by Jill Barnett
I expect that you are smiling now. I do so love your mother, darling. I am thinking that perhaps she and I should go to the country when things let up a bit. What keeps me here is that I am so very afraid that I will not be able to see you when you get relieved. I know it would only be for a day or two, but I couldn’t bear it if you were given a forty-eight and I couldn’t see you.
Know that I love you with all my heart, my darling, and I miss you as always, but trust, too, that I know you are up there flying the skies and protecting us. While I worry about you, I know you are the very best at everything you do and that you will come back to me when this is all done.
I keep you in my heart.
Greer
“SEPTEMBER IN THE RAIN”
Wellingham Airfield, Essex
10 September, 1940
My lovely Greer,
Rumor is that we are to have relief sometime in the next week. I have heard this for a while, but was hesitant to tell you until the time was growing close and until I could make certain the rumor appeared to be not merely wishful gossip. Our flight commander has said leave is most likely to happen very soon, and since he is never one to spread idle rumors, I would say it is so.
While common sense tells me that certainly I would prefer to have you tucked safely away in Keighley, 1 know, too, that I would not be able to see you there with a mere forty-eight-hour leave. I want you to remember that I think you and my mother are very brave. I am proud of both of my ladies.
Mother’s comment about Dietrich was quite fun, and knowing Mother as I do, I suspect she will soon write the poor actress a pointed letter condemning her for having the audacity to be born in Germany.
I shall end this brief letter by reiterating that I adore you and miss you terribly. I shall see you soon, my dearest and sweetest wife.
All my love forever,
Skip
He leaned back in a hard wooden chair as he sealed the letter; then he set it on the small desk in the corner of the dispersal hut and penned the address on the front of the envelope. He stood and crossed the room, then placed the letter in the mailbox and tossed a penny for the Post in a can that sat next to it.
There was a blackboard above the table where they marked hits. It was the ace board for the squadron. He had seven hits.
He turned away from the board and braced one hand on the wall, then pulled a packet of Craven “A”s from his pocket, stuck the cigarette between his dry lips, and lit it. He stood there and watched the smoke curl.
The hut was filled with smoke, because there was little else for them to do between missions. Sit there in readiness, smoke, drink black tea and coffee. Eat some of the tomato and cheese sandwiches or local-made cakes that were stacked on the food table between a beat-up old icebox with a motor that chucked loudly and a wooden trash bin filled with crumpled cigarette packs, snuff tins, gum and chocolate wrappers. There was as much raw tension in the air as there was cigarette smoke.
A quiet game of whist passed the time for some flyers across the room, their Mae West life vests stacked in a corner and their chutes piled beneath each man’s spindled chair. Others were reading, slouched on sofas, in deep chairs, or on skeletal cots with the news or a book.
Skip couldn’t concentrate enough to read a book. He had no focus when he was outside the cockpit. So he wrote letters and paced the room like a caged cat. And like the others, he waited.
He hadn’t told Greer about his deepest fears. At first he told himself it was because she was carrying their child and he didn’t want to worry her. But perhaps he was too ashamed to tell her. She did think he was the “best pilot in the RAF”—the best pilot in the RAF who vomited his belly out whenever he landed.
This was much on his mind of late, and he remembered something similar happening to him when he was just a lad. He had wandered into a field where his father and some other chaps were trap-shooting at clay pigeons. A flock of rooks flew overhead, and one of the men swung his gun around and picked off a bird.
It hit the ground and a moment later the flock turned back, cawing and circling over the dead bird for the longest time. Skip remembered being very ill. He’d emptied his stomach of the pot-beef and cheese sandwich there in front of all, so the men stopped shooting and went back to the house. His father forced him along ahead of him, but did not speak of it. To this day Skip never knew what his father had thought.
Before the sun had gone down, Skip had walked back to the small meadow and sat there cross-legged in the grass, holding his tight belly and watching the flock as it still circled the dead bird. It had been hours. Finally, as if the funeral were done, the birds began to fly away, one, then two, then more. When the sun was completely down and the air was growing chilled, there was only one bird left, cawing in the half dark and circling over its lost mate.
When Skip was flying his Spit and saw someone killed, a comrade or the enemy, he felt like that lone bird, circling high in the sky, still alive but understanding that someone else just like him no longer lived. He never told Greer how he was so very relieved whenever he saw an enemy parachute. He didn’t tell anyone. He didn’t tell her that when he made a kill, he inevitably flew back to base and emptied his stomach the moment his feet hit solid ground.
He saw that other flyers came back with a dulled look on their faces. The energetic, anxious, and bright glow they’d had before all this started had promptly disappeared from their eyes as surely as if someone had killed it. The Brylcreem boys weren’t so bright and glossy anymore.
War did that to a man, changed you whether you were on the right side or not. Your basic beliefs were tested. You did what you had to do, but war played havoc with your values and your internal barometres of morality, with what was right, and what was wrong. War turned everything on its ear. He could see that in all the men of No. 77 Squadron. Innocence lost to the fact that they had to kill or be killed.
