Daisy's Wars

by Meg Henderson

  ‘Oh dear God!’ Daisy said. ‘Not another damned Fly Boy?’

  ‘My father would tick you off for that sort of language, you know,’ Edith smiled. ‘He’s a Lanc navigator,’ Edith went on, ‘a really nice chap.’

  ‘Aren’t they all?’ Daisy sighed wearily.

  ‘Thing is, I’ve found it really hard to be in the tower when he’s on a mission, wondering if he’s for the chop and trying not to wonder in case that makes it come true.’

  Daisy was about to say she hadn’t noticed Edith having a hard time, but then Edith wouldn’t have shown it – not even-tempered, sensible Edith.

  ‘I think I’ll find it easier being somewhere else, not watching his kite taking off and waiting for it to return.’

  ‘So you’ll still be seeing him?’ Daisy asked. ‘Even though you’ll be away from the base? It’s serious, Edith?’

  Edith nodded.

  ‘Well, all right,’ Daisy said grudgingly. ‘But let him know I’ll be watching him, that’s all, and if he as much as glances at another female he will be for the chop! If the Germans don’t get him, I will!’

  And so Edith left for calmer waters, but that was always happening. Friends came and went, and, if you were lucky, kept in touch and might even come back again.

  These days Dotty had quietened down and didn’t attend so many parties, which pleased Daisy, who mainly spent her leaves, with or without Dotty, but mostly without, with Mar and Par in Rose Cottage. At Langar she became known to live it up in the Big Smoke and wouldn’t stoop to entertain any of the boys at the base; she was well out of their league. She never corrected the impression, it gave her new persona strength. There she was, a non-smoking, celibate teetotaller who was known as the definitive Good-time Gal, a tribute to her acting abilities, backed up, of course, by the outer packaging.

  ‘Off to some orgy at the Dorchester?’ the girls would giggle as she left the base.

  ‘Why not?’ she’d smile back, ‘but if I remember correctly it’s the Savoy again,’ never once saying that she was bound for Rose Cottage. Dotty was sworn to secrecy, but Dotty wasn’t the chatterbox she had once been. She too had changed character and her bubbly nature had been harnessed in a way no one expected when she had been made an orderly. It suited her, it brought out abilities no one, least of all Dotty herself, had ever suspected she might have, and she had made her mind up that she wanted to train as a nurse.

  ‘You sit with them, Daisy,’ she would explain, ‘and they can be terribly injured. The smell of their burned flesh clings to you and you can smell it all along the corridors, but it’s just a smell, after all, you have to get over it. All they want is someone to hold their hands and tell them they’ll make it, even if they know it’s a lie. They tell you about their mothers or girlfriends or wives and ask you to write to them saying it’s not so bad, really, even when it is. We get them off to better-equipped hospitals if it’s possible, but there are times when you know they won’t last that long, so you just sit there and keep them company, even if they’re unconscious.

  Did you know that hearing is the very last thing to go? They can hear you even if they’re spark out and about to die, so I tell them what happened in the NAAFI the other night, which pilots were getting engaged, drunk, or in a fight, all the usual stuff. At least then they can go calmly and peacefully, without any fear or panic because they don’t know they’re going. Do you see what I mean? I mean, if it ever happens to Frank, I’d hope someone would do the same for him.’

  Daisy didn’t reply. Something had struck her to the core about Dotty’s words, confirmation if ever she wanted it that there was something between Dotty and Frank, and she couldn’t understand why she was so struck by it. She had wanted that, hadn’t she? His attention elsewhere? And nowhere better than on good, kind, adoring Dotty, so why did she feel tears spring to her eyes and have to bite her lip to distract herself? Why?

  It wasn’t as if he was betraying her in some way, was it? If anything he probably didn’t deserve Dotty. When Fly Boys were lost it was Dotty who always wrote to their families, telling them what a fine young man Ted, Tom or Tim had been, how everyone liked them, and she kept up the correspondence as long as they wanted it. They were hungry to hear of the last months they hadn’t shared with their boys, so she asked Daisy to help her with the letters, and Daisy agreed, too overcome by the change in her friend to refuse.

