The weather on their stand-down had been good and the crews lounged in lawn chairs or set up card tables outside. Someone organized a cricket match in an adjacent field, a rough, enjoyable game, but many simply slept, worn out by war. Teddy and Keith went for a long, lazy bike ride with a couple of WAAFs, Lucky lolloping beside them. When he got tired he was put in the basket on the front of one of the WAAFs’ bikes where he sat like a proud figurehead, his ears flattened by the breeze. “In the cockpit,” the WAAF said. Edith, a chop girl you couldn’t help feeling sorry for. The last three aircrew she had dated had failed to return from ops and now no one would go near her. In a darker moment Teddy had considered sleeping with her just to see what would happen to him afterwards. Perhaps he still would, he thought. She was keen on him, but then all the WAAFs were.
They ate fish-paste sandwiches and drank water from a stream and it was as if the Third Reich didn’t exist and England was restored to her green and pleasant self.
He checked his watch. Three o’clock. They would have eaten lunch at Fox Corner without him. He hoped so anyway. He had left Keith in their unholy clutches long enough, he supposed.
They crossed the meadow, in full summer regalia—flax and larkspur, buttercups, corn poppies, red campion and ox-eye daisies—and skirted the edges of one of the Home Farm’s big wheat fields. The wheat glimmered and undulated in the breeze. He had often worked on the harvest in these fields, punctuated by beer-and-cheese lunches with the farmhands beneath a hot sun. Hard to believe life was so simple once. He remembered it now as a romantic pre-war idyll, You sunburnt sicklemen of August weary, come hither from the furrow and be merry, but he supposed for the farmhands there was no Shakespearian pastoral to be found in their toiling and the harvest was just another turn of the agricultural year and its never-ending, grinding labour.
There was a scattering of poppies amongst the wheat, red spots of blood amongst the gold, and he thought of those other fields in that other war, his father’s war, and felt a great fall inside himself at the memory of Hugh. He wished his father was in Fox Corner, waiting for his return with a glass of beer in the garden or a tumbler of whisky in the growlery.
The dog had bounded off into the middle of the wheat and he could no longer see it but he could hear it barking with excitement, not nervous now, so it must have found some creature less threatening than a cow—a rabbit or a harvest mouse. Teddy whistled so that the dog could keep its bearings and navigate its way out of the field.
“Time to go,” he said, when it finally scampered back.
We thought we’d lost you,” Sylvie said crossly.
“Not yet,” Teddy said.
“All right?” Keith asked, handing him a glass of beer. Keith was sitting on the terrace, looking very at home. The great and the good appeared to have left.
He decided to spend the last night of his leave with Ursula. Keith was off on the razzle with some of his fellow countrymen.
Teddy walked through the parks and then took up a sentry post outside Ursula’s office and waited to surprise her when she came out from work.
“Teddy!”
“The very same.”
“And Lucky! What a treat to see him.” Again, Teddy felt himself coming in second to the dog. Lucky was beside himself at seeing Ursula again. “This is good timing,” she said, “or perhaps you’ll think it bad. How do you feel about chumming me along to the Proms? I’ve got two tickets and the friend who was coming with me has had to drop out. We can eat afterwards.”
“Splendid,” Teddy said, groaning inwardly at the idea of attending a concert, possibly the last thing he felt like doing. The sea air and his twenty-four-hour furlough with Nancy, not to mention the lunch at Fox Corner, had drained him of whatever reserve of energy he had left and he would rather have gone to a cinema and fallen asleep in the fuggy dark, or perhaps drunk the night into oblivion somewhere pleasantly unchallenging.
“Oh, good,” Ursula said.
She decided to leave the dog in her office. “Against the rules, I expect,” she said cheerfully, but there would be a lot of people working through the night, “and he’ll be spoiled rotten.” Lucky was a pragmatic dog and immediately attached himself to one of the secretaries.
It was a beautiful evening and they enjoyed the short walk along to the Royal Albert Hall. They were early and there was still plenty of sunshine to warm them in Kensington Gardens, where they took a seat on a bench and ate the remains of Ursula’s lunchtime sandwiches that she hadn’t had time to finish because she’d had to “run up and down” to Whitehall. “All I do really is move paper around. I think it’s what most people do. Not you, of course.”
“Thank goodness,” Teddy said, remembering the tedium of the bank. If by some chance he survived the war, what on earth was he going to do? The idea of an afterward filled him with dread.
His sister stood up and brushed crumbs off her skirt. “Best get going, don’t want to keep Beethoven waiting.”
They had good seats, the tickets given to Ursula by “someone.” She had hoped to bring her friend, Miss Wolf, but she’d had to cancel. “It’s very sad,” Ursula said, “she’s just learned that her nephew in the Army has been killed in North Africa. Miss Wolf is a simply splendid person, a shining star, and she is a great believer in the power of music to heal. And to hear Beethoven in the midst of war, especially this Beethoven, would have pleased her enormously.”
Which Beethoven, Teddy wondered? He read the programme notes. The Ninth. The BBC Symphony Concert Orchestra with the Alexandra Choir, Adrian Boult conducting.
