by Wendy Orr
Jane is mortified. At nearly thirteen, her parents are a constant source of embarrassment, but soppiness over a picture book is truly sickening.
‘That’s too young for Rick,’ she bosses—Rick is now nine, Mike eleven.
‘It’s for me,’ says Ruth, ‘not my children. If my grandchildren are very good, I’ll let them look at it.’ In fact the book will be given to Megan when she turns five, because her grandmother, having owned it for a while, can pass it on as she would have if it had truly been her childhood book.
Jane, a more fortunate migrant with a whole trunk full of childhood, will watch her daughter open the parcel and regret the adolescent sarcasm.
Heathrow is the most vast, the most mind-numbing, of the airports Jane has sampled on this farewell tour, although that could be simply because fatigue has increased exponentially since Singapore.
It almost seems the most depressing part of the trip, coming through the gate with people holding welcome flowers and waving, some of them jumping to see and be seen above the crowd, and not one of those watching faces or hug-waiting arms can be for her.
But: ‘Jane!’ calls a voice, proper and British, and suddenly Mary appears in front of her, whiter and stouter but essentially unchanged from the woman who’d waved goodbye to Jane and Ian from this same airport twenty-nine years ago.
Jane’s not sure why she hasn’t expected Mary to meet her, as if her mother’s dying has made the rest of that generation too frail to drive, as if no communication has been possible while she herself has been in the air.
‘Ian phoned with your flight number,’ Mary confirms. ‘I couldn’t possibly have let you take a train after all this.’ All this including the noise, the crowds, the waiting for luggage, as much as death.
In the privacy of the car Jane asks for details. Mary sits quietly and makes no attempt to start the engine.
‘She’d been so well; I was amazed at her stamina. We had a quiet Sunday after the busy week; took the dogs for a good walk in Burnham Beeches and sat out in the garden after lunch—it was a lovely day. She spent a good part of the afternoon writing letters.’
Jane so badly wants one of the letters to be to her that she can’t speak. She didn’t know they were the last letters she’d write, she reminds herself. There’s no significance in who they’re to. But of course there is.
‘We had a light supper,’ Mary continues, clearing herself of overburdening an ageing circulatory system, ‘poached eggs on toast: nursery tea. We finished a game of Scrabble—she won, naturally, but said she was rather tired and went to bed early.
‘Next morning, as I said on the phone, I let her sleep, but she’d been getting up at seven every morning, so at nine I thought I’d just see that she was all right.’
For the first time Mary dabs at her eyes. ‘It’s funny, I thought I ought to check, and yet I didn’t really imagine that anything would be wrong. It was such a shock.
‘I suppose I should have waited for the doctor before I phoned you, but I knew she was dead and felt as if you ought to know first. Silly, when you come to think of it, though it’s not really something one can mistake. The doctor said she’d probably died quite early in the night, around midnight.’
‘Did he say how?’ Jane asks hoarsely.
‘Stroke.’
You couldn’t even get that right, God!
‘He says she’d have barely had time to feel anything before it was over. I have to believe that’s true, because I didn’t hear anything. I don’t sleep particularly soundly—surely I’d have heard her cry out!’
Guilt, Jane realises, spreads its wings far. She pats Mary’s hand and wonders if she could hug her, though is prevented by the physical awkwardness of gearsticks and handbrakes.
‘So where . . . ?’
‘She’s still at the hospital mortuary. You can see her there if you want to, but it might be pleasanter to wait till she’s at the funeral home.’
Jane pictures the mortuary scenes on ‘Taggart’ and ‘Morse’. Funeral homes have never sounded more appealing. ‘When does she go there?’
‘When you arrange it. It has to be next of kin.’
Looking as disorientated as she feels, Jane is unable to imagine a first step: are funeral directors listed in the Yellow Pages?
Mary adds quickly, ‘A friend recommended one who was very helpful when she lost her husband.’ Mary’s friends being at the age when husbands are lost, but Jane’s tired brain pictures her checking under beds and behind the couch.