  Dotty had found her niche in a place where everyone doubted that she could cope, her mother included, and if her patients did survive, as often as not they would be sent off to Rose Cottage to convalesce, which gave Mar something to do while Par was peeing in Winston’s private lavatory.

  Meanwhile, the Frank situation was worrying Daisy in other ways. He wrote to both of them and she saw how Dotty looked forward to his letters. She would lie on her bed and read them out, completely unaware that Daisy had one hidden under her pillow that she didn’t mention, far less read out.

  There was a difference in the letters, though. To Dotty he wrote about his work, about the islands closer to Scandinavia than Britain where he had been posted and how he missed having fun in London. But he told Daisy all about his home in Australia and what he wanted to do after the war and about his feelings. He had been so excited at the prospect of getting away from home, just like all the others, and he swore they would never drag him back again.

  ‘My home’s in the Darling Downs, a black-soil plain and a very productive agricultural region. The family farm is in Dalby, a farming community in Queensland, it grows grain and grazing crops in summer and winter. The topsoils store a lot of rain, so you can grow a good crop of wheat in three or four weeks, but when it does rain, even pretty lightly, you can’t drive around the farm for two or three days. It isn’t as hot as other places, in fact people come to the Darling Downs from all around in summer to keep cool.

  ‘In winter we get fine, sunny days, though the nights and mornings can be frosty. Then dry, cold NW winds come in August and the landscape can look a bit brown and desolate, but it warms up in September, though you still have to watch out for a late frost that could destroy the wheat crops when they’re in flower. In October the crops are close to harvesting and the soil’s warm enough to plant summer crops. Usually the days are warm and the nights are mild, even in November. When it does rain in summer it comes in storms, they come from the west and bring wind and hail, blowing the crops over and knocking the heads. The storms are very localised, though, you can get fifty millimetres and the guy up the road will only get ten.

  ‘I miss it so much that it hurts – it was all that kept me going through the Battle of Britain, the thought of going back home again. Though I didn’t think of it when I was in the air, only when I was waiting to go up again. I came over with one of my mates, Gerry, and we always tried to look out for each other. We went up once south of Manston to intercept a raid of 109s, and we saw a seaplane below. The Germans were very good at that, they flew seaplanes all along the English Coast to rescue their boys, and we had very little in that line. I decided to go after the seaplane and Gerry went after the 109s, but he found himself on a collision course with one and it fired as fast as he did, then crashed into him underneath. I could see that his engine had seized up and as he passed me his cockpit was full of smoke and he was having trouble opening it. I don’t know how much you know about Spits, Daisy, but the hoods are made to fit one plane. If it has to get a replacement at some time the hood doesn’t always fit, and that was what happened to Gerry.

  ‘There he was, trapped, and the burning fuel coming back at him and filling the cockpit as he tried to glide it down. I saw him hitting some open ground, where anti-invasion posts had been put in to stop enemy gliders landing, and I thought that was the last I’d see of him. He came back that evening, though. He’d found a little jemmy thing and smashed the hood with that, then somehow he got out and watched the plane burning and his fuel exploding. He was sitting there on the ground, his hair and eyebrows singed and his knees pretty bad
ly hammered, and this woman came out of a nearby house and calmly asked if he’d like a cup of tea! And Gerry said, “Struth, haven’t you got anything stronger, lady?”

  ‘We were pretty short of pilots so he went back up the next day, but I think he would’ve done anyway, to get over the fear quickly. Taught us all a lesson, though. You’d see us every spare minute we had, opening and shutting hoods, opening and shutting, over and over, to make sure it would give if needed.

