A God in Ruins

by Kate Atkinson

  After she had left to catch the train to King’s Cross he phoned Ursula and unburdened himself, but instead of sympathy she was sharp and said, “Don’t be silly, Teddy, Nancy would never be unfaithful.”

  Et tu, Brute? he thought, for once disappointed in his sister.

  As planned, on Friday evening his errant wife was brought promptly back from the station by a taxi. Teddy caught sight of it pulling up and watched as Nancy paid and the taxi driver took her small case out of the boot. She looked weary as she walked up the gravel path to the house. Worn out by passion probably or distraught at having to leave her lover.

  He opened the door while she was still fumbling for her key. “Oh, thanks,” she said, walking past him into the hall without looking at him. She reeked of tobacco and of alcohol too. “You’ve been smoking?” he said. “No, of course not”—her lover must be a smoker, leaving his scent all over her. His spoor. “And drinking,” he said, feeling revulsion.

  “Everyone was smoking in my carriage,” she said dispassionately, “and yes, I had a whisky on the train. Does it matter? I’m sorry, but I’m dog-tired.”

  “It must be all those museums and exhibitions,” he said sarcastically.

  “What?” She put her case down and turned to stare at him, her expression unreadable.

  “I know what’s going on,” he said.

  “Do you?”

  “You’re having an affair. You’re using all these little jaunts as cover.”

  “Jaunts?”

  “You must think I really am slow to catch on. Poor old plodding Teddy.”

  “Plodding?”

  “I know what you’ve been up to,” he repeated, growing irritable that she wasn’t responding to his needling. If she confessed, declared that her affair was over, he would forgive her, he decided magnanimously. But if she continued to lie he feared he might do or say something that there would be no going back from. (“I was never ‘in love’ with you, you know.”)

  It didn’t help when she simply turned away from him and walked off into the kitchen, where she drew a glass of water from the tap. She drank it down slowly and then placed the empty glass carefully on the draining board.

  “I know,” he said furiously, yet still trying to keep his voice low as Viola was asleep upstairs.

  Nancy looked at him sadly and said, “No, Teddy. You don’t know. You don’t know anything.”

  1942–43

  Teddy’s War

  Experience

  “Twenty minutes to the run in to the target, skipper.”

  “OK, navigator.”

  They had ploughed their way through the flak put up by the coastal defences and dog-legged faithfully along the flight plan over occupied territory before making it through the thick belt of searchlights that girdled the Ruhr. There had been very little cloud on the run in and they had occasionally been able to make out lights below—a factory at work or a blackout not being strictly observed. More than once, torches or lamps had flashed up at them and, over Holland, Norman Best, their quiet flight engineer, had read out loud the Morse code from a well-wisher below, dit-dit-dit-dah. V for victory. It was a message of both faith and comfort that they saw frequently.

  “Thanks, pal, whoever you are,” Teddy heard the rear-gunner say. The rear-gunner was a scrawny, red-headed Scot, eighteen years old and the talkative sort, but he made an effort to keep his volubility for when they were on the ground. Teddy’s crew knew that he favoured silence on the intercom unless there was something that needed saying. It was too easy to start chattering, especially on the way back when everyone was more relaxed, but even a moment’s distraction, especially for the gunners, and that was it. End of the story.

  Teddy felt the same as his rear-gunner did about the anonymous Dutchman—or woman—down there. It was good to know that they were appreciated up here. They were so cut off from the ground—even when they were destroying it with their bombs (especially when they were destroying it with their bombs, perhaps)—that you could sometimes forget that there were entire nations for whom you were the last hope.

  I can see the target markers going down, skipper, twenty miles ahead cherry-red.”

  “OK, bomb-aimer.”

  It was the final op of their tour and they were edgy with foreboding. They had beaten the odds to get to tonight and were all wondering if fate could be so cruel as to bring them this far and then give them the chop. (It could. They knew.) “Just one more, Jesus, just one more,” he had heard his godless Australian bomb-aimer murmuring as they waited on the runway for the green Aldis light.

