’t have seemed right, anyway. Walt and just one woman. Not with the whole base depending on him.
I watched the flare of the match, and saw the peaked outline of his face as he stooped to catch it with two cigarettes. Then I felt his touch as he passed one to me. One of those long, posh fags of his, which tasted fine and sweet, although it was odd to hold compared with the stubby NAFFI ones because the glow of it came from so far away. No one else, I thought, would ever do this for me—sit and smoke a fag like this. Only Walt.
He finally ground his cigarette out in a little shower of sparks beneath his shoe. I did the same, more by touch than anything.
“So you’re the girl we’re all supposed to avoid?”
Pointless though it was in this darkness, I nodded.
It was the first time I’d heard him laugh. Like his voice, the sound was fine and light. “The things people believe!”
“It’s true, though, isn’t it? It is, although I don’t understand why. It may be that it’s only because…” I trailed off. I’d never spoken about being the chop girl to anyone before. What I’d wanted to say was that it was our believing that had made it happen.
I heard the rustle of his packet as he took out another cigarette. “Another?”
I shook my head. “You of all people. You shouldn’t be here with me.”
The match flared. I felt smoke on my face, warm and invisible. “That’s where you’re wrong. You and me, we’d make the ideal couple. Don’t bother to say otherwise. I’ve seen you night after night in the NAFFI…”
“Not every night.”
“But enough of them.”
“And I saw you, that night. I saw you walk over that puddle.”
“What night was that?”
So I explained—and in the process I gave up any pretence that I hadn’t been watching him.
“I really don’t remember,” he said when I’d
finished, although he didn’t sound that surprised. This time, before he ground out his cigarette, he used it to light another. “But why should I? It was just a puddle. Lord knows, there are plenty around the base.”
“But it was there. I was watching. You just walked over it.”
He made a sound that wasn’t quite a cough. “Hasn’t everyone told you who I am? I’m Walt Williams. I’m lucky.”
“But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”
Walt said nothing for a long while, and I watched the nervous arc of his cigarette rising and falling. And when he did begin to speak, it wasn’t about the War, but about his childhood. Walt, he told me he’d come from a well-to-do family in the Home Counties, a place which always made me think of the BBC and pretty lanes with tall flowering hedges. He was the only child, but a big investment, as was always made clear to him, of his mother’s time, his father’s money. At first, to hear Walt talk, he really was the image of those lads I’d imagined I’d when I joined the RAF. He’d gone to the right schools. He really had played cricket—if only just the once when the usual wicket keeper was ill—for his county. His parents had him lined up to become an accountant. But Walt would have none of that, and my image of his kind of childhood, which was in all the variegated golds and greens of striped lawns and fine sunsets, changed as he talked like a film fading. His mother, he said, had a routine that she stuck to rigidly. Every afternoon, when she’d come back from whatever it was that she was always did on that particular day, she’d sit in the drawing room with her glass and her sherry decanter beside her. She’d sit there, and she’d wait for the clock to chime five, and then she’d ring for the maid to come and pour her drink for her. Every afternoon, the same.
Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 2