  ‘I had this sergeant pilot who used to give us tips. They were looked down on, the sergeant pilots, the RAF officers wouldn’t let them be commissioned, you know, treated them like scum pretty often, wouldn’t even share their cosy billets with them. Most of them lived in tents along the airstrips, so when the Germans came calling they got the chop, even though pilot numbers were getting fewer by the sortie – that crazy class thing went on. This sergeant pilot gave us better training than the RAF did, told us never to fly straight and level for more than thirty seconds when the enemy was likely to be about, even when you’re attacking, keep an eye on what’s happening around you, and never watch your kill, your flamer, going down, because that means you’ve taken your eye off the real ball. And you should never identify with the men in the enemy planes. You’re in a tin box, he used to say, trying to knock other tin boxes out of the sky. Sometimes you’d see this little human being on the end of a parachute and you’d realise it was someone’s son, you know? But then it would descend and you were still up there and one of those little human beings might do the same thing to you, so you couldn’t hang around to see if he was OK.

  ‘Then once we came across a single Heinkel and we went after it, hitting the fuselage and setting it on fire, so we stopped the attack and tried to escort it back to land. I was flying on its port side, where the fire was, and I could see the crew clearly. I almost wanted to jump across and help them. It was strange, we spent all our time trying to blow them out of the sky and they did the same with us, and now I just wanted this lot to survive. We were within a few miles of the coast when a Hurricane from another squadron came in behind us, didn’t even think of us being all around, and poured a long burst of fire into the Heinkel. It blew up in our faces and ditched into the sea. There were no survivors, and I had this urge to turn and open fire on the Hurricane. I just felt such a sense of loss.

  ‘There are times when I can’t make any sense of the war, Daisy. I can’t wait for it to be over and to get back home. I want to raise a family, with a wife first, but you know that already, there’s only one candidate. I can’t wait to see my mother and father again. There are times when the hunger to see them is so strong it almost hurts. But it must be like that for you, too, bet you can’t wait to see yours again.’

  Daisy lowered her head for a few seconds. She had to find a way of getting out of this situation, she decided. She wasn’t getting drawn into the dream, so she replied to his letters by telling him about her work, while Dotty, she knew, told him of the life she had planned for when it was all over.

  So there they were, in a bizarre ménage à trois, with one of them completely unaware they were three. Daisy wrestled with it every time she received a letter, but decided she couldn’t tell Dotty. The girl was in love, and even if only with the idea of him, it didn’t matter, so she kept quiet. Besides, there was no danger of anything developing between Frank and herself, so she wasn’t deceiving Dotty, she reasoned. At the same time she worried in case Dotty might find out and feel betrayed anyway, though there was nothing to feel betrayed about, except that she had never told her Frank wrote to her, too, and now it was too late to tell her.

  Daisy felt there had been too much loss in her life. Not that she was the only one to claim that, but she needed time to readjust to what her life had become, and she didn’t yet know what that was. She was alone in the world, there was no family to welcome her back, all sins forgiven and forgotten when all this was over, a thought that sometimes caused her moments of panic.

  Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she realised, she must have held on to the hope that one day she would be accepted back into the family fold, though she couldn’t see how with Dessie still around. Now that would never happen and she would have to find her way through life on her own.

  Sometimes she would waken in the night hearing her mother’s tortured breathing, a sound that had terrified her all her life as she waited for the next and the next breath, and now that there was no hope of ever hearing it again, she wept. At the same time, much as that prospect frightened her, there was a feeling that she didn’t want anyone else to be close to her ever again. They hurt you and then they died – being alone was preferable. She didn’t want marriage and children, never had, which probably made her unusual compared to other girls of her age. Look at Violet and Molly, aching to be with their boys – for Daisy those feelings had merged with the fear of closeness. When she thought about closeness she saw Dessie’s face again, mouth gaping and dribbling as he sweated on top of her, inside her, eyes unseeing, intent only on using her, making her dirty, amid the smell of stale cigarettes and booze. If that was closeness she had no use for it, no one would ever get that near to her again.