‘There’s another thing, dear,’ Mary adds, still making no attempt to start the car. ‘I’m afraid you have to go and see the coroner this afternoon.’ Coroner, with its further connotations of murder and mystery, is not a comforting word.
‘It was an unexpected death,’ Mary explains, as if reciting a lesson. ‘The doctor was legally bound to report it to the coroner.’
Jane hadn’t considered exactly how a doctor would know what had killed her mother. ‘So they did a—?’
‘Post-mortem,’ Mary says, trying for brisk and not quite succeeding. ‘But that’s all over with. All the coroner will want now is personal details, date of birth and that sort of thing. Just routine.’
‘Poor Mom.’ Though Jane is not sure that she doesn’t mean Poor me. ‘And then I contact the funeral director and start organising?’
‘He’ll help you with the details. You know your mother wanted to be cremated?’
Jane nods: Ruth had never shirked from discussing her own death or disposal. Jane suspects that she would have handled this situation much better than Jane herself is doing.
‘And you’ll take the ashes . . .’ Mary stops. ‘Are you going straight back to Australia?’
‘I haven’t sorted anything out yet,’ says Jane. ‘But I’ll have to take her back to Evelyn’s Pond. If Mike and Rick can come out, we can sort out the farm and . . . the ashes. Mom and Dad wanted to be scattered together, in the woods.’
Like Hansel and Gretel, says an irreverent voice in her mind, the part of her that finds cremation too bizarre to fully believe; except that Hansel and Gretel scattered crumbs of bread, not themselves.
Returning to Hamble after losing her parents for the second time in three months, it’s only in the air that Ruth knows who she is. The drill of pre-take-off checks—hydraulics and gauges, flaps and tail wheels—is a lifeline: I know this, she says to herself, this is what I do. Take-off itself, even in the midst of grief, is a heady mix of independence, power and an initial rush of adrenalin, and when that flash of elation dies down, the importance of safely delivering the plane steadies her; responsibility and concentration crowd out brooding thoughts.
Now, on a hazy September afternoon, in sidcot suit and helmet, her Blue Bible of flying instructions taped to her knee, she taxis down the runway in a refitted Wellington bomber. If not the size of the big Lancasters dominating the continuing massive raids over Germany, it’s still a big, heavy crate, the largest she’s qualified to fly and the one on which she has the least experience. On this last delivery of the day, it takes all her concentration and strength to keep the nose up for successful take-off; she levels out over the trees and heads towards the Midlands. She has no philosophical problems with delivering bombers, seeing the situation simply and fiercely—the more Allied bombers that go out, the sooner the war will be over. Of all the complex mess of emotions whirling inside her, hatred of the enemy is the only simple one. If she could load this with bombs she would fly happily to Europe herself, to flatten all resistance wherever Bill might be on his supplies-for-wounded exchange. She thinks of them only as the enemy—Nazis, the Luftwaffe, antiaircraft gunners who would kill Bill if they could—cannot let herself think of the people facing ruins like the ones in Savernake Street.
Cannot think of Savernake Street at all.
Spotting the airfield, descending, taxiing down the runway, the handing-over routine; a sigh of relief at no accident report—she’s still not worried about her own life but damaging a c
raft on landing is a constant nagging fear. Little is forgiven a woman pilot, and she can’t imagine how she’d exist if flying were taken from her.
The mist closes in; she’s glad of the overnight bag stashed in her cockpit and a phone call to home base confirms it: she’ll be sleeping in the Waaferie tonight, in some night-duty WAAF’s bed. It’s never a comfortable situation, but in the mess, in the company of the men she thinks of as the true pilots, she keeps up the front—not even a front, an alternate personality, a truer Ruth Townsend because she is familiar to herself and others. The men are drinking heavily, showing off to each other as much as to her; strain shows on young faces. They never know when they go to bed whether they’ll be up that night, waiting for the hand on the shoulder in the middle of sleep, ‘You’re on, sir.’