  It had been a terrific slog to reach the requisite thirty. Some of their sorties only counted as a third of an op. “Gardening” runs—mine-laying in the Dutch shipping channels or off the Frisian coast—or attacking targets in France only chalked up a third of an op. Occupied France was considered a “friendly” country, but friendly or not it was still full of Germans trying to shoot them down. It was true you were more likely to be killed on a raid over Germany (“Four times more likely,” according to Ursula’s girl at the Air Ministry), but you were still risking your life. It was rather iniquitous, Teddy thought. Or, in the more straightforward language of his bomb-aimer, “Bloody unfair.” Keith was the first person that Teddy crewed up with at the OTU.

  Crewing up was an unexpected affair that had taken them largely by surprise. All the components—pilots, navigators, wireless operators, bomb-aimers and gunners—were simply emptied in a jumble into a hangar and told by the station commander, “Right, chaps, sort yourselves out best as you can,” as if some mysterious law of attraction would form a better bomber crew than any military procedure. And, strangely, that seemed to be true, as far as Teddy could see anyway.

  They had all milled about aimlessly for a while like a flock of geese in a farmyard at feeding time, somewhat abashed by what was being asked of them. “It’s like a bloody dance hall, waiting to catch some girl’s eye,” Keith said, approaching Teddy and introducing himself, “Keith Marshall, I’m a bomb-aimer,” his dark-blue uniform marking him out as Australian.

  Teddy’s first port of call had been a navigator but he liked the look of Keith and if the war was teaching Teddy anything it was that you could often tell a man’s character from the way he looked, an expression in the eyes, a glance here and there, but mostly something indefinable, and he wondered if it had been this elusive quality that had made him warm immediately to Keith. And the fact, of course, that he had overheard an instructor saying that he was a “good bloke, who knows his stuff.” Turned out this was true. Keith may have washed out as a pilot (“Couldn’t land the bloody thing”) but had graduated top of his class on his bombing course.

  Australians had a reputation for being rambunctious but Keith seemed steady, his blue eyes thoughtful. He was twenty, brought up on a sheep station, and had spent a good deal of his life, Teddy supposed, gazing at a distant horizon under a harsh sun, unlike the soft green fields of Teddy’s own childhood. It must form your perception of life, he supposed.

  He was looking forward to seeing something of the world, Keith said, “even if it’s only the Third Reich on fire.”

  They shook hands, like gentlemen, and Keith said, “Well, skipper, best get a move on, we don’t want to be left with just the wallflowers.” This was the first time, Teddy thought, that a member of his crew (his crew!) had called him “skipper.” He felt as though he had finally stepped into his own shoes.

  They scanned the hangar together and Keith said, “See that bloke over there, by the wall, laughing at something? He’s a wireless operator. I had a drink with him last night and he seemed like a straight sort.”

  “OK,” Teddy said. It seemed as good a recommendation as any.

  The spark was a nineteen-year-old from Burnley called George Carr. Teddy had already witnessed George Carr offering to mend someone’s bicycle, enthusiastically taking it to pieces and putting it back together again before presenting it to its owner, saying, “There, better than when it w
as new, I’ll bet.” He liked fiddling with things, he said, which seemed a useful trait in a wireless operator.

  George in turn pointed out an air-gunner for them, again an acquaintance based on a night drinking in the mess. He was called Vic Bennett and he was from Canvey Island and had a toothy grin (he had the worst teeth of anyone Teddy had ever seen), and after he was introduced he hailed “a mate” who he’d been on his gunnery course with. “Sharp as a tack,” he said. “Reflexes of a rat. Looks a bit like one too. A ginger rat.” This was their talkative young Scot, “Kenneth Nielson, but everyone calls me Kenny.”

  Still no navigator, Teddy thought, bemused at how quickly he’d lost any control of this process. It was a little like a game of Consequences, or perhaps Blind Man’s Bluff.

  How do you tell a good navigator, he wondered, looking round the room. Someone unflappable, but then that was a quality they all needed, wasn’t it? Nose to the table, focused on nothing but the job. From somewhere behind him he heard the slow, imperturbable notes of a Canadian accent. He turned around and, identifying the owner of the voice, caught sight of his navigator’s brevet and said, “Ted Todd. I’m a pilot in the market for a good navigator.”

