‘Roll me over,
In the clover.
Roll me over, lay me down and
Do it again.’
They stopped singing and stood dutifully by the open window while the BBC announcer said in his important voice: ‘The Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Winston Churchill.’
The first of the Hurricanes came into the runway, flattening out over the darkening pine trees and hovering before landing with an airy curtsy. The other four planes circled like evening crows. Then the station klaxon, the alarm signal, blared across the dim air. Millie’s hand went to her mouth and the airmen turned from the open windows and went back to the grass verge where the others now began to stand soundlessly, as if some hidden anthem were being played. She found herself going forward, timidly, almost with a feeling that she might be intruding. ‘His undercart’s gone,’ she heard one of the men say. ‘Stand by for some sparks.’ The klaxon had ceased and the blue-grey fire engines jolted from their sheds and ran to the side of the runway. A growing sense of anxiety fell across the watchers. They had fallen to an almost religious silence. The only voice to be heard was that of Churchill: ‘The great air battle which has been in progress over this island for the past few weeks has recently attained a high intensity . . .’ It issued eerily from the open window as one by one the Hurricanes, now little more than silhouettes in the dusk, approached and touched down, taxiing away to the grass verge. Once landed, the pilots climbed out on to the wings or remained in their cockpits, waiting and watching for the last plane. It circled, droning sadly, two hundred feet up. No landing wheels were visible below it. It looked like a legless duck.
‘It’s Chubby,’ Millie heard one of the men say. ‘He’ll be all right. He’s got luck.’
‘Chubby?’ she asked the young man, touching him on the sleeve with quick concern. ‘Which one is that?’
‘Him,’ responded the airman a little stupidly. ‘Up there. Can’t get his undercart down . . .’
The youth’s companion realized what she had meant. ‘Smith,’ he answered. ‘It’s Graham Smith. He’s called Chubby.’
Her body went cold. She said nothing but stood with her eyes on the ground when everyone else was gazing at the sky. Quickly she prayed. Please God, make him get down safely.
‘He’s trying to lose fuel,’ said one of the young men.
‘He didn’t have much to start with,’ said another dropping down on the grass without taking his eyes off the plane. ‘He’s windy, I expect.’
Millie realized what he meant. That the pilot was frightened of coming down; somehow trying to put off the telling moment when he would have to do it. The Hurricane droned complainingly as it turned over the ashy light of the field again. From the open window the loud bulldog words of Winston Churchill came across the grass. ‘The gratitude of every home in our island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen . . .’
‘Shut that row off!’ demanded a boy’s voice. But no one moved. Their attention remained on the Hurricane.
‘He’s going to have a go now,’ said one of the pilots. ‘The old man’s talking him down.’ Millie looked towards the control tower. ‘Come on, Chubby, you can make it,’ the pilot said. His companion called shrilly: ‘Give Chubby a cheer! Come on, a cheer! Hip-hip . . .’
‘Hooray!’ they all shouted at once, some waving their flying helmets and gloves in the air. And twice more: ‘Hip-hip-hooray.’ Then deep silence.
Churchill’s voice resounded over them. A young airman turned, anguished and affronted. ‘Shut up!’ he shouted at the radio. ‘Shut up, will you!’ Savagely he rushed towards the window and pulled the wire and the plug from the set.
The fighter made its final turn above the trees and came in on a low path. Every face watched it. Millie could feel the fearful tears choking her eyes. She stared with the others. As soon as the bare underbelly struck the ground a fire began, streaming out like a red, yellow and black flag. She cried out and turned away. Cries went up from the young airmen.
‘Oh fucking hell!’
‘Oh, what a bastard!’
The plane skidded madly along the runway, slewing first one way, then another, streamers of fire coming from its engine and its wings. Almost opposite the assembled men it made a final slurry and whirled like a roundabout. All the nose was aflame. Ammunition began to explode, small bright bangs, like fireworks. The group on the grass bent their heads. Millie saw that the figure in the cockpit was moving, almost casually it seemed, in the oily smoke. The sliding roof was pushed back and the pilot attempted to rise.
Along the verge ran the fire engines, shuddering to a stop, their crews paying out hoses towards the plane and within moments covering it with foam, huge blobs like a giant’s shaving soap. A tongue of fire licked through. Ammunition crackled. Two of the helmeted firemen had reached the side of the aircraft and were clambering on to the wings. They trudged through the white foam and the red flames, pulling down the swaying figure of the pilot, falling with him to the ground where they struggled like three fighting snowmen. The ambulance crew ran forward and disentangled them, rolling the young airman sideways until he was clear of the plane. They laid him out on a stretcher. Then he began to scream.
Millie, hardly able to see through her sobs, ran forward with some of the others. Graham had stopped crying out when they arrived and shouted wildly: ‘Not bad, boys! Not too bad!’ He did not see her.
She saw how terribly burned he was. His hair was gone and his face was meat-raw. One eye had vanished. They ran away with him and left the woman and stunned pilots standing impotently. Millie turned back towards her library room, still crying deeply into her shaking hands.