It’s leaving the mess that she sees one Nissen hut separated from the other barracks. A tin mortuary. In vivid restless dreams that night she sees it stacked with dead airmen, all in RCAF blue. The top layer have Bill’s face, but underneath, although she can’t see them, are her parents. Birth parents or Mama and Papa, she’s not sure; she’ll never be sure, and that’s the knowledge she wakes with. That she’ll never know the things she needs to know.
There is no sense of time. The blackness around her is less total than that within. With absolute clarity she sees that there is no point in life, in love, in being. She may survive or she may not; Bill may survive or he may not, and if they both do and if by some freak of chance Bill still wants to marry her, she won’t let him, it wouldn’t be fair for him to marry someone who barely exists, someone with no thread of history to anchor her to life. Because this same terrible clarity tells her that if he does, if she lets him and they have children, there will be no point in that either. If we have children only for the survival of our genes, then the only reason for our children’s lives is for them to have children and on ad infinitum, and where then is life? Who is the one actually destined to live and not just survive?
Bleakness more terrifying than fear, blacker than despair, and she does not recognise that it’s born of both. In half-waking dreams she tumbles down pits, a slippery-sloped abyss, endless, bottomless, whirling and dark.
In the morning the mist has turned to fog; the taxi Anson is still grounded. No time for breakfast before the train, and she’s reminded of the letter she wrote Bill some lifetime ago. I’m even thinner now, she thinks, but it doesn’t seem as important as it once had. Too slow to find a seat, she perches in the corridor on her overnight bag.
An American soldier squats beside her, young, crew cut and curious about the wings on her tunic. Not curious at all, it’s just an opener, he’s trying to chat her up. She looks at him, amazed that he can’t see she doesn’t exist.
‘How does a girl get to be a pilot?’ he asks, allowing the train’s movement to rub khaki shoulder against blue tunic.
‘I can’t talk now,’ says Ruth, and closes her eyes.
There is a two-hour diversion for track damage; the journey takes six hours; she has not eaten since the night before and sways when she gets to her feet to step down. The soldier reaches an arm to steady her, ‘Take care, ma’am,’ and she wishes he were Bill and that it was the morning before her parents died and all she had to grieve over was not knowing who she was and there was still some possibility of finding out.
Back at base, more welcome than tea, she finds the notice confirming her requested transfer to White Waltham, just out of Reading and not far at all from Bill. There’s a letter from him too, but she tucks it into her pocket to keep for evening and the solitude of her own room. Simply touching the envelope that his hands have held, his tongue has sealed, makes it less likely that he’s changed his mind about loving her, but her equilibrium is too finely balanced to risk emotion in public.
I don’t know what you’re thinking or how you’re feeling as you read this, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m on the wrong track. I can’t help worrying about you; your letters are brave and cheery, but I know you’re suffering. I know that I can’t understand exactly how you’re suffering, but I’m doing my best to fathom it. It seems to me that as well as the terrible way you lost your parents and how anyone would feel about that, you feel like you’ve in some way lost yourself as well with the news they gave you that night.
If I’m wrong, don’t even bother reading the end of this letter and remember that I’m a country hick who’s got the wrong end of the stick again.
If I bought a horse because it was out of a certain mare and stallion and it was the best horse I’d ever had, I wouldn’t sell it if I heard that the breeder had lied about the bloodlines. It’s the horse that matters, not the pedigree. Seems to me it’s the same thing and it doesn’t matter if your parents aren’t who you thought they were, you’re still the person you thought you were, and the person that I met. (He wants to say, and fell in love with, but is afraid the words sound phoney.)
That night in the park you wanted to know about my family and my childhood and maybe you’ll think, ‘easy for you to say’, but your life is still just as real and belongs to you just as much as mine does to me. Everything that happened, all your memories, are still true.