There were long nights when he would lie in his cot in the barracks and think that he wanted to turn in his wings and walk away. Duty and pride wouldn’t let him. There was immense irony in the fact that all he really ever wanted to do was fly a plane. He had thought in his youthful naïveté that the Royal Air Force was his path to glory. When they plotted and planned and flew maneuvers, they used the term “kills” and talked about “aces” and “dogfights.” But that was only talk, words with no experience attached to them.
Now he was shooting men out of the sky, because he had no choice.
“Look here!” Hemmings waved a newspaper at the room in general.
“Hold the bloody thing still so we can see it.” Mallory tried to grab the paper.
Hemmings stopped waving it, folded it back, and held it up.
There was a huge cartoon that covered the entire page; it was of a giant RAF pilot standing in the clouds, pulling Luftwaffe planes out of the air like King Kong. Beneath was the caption: HORATIUS OF THE SKIES.
A cheer went up in the room.
“There’s a quote here from the PM,” Hemmings added.
“Read it!”
Hemmings looked down and read, “Today Churchill voiced what the nation is feeling at the heroism and valor of the British Royal Air Force. Said the PM, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many . . . to so few.’”
There was a long moment of silence as the PM’s words and meaning hit every single man in the room.
Mallory took a hit off his fag and said casually, “He must be talking about our pub bills.”
At that, everyone laughed. It felt damn good to laugh. And for some flyers the joke was true. A noggin or two of beer, a gin or a scotch or single malt was the only way they could find the courage to go up again the next day, day in and day out, week after bloody week, facing repeated waves of the Luftwaffe. Others needed to drink themselves to sleep, to knock back shot after shot of hard liquor until they were numb enough to sleep.
The door to the dispersal hut opened and the flight commander came inside. Skip waited fo
r the inevitable words, “Scramble men! Scramble!”
But there was no panicked order, just a long, drawn-out pause from their squadron leader.
“No. 55 just came in by truck to relieve you. No. 77 has a forty-eight effective at fifteen hundred.”
The clock on the wall said eleven hundred. The official start of leave was still four hours away.
The others turned away from the clock and began to grumble and mutter. Some cursed. Even Mallory, who seldom showed anything close to a human emotion, threw his cards down on the table. One chap in the corner stood up, clearly ready to go at it with whomever he could find.
The CO began to laugh. “You should leave now, unless some of you are dead keen on waiting four lousy hours.”
Books slammed closed. Newspapers drifted to the ground. Chair legs scraped the floor. Someone tossed a king of hearts into the air, the pool of fifty pounds quickly abandoned. It wasn’t long before most of No. 77 Squadron had gathered around the train station near Wellingham, talking, smoking, and waiting for the trains. The men were off in different directions: some into the arms of a sweetheart, some towards a huge serving of Mum’s flaky pastry and a good night’s sleep in their own feather beds, while others went to Piccadilly and more rackety entertainment, the kind that came in the form of noisy pubs, London’s Follies Bergère, or the Windmill Theatre with its tall and buxom girls who wore military hats and little else.
Not a single man who stood there was aware that at the exact same moment the next train squealed its way into the small, rural station, air-raid sirens in a crumbled and smoldering London began to sound the all clear.
“HEAVEN CAN WAIT”
“Mrs. Inskip, can you hear me?”
Someone was calling her. The words dragged out slowly and were indistinguishable, as if they were coming from a broken gramophone. She didn’t know who it was. She couldn’t understand them. She wanted to ask, “What?” She could think the word, but she couldn’t speak it. There was something in her throat. She could not speak around it. When she tried to take a breath, everything smelled charred, like the autumn air of Keighley the morning after the October bonfires.
“Mrs. Inskip? Can you hear me?”
Of course I can hear you!
“If you can hear me, raise your hand or open your eyes. Give us a signal.”
She tried. She couldn’t open her eyes, because she couldn’t feel them. She couldn’t feel much of anything. The edges of her world were as misty as the Thames in winter.
Raise my hand. He said to raise my hand.
She raised her hand.
“Still nothing,” the man said on a half sigh.
I’m lifting my hand. Look!
“There is no sign from her. She cannot hear me.”
I can hear you!
She lifted her hand again.
Blast it all! Why did they not see it? Pay attention!
Someone tapped her on the bottom of her foot.
I feel it! I can feel it!
“There is still no response.”
Yes, there is, you damned fool!
She could hear the scratching sound of someone scribbling with a pen on paper, then a woman’s voice. “Such a shame.”
What is a shame?
“I’ll come back this evening and check on her, nurse. Keep her as comfortable as possible. I’ve reduced the morphine.”
Morphine? My God . . .
“Perhaps lowering the medication will bring her around. Let me know if there’s any change.”
“They’re bringing in more injured, Dr. Falconer.” A new voice, a woman’s voice, came from a distance.
“I’ll be along momentarily.”
Wait! Wait! I can hear you!
She heard his footsteps going away, the tap-tap-tap of his shoes.
Come back! I am here! I can hear you! See my hand? Aren’t I lifting my hand? I can feel it! Come back! Don’t leave. Please don’t leave me . . .