The young men turned slowly, and, in an aimless way, began to drift back towards the buildings. Hardly seeming to know what he was doing, the youth who had pulled the plug from the wireless set put it back. They had missed Churchill’s speech. An announcer promised that the variety programme ‘Garrison Theatre’ was to follow shortly.
Millie went back to Binford that evening and, cycling from the station, went first to Robert and Elizabeth’s house. Robert was enthusing over Churchill’s speech. ‘They’ve just quoted some of it on the news,’ he said. ‘I wrote it down. Listen . . . this is about the RAF boys: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” Isn’t that grand. Did they have it on at Moyles Court?’
Millie was still trembling. Elizabeth had given her a cup of tea and the china rattled in her hands. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘Something happened and they switched it off.’
Twenty-one
IT WAS NOT until the first days of September that the Germans turned their attention from the airfields of southern and eastern England and sent the bombers by night and day to London. Berlin had been bombed by the Royal Air Force and revenge was required, revenge that was to cost the Germans dear, for they had fallen for a ploy. If their attacks on the fighter fields had continued even briefly they would have broken the British air resistance. Instead they fell for the bait and sent their bombers to attack civilian London, giving a respite to the aerodromes. To encourage these reverse attacks the RAF continued to bomb Berlin. Sometimes the British Wellington, Whitley and Hampden bombers crossed the Channel while the Dorniers and Heinkels were flying in the other direction.
The first anniversary of the outbreak of the war, 3 September, was marked by a preliminary raid on London. The weather had continued bland into the autumn and the leaves in London were changing colour early because of the long and dry summer. Early on that evening James and Joanne walked to the Queen’s Hall for an anniversary concert given by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It was an evening of patriotism and nostalgia. Chopin’s military polonaise was played by Moura Lympany, who was also the soloist in the defiant piano concerto by Edward Grieg. As the moving music of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance filled the great drum of the hall, so notes of the air-raid sirens filtered over
London in the dusk.
Joanne would be leaving the following morning, taking John Colin with her. They had sat close in the crowded auditorium, their shoulders touching, and had given themselves to the moment. Then there sounded the rumbling of guns, distant but distinct, underscoring the music.
Joanne, once, pressed her cheek into his sleeve and he moved his head so that his face touched hers. Afterwards they walked through the empty streets in silence, their hands together, until an air-raid warden appeared like a comic actor as they rounded a vacant corner. He was the same man who had once before approached them in the same street. There was no apparent recognition.
‘’Evening, sir, madam,’ he began like a doorman, his hand going to his helmet in a vestige of a salute. ‘There’s an alert on, you know, sir.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said James.
The man pursed his lips. ‘They’ve started on us, I reckon.’ He appeared inclined to conversation. ‘The blighters are after London,’ he continued. ‘South London’s getting it now, so I got a report. Croydon. Bombed the airport, I understand.’
‘Yes,’ agreed James impatiently. ‘I thought it might be in that direction.’
‘I haven’t got over the first lot, yet, sir,’ added the man with doleful belligerence. ‘Went right through it, fourteen to eighteen. Gassed in nineteen-seventeen, 22 April, at seven in the morning. Badly gassed.’
Joanne said: ‘That’s really terrible. And now you’re in another war.’
He stared at her accent. ‘Yes, miss. Maybe your country will be coming in to help us soon. Don’t want to leave it to the end, like the last time, do you?’
James said: ‘I’m sure they won’t. We must be off now. We really ought to be under cover.’
‘Exactly, sir, exactly,’ agreed the warden ponderously saluting again. James returned the salute which pleased the man immensely. His smile dropped, however, when they had walked on. ‘It’s all right for some,’ he grumbled. ‘It always is.’
This was their final time together and a feeling of deep sadness and reality surrounded them as they sat in the apartment. James poured the ritual drinks and Joanne went to the gramophone and again put on the record of ‘Above the Stars’. The rumblings of the raid on south London sounded distinctly into the room.
‘You’re not afraid?’ he said knowing what the answer would be. ‘Of the bombing?’
‘I’m afraid of a lot of things,’ she replied rising, ‘but not of the bombing. Not right now. Is it okay if we watch?’
He smiled seriously and walked towards the heavy curtains but she forestalled him with a hand on his sleeve. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘It appeals to my sense of the dramatic. Just sit. Be the audience.’
He leaned back on the deep settee. She went to each lamp in the room and extinguished it so that they were engulfed in the darkness. The music swelled around them in the void. She moved to the window and easing the cords of the velvet drapes pulled them apart, opening out a wide and amazing vista of distant London under attack.
Flashes lit the horizon, guns trembled and searchlights patterned the roof of the sky. Across the immediate housetops there played a low flickering like that of a gas burner; distant buildings on fire. The explosions were muted and they could hear no planes. All around them was dark and calm, Abt’s German music accentuating the remote performance.
‘You could almost say it is beautiful,’ she said eventually returning and sitting beside him on the couch.
He was conscious of her lovely smell in the dimness. ‘I don’t know what I shall do without you,’ he said.
She leaned against him and he could feel her trembling. ‘Or me without you,’ she whispered. ‘I guess we’ll have to learn.’