I know you want more than that. I’ve been trying to imagine how I would feel if I discovered that not only my mother and father weren’t my parents, but that my grandparents, especially my Grandpère, who’s lived with us nearly as long as I can remember, and all my aunts and uncles, were not related to me. I know that I would feel as lost as I think you do now—and yet they’d still be the same people. It wouldn’t change how they’d treated the child that I used to be, or what they thought of me as a man, and it shouldn’t change how I feel about all that.
Probably I’m not saying this very well. I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say, except I believe there’s a part of us that’s always us, no matter what happens. Maybe that’s the soul. My Grandma, my mother’s mother, took a stroke a couple of years before she died; her right arm and leg were useless and she couldn’t talk. But sometimes she’d watch you and listen to what you were saying so that she looked like Grandma again and you could see Grandad thinking she was the same girl he’d married all those years ago. That little bit of her was still her.
You’re still you. You’re more yourself than anyone I’ve ever met.
All my love,
Bill
Tears come to her eyes and keep coming; she is crying now, not delicately sobbing; this is gasping and hiccupping, head under the pillow to muffle shame. Tears of blood is what they feel like—smarting, angry tears; it’s a long time before she exhausts herself into some sense of peace. The letter can’t retrieve her identity but it pulls her back from the brink of the abyss. He’s a good man, a wise man, and he really does seem to be in love with her.
The following Sunday, a clear and cloudless morning, Ruth arrives at White Waltham to find that no aircraft will be delivered or picked up today. The seventeenth of September has been chosen as a day of commemoration for the valiant few of the Battle of Britain, and although it’s pleasant to be able to attend the church service, Ruth can’t help feeling that they are tempting fate by not being in the air in such perfect weather. There is also still a slight trace of bitterness at Miles’s fate—one of the even fewer, killed too soon to be named valiant. She repeats the Lord’s Prayer mechanically, wondering how long their love would have survived if he had. There is no doubt in her mind that she would have fallen in love with Bill whenever and however they’d met, but her conscience stirs uneasily at the hint of gratitude for Miles’s death. ‘Forgive us our trespasses,’ she repeats, to Miles as much as God.
The ‘Amen’ is followed by a drone of heavy aircraft and the reason for the grounding begins to become apparent.
‘Pity a sparrow trying to stretch its wings today,’ a Cockney flight engineer mutters, and then the planes are overhead, drowning speech, hymns and organ. Ruth is impatient for the service to finish, but the formations are still passing, wave af
ter wave, long after the congregation finally files outside and is free to watch.
It’s like D-day without the ships, Ruth thinks as the hours pass and the aircraft continue—bombers, troop transporters, gliders swaying behind their tow planes, fighters flanking them. Bill is up there, there mustn’t be a crew left in England, and fear for him combines with the overwhelming, the unencompassable thought that the war is about to end. Nothing could stand up to what she guesses correctly is the biggest airborne invasion in history. In the silenced crowd outside the church, she is praying soundlessly, wordlessly, with every fibre of her being as she had not been able to inside.
Fifteen hundred feet above, Bill feels her prayer. His logical, mathematical mind tells him that this is no more than the awareness of flying over her base, knowing she’ll guess that he’s up here. Adding one and one and getting three, he tells himself, but it doesn’t change the feeling that their thoughts have touched.
It adds to his buoyant mood. At the briefing yesterday they’d been told that this invasion of occupied Holland would secure the crucial bridges across the Lower Rhine and take the Allies right to the threshold of Germany. One of the most immediate effects of success will mean the end of the V2 bombs terrorising the women and children (not the men? Bill wonders) of south-east England. If he’s never been able to avenge his brother’s death by submarine, he’s all the more keen to participate in revenge for Ruth’s parents.
And, the whisper adds, this will mean the end of the war by Christmas. The Germans are already defeated; their few troops in the Netherlands the dregs and the untrained, invalids and children. Against them, in this one morning, the Allies will drop 16 500 paratroopers and 3500 troops in swaying plywood gliders, with more men and equipment to follow over the next two days. In three days this airborne army will have met up with the thousands of troops and tanks of General Horrock’s XXX Corps, waiting in Belgium and poised to sweep through the country like a liberating dose of salts.