She could feel tears slide from the corners of her eyes and curl behind her ears as if they were only the reading spectacles she put on every day and not the frustration and pain that was spilling out of her. She tried to move, tried to sit up, but something sharp and jagged shot like fiery knives through her whole skull. It hurt so much the world disappeared into nothing but black, hollow silence.
“MAKE BELIEVE ISLAND”
There were no taxis, so Skip had to go on foot from the train station. He didn’t walk. He ran, sidestepping the bricks, wood, debris, and broken glass in the streets, alleys, and walks. His musette bag was slung over a shoulder, where it bounced heavily on his upper back like some huge hand that was shoving him towards home. He took a shortcut through the park, which wasn’t crowded. Silver barrage balloons flew like toy dirigibles over the greens. Soot coated everything from the grass to the hedgerows, and a fog of smoke lingered in the lower branches of the old trees.
There was a huge black hole in the ground where a park bench and fountain used to be. Pieces of shattered marble and cement peppered the neighboring ground. Nearby shade trees, once wide and broad, had been splintered by the blast of the same German bomb.
Skip came out of the park running, scared by what he saw and more afraid of what he might see. He skirted the knot of fire trucks that were busy pumping water where incendiaries had fallen and spread fire in random, destructive patches for a whole city block.
His heart racing, he turned onto a street a few blocks from his house and stopped suddenly.
There was no damage here. It was postcard perfect—giving a surreal sense of walking into another dimension. The trees planted leisurely along the walks still wore their yellowed leaves. The town-houses themselves bore not even a fingerprint of the war. Not a cracked window. Nothing.
He looked back over his shoulder, wondering for an instant if he’d had so much combat that he looked for destruction and danger when there was none.
He was so much relieved he could feel his eyes tearing as he walked briskly toward home. He took deep breaths as he walked. Experience had taught him that breathing helped to stop the crying. There were moments in his plane when he escaped a near hit or a chase that he would realise there were tears streaming from his eyes.
It was a fact of war: men were frightened and men cried.
He rounded the street corner. He was running again, searching for No. 27.
And there it was. The iron grate at the base of the steps. The lacquered black door. The polished brass numbers. Two. Seven. Unharmed.
He stopped he was so relieved, a hand over his damp eyes.
All was untouched. All was perfect.
He took a few more breaths. A sparrow was chirping loudly from above. He would have to get the nest from the eaves or the little buggers would wake him at a ghastly early hour.
He looked up.
The top three floors and the roof of No. 27 were blown completely away.
“FOOLS RUSH IN”
It was sheer chaos at the entrance to the hospital. Everyone was talking at once. There was only a narrow set of doors where people were sandwiched together, trying to wedge inside. Skip ran around to an alley entrance where an ambulance was wheeling in someone. He walked up to the front desk.
A nurse was thumbing through a stack of papers and clipboards.
“Please.” Skip could hardly speak he was so out of breath. “I’m looking for a Mrs. Inskip.” He braced his hands on the desk in front of him, hung his head, panting. “The Home Guard sent me here. My wife was brought in about three, perhaps four hours ago.”
The nurse at the small desk began checking a list. She picked up a second list and looked up. “I’m sorry. We have so few come in with names. The casualties have been flooding the place for three days now. But today is the worst of it. The good news is they just found a girl who had been buried under rubble for almost a hundred hours. A hundred hours. Can you imagine?” She shook her head in disbelief and went back to scanning the list. “Here she is. Inskip. Ward three, second floor.
Take those stairs.”
He took the stairs two at a time, then pushed open a door that led into a corridor busy with hospital staff and doctors. He passed three wards until he reached the one with the number three painted on the hall wall. There was a nurse coming out of the doors and she blocked him.
“I’m looking for Mrs. Inskip. I’m George Inskip.”
Her face was kind but serious. “She’s in the fourth bed on the right. Still unconscious. We cannot get any response from her, but perhaps hearing your voice will help. Come.” She pushed open the door.
He followed her inside to a long, narrow, and sterile room that smelled of alcohol, camphor, and soot, then followed the nurse over to a bed, his heart hammering like machine gun fire.
She stopped at a bed and moved out of his line of sight.
“Greer?” He took a step towards the bed, then froze. He stood there as though in some kind of strange nightmare. It wasn’t his wife’s lovely blond hair he saw, but black hair. It was his mother.
He turned without a word to the nurse and left the room, shoving open the door with a straight arm, and then he stood there in the hallway, disoriented, somehow lost. His mother. He hadn’t once thought about his mother. He had forgotten her. The floor seemed to swell up towards him. He stepped back to the wall for support. Greer? His mother?
The nurse came out. She placed her arm on his. “Perhaps it’s a good thing that she is still unconscious. Such injuries are difficult to see in someone you love.”
Injuries?
He hadn’t even noticed anything about his mother but the shock of seeing her familiar black hair. He’d seen that it wasn’t Greer’s, and he’d left.
“My wife . . . ” he explained quietly. “I thought she was my wife. She’s my mother. I never thought to ask about my mother. They were together.” He looked back at the ward door.