  So there was nothing there in her future, and no one of her own. What could she do, where could she go? Shut the door, Daisy. Shut the door and put on your act. Let the future wait, for now there was still a war on.

  13

  At the end of the year one problem was solved: Dotty was transferred to non-operational Station Sick Quarters, where there were both British and Polish patients. She had already moved away from Daisy before that, of course, when she became so absorbed in her new life and work, and it was time for Daisy to move on too – from Dotty at least. When she’d been recovering from Dessie’s assault she had needed Edith’s silence; and then she’d wanted Dotty’s cheerful noise to hide behind when her family had been wiped out. But Daisy had come out the other end and needed different company from both the old and the new Dotty. Not that she’d lost her affection for Dotty, and no one ever made any goodbye speeches. They would still stay friends and in touch, but from a distance that she felt ready for.

  Daisy wondered what this said about her, but she suspected that people must grow out of other people all the time, and in wartime you had to get used to partings anyway, it was the way of life in the services. It was a time of replenishing the spirit and rebuilding the parts that had been damaged, and she would walk alone through the different seasons, thinking sometimes, at others trying not to. In summer there were apples and plums on the trees and the smell of the fruit made your mouth water, followed by the rustier yellow of the autumn sun complementing the oranges and reds of the trees, the hedgerows full of elderberries, brambles and rose-hips. Almost imperceptibly winter arrived, bringing crystal-clear air one moment and snow blizzards the next, so that you couldn’t see more than a few inches in front of you and the freezing wind blew through you. Everyone went to work to clear the runways, no one would have thought of refusing, especially when some besotted Fly Boy had smuggled a pair of sheepskin boots to the object of his desire.

  Daisy loved the snow: now that she could see it in the country she knew that’s where it was meant to be. It was wasted on cities, where it was all-too-soon trampled into a cold, wet brown sludge. The only problem was that when they set off to steal coal from another hut to keep the stove burning – which they all did – their footsteps left clear trails to the guilty. But springtime would be just around the corner, or so they told each other as they shivered in their beds every night, usually to yells of ‘The next one to say that dies!’ It would be fresh and green and there would be flowers for the first time in many months. There would be snowdrops.

  They’re quite beautiful when you see them up close, you know.’

  ‘Last warning, no more or you die!’

  ‘And crocuses – or should it be croci?’

  ‘Right, that’s it! I’m coming to get you!’

  ‘And the world will be bright again!�
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  Then they would all join in a wry chorus of ‘There’ll be blue-birds over the white cliffs of Dover’, followed by raucous laughter.

  And even though they made a joke of it, it still made you believe the world could be clean and free again, one day, one day soon.

  By the time American Forces were arriving in 1942, having joined the war rather belatedly again, Daisy was established in her little world, the only one she had, up in the Langar tower. She found the work suited her and she did it supremely well. It had been reported by her colleagues that she was completely calm in the worst circumstances and she had a voice that carried well on the radio. More than this, she seemed capable of taking the stress – though no one called it that in those days – of talking to aircrew in desperate trouble, boys who were about to die and would have Daisy’s voice as the last sound they would hear. Knowing this as she talked to them, she never cracked and stayed on the line till the end, chatting to them in non-military language when she thought it was appropriate, a great sin in the eyes of the hierarchy.

  She was good with the girls, too, looking after them in the early days of their service careers, the first time away from home for most, and making sure they were protected from predatory aircrew, even if she had already conceded general defeat on that one.

  By spring 1942 she had got to grips with service life and grown in confidence, and she also had the respect of the aircrews for the way she handled her job. They all tried to bed her, of course, that’s how they were: when tomorrow might never come, young men’s fancies turned to fornication and, crudely, in Daisy’s case, to a rolling sweepstake that grew to a fortune for the first one to manage it. Daisy knew this and dealt with it by treating them with her Mae West attitude, friendly but distant contempt, when they were on the ground. When they were flying it was different, then she did everything she could to coax them safely home, and when they didn’t make it she would write to their families, telling them what heroes their boys were.