From one edge of the window to the other the show of lights continued. Twice at its centre there was an eruption, a boiling of pink fire.
‘I think it’s well that you’ll be away from this,’ he said. ‘Very soon all London will be like it. Fire everywhere. We are just sitting waiting.’
She shrugged and stood up, her slender shadow outlined against the window. ‘That is not something that would upset me,’ she said. ‘Somehow I feel it would never touch me. America is certainly going to seem very dull and unreal now. But they won’t hear of my staying here. They’ll fire me first, so my editor says.’ She paused and, still with her back to him, she added: ‘And there are other things.’
There was no future for them. James had a momentary picture of Millie asleep in the deep country. The recording had finished and, thoughtfully, Joanne moved the arm of the gramophone back to the edge and it began to play again. Turning towards him she held out her hand and they walked together into the bedroom. Immediately she pulled away the curtains there so that the same remote drama was opened to them.
‘This time,’ she said standing beside the bed that had become so familiar to them, ‘this last time, I would be glad if you would undress me. I want to stand still, just like this, looking out of the window. I would like you to take my clothes off. Will you do that, please?’
He stood close to her and enfolded her body in his arms, his head dropping haplessly against her luxurious hair. Her sensation filled him. His desire for her brimmed over with regret. They kissed and then he began to take her clothes away. She opened his shirt and rubbed her hands on his chest and then laid her face against it. He could feel each tear as it ran down his skin.
When they were both naked they lay back together on the silk counterpane, faintly luminous in the light of night and the far illuminations. They kissed each other’s bodies and then, saying nothing, moved together for the final moments of their time together.
As they lay afterwards, cooling against each other, they could hear the needle of the gramophone bobbing with its patient monotony, for ‘Above the Stars’ was finished. She left the bed and went into the other room to switch it off, then came back and slid against him. They turned together and looked out of the window from the bed. The guns and the bombing had ceased, although the searchlights still fingered the sky and at the base of the stage there were still low footlights of fire. But the raiders had gone for that night.
‘It’s finished,’ said James.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It has.’
Sunday sunlight and the tinny sound of a band filled the single street of Binford. That first Sunday of September, one week before the day Hitler had appointed for his invasion of the British, the Home Guard, the coastguard, the fire brigade, the air-raid wardens, the newly appointed Binford ambulance, the Women’s Voluntary Service, the veterans of the British Legion and the boys and girls of the scouts, guides, brownies and cubs, paraded below the hamlet trees, on their way to the church. Throughout the country it had been ordained as a day of prayer, a plea to God for deliverance and for a just victory.
The procession was a little ragged. Ben Bennett’s New Forest Arcadians had been hastily and not unsuccessfully transformed into a marching band because the Lyndhurst Salvation Army, the Lymington town band and others were needed for their own church parades, and their services were jealously guarded. Henry Bunigan had offered his efforts with his barrel organ mounted on a wheelbarrow, but Robert, the other members of the parish council and the vicar had decided that this was scarcely in keeping with the proper solemnity of the occasion. Bennett’s Arcadians, under Mrs Bennett, her knees marching like vertical pistons, her teeth bared, had, at least, semi-military uniforms, and knew some marches.
The parade went twice around the village, going both up and down the main street, before arriving at the sloping green outside the church. There were few people to witness its modest grandeur, since the inhabitants were either marching in the procession itself or already congregated in the packed church listening for the approaching music through the open sunlit door.
Josh Millington and his wife, however, did stand at the trampled fence before the burned-out house and witnessed the straggling line go by. He had returned to water his melons. The British Legion flag borne by a s
hiningly medalled veteran, and the Union Jack, carried by a rotund and scarlet-faced boy scout, were dipped in respect. The old pair were unsurprised, having lived in Binford through their lives, to find that there were two odd men out in the procession. Henry Bunigan and his barrel organ ground along behind the ragged lines, the instrument mounted on a wheelbarrow bravely pushed by young Tommy Oakes, in his rebel cub uniform. The boy sweated and the old man hobbled and turned the handle. The sounds of bygone Vienna rolled metallically from the trembling box, causing the few marchers actually in step to lose their rhythm and to turn accusingly towards the outlawed pair behind. Henry waved them on with a defiant hand. ‘It’s our parade too, you know!’ he bellowed over the top of his own cacophony. ‘We’re allowed to say a bloody prayer like everybody else.’ Tommy Oakes put down the barrow momentarily and inserting his fingers in his mouth performed a shrieking whistle of approval. Then he picked up the handles and the strange backmarkers continued after the procession.
Major-General Sound was on the raised triangle of grass outside the church to take the salute. The very act of briskly raising his flattened hand to his cap made him puff out his cheeks. His tight tunic was drawn up like a bag on a string, but at his belt was his service revolver bulging in its chestnut holster. He had borrowed it back for the morning.
Robert stood stiffly, properly, but slightly to the rear of the major-general, the members of his family arranged on the small green hillock behind him. James and Harry were both home for the one day, something which pleased him immensely, both sons stiff in their uniforms below the wide shade of the horse chestnuts.
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