“Alle Menschen werden Brüder,” Ursula said. “Do you think it’s possible? One day? That all men could be brothers one day? People—by which I largely mean men—have been killing each other since time began. Since Cain threw a rock at Abel’s head or whatever it was he did to him.”
“I don’t think the Bible’s that specific,” Teddy said.
“We have terrifically tribal instincts,” Ursula said. “We’re all primitives underneath, that’s why we had to invent God, to be the voice of our conscience, or we would be killing each other left, right and centre.”
“I think that’s what we are doing.”
The auditorium was rapidly filling up, people shuffling in, and they had to move their knees to one side several times to let people pass. Down below, the promenaders were jockeying politely for good spots in the arena. “These are rather good seats,” Teddy said. “Whatever man gave you them must like you a lot.”
“Yes, but they’re not the best seats,” Ursula said, seeming to find this remark very amusing. “Those were huge raids last week,” she said unexpectedly, the non sequitur knocking him off balance.
“Yes.”
“Do you think Hamburg is finished?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. Probably. From seventeen thousand feet you can’t see much. Just fire.” The choir began to take their places.
“They took a real hammering,” Ursula continued.
“They?”
“The people. In Hamburg.” Teddy didn’t think of them as people. They were towns. They were factories and railway yards, fighter stations, docks. “Do you ever have any doubts?” she persisted.
“Doubts?”
“You know, about area bombing.”
“Area bombing?” It was a term he had heard, but not one that he had given a great deal of thought to.
“Indiscriminate attacks. The civilian population considered to be a legitimate target—innocent people. It doesn’t make you feel… uncomfortable?”
He turned and looked at her, astonished by her bluntness. (Uncomfortable?) “We don’t target civilians! Can you devise a war where no one is killed? We have to destroy their industry, their economy, if we’re to win. Their housing, too, if necessary. I’m doing—we’re doing—what’s been asked of us to defend our country, to defend freedom. We’re waging war against a deadly foe and we’re risking our lives every time we fly.” He could hear himself slipping into rhetoric
and grew irritated, more with himself than Ursula, for surely she of all people understood the concept of duty.
Now let’s get the rest of them, Sylvie’s bishop had said yesterday.
“And how do you define ‘innocent’ anyway?” he pressed on. “Workers in factories that are making bombs? Or guns, or aircraft, or steel, or ball-bearings or tanks? The Gestapo? Hitler?” He was most definitely into hyperbole now. “And let’s not forget it was the Germans who started this war.”
“I rather think we started it at Versailles,” Ursula said quietly.
Teddy sighed, regretting his choleric response. Methinks he doth protest too much. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think if only I could go back in time and shoot Hitler, or, better still, kill him at birth.”
“But then, I suppose,” Ursula said, “you could keep going back, unpicking history all the way, until you arrived at Cain and Abel again.”
“Or the apple.”
“Shush,” someone said crossly as the first violinist made his way on to the platform. They joined in the applause, relieved to end the conversation. Ursula put her hand on his arm and whispered, “I’m sorry. I haven’t lost faith in the war. I just wondered how you felt. If you were, you know, all right.”
“Of course I am.” Teddy was grateful when, to much acclaim, Boult appeared. A great silence fell.
Ursula should congratulate him, not raise doubts. Operation Gomorrah was considered an enormous success by the crews. It was a turning point, it would push the war nearer to its conclusion, it would help those troops, the “brown bodies,” who at some future date were going to have to land again on European soil and battle their way to the end. “A good prang,” his flight engineer, Geoff Smythson, had written in his log book. A good show, the solicitor said yesterday, slavering in anticipation of the poor pig.
The crews had been pleased, Teddy thought, glancing at his sister, now utterly absorbed in the music. Surely everyone was?
Later, much later, long after the war was over, he learned that it had been a “firestorm.” He had not heard that word, not during the war. He learned that they had been sent deliberately to residential districts. That people were boiled in fountains and baked in cellars. They were burnt alive or suffocated, they were reduced to ash or melted fat. They were trapped like flies on flypaper as they tried to cross the molten tarmac of the streets where they lived. A good prang. (“An eye for an eye,” Mac said at the squadron reunion. Until everyone was blind, Teddy wondered?) Gomorrah. Armageddon. An Old Testament God of spite and vengeance. Once they started there was no going back. Hamburg wasn’t a turning point, it was a staging post. In the end it led to Tokyo, it led to Hiroshima, and then later the whole argument about innocence became irrelevant when you could flick a switch on one continent and destroy thousands on another. At least Cain had to look at Abel’s face.
The RAF had gone back for a second innings on the Tuesday night and found the city still ablaze—one vast inferno, like a glowing, incandescent carpet spread across the landscape, smothering everything beneath it.
It was like flying over an immense volcano containing the fiery heart of hell from which violent explosions would occasionally erupt. The City of Destruction. Its ferocity, its terrible awful beauty, almost returned poetry to Teddy. A medieval apocalypse, he thought.
“Navigator, come and look at this,” he said, persuading Sandy Worthington out from behind his curtain. “You’ll never see anything like it again.”