  “I’m good,” the Canadian said with a shrug. “Good enough anyway.” He was called Donald McLintock. Mac, naturally. Teddy liked Canadians, in his time over there he had found them to be reliable and not given to neuroses or over-active imaginations, neither of which were good qualifications for a navigator. And just hearing the accent had brought back fond memories of the big open skies where he had learned to fly on Tiger Moths and Fleet Finches, fluttering above the great patchwork of Ontario. They were fragile little things compared to the Ansons and Harvards he had graduated on to, to say nothing of the hulking Wellingtons that they were going to be doing their training on at the OTU. “Bus drivers” was how fighter pilots referred derisively to bomber pilots, but it had seemed to Teddy that it was going to be the buses that won the war.

  “Welcome on board, navigator,” Teddy said. More gentlemanly handshaking all round. They were a mixed bag, all right, Teddy thought. He rather liked that. “We just need a Kiwi for a flight engineer,” Keith said, echoing his thoughts, “and it’ll be like the bloody League of Nations.” They didn’t get a Kiwi, they got Norman Best, from Derby, a rather shy, earnest ex-grammar-school boy with a degree in languages and a firm Christian faith, but not until they reached their Heavy Conversion Unit, so that was that for now. They were a crew. Just like that. From now on they drank together, they ate together, they flew together and their lives were in each other’s pockets.

  That first night after crewing up they went on the obligatory crew binge. The egalitarian spirit meant that everyone must take their turn to buy a round, so six pints later they staggered back to their sleeping quarters as drunk as lords and declaring their undying friendship. Teddy had never been so inebriated in his life, and he realized as he lay on top of his bunk that night, the room revolving around him, that he had never been as elated either. Or at least not for a long time, not since he was a boy perhaps. He was about to have an adventure.

  They were all NCOs apart from Teddy. He had been given a commission, for no other reason, as far as he could tell, than that he had been to the right school and the right university and that, when asked, he had said that, yes, he liked cricket, which he didn’t that much actually but he could see to say so would be the wrong answer. And that was why he was here now, months later, en route to Duisburg, a leader of men, the master of his fate, the captain of his soul and of a bloody big four-engined Halifax with an unnerving tendency to swing to the right on take-off and landing.

  Ten minutes to target, skipper.”

  “OK, navigator. Ten minutes to target, bomb-aimer.”

  “OK, skipper.”

  In the air they addressed each other by their roles but on the ground they were defined by themselves—Ted, Norman, Keith, Mac, George, Vic and Kenny. Like playmates in a storybook adventure, Teddy thought. Two of Augustus’s “pals” were called Norman and George, but Izzie’s Augustus and his cohorts were still eleven years old, forever young, and occupied with their catapults, with catching minnows and raiding the larder for jars of jam, which for some reason they seemed to regard as the holy grail of foodstuffs. Izzie’s creation and his band of merry boys were currently “doing their bit” in Augustus and the War—scavenging for paper by taking the newspaper from people’s letter-boxes and collecting scrap metal for salvage by stealing pots and pans from the Swifts’ outraged neighbours. (“ ‘The frying-pan isn’t scrap,’ an exasperated Mrs. Swift said. ‘But it’s for the war,’ Augustus protested. ‘You’re always sayin’ we have to give up things. I’m givin’ up people’s pans.’ ”) Izzie’s Augustus, Teddy thought rather resentfully, didn’t have to deal with flak or worry about a Messerschmitt descending on him like a hungry bird of prey.

  His own Augustus—his grown-up double, as he imagined him—was almost certainly dodging life in the services. He was probably a spiv, a war profiteer, selling spirits and fags and anything else he could get his mucky hands on. (“There you go, guv, that’ll be ten bob. Remember, mum’s the word.”)

  They were toiling through flak—continual shell flashes and oily grey puffs of smoke buffeting them—although the noise of the explosions was drowned out by the aircraft’s own deafening Merlin engines.

  “Keep a sharp lookout, everyone,” Teddy said.