Keith didn’t need to direct them in, they could see the conflagration from many miles away and as they flew over the boiling, bubbling cauldron of flames he said, “Let’s put another shovelful of coal on the fire, shall we, skipper?”
A filthy dense column of smoke rose as high as the aircraft, and they could feel the tremendous heat rising up from below. They could smell the smoke through their oxygen masks, and something else, even less welcome, and when they landed back at the squadron they discovered that Q-Queenie’s Perspex was covered in a thin film of soot.
The smoke and the soot of the fire had risen up to meet them thousands of feet in the air. And the something else, something that Teddy would never forget, something he could never talk about—the smell of burning flesh rising from the pyre.
He knew then in his secret heart that one day a reckoning would come due.
Sometimes a German fighter would infiltrate the bomber stream as it made its way back across the North Sea, a particularly mean trick. It might pick off an aircraft as it headed home or even as it came in to land, just as safety was at hand. A few weeks after the Battle of Hamburg, after dodging and weaving for months, Q-Queenie was finally caught on the way back from a raid on Berlin.
It had been a long hard struggle to get back from the Big City and they were all sleepy and cold. They had eaten their chocolate, drunk their coffee, taken their wakey-wakey pills, and it was a great relief when they finally saw the red light on top of the church spire in the village nearest to the airfield. Teddy presumed the light was there to prevent them crashing into the spire but they always regarded it as a beacon guiding them home. The flare path was lit up and they heard the cheery tones of a WAAF in the control tower clearing them to land, but no sooner had she spoken than the flare path was extinguished, the airfield plunged into darkness, and the call sign for intruders was broadcast.
Teddy switched off Q-Queenie’s lights and pulled back on the controls to take her up again. Somewhere, anywhere but there, because he could see tracer fire crossing in front of them and the gunners were yelling that there was a bandit, but neither of them seemed to know where he was and their guns were hosing all over the sky. There was no sky to corkscrew down into, not enough speed to do anything, and he thought perhaps the best thing he could do was just land any old how, pancake down on whatever was below them.
Before he could do anything, Q-Queenie was pummelled by cannon fire from the fighter. It must have hit her in the undercarriage because they landed on one wheel and she tipped over, one wing high, the other digging into the ground, and they left the runway and screamed through a field before hitting a tree that they all swore had never been there before but was real enough to flip them over, like a giant insect, and the world inside Q-Queenie was turned upside down.
There were a lot of groans coming from behind Teddy, but they were the groans of people who had been thrown around, bruised and battered, not mortally wounded. He could hear a lot of angry Norwegian. Only Keith was silent, and Sandy Worthington and their Geordie mid-upper kicked open the bottom—now top—escape hatch and helped to drag him through it.
As they exited the topsy-turvy aircraft, the flare-path lights came back on and Teddy was surprised to see that they were still within the boundary of the airfield and the blood wagon and fire engine were already racing out to them. Apart from the fact that they were upside down—or perhaps because of it—it was a miraculous landing. For this “brave deed” he added to the fruit salad of ribbons on his uniform—a bar to go with his DFC.
Keith had lost a lot of blood, he’d been hit by the cannon fire before they crashed. He was deathly silent although his eyes were half open and his little finger was fluttering. No last words. Well, good luck to you then.
They laid him on the ground, and Teddy pulled him on to his lap and held him in his arms, awkwardly, a brutal pietà. Keith’s luck had ceased to be widdershins and had become ordinary rotten stuff. And it had run out. Teddy knew he wasn’t going to last more than a few seconds and saw the moment when the finger stopped fluttering and the half-open eyes lost the light, and he was sorry that he couldn’t think of anything to say to Keith that might have made him feel better about leaving this life. But there wasn’t anything really, was there?
When he got back to his quarters, Teddy stripped off his bloody uniform and emptied the pockets. His cigarettes, the silver hare and, finally, the tardily taken photograph of himself and Nancy and the dog on the promenade by the sea. A smear across the top, still wet. Keith’s blood.
It seemed precious, like a relic. “Tea,” he told his granddaughter when she asked about it, not because she wouldn’t have been interested but because it was a private thing.
He showed his feelings to the dog alone, pressing his face into the fur of its neck to stifle his emotions. It suffered for a while and then struggled out of his arms.
“Sorry,” Teddy said, pulling himself together.
But that was several weeks away yet, in the future. Now, in the present, in the Royal Albert Hall, Beethoven was performing his secret ministry on Teddy.
Teddy resolved to simply feel the music and stopped searching for words to describe it, and by the time the fourth movement came around and Roy Henderson, the baritone, began to sing (O Freude!), the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up. In her seat beside him, Ursula was almost quivering with the power of emotion, like a coiled spring, a bird ready to rise from the ground at any moment. Towards the end of the final movement, when the magnificence of the Choral becomes almost unbearable, Teddy had the odd sensation that he might actually have to hold on to his sister to prevent her rising into the air and taking flight.
They left the Albert Hall and walked into the balmy evening. They were silent for a long time as the dusk gathered around them.
“Numinous,” Ursula said, breaking the silence eventually. “There’s a spark of the divine in the world—not God, we’re done with God, but something. Is it love? Not silly romantic love, but something more profound…?”
A God in Ruins Page 32