  In the distance he could see a shower of incendiaries coming down, being jettisoned probably by an aircraft trying to gain more height. All it did was provide helpful illumination for the German fighters flying above the bomber stream who were dropping marker flares—pretty, like chandeliers—that seemed to hang in the air, providing a well-lit corridor for the unfortunate bomber to fly along. Seconds later the bomber erupted into a blood-red fireball, belching black smoke.

  “Log that, navigator,” Teddy said.

  “OK, skipper.”

  They had taken off late. As an experienced crew they would normally have been near the front of the bomber stream, but there had been trouble with the port inner engine and they became the last rather than the first aircraft to take off from their station and were right at the tail of the skein when they reached the rendezvous point over Flamborough Head. “Well, someone has to bring up the rear,” Teddy said, in a rather futile attempt to encourage his downhearted crew. They all knew that being a straggler made them an easier target for the fighters to pick off—a distinct little blip on the German radar rather than part of a protective flock.

  A crowded bomber stream presented its own terrors, of course. Earlier in their tour they had been part of Harris’s first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne. In a great Armada like that you found yourself wallowing in someone else’s slipstream, wondering all the time where everyone else was. It had seemed to Teddy that the greatest danger came not from the German fighters or flak but from their own side. They had been stacked in layers, the slow Stirlings at the bottom, the high-flying Lancs at the top, the Halifaxes providing the filling in the sandwich. The exact speed, height and position for each aircraft was predetermined, but that didn’t mean that everyone was where they were supposed to be.

  At one point on the route another Halifax had passed right over the top of them with only twenty or so feet clearance, a great dark shape like a whale, one with red-hot exhausts. And later, on the track to the target, Vic Bennett, in the mid-upper turret, had started yelling blue murder because there was a Lancaster above them that had just opened its bomb doors and Teddy had to jink away from it, worrying that they in turn would slam into another aircraft.

  They had witnessed a collision too close for their own comfort when a Halifax on their port beam crossed the bomber stream and a Lancaster flew smack into it. Their own aircraft—J-Jig, before they lost her—was rocked by the massive explosion. Bright white sheets of flame shot up from the petrol tanks in the wings of the Lanc and Teddy shouted at his gunners not to look in case the
y lost their night vision.

  There had been no trouble finding Cologne. By the time they reached the target it was ablaze, filthy red flames and smoke everywhere that had already hidden the marker flares, so they headed for the centre of the largest fire and dropped their bombs and banked away. Looking back, despite the colossal size of the enterprise, it seemed like an uneventful raid, and to tell the truth, Teddy could barely remember the details of it now. It felt as if he had lived many lifetimes. Or perhaps just the one endless night that, according to Blake, some were born to.

  And time itself had a different quality. Before it had been like a vast map—seemingly endless—that had been unrolled before him and on which he could choose in which direction to go. Now the map only unrolled beneath his feet a step ahead at a time and might at any moment disappear. “I felt the same at the height of the attacks on London,” Ursula said, attempting to decode this tortuous metaphor when he saw her on his first leave—they had six days off every six weeks, and he had chosen to spend them in London rather than Fox Corner. He didn’t even tell Sylvie he had leave.

  “Before the war,” Ursula said, “every day was much the same, wasn’t it? Home, the office, home again. Routine dulls the senses so. And then suddenly it feels as if one’s living on the forward edge of one’s life, as if one never knows if one is about to fall or fly.” Neither extreme seemed to involve a soft landing, Teddy noticed.

  “I suppose so,” he agreed, realizing he had no real idea what he was talking about and didn’t much care. He lived his life in the face of death. It was a simple enough reduction without hedging it around with figurative language.

  Eight minutes to target, skipper.”

  “OK, navigator.”

  “Stay alert, gunners.”

  “Yes, skipper.”

  “OK, skip.”

  The gunners didn’t need reminding, it was just a way of keeping everyone in touch. He knew they were swinging their guns around the sky, ever vigilant. They had hardly fired their guns in the whole of the tour. As soon as you started shooting you marked yourself as a target. A fighter could easily miss you in the dark, but if you were laying a thread of red tracer fire right to your door he would soon find you. And his big cannon would do a lot more damage than their own puny Browning machine guns could. Gunners were—essentially—your lookouts. There were gunners who went through a whole tour without ever